Terry Redhill stood up woozily. His face was bathed in blood from a cut running slantwise across his forehead.
“Whuzzat?” he said dazedly. “Whuzz—?”
Micah didn’t get a good look at the thing that killed Terry Redhill. There was some mercy in that. It darted down from the trees. Part snake, part bird or bat or some winged creature at any rate. It carried with it the ripe stink of death. Micah did catch a glimpse of eyes—a dozen or more bunched like grapes within the runneled ruin of its face, or one of its faces—all staring with bright, malignant hunger. It flapped down with a sort of breezy insouciance, not at all predatory, as if it had merely happened upon Terry Redhill by accident and decided to do what it did to him.
It… it enfolded Terry. Somehow lovingly. Terry’s head, specifically. Those sheer, dark, bat-like wings wrapped around his skull in a suffocating embrace.
“Whuzz—?”
What happened next was hard to explain. The scene was chaotic, the light thin, the air swimmy with diesel fumes from the ruptured gas tank. Micah was aware of the smallest details—the oily taste of the shotgun shells in his mouth, the thin fingernail paring of the moon through the trees. He experienced the following events with senses that were superattuned in some ways and dulled in others. Later, he would suspect his mind had done so automatically, shielding him from things that would have driven him mad on sight.
The thing that was wrapped around Terry Redhill’s head began to flex. To constrict. The whiplike cord upon which it had unfurled from the tree thinned with tension. Terry issued terrible choking sounds that were muffled by the stinking flesh draped over his face—flesh so sheer Micah could see the man’s pain-wrenched features. Those muffled chokes quickly became squeals.
The thing tensed, every part of its awful musculature quivering; then it torqued spastically—it reminded Micah of a man struggling to open a stubborn jar of strawberry jam, that moment when the seal finally gives. This was followed by a wet ripping note. A fan of blood jetted from Terry Redhill’s neck with incredible pressure and painted the side of the truck.
The thing ascended into the tree again. It took Terry’s head with it. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. Terry’s body stood there for another moment, blood fountaining from the raggedly severed neck, before collapsing to its knees like a penitent Pentecostal. Headless Terry fell forward and struck the truck with a hollow bong.
Something rushed from the trees at Micah. He caught the briefest inkling of its shape: a trio of timber wolf heads thrust from a long and eelish body rippling with legs of all different sorts. He raised the shotgun and fired as it hurdled Terry Redhill’s corpse; buckshot tore into the thing, ripping away gobbets of flesh; the impact steered it off course so that, instead of hitting Micah flush, it glancingly struck him, one of its claws or teeth tearing across his rib cage to leave a sizzling note of pain. He fell, his skull striking the tailgate and shooting stars across his vision. The thing carried over the truck bed, a horrifying freight train of legs and snouts and snapping jaws.
Micah staggered up and took aim as it retreated, pumping the Ithaca and firing three shots. The muzzle exploded with flame, illuminating the woods in brief flashes. A chunk blew off the thing’s hide, splattering the side of a ponderosa pine. It squealed and reared—the sinuous segmented movement of a snake sitting up, its spinal cord popping like chained firecrackers—as it moved deeper into the forest. Much else lurked there in the trees, slavering and snapping.
“Otis! Oh God, Otis!”
Charlie was trying to haul his friend out of the truck. Charlie’s nose must’ve broken when his face collided with the windshield; it was squashed off to one side, blood painting the bottom of his face. But Charlie was focused on Otis, who was trapped. The crumpling door had not only broken his leg high up—it had also pinned his foot. Otis’s face was tallowy with shock. Slick balls of sweat rolled down his cheeks. The pain was such that he’d vomited; under the fritzing dome light, Micah could see chunks of that evening’s hastily eaten meal on his shirt.
“Otis!” Charlie hauled on his friend’s arm, too terrified to be gentle about it. “We got to get out.”
Otis’s eyes rolled back in his skull. A ludicrous half smile graced his face. Micah had seen it before. Pain, shock, and adrenaline can put a man into a beatific dream state.
“Come on!” Charlie jerked Otis, who shook like a rag doll. Blood shot from the compound fracture and spritzed the dashboard.
Something thumped off the truck’s roof and bounced into the bed. Terry Redhill’s head. Terry’s lips had been bitten away—such clean, straight teeth, Micah thought with dreamy panic; he must have had a good dentist—and his eyeballs had been sucked out. Half his scalp had been peeled back like a stubborn toupee, from the rear of his skull to the front; gravity folded it down as Micah watched, a vein-threaded red curtain draping Redhill’s ruined face.
Micah fired up into the tree from where the head had fallen. He heard a rippling shriek up there. He saw something latched around the trunk thirty feet up—a jumble of parts, long and arachnid, a sight a human mind couldn’t even summon in a nightmare. Seeing its shape in the muzzle flash, Micah felt as if someone had levered the top off his skull and whispered directly into the twitching gray matter—a terrible secret that he would have to live with the rest of his life. The thing unfurled with effortless grace, its blood pattering down on the truck as it scuttled farther up the tree.
Micah spat the saliva-coated shells into his palm and plugged them into the shotgun. He hopped over the bed. He could die here. In a second, a minute, or anytime between. That fact bestowed an eerie calm within him. This was the world as he’d found it. His only option was to deal with its new parameters.
“Charlie!” Micah shouted, grabbing the man’s shoulder. Charlie turned to face him; his face swam with mindless fear. “He is stuck!” Micah said. “We must free his leg.”
Charlie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish dying on land. But he nodded. “Okay, okay, okay, okay—”
Micah handed him the shotgun. “They are everywhere.”
He climbed inside the cab through the passenger door. It was hot and tight and perfumed with blood and diesel. The windshield was spiderwebbed where Charlie’s head had struck. Micah glanced past Otis, out the window, where shapes were massing some twenty yards off.
“Otis, sit tight,” Micah said, as if the man had any other choice. “This is going to hurt.”
Otis issued a garbled note that Micah took as one of recognition. He crawled down into the foot well. Wires hung from the busted fuse box. He wormed past Otis’s right foot, shoving it rudely aside; Otis screamed as the pain shot up his leg. Micah didn’t apologize; there was no time. He squirmed forward until he was able to close his hand around Otis’s boot, pinned under the buckled metal. He wrapped his fingers through the bootlaces and yanked as hard as he could. Otis screamed afresh. Micah couldn’t summon much force with his body at a bad angle, one arm partially trapped under his chest. But he was redlined on adrenaline and this helped. Otis just kept on screaming. Let it out, friend, Micah thought. Maybe it’ll keep those things at bay.
One hard wrench succeeded in popping Otis’s heel out; Micah let out a small cry of delight as Otis’s boot slid from the crimped metal. He just had to crawl his fingers in a little farther and yank his toes out now—