feet and stare the demonic creation directly in the yellowed eyes. “How in the hell do you think that I could possibly…”
He stumbled backwards, his legs feeling like wobbling noodles beneath his weight. Everything became fuzzy as he swayed from side to side in the midst of a dizzy spell. His mind fought to grasp what he already knew to be true as he finally fell to the ground.
The monster’s loud, booming laughter echoed throughout the room, settling into Matt’s skull where it seemed to linger eternally.
Breathing heavily, he hopped to his feet, his heart thundering in his chest as he dashed towards the window, slamming his forehead into the glass as he stared off at the group of people gathered for the barbecue.
“Get out of there!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, unlatching the window and sliding the glass back to reveal the screen covering. “Get away from there!”
But there was nothing but the sound of happiness and laughter from the frolicking group of party- goers.
“You have to stop this!” Scott shouted, whirling and sprinting towards the devil, taking hold of a mass of the cloth that covered his chest in either hand and shaking it violently.
The man just smiled, his graying gums spreading from his yellow teeth in a menacing grin.
His eyes widening as a sense of panic set in, Scott whirled and grabbed the phone off of the desk. Bringing it to his face in his trembling hands, he pressed the “Caller ID” button and then the down arrow. The last number to call showed up in the middle of the screen and he immediately pressed dial, praying that it wasn’t too late to stop Greg.
The phone rang once.
Twice.
Three times.
The voice mail picked up after the fourth ring as Scott spiked the phone into the wall, breaking through the drywall with a cloud of powder.
“Help!” he shouted, whirling around the room looking for anything at all that might be of some assistance.
Snapping back to the creature, his teeth bared ferociously, he growled, “Stop this.”
“I cannot do that,” the deep voice answered.
“Fuck!” Scott shouted as he brushed past the monster and dashed into the hallway, hurdling the stairs into the entranceway. A chorus of laughter filled the house as he burst through the front door and out onto the lawn.
The wet snow that still coated the lawn in patches seeped up between his bare toes as he raced across the wet grass, bounding over the curb and onto the street. Pebbles and grains of dirt dug into the pads on his feet, stinging as they pierced the flesh, but he had no time to even notice.
A block away, he could see the herds of people milling in the street, oblivious to what was about to happen.
“Get away from there!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as he hopped over the curb on the other side of the street and onto the muddy mess of yard in front of the skeletal house covered with tarps.
His feet sunk deeply into the mud that seethed between his toes as each step became labored, his balance tedious.
“Get away from there!”
There was a loud explosion that echoed down from the hills above. The ground rumbled beneath his feet as a cloud of smoke appeared above the trees that lined the foothills, against the blue colored Rockies.
“No!” he shouted, as the ground seemed to drop out from beneath him.
Falling to his face on the muddy ground, he scrambled forward, clawing at the thick mud in a futile effort to regain his feet. The ground still trembled, a loud groan filtering his way from the explosion.
Scott was helpless to do more than watch as the street ahead split wide open, starting at the entrance to the development, heading straight down the middle of the street towards the park where the groups of people all stopped what they were doing to stare up at the cloud of smoke billowing from the distant trees. They swayed on their feet against the rumbling earth, some of them starting to run, others frozen in time as they felt the earth split open between their feet.
The asphalt crumbled atop the fragmenting earth as the street fell into the old mine shafts. Bodies that had once been in the center of his view slipped beneath the earth amidst a chorus of screams.
Smoke and dust filled the air above where the street had once been, blocking his view of the park, which had suddenly fallen silent. The shuddering ground subsided as Scott was finally able to push himself to his feet.
Sprinting as fast as he possibly could, his heart hammering through his pained lungs, he raced to the edge of the sidewalk across from the park on the edge of the crumbled street. Falling to his hands and knees, he stared down into the canyon of broken asphalt at the mess of twisted and shattered bodies that littered the smoking ground.
The spray from a snapped water main doused the whole area in a heavy rain, wetting down the clouds of dust as the brown droplets of water settled to the earth. Tears streamed from his eyes as he clenched them shut as tightly as he possibly could. There was a hollow ache right in the center of his being.
Forcing his eyes open and fighting a wave of choking sobs that burst from his quivering lips, Scott climbed over the lip of the canyon in the road, lowering himself to the ground to begin to sort through the corpses to see if there were any left alive.
A shadow crossed over him from above as he knelt by the first badly twisted body. He looked up just in time to see the big, brown eyes of the large stag beneath the heavily forked antlers atop its head. The eyes glimmered momentarily in the midday sun before the animal finally whirled and bounded off out of sight.
Turning his attention back to the piles of rubble that he now sorted through, Scott wept as he searched for any sign of life.
