Falconer was already throwing the monster truck into reverse, cranking the wheel and getting us perpendicular to the highway, then cranking it the other way to get the big bastard of a vehicle heading the other direction. The roar of the big guns outside was like the finale of a fireworks display. I couldn’t hear myself think.
The truck shook. Amy screamed. Something had hit us.
Falconer growled and fought with the wheel. We weren’t moving. I smelled smoke. Another shell smacked the front of the truck, knocking the hood askew.
Flames flew up in front of the windshield.
“GET OUT! GET OUT AND GET FLAT!”
Falconer threw open his door and ducked out. John was messing with something in his lap. The furgun had fallen to the floorboard. I grabbed it, then climbed over Amy and threw open the door. The sound of monster shrieks and cannon fire filled the air. My shoes hit the pavement and I heard Falconer scream, “THE DITCH, GET TO THE DITCH.”
I saw where he was going—the deep drainage ditch along the west side of the road, no more than ten feet in front of us. John spilled out behind me, all of us now using the burning truck as cover against the barrage of gunfire. Falconer sprinted forward, making himself as low to the ground as he could, and dove into the ditch.
Amy screamed, “JOHN!”
John wheeled around to see a big infected fucker loping toward him from behind, dragging the tattered remains of a black space suit.
I fumbled with the furgun but before I could even get it sitting properly in my hand, John hit the let’s-just- call-it-a-zombie with three barrels of shotgun. Suddenly the monster was missing everything from the neck up.
To Amy, I yelled, “Stay low! As low as you can! GO!”
We ran from behind the truck and tumbled down into the drainage ditch. Bullets punched the dirt and pavement overhead. The truck exploded, sending flaming debris whirling through the air above us. It was the second time I’d almost been hit by a flaming truck part in the last half hour, a new personal record.
Amy screamed, “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US!”
I said, “DOWN! GET YOUR HEAD DOWN!”
A spray of bullets raked across the water behind us, punching into the mud of the embankment.
She yelled, “WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!”
John was frantically trying to pull something out of his pocket—shotgun shells, I assumed. Something whistled past my ear. Next to me, Falconer tumbled into the shallow water of the ditch. The stream under him ran red.
“FALCONER!”
“AMY! NO!”
I grabbed for her arm. She pulled away from me.
She scrambled up the embankment.
Right into the line of fire.
It seemed to happen in slow motion. She stood up, right into the storm of bullets, and started waving her arms in front of her, like she was trying to flag down an oncoming car. She was shouting something at them that not even I could hear over the hellstorm erupting all around her.
Time seemed to stop. I had this frozen, snapshot image of her, standing up there, silhouetted against the iron-gray sky, her pants soaking wet and splattered with mud, her skinny freckled arms up in front of her, pulling the tail of her shirt up to reveal two inches of pale, vulnerable skin. All these details, captured perfectly in my mind, in that endless moment.
And the moment was, in fact, endless, because time had stopped.
From behind me John said, “Finally. Jesus.”
It was dead silent all around us. The water at my feet had frozen. A spray of bits of mud hung in the air in the embankment above me, where a bullet had struck a microsecond before.
I turned to John, who had the Soy Sauce container in his hand. I said, “What the—”
“Oh, Dave! You’re here with me. I stopped time. I hope that’s okay.”
“You… you can do that now?”
“Yeah, ever since I took the Soy Sauce last night. I’m like Zach Morris in
I climbed up the embankment, taking in the frozen battle all around me, like some sort of huge, open air, incredibly fucked-up sculpture in a museum. I looked back at Amy, a statue frozen with her mouth open, exposing her crooked incisors.
I shrugged and said, “Well, it’s actually not the weirdest thing that’s happened on the Sauce.”
John walked up behind me and said, “I wouldn’t even put it in the top five. And I know what you’re thinking, and no, we can’t push her out of the way. Nothing can be moved. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they tell you not to change anything when you go back in time, like it’s a rule or something. I mean literally nothing can be moved. I tried.”
I said, “I can move the furgun.” I still had it in my hand.
“Right, and you’re moving your pants when you walk. I think it’s anything you were touching when everything stopped.”
“How long does it stay like this?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only done it once before. I couldn’t intentionally make it start up again but… I got the sense that it lasts until you do what you need to do. Whether you know what you need to do or not. If that makes sense.”
“What do we need to do?”
I stared over at the column of smoke frozen over the burning truck, the still flames looking like orange-blown glass sculptures. Then, from the still, black column, a whisp of smoke moved.
At the exact same moment I thought it, John said it out loud:
“Oooooh, shit.”
The shadow men were here.
It started with that single, black shadow, hanging in midair. It was moving toward us.
Then I saw another one. And another. They grew out of the air, black shapes like holes burning in the white curtain of reality, revealing the darkness beyond. Three and four at a time they appeared, the darkness taking on the vague shapes of men. Each time my eyes focused on one spot, walking shadows would appear where I wasn’t watching. It was like trying to count snowflakes as they landed on a windshield.
John and I backed away from them, then realized they were behind us, too, on the other side of the ditch.
We were an island in a black tide of them.
PAGE 312 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI
and I must emphasize that my encounters with the Shadow Men have been rare, in the sense that stepping in dog feces is rare. That is, the potential is always there, you never forget it when it happens, but you go just long enough between incidents to let your guard down. Yet, everyone has been in the presence of a Shadow Man, in the same way that everyone has been in the presence of electricity. It is all around you, invisible, tickling at the periphery of your perceptions. Then one day, you touch a bare wire…
These beings live in between moments and outside of time, across dimensions and perhaps never fully exist in any particular one. They have been called ghosts, and no doubt they wear the faces of the recently dead in the imagination of a person trying to reconcile what they saw in that dark corridor, or in the silence of their bedroom at three in the morning. For others, they will perhaps appear to be tiny, gray aliens. Centuries ago a Shadow Man would have been called a faerie, or succubus. That is how the human brain works, when it looks at a formless
