I chewed nervously on my bottom lip as I brought my rifle back around, clasping it tight before me. I wanted to move a little closer but remained where I was. I wasn’t a soldier under his command, but I listened to Darnell. He knew what he was doing, I was still inept. And I wanted him to teach me everything he knew, pissing him off by disobeying him was not going to help with that. Thanks to Darnell, and the situation we had been tossed into, I could handle a gun with far more competency than I could have a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t been very good at firing a gun in the beginning, but lately I seemed to have acquired some strange natural ability for it. We didn’t get to practice often, as we didn’t want to waste ammo or draw attention to ourselves, but the few times I’d had to fire a gun recently, I hadn’t missed.
I focused my attention on the thing moving across the field. I couldn’t quite see what it was yet, but it didn’t appear to be one of the massive tick/octopus/crab/jellyfish looking things that had been able to reawaken the frozen people by violently draining their blood from them. People we still couldn’t figure out how to reawaken on our own. People that we weren’t even sure were still alive anymore, or if we would ever be able to save them. So much time had passed since The Freezing that it seemed impossible that any of them could still be alive within their frozen forms.
However, none of us were willing to give up hope yet.
The thing across the field did not appear to be one of those monstrosities, but just what exactly it was eluded me. I moved steadily closer, staying low as I crept toward the field with Bret on my heels. I did not miss Darnell’s warning look, but I didn’t acknowledge it either as I stopped at the edge of the woods. Whatever was out there, it was half hidden by the tall grass moving ever so gently in the early September breeze.
It was small, or at least smaller than most of the other creatures we had seen until now, as most of them were full and large with blood, human blood. The aliens themselves were exceptionally human in appearance with their dark hair, eyes, and olive skinned to darker hued complexions. They had rarely come to earth before The Freezing, and there was no sign that they had returned since the attack had started.
I doubted they would. They wanted our lives, they wanted our blood, but they despised us, looked down on us, and hated anything that had to do with our planet, except for the abundant food supply we offered. I rested my hand against the rough bark of a white oak, narrowing my eyes as I strained to see across the field. I could no longer see anything about what was causing the movement, but if the motion of the grass was any indication, it was getting closer.
I glanced worriedly at Bret, his jaw was clenched, his eyes fierce. I didn’t know what was coming at us, but the hair on the nape of my neck was suddenly standing on end and there was a cold sweat suddenly trickling down my back. Then, the grass parted and a young girl stepped out. My jaw dropped, my hand clenched on the trunk of the tree. I didn’t know where she had come from, but there was something so lost and forlorn about her that I had the strangest urge to cry.
Her clothes were torn; blood marred the front of the sundress she wore. Her dark hair was a tangled mess as it hung over her thin, delicate shoulders. Her face was streaked with dirt and blood; her eyes were hollow in her thin, pale face. She was so small, so delicate and fragile that my heart ached for her, she reminded me so much of Abby that I nearly burst from the woods and ran to her. I managed to stop myself only because of the fact that Bret had stepped partially in front of me. I didn’t know where she’d come from, but it looked as if she had been through hell.
Darnell gestured to Sarah, one of his soldiers, and then pointed toward the young girl who was staring unseeingly at the woods. Sarah nodded before slipping into the darkness. I knew which way she had gone, but even I lost sight of her almost immediately. When she reappeared it was from three hundred feet away on our right, and she was moving out of the woods.
The girl turned slowly toward her, but didn’t seem to recognize the fact that Sarah was even there. She remained unmoving. She has to be in shock, I thought wildly. The fact that Sarah had a gun trained on her probably wasn’t helping, but I would have done the same thing. If there was one thing we had learned recently it was that anything could be dangerous, and to neverlet our guards down.
Sarah moved steadily toward the girl, her face remained impassive, but I could sense Sarah’s confusion, her hesitance. Bret grabbed hold of my arm as I made a move to get closer. I wanted to protest his controlling gesture, but I remained silent. I was too afraid to make any kind of noise or motion with Sarah so exposed. Sarah stopped five feet away from the girl, the gun wavered slightly.
“Are you ok?” Sarah demanded. The girl remained silent, unmoving. “Can you hear me? Are you ok?”
I wasn’t breathing anymore; my lungs were beginning to burn but I still wasn’t breathing. Something was wrong, this wasn’t normal. Darnell seemed to sense the same thing as he rose slowly to his feet and leveled his rifle against his shoulder.
Then it happened. It was so fast that none of us had a chance to fire a shot, not even Sarah. One moment the girl was standing there quietly, and the next she was on top of Sarah. At first I didn’t understand what had happened, or who had moved first, but then it all became painfully, clearly obvious. That girl was nota girl.
Or at least not anymore.
Something lashed out of her mouth as she launched herself forward. The tentacle thing/tongue slammed into Sarah’s face with a sickening crack of bone that echoed loudly throughout the still night. I couldn’t move, couldn’t react as Sarah’s face caved in. That thing, which I now recognized as being eerily similar to the tentacles that came from the larger monsters that hunted us, slid down Sarah’s throat as the hideous girl knocked her to the ground with far more force than I would have expected from her small frame.
By the time Darnell recovered enough to open fire on the horrific creature, it was already too late for Sarah. The creature/girl bucked wildly as the bullets tore through her flesh. A strange hissing scream erupted from the thing, it fell back, its tentacle lashing wildly through the air before retreating swiftly into its mouth. Before us the girl/thing seemed to melt. Flesh and bone reshaped into something else, something far different, and yet strangely familiar as one of the ugly, deadly creatures we were more familiar with unfolded from what had once been the body of a young girl.
It was not as massive as some of the others we had encountered, but this one seemed even more monstrous, evil, and menacing than any of the far larger ones. For one thing, it seemed to be able to mimic a human being pretty damn freakingwell. That was a trait that noneof us had experienced before.
I didn’t realize I was pulling the trigger until I felt the recoil of the gun in my hands. I wanted to scream in horror, wanted to flee, but my darker instincts seemed to have taken over as I pulled the trigger over and over again, continuing to do so even long after the gun was empty. The edge of my mind, the reasonable, still slightly sane part, realized that I should stop shooting. It was pointless to continue to do so. But I could not bring myself to lower the empty gun until Bret grabbed hold of it and forcefully pushed it down.
I was ashamed by the shaking that rattled through me. My teeth chattered. I had lost my mother, I had lost Cade, I had seen far more of these things than I cared to recall, but for some strange reason I was shaking so badly I could hardly stand. What I had just witnessed had rattled me so much I was afraid I might actually piss my pants.
It had looked so human ,so eerily childlike. And what it had done, well what it had done was pulverize Sarah’s pretty face with the most disgusting thing I had ever seen before. Even from my distant position I could see there was nothing left to her. Tears choked me as I realized that her own mother wouldn’t have been able to recognize the smashed mess before us.
“It’s ok Bethy.” Bret’s voice trembled as he spoke the words. I wondered briefly if he believed them. I didn’t. “It’s ok.”