light. Beyond the bright island in front of the car lay only a void. Like the end of the world. Not limping, though her leg ached, she headed into the trees. “Steven?” Her shadow hurtled on ahead of her, startling her as it leaped from trunk to trunk. “Matthew?”
Hot wind gritted across the sand, and she listened to the night keening as it passed over her.
She heard birds calling in agitation…and other noises now, tiny sounds, as though dozens of small slinking beasts scurried through the brush. Things crunched underfoot.
A ticking of leaves and twigs became a heavy crunching.
“Steven?”
It grew louder.
She aimed the rifle at nothing she could see.
It growled.
She fired and ran, blinded, her shoulder aching from the recoil.
Again, the gun rocked and roared, and she breathed the tang of gunpowder.
It grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back.
She felt its talons, felt her scalp burn as hair ripped out. Crystals of pain tore through her skull, and her mouth pulled open, a gravid choke bursting in her throat. Whirling, she struck with the rifle butt, the blow containing all the terror-born fury of a thousand nightmares.
The dark shape staggered.
The gun wrenched from her grasp to go crashing into the dark.
She ran. Pain jolted in her leg as she broke through thick bracken. She could hear the thing crashing through the underbrush close behind her, and she stumbled, the flashlight on her belt banging against her thigh. She groped for the flashlight, pulled it loose. Switching it on, she cast it as far as she could into the pines. Instantly, she bolted in the opposite direction.
The pounding in her chest squeezed the breath from her until she could hear nothing but her own gasps. Sinking to the ground, she curled her body into a ball, found a bush to crawl beneath.
The night came in with wave after wave of terror; she felt it close above her head like a black foam.
Something swirled in her vision, off in the trees, dim movement.
Mist shrouded the glow of the flashlight.
In refracted brightness, she could almost see what held the flashlight, could almost make out the misshapen arm.
The beam struck her eyes, and her night vision blanked out. An unvoiced scream rattling in her brain, she turned her head until the beam passed on. She blinked. Dark and squat in the diffuse moonlight, something loomed behind her in the reeds.
The patch of brightness had stopped moving, still a good distance away, and she staggered on, gaining speed as the leg responded to her panicked demands.
The thing had thrown it away.
Off its hinges, the door leaned against a tree.
She stepped on something soft.
Her eyes tracked across the moonlit floor.
From a dark corner inside the shack came a blubbering mockery of words. She backed away, slipped on a mound, fell, and a lump of something slimy as wet clay came away in her hand. She rolled. There was movement in the bulk she tumbled over, and she recoiled with a silent shriek.
“’Th-thena…” It spoke and reached for her.
“Steve!” She knelt by him, felt the wetness of his shirtfront. “You’re hurt? Did you crawl in here? No, don’t try to talk.” She watched the doorway. “It’s out there.” She searched his pockets for matches, struck one, and the sulfurous stink found her throat. In the glow, his shirt glistened.
She looked around at hell, at madness.
The occupants of the shack lay in positions of abandon. Most had clothing peeled back to expose rotting carcasses. Pocked faces grinned pus yellow and mold green in the light of the tiny flame. Nearby, what appeared to be a male hunched on its face, coarsening gray buttocks exposed, and against the wall, a skeleton grin that fell away in maggots was no less obscene than the legs spread wide beneath a tattered skirt. Puddling flesh left the leg bones bare in spots.
The match went out, and she inhaled the horrible intimacy of the dark, the air so corrupt even it could probably kill. She pressed Steve’s handkerchief to his throat, tried to stop the blood that gurgled there. “You’ll be all right, Steve. I’ll get you out of here.” She lit another match but couldn’t bring herself to look at his slashed belly. Tightening her jaw against the rising flow of nausea, she closed her eyes against the force of her mind’s rejection. She couldn’t move.
A distant flash of pain forced her eyes open. The match had gone out. With burned fingertips, she fumbled for another.
“Something under me…hurts…” Squirming, he shivered convulsively, and his arms jerked toward her.
“Don’t try to move.”
But he pulled her toward him. “…get out…”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“’Thena, run.” His grip tightened. “Don’t you know…where we…?”
“We’re in its…lair.” Striking another match, she spoke softly. “My leg hurts. I can’t run anymore.”
A howl shook the walls.
She clutched him in terror. The sounds that emerged from his throat ceased to be words.
Strange objects littered the shack. Damp sticks that might once have been furniture were heaped in the corners, and things twisted and partially devoured sprawled upon them, coated with a scum that seemed faintly to