After the mysterious amber light dissipated, darkness took up its place, leaving Mallory shaken despite her unexplainable revival. She searched the car with frantic glances, finding the other seats vacant. She couldn’t recall when the car had come to a stop, or where the others had gone once it had. Why would they just leave her here? Or maybe they hadn’t, maybe the car had done something to them?
Outside, the headlights cast white beams into an old cemetery overrun with tangled vegetation.
She couldn’t remember coming to a cemetery.
Further distressed by her new surroundings, Mallory began struggling with her bonds. She unclipped the seatbelt and groped for the door handle.
After uncounted eons of watching the failure of those who’d come before it—after waiting throughout the full scope of human history for its chance to return power to its kind—the nameless entity finally saw freedom drawing closer, pulled by a boy who would soon be dead at its newborn hands.
Returning to the Mercedes, the entity relished its impending triumph.
In minutes, it would kill Mallory and use her life force to reactivate the spells etched in Kane’s flesh—carvings that had long since become irremovable scars—thus releasing him back into this world, bonding them in an unholy coalition. United, they would be unstoppable, free to unleash the others of its kind from their torment and take back the world that was rightfully theirs.
Then, the real battle would begin.
Watching the children from a distance, it cursed the Other’s power, unable to fully perceive what the teens had discussed near Kane’s grave. No matter. Tim strode toward the car, dragging Kane’s coffin, and soon they would all be flesh for its brethren.
Upon reoccupying the vehicle, it found Mallory had broken free.
Impossible. She shouldn’t have regained consciousness so quickly.
She tried for the door, but the entity activated the locks, sealing her in. Revitalized, the girl moved with the agility of a spirit, dodging its attempts to recapture her with the seatbelt. She leaned back in her seat and kicked the damaged windshield with both feet. The gummy, shatterproof glass popped loose, folding away, and the girl scrambled out over the hood.
Tim approached within arm’s reach of the graveyard’s fence when half the Mercedes’s windshield broke outward.
The glass burst away from its frame and folded over on itself. A split second later, Mallory came crawling out through the gap, clambering onto the vehicle’s hood.
Tim dropped the line to Kane’s coffin. “Mallory!”
With a spray of gravel spitting from its tires, the Mercedes reversed away from the fence. It rocketed backward, jerking out from under her. She lost her balance and slid headfirst off the car’s front end.
Tim abandoned the coffin and bound over the fence after her. “Mallory, hang on.”
The possessed Mercedes slid to a halt a mere twenty feet away, its engine roaring.
“Look out,” he screamed. “Run. It’s coming.”
The car shot forward. Geysers of dirt and rock streamed into the air behind it. Tim’s pumping legs turned to jelly when he realized he’d never reach her in time to help.
The headlights found her. They glinted on her bloodstained clothes.
To Tim’s astonishment, Mallory lunged to the side, rolling clear of the Mercedes as its dented bumper closed in for a bite. The car roared past, missing her. It raged on to the far end of the lot, where it slammed on its brakes and slid around to face them.
Tim ran to her. “Mallory, are you all right?”
She spun around and seized his reaching arm. “Tim, what the hell’s going on?”
“Come on,” he urged, “we have to get back in the graveyard. Can you stand?”
By the time he finished the question, she’d already pulled herself upright. “Yeah, I’m okay now.”
He gaped at her chest wound, seeing only healthy, unmarked flesh through the rip in her blood-soaked shirt.
At the far end of the lot, the car’s headlights blazed with the white-hot intensity of a blast furnace.
“Let’s go,” he started to say, then fell silent when the ground beneath their feet began to quake and rumble. The hard soil fractured, ripped apart by a thousand jagged cracks that spread outward in a twenty-foot radius around them.
“What’s happening?” Mallory cried. She reached out and grabbed Tim for stability.
Their feet sank into the crumbling dirt like two explorers trapped in quicksand.
Tim opened his mouth to reply, but his words came out in an unintelligible moan when several dozen withered arms jutted from the split ground and clasp tight around their legs, dragging, yanking, hauling them downward. In seconds, they were up to their knees—then their waists—in the dry, churning dirt.
Their screams interwove to create a helix of hellacious noise.
The clammy arms of the dead lashed over Tim’s shoulders and around his neck, a dozen knotted, flailing arms, two dozen, reached upward, gripped his hair, slapped down across his face, clawed his skin.
Knowing the nature of their spirited fetters made no change in the situation. They were still trapped, with nothing in reach to free them.
“Tim,” Mallory wailed. “Oh, God, no, Tim. Stop!”
These were no longer wild shouts of panic, he realized, but focused screams of terror. Twisting with all his might, he angled his head in her direction and saw the cause of her newfound fear.
Mallory had stopped sinking at chest level.
He hadn’t.
“Tim,” she shrieked. “Oh, shit, try and grab my arm.”
Immobilized by the entangling roots, unable to reach for her, all he could do was watch while the dirt dragged him down, coming closer and closer to pulling him beneath the surface.
Then he saw something.
Headlights. On the driveway. Racing closer.
A noisy red station wagon exploded into view at the far end of the lot and rammed the Mercedes at full speed. It punched into the driver’s side door like a huge metal fist, propelling the whole car halfway into the woods, slamming it against a line of trees with a deafening crash.
The lights blinked out.
Both vehicles became enveloped by dust.
And Tim stopped sinking.
“All right, now, get out.”
Paul had his door open and one foot already on the ground before Frank finished shouting the command.
He’d been warned to move fast. On the way down the driveway Frank had him transfer the duffle bag into the backseat so his movements wouldn’t be hindered.
Frank sprang into action, too, shotgun in hand. Once clear of the car, he turned and pumped two loud shots into his side of the wagon, blowing the tires flat.
Following his half of the instructions, Paul aimed the muzzle of his weapon and pulled the trigger, shooting out the front tire, then the back. With that done, he hurried around the wagon’s rear end and ran for the children, praying they were safe. They’d spotted them through the trees during their approach, illuminated in the high beams of the other car.
He gave a brief glance to the Mercedes; dark and vacant, it huddled between the station wagon and a thick tree, now a crumpled shadow of its former glory. But what about the driver?
He’d just passed the wagon’s rear bumper when the station wagon lurched backward at him, its engine suddenly alive.
“Watch it,” Frank shouted.
