twinged with red.
“Lightning?” I said almost hopefully.
“What kind of devil’s lightning is that?” demanded Vance. “It was red. I swear it was red. Man, did you see it?”
I nodded, but wasn’t really listening to him. I had caught sight of the lake. I gestured and pointed.
We had made it up to the top of the only hill in Redmoor on the East side. It wasn’t very high, but it was enough to see over the trees and houses to the Lake. The water there was as black as slate flecked with silver. Even at this distance I could see the waves the storm was kicking up. It was like looking at an open beach along the Atlantic. And out there, under the storm and under the waves too, I thought I saw a light. A blue-green glow. After a few seconds the glow died down and the Lake was just roiling dark water again.
Vance turned back to me, and I could see from the horrified look on his face that he had seen it too. For once he was speechless. The wind was beginning to gust up into a roar at times now. The trees bent and whipped at the sky.
“Let’s get moving. If that girl is out here we had better find her fast,” I shouted over the winds. We turned and hurried up Bohlend Drive.
We actually found the girl. I think we were more surprised than she was when she popped out of an abandoned car and came up behind us to grab our coats. We hadn’t even made it up to the Nelson place yet, and we were so distracted by the storm that we hadn’t heard her cries as we passed the car in which she had hidden.
Holly Nelson was a preteen and not a little girl anymore. You could tell she would have real breasts and hips within a year or two, but right now, she was wearing pajamas with yellow bears blowing bubbles on them. She was rail-thin with long wet hair that had pasted itself in black stripes over her face. Her bright green eyes shone with fear out of her very pale face. In her hand, she gripped a six-inch long screwdriver with a green resin handle.
“I–I was hiding in the car,” she told us in between sobs. “
“We’ll take you back to your parents, everyone is fine,” I told her.
“Things?” asked Vance, grabbing her arm. She nodded, and I saw Vance’s radar go on. He eyed the soaking landscape around us nervously. I couldn’t blame him.
Vance patted her shoulder. “Were they flying things?”
She nodded again.
Vance recoiled and his hand leapt from her shoulder as if she somehow had delivered a shock to his fingertips.
“Let’s move,” I said and there was no argument from either of them. We headed back toward the medical center. We had less than a mile to go, but the storm was moving in off the Lake unusually fast.
Thirteen
It was the most savage storm I’d ever seen. Earlier, there had been no thunder, but now there was plenty of it crashing in the sky with more red flashes deep up in the clouds, lighting them up from the inside like a light bulb under a gauzy blanket. Here in Indiana we are a long way from open seas and hurricanes, but we do get a tornado now and then. I’d always heard about them, and we had the warning system, but I’d never seen an actual funnel cloud up close until today.
“What the heck is that?” demanded Vance, and I saw that the black clouds were passing over the area of the Lake where we had seen the lights in the water a few minutes before. A silver gushing cloud rolled out over the lake centered on this point. It rose higher as we watched and formed a swirling dark conical shape that aimed down into the lake. The mist and winds it kicked up at the bottom swallowed the trees along the lakeshore.
I gazed at the storm for a second, thinking hard. I realized that the storm had touched down just about where I had met the changeling and spoken with her the night before. Were the two events related? I had no idea. But I wondered if that pile of rocks I’d set out there would still be there to mark the spot after this storm. I doubted it.
“It’s a water cyclone,” I said, “we’ve got to run, and we might have to find a cellar to hide in.”
Holly was pulling desperately on my coat. I worried instantly that she had hurt herself. She had no shoes on and I’d been wondering all along when I was going to have to pick her up and carry her.
But it wasn’t her feet. She pointed behind us and screamed something but I couldn’t make out the words. I looked behind us and I yelled myself.
They were coming. The flying ones.
I’d developed a theory about them that differed from everyone else’s. Some people thought the flying ones were birds, because they ranged in size from about that of an adult crow to that of a goshawk. Others theorized they were leaves originally, because they were shaped like leaves and had the skin-texture of a leaf-if you can imagine a leaf that is fleshy, like a big slab of steak. Worst of all was the sucker-like mouth that could chew through the back of your coat and latch onto an artery to suckle. I myself figured they were too leaf-like to be birds, and too big and mobile to be leaves-I figured they were both. Somehow-I felt in my bones I was right the very first time I thought of it-I knew they were both bird and leaf, merged together in whatever unnatural fashion these changelings were made, like two colors of candle wax melted and molded together to form a new color in a new shape. Except that these new shapes were abominations, things like flying kites that wriggled through the air and which seemed to catch currents and glide like flying squirrels down upon their fleeing victims.
Behind and above us, moving in wild swirling patterns in the turbulent winds were perhaps a dozen of them. I could see glittering eyes like black marbles. Their open maws worked beneath those eyes, contracting and expanding in anticipation,
We ran.
I took Holly’s hand with my left arm and drew my saber with my right. Normally, you could hear them coming when they swooped down on you from out of the sky, but today with the storm beating down on us we couldn’t hear a thing except for the roar of the cold silver sheets of rain pouring on the asphalt and the wind screaming in the trees. Still, I sensed their nearness and whirled and slashed just as two of them dived for us. One sheared apart to flip and slap on the wet pavement like a gasping bass in the bottom of a fishing boat. The second made it down and adhered itself to the back of Holly’s head. She shrieked, hitting that special, ear-splitting high-pitched note that only young girls can reach.
I lifted my saber but realized I couldn’t do anything without risking her life. I reached out and tried to rip the thing out of her hair. It felt like a wedge of muscle. The cold rubbery flesh was strong and I thought that a stingray must have felt like this. Vance had joined us then and he gripped the thing and tugged at it too. His lips curled back to bare his teeth in disgust, but he did it. Our efforts only made Holly scream louder. Blood trickled down her face as her scalp opened up.
Then there was a silvery flash as her hand raised up and punched at the thing. It was the screwdriver she had been carrying. She stabbed at it repeatedly. I saw one of the black spherical eyes pop. Then it let go and Vance and I stomped the unholy life out of it.
We both took up one of Holly’s arms and ran. We half-carried Holly the rest of the way into the parking lot. Jimmy Vanton and Carlene Mitts were there to greet us with shotguns. They boomed at the things that darted about like kites in the sky. We didn’t stop running until we slammed open the glass doors and stumbled, dripping with rainwater and blood, into the waiting room.
We had made it.
Doc Wilton gave Holly a dozen or so stitches in her scalp and there was a spot up there she would have to comb over and hide for the rest of her life, but she would live. When I came to see her, munching on the sandwiches and coffee Monika had given me so long ago, but which I had never had a chance to eat, she was still gripping her screwdriver resolutely. I nodded in appreciation, she was a survivor. I didn’t know whether to be glad for her or to mourn the rest of her childhood she had already missed out on.
“Thanks guys.” She gave us a smile.
