We kept moving up the sheer face of the hill, Mickey’s light picking out skulls and ribcages, a few fully articulated skeletons in rags rising from the sand. Half way up we heard more of that grisly, fragmented laughter and it was directly behind us. There was no doubt of it. We froze again, weapons drawn.
It was there, but we couldn’t see it.
The moonlight in the pit was uneven with all that heaped refuse down there casting jagged shadows in every direction. Every time we heard a noise, our flashlights revealed nothing.
But it was coming. Getting closer, tightening the noose around us.
We came to a halt, bunching together in a circle, weapons pointing in all directions. But on whose flank it would attack, we did not know. My mouth was dry as sawdust. I couldn’t even summon the spit to swallow. It felt like every muscle and tendon in my body had drawn tight like wires.
We heard it, seemingly in several different directions.
It was casting around out there, cat and mouse. I heard things crunching like it had stepped on skulls and crushed them flat. Something huge fell over and the ground shook. I felt the stomping of its feet. A section of cement pipe came flying out of the darkness, whooshing right over our heads and impaling itself in the hillside.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Carl said, his voice weak with a sort of manic desperation I’d never heard in it before.
“Quiet,” Texas told him
The pit was silent as a crypt suddenly. I could hear the others breathing but nothing else. Sweat rolled down my neck. I could feel the heat rising from the others. It was close, the beast was close. I knew that much. It had been playing games with us, trying to drive us into a state of absolute fear and it had succeeded quite well. Now the end game was at hand. Mickey scanned her light around with a trembling hand and picked out nothing but bones, broken slabs of pavement, the rusting hulk of an old stove. Suddenly, the air was thick with a sickening stench like spoiled meat.
The beast came leaping out of the shadows, roaring with primeval appetite.
We shot at it, but it was like trying to kill a ghost. It was there. And then it was not. Panic set in and we just scrambled madly up the hillside. Mickey led the way, Texas right behind her. Gremlin knocked me aside and then grabbed Janie and tossed her back. She lost her balance and rolled ten or fifteen feet down the hillside.
“Take her!” Gremlin cried. “Take her and leave us alone! She’s the one you want!”
I went after Janie and Carl went after Gremlin. I heard them tussling. Heard screams and cries. I pulled Janie up and fired into the darkness where I heard the beast. As I led Janie back up, I saw that Carl had Gremlin on the ground. Gremlin was screaming and crying and Carl was drilling him in the face. By the time I reached him, he had yanked Gremlin to his feet. Then, grabbing him by the hair and the back of his jacket, he lifted him right up and threw him. Gremlin went airborne about five feet, hit the ground rolling. He rolled right down to the bottom and when he finally stopped he let out a demented scream that was about as close to raw insanity as I’ve ever heard.
We saw him in the moonlight.
Just as we saw the grotesque figure standing over him. The beast picked him up with very little effort, hoisting him over its head and shaking him like an offering to the cold moon above. He was squirming, crying, screaming. If I hadn’t have hated that bastard so much at that point, I might have felt sorry for him. The beast brought him down on a sawtoothed plate of exposed metal. His scream ended instantly with a wet, shearing sound.
We ran up the hillside and out of the pit in record time.
Behind us, we could hear the sounds of Gremlin being battered to a pulp.
22
Thirty minutes later we saw the bridge. It stretched about half a mile over the Calumet River and the railroad tracks below. It was a steel bridge with two high arches near the center, sagging and twisted like it had withstood an airstrike. Maybe it had. I estimated that it was probably a good hundred foot drop to the river below. The closer we got to it the more we all saw the wreckage: mangled girders, blackened uprights, overhead beams sheared and hanging, the whole thing crowded with debris, smashed cars and trucks. Everything from big semis to minivans. It almost looked like they had been driven up on the bridge to form some kind of barricade. Many of them were charred.
As we neared it, Janie said, “Are you sure this thing is stable?’
Mickey nodded. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s safe.”
I don’t think any of us were very reassured. It looked like some kind of war had been fought up there and not that long ago. In my mind, the bridge was the monstrous exoskeleton of some gigantic insect, shattered and broken and rawboned, just waiting to fall into the polluted depths of the river below.
I checked Texas Slim’s wound by flashlight, just to see if all the commotion had torn it open but it was okay. So on we went.
Mickey led the way, seeming to know it quite well as she slipped around the burnt hulks of cars, trucks, and nameless machinery. We saw quite a few skeletons, some cremated behind the wheels of vehicles and others scattered underfoot, birdpicked and disjointed. It was like a graveyard. My flashlight picked out more than one skeleton that was punctured with bullet holes and that made me certain that a war was fought up here, or at the very least dozens of small skirmishes. Several trucks had burst through the railing and hung precariously on the edge, their noses pointed out into the misting blackness. A sluggish, gray-green fog with the consistency of ectoplasm drifted over the river below. Now and then there was an opening in it and I could see the wrecks of vehicles rising from the murky, stinking water.
Mickey continued to lead us on, threading us through the wreckage. Five minutes into it, both Carl and I lit cigarettes to calm our nerves. “You know she could be leading us into a trap, don’t you?” he whispered to me as he cupped a match to light my smoke.
It had occurred to me, of course.
A sleek, attractive woman like her. How easy it would have been for her to draw in men and then use their own raging hormones and that very male need to protect women-especially sexy ones-against them. But I didn’t really doubt her. I had a good feeling about her. Maybe her motives weren’t entirely altruistic, but then again whose were? I did not get the sort of bad feeling from her I’d gotten from Gremlin after he hooked back up with us. And that had probably not been any sixth sense on my part, but maybe an intuition planted in my head by The Shape.
We walked on.
The bridge canted slowly upward and leveled out beneath the arches where it ran flat for about two city blocks before canting back down to the other bank. The closer we got to the arches, the more wrecked vehicles I saw. The entire thing was nothing but a vast junkyard. It made me nervous. With all that scrap metal lying around, we could have walked right into an ambush at any moment. It would have been tricky in full daylight, but at night… just death waiting to happen.
So when Janie stopped walking and said, “I think there’s something out there,” I was not really surprised. Maybe I’d been feeling it for awhile, too, telling myself that it was nothing but shellshock, post-traumatic stress from our encounter with the beast. But as I stopped, yes, I was feeling it, too.
Carl and Texas looked around, then looked at each other. They were not convinced.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe you got the jitters.”
“Sure,” Texas Slim said.
“No, it’s not that,” Janie assured us.
Mickey was hugging herself, looking troubled. “She’s right, Nash. I feel it, too. Like a hundred eyes are staring at me.”
Well, by that point I had learned to trust Mickey’s intuition. Janie’s was pretty well developed, too, but Mickey’s was practically a sixth sense. I decided we’d wait a moment. We got up by the arches, sidled around a fuel tanker, and then kept an eye on what was beneath us, that strip of bridge running back towards the bank we’d just left. The moon had abandoned us. It was rafting through clouds high above. The tension inside me was like hot
