“She needs a hospital,” Stella mouthed.
Jill stopped drumming the pot for a second, shocked still by the dread of sadness. This broke the concentration of the others.
When she picked the rhythm back up, it was too late. Whatever trance the younger girls had been in disintegrated. “Why’d we stop?” asked Candace.
“We need to do something else,” Stella explained. “Soon.”
“No!” Emera hugged close to the old woman, squeezing a breath from her that was too close to a death rattle. “Miss Iss hassa stay here till she gets better!”
Stella rubbed the child’s quivering back. “Honey…”
With an excited bark, Bravo dashed to the door.
“Open up!” Bernard shouted, as he pounded the door like a raiding SWAT captain. “Hurry!”
Jill went to the door and was nearly knocked to the floor by the giant woman who rushed through.
“Where is she?” asked Brinke.
Bravo did not bristle, and no one asked who she was. Her urgency and self-assurance told them all they needed to know.
“Keep doing what you’re doing, everyone.” Brinke pulled Ysabella’s blankets away and lay atop her like a lover, hugging Ysabella’s lolling head in her arms. “Stay close, sugar,” she told the confused Emera. The little girl reacted quickly, reclaiming her spot against Ysabella, like a cat seeking warmth.
“Okkala Boro-Tah Cam-Ura Tahn!” Brinke said in a tone that commanded attention.
She repeated the incantation, rocking restlessly.
“Hit it, everybody,” said Jill, and the other women joined in the chant as best they could until they had the hang of it. As their voices rose, so did their assurance, and soon Elaine, Leticia, Candace, Stella and Bernard had formed a pentagon around the bed with their hands linked, their heads held high, and their wills rocketing into the universe.
* * * *
Staring expectantly at Timbo, Kerwin raised his voice-box amplifier in a shaking hand. “What are you waiting for?”
“No use shooting their legs,” Timbo answered. “I’m waiting for one of ’em to show its face.”
“At least the barricades are holding,” Mayor Stuyvesant said.
The heavy double doors at both ends shook, as if the monsters had heard and sought to prove her wrong.
“For how much longer?” asked McGlazer.
In the weight room, each unearthly roar, every echoing crash drew ever more strident and frightened cries from the children huddled in the farthest corner.
“What’s happening!?” asked a six-year-old boy whom Stuart and DeShaun only knew as Pockets.
The older boys grimaced at one another to pass the buck. Finally, DeShaun tried, “The storm’s knocking down trees or something.”
Stuart peered through the rectangular pane set high to the side of the door.
The tentacles had withdrawn, leaving a tense stillness, and leaving McGlazer, the mayor, Bernard, Timbo and Kerwin out in the open.
“Are the trees gonna fall on us?” asked Pockets.
“We won’t let them.”
“Why can’t we have the lights on? I’m scared!”
“Hey, let’s play a game, you guys,” DeShaun suggested, peering around the room for some kind of prop.
A chorus of sibilant roars rendered the ruse ineffective. The kids broke into a chorus of their own, sobbing pleas for their parents, for the lights to be on, to be taken home.
The pounding at the Community Center’s doors devolved to eerie scratching sounds, then to nothing, which was worse.
The monsters had stopped blindly thrashing with their tentacles and their scratchy-voiced screaming.
“Could they have left?” whispered Doris.
Their incredulity was apparent even in the darkness.
“No science-based defense this time?” McGlazer asked Bernard.
Bernard shook his head.
One of the high windows went black, filled by something from a bad Halloween acid trip.
“Good God. It’s…a pumpkin…something…”
Timbo was quick to aim and fire, hitting a sickly eye. There was a burst of pulpy blood, then a cry of almost human agony. The thing quickly disappeared, leaving only the sounds of rain and lightning.
“Good shooting!” praised McGlazer.
“They must be too large to get in through those windows, maybe even the doors,” noted Bernard.
“Maybe we can wait them out,” wondered Timbo.
“But there’s still the rest of the town,” the mayor grimly added.
“How many can there—”
Timbo’s question was cut short by the crashing of the flimsy pallet boards covering the windows above them as a six-inch-thick spider leg punched through. The boards fell across Kerwin’s back, drawing a weird grunt.
“Are you o—?”
Six viney appendages flew in after the boards, moving as fast as the lightning that cracked at the same time. McGlazer and crew dashed to the opposite side to dodge the flailing killer cables. Timbo fell to his back as he aimed the rifle up at the newly broken window.
He got off a shot as another of the evil orange faces peered in, shrieking loudly enough to shatter nerves. The bullet missed, sparking the cinder-block edge of the window.
The quintet rolled and crawled back toward the middle, just beyond the reach of the vines on either side. “Dammit!” shouted McGlazer.
They huddled closer and closer, as the grappling root-ropes stretched to ensnare them. Awful orange faces filled the windows now, grimacing and grinning down at their prey, reducing the meager sodium lights of the parking lot to a dim suggestion.
“If they get any bigger, they’ll be able to reach us,” said Bernard.
“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that.” Pointing up at one of the demons with a trembling finger, the mayor spoke with more pessimism than anyone had ever heard from her.
It opened its mouth wide, squinting, as if in the pain of giving birth.
* * * *
“I should probably tell you now, dear boy,” Violina began, patting Dennis’s arm. “I know what you’re trying to do with the sneaky, silly water scheme.”
Dennis didn’t react in even the minimal fashion he was allowed. He just stared ahead into the rainy road and drove, seething.
“That’s why I’ll let you have a little drink of your old favorite soon.” She raised her flask in thumb and forefinger, shaking it a little to make it slosh. “Diamante’s with a dash of magic motor-control potion!” She tucked it back into her cleavage. “A little something
