Husk

the other teenager, engulfing him.

“What the hell!” Brad’s friend shrieked, thrashing his arms. But the nylon material wrapped itself around his face, smothering his cries.

Shivering with fright, hardly able to believe his eyes, Tim stood and watched the choking juvenile fall to his knees. Every so often the kid managed a short burst of strength and struck harder at the coat, coughing Tim’s name through the material.

He thinks I’m doing it.

“Help,” Tim screamed. “Someone help! Anyone!”

He glanced around, searching for the third boy from Brad’s group, the one who’d been hit by the rock, but apparently both Brad and his friend had already fled.

He was alone.

Alone with the nightmare jacket and a dying boy who’d wanted to smash his skull open thirty seconds ago, his pleas for help lost in the trees and the wind.

Shaking, with his sanity teetering on a wire over a chasm of madness, Tim realized that his right hand remained clenched around the bottle. He raised the blood-streaked glass to his face as if he’d just found it lying in the dirt, but the awful wet substance glinting on its surface reminded him he’d had it all the time.

The sight of Brad’s blood splattered over the back of his hand conjured the urge to throw the weapon away and run. But what about the jacket? What if it came for him next? And the boy? He couldn’t just leave the kid to die.

But by the time he marshaled the courage to act, the teenager had slumped to the ground, unmoving. The encompassing jacket began to uncoil.

Tim raced down the path and found one of the teenagers’ abandoned bikes. Hefting it up, he looked back and caught a glimpse of the garment. Now free of the boy, it pushed up from the ground with hollow arms and shuffle- turned in his direction.

Tim stared in disbelief.

It scrambled after him.

Tossing the bottle aside, he lunged onto the mountain bike and for home without a second glance behind him, too afraid that he’d see those hollow arms reaching for his neck.

Three hundred yards later he came to the first fork that led home.

The bike’s tires thrummed on the dirt as he made the turn, and he sunk down, ducking low tree branches.

He knew he must’ve outrun it by now, knew that he should slow his pace to a safer speed, but his heart had become a wild engine within his chest, and he continued on at full strength, relying on his knowledge of the trails to get him home intact.

The surrounding trees rushed past in a blur. Ahead, the forest shifted from side to side with the night’s increasing wind.

A train whistle howled in the distance.

The noise came over Tim’s shoulder from somewhere in the east, sounding like a banshee scream from The Beyond. He flinched, causing the bike’s trajectory to wobble. For a tense second he felt himself hurtling toward a future of broken bones and stitches before regaining control.

The whistle came again, longer this time, closer, and he guessed the engineer was giving advance warning before crossing Pioneer Trail.

Which means it’s headed toward town.

Tim swallowed the thought with a helping of dread. It wouldn’t be long before the train rumbled down the section of tracks he planned to use to get home, and that meant he’d be stuck waiting for it to pass.

Alone.

In the dark.

With a haunted jacket running loose in the forest.

He raced onward, bringing the bike up to full speed again by the third wail of the horn.

Without slowing, he made a sharp turn to the right, plunging onto a narrow side path just wide enough for the bicycle’s tires. He soared along the shortcut for thirty feet. Overhanging branches whipped his arms and legs, until he finally remerged onto Tomahawk Trail, an unpaved back road.

Across Tomahawk, a new set of bike trails branched in several directions, and he raced down the course that led to the railroad. He crested a small hill and sped onward, entering an uninterrupted sixty-foot dirt lane that joined up with the tracks.

The bicycle’s frame vibrated with the train’s approach. He slammed on the hand brakes halfway down the straightaway, fishtailing to a halt atop crunching gravel. At the far end of the trail, a strengthening light illuminated the darkness until Tim could see the train tracks in its glow.

The train’s lead engine rolled into sight, moving eastward at a languid ten or fifteen miles-per-hour. Tim slumped onto the bike’s handlebars, gasping and out of breath. He could double back, return to the bike trails and take the long route home, but just the thought of turning around made him sag further with exhaustion.

He looked behind him and found the trail mercifully vacant.

Okay… Five minute break…

Tim leaned forward, catching his wind, when a strange sound caught his ear. It came from something nearby, close enough to be heard over the clamor of the train: the sound of sticks snapping in the darkness to his left. He bolted upright, tensing.

Ahead, out of a pulsating cluster of tall plant limbs, an enormous deer clambered onto the road. It was a ten-point buck, massive, with antlers that reached above its head like gigantic open hands. It meandered across the lane twenty feet in front of him.

Tim exhaled and tried to relax.

Get a grip on yourself. It’s only a deer. The train probably just scared the poor sucker.

The animal’s hooves tromped the dirt—Clup-Clup—but it didn’t run away. Instead, its dark shape turned and started in his direction.

“Shoo,” he told it. “Shoo!”

Clup-Clup… Clup-Clup…

The animal showed no sign of relenting. It quickened its advance. Afraid it might charge him, Tim backed the bike away one step at a time, ready to turn and flee if the beast got too close. He glanced around, searching for something to scare the animal away with. He looked down and he saw a small pouch affixed to the bike’s frame that contained a plastic water bottle and, in a side pocket, a mini-Maglight like the one Brad had used earlier. Freeing the flashlight, he directed it at the deer and twisted it on.

The animal didn’t freeze in the light like he’d hoped.

He did, however.

The deer’s mud-splashed hide hung on its bones like a moth-eaten sweater, pockmarked by dozens of dark holes where its decaying skin had peeled off. It had no eyes, just two dirty sockets, and the flesh of its snout had rotted away to reveal twin rows of teeth. Maggots rained from its underbelly with each shuddering step.

“Did you think you could outrun me, Timmy?”

Tim staggered, clapping his hands to his head.

With no further warning the deer exploded into a run, shedding parts of its decomposing flesh in the process.

Tim screamed. He yanked up on the handlebars, spun the bike around on its rear wheel, and hit the pedals the moment he faced the other way. The rear tire kicked up dirt. The decrepit deer lunged, lowering its withered head. Jagged antlers reached for his flesh like Death’s bony fingers.

Tim careened to the right and dodged off the path. The diving points missed him by mere inches. The creature brushed past him and crashed into a sapling on the road’s edge, trampling it to the ground.

Not looking back, he rode down the steep embankment, plunging into a nature-made sluice eroded from years of runoff rainwater. The bike bounced and slid over the mixed terrain of hard rock and soft sand, but the momentum of his initial run drove him through it with minimal interference. He headed down hill, picking up speed.