“Shit, lady, you’re nuts.”
Melissa held her position, pinning the accelerator all the way open. Even in their present gear, they closed the gap between the driveway and the monster with surprising speed. She spotted Frank crumpled at the creature’s feet, dangerously close to where they were headed.
She didn’t let up.
Amber light filled the cab.
The colossal figure pivoted, twisting around to greet them with three outstretched arms and a thunderous bellow of rage.
Jimmy pushed and squirmed, finally heaving Melissa off him. Screaming, he slammed both his feet down on the brake pedal, mashing it to the boards. The truck slid. Pneumatic screams joined the beast’s call while the semi’s air brakes strove to slow its advance. But regardless of its stopping power, the cab’s front end collided chest-level with the entity’s towering body, hitting the thing head on, propelling it into the one place she’d been told it couldn’t go.
Through the fence and into the cemetery.
Sprawled on the ground, Frank watched in semi-conscious wonderment when the two imposing juggernauts clashed together, the massive truck overcoming the entity’s humanoid configuration of flotsam with its inexorable momentum, launching the monster into the graveyard at the same instant one of its giant forward tires rolled over Kale Kane’s blazing coffin, crushing it like a snail shell and smearing its festering cargo.
The amber light vanished.
Mallory cheered along with Tim and her father when the hulking creature dropped to its back, smashing three grave markers to rubble beneath its bulk.
The church shook.
Mallory backed away from the window, looking to Tim and then to her dad. With the light from Kane’s coffin extinguished, the old sanctuary had reverted to a cavern of shadows.
“Now what’s happening?” she cried.
“Look at that,” Tim shouted.
A glowing light had appeared within the cemetery, shining upward from the gaping pit of Kale Kane’s open grave. Mallory moved closer to the window, gripping its frame with tense fingers. Black light spilled skyward from the earthy excavation outside, impossibly
The eerie luminescence began to expand across the churchyard. The soil piled around the parameter of Kane’s grave suddenly collapsed inward, the walls crumbling away like sand falling through the neck of an hourglass.
Inch by inch, the grave began to widen. Slow at first, then faster.
The killer’s headstone tilted and fell forward, vanishing into the fissure.
“I think we’d better move,” her dad said.
The hole continued to broaden. Clusters of weeds dropped out of sight, followed by two flanking gravestones, and then a third, fourth, and fifth.
They turned from the windows and hurried through the building’s wreckage, making their way outside.
Jimmy’s truck still shifted from side to side on its massive shocks. Melissa dropped out of the cab and hurried around its front end to look for Frank.
She rounded the bumper and came to a skidding halt at the sight of the odd glow rising from Kane’s empty grave.
Tentacles of electricity leapt out of the hole where Kane’s coffin once rested, lashing through the air. They sparked off the nearby fence posts in a series of blinding flashes. She threw herself backward against the dented grill of the semi when one jagged tendril sputtered across a portion of fencing not far from her feet, scorching the metal, leaving it steaming. In its wake, the sturdy iron bars appeared cracked and colorless; even the grass around them was now ashen and brittle.
The lightshow ceased a moment later, replaced by a pallid mist that billowed out of Kane’s dilated gravesite. It flowed between the rows and swirled amongst tombstones. In seconds the churchyard vanished within the haze, leaving only the entity’s giant legs visible at the edge of the phenomenon.
Melissa froze where she stood. To her right, she detected the sound of people moving inside the devastated church building, and to the far left, she registered three separate voices exclaiming words of amazement pertaining to the lightning strikes. She knew she should do something—warn the people to stay back, see if anyone in the church was hurt, find Frank—but when she finally started to turn, a fleeting glimpse of movement redrew her attention toward the misty land ahead.
The entity lay trapped, unable to vacate its anatomy of interconnected corpses.
Kane was gone. Its powers were gone. All was lost.
The ground vibrated. Fear became a phantom saber cleaving wounds of pure terror to its core.
The time had come to return to the others, to the torment, to the place where numbness would be a sacred blessing.
Melissa screamed and fled backward when two gigantic, talon-tipped claws solidified out of the mist and lunged toward her with savage speed.
Pinned where she stood by fear, Melissa looked on while the massive hooks dropped down and closed around the entity’s body, clutching it in a ghostly grip. They jerked back, hauling the monster into the impenetrable haze and out of sight before her mind had a chance to contemplate a reaction.
Melissa remained flattened against the big rig, shaking, watching the spiraling plumes of vapor that coiled over the land where the monster’s shape had just been.
“Melissa,” Frank’s voice called.
She jumped at the sound of her name, raking an arm over the truck’s ruined grill, cutting herself and drawing blood. The pain enlivened her. Still shivering, eyes wide and directed forward, she shuffled back along the semi, averting her gaze from the mist-laden graveyard only long enough to sidestep Kale Kane’s extirpated remains. Nothing recognizable remained of the killer, save for a molted green arm that lay in a liquid puddle of half-rotten flesh and embalming fluid.
She found Frank near the cab’s midsection and almost forgot about everything else when she beheld his condition.
She knelt at his side. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you look like you went through a meat grinder.”
He smiled. “Melissa—”
“Keep your voice down,” she warned. “Look, I knocked the entity-thing into the cemetery and something weird happened. Something
“There’s nothing to fear,” he answered.
“You don’t get it. Something’s out there, something even bigger than the entity.”
Frank shook his head, wincing from his injuries. “Not anymore, there isn’t. You did it, Melissa. You sent it back to where it came from, back to where it belongs. You saved us… Look for yourself.”
She traced Frank’s line of sight to the stoical slabs of the old churchyard, finding most of them now illuminated by the truck’s headlight. The mysterious fog had already evaporated into the night.
The entity’s body was gone.
A wide trench cut across the ground where the beast had fallen. The scoured trail led deeper into the cemetery, to the vacuous pit of Kale Kane’s grave. Numerous headstones had been knocked flat to the right and left of where the body passed, some crumbled to ruins and imbedded in the dirt.
Melissa heard footsteps approaching. Paul Wiess and two children poked their heads around the front of the semi to gaze at her with questioning faces.
