I headed for the door, trading the.45 for my shotgun on the way. A quick glance through the side window in the hallway, and I spotted a couple soldiers armed with M4 carbines breaking from the treeline. I didn't have time to worry about them. Turning quickly, I started down the stairs.
What I should have done was take another look through that front window. If I'd done that, I might have noticed the burrowedup tunnel in the sand over Roy Barnes's grave.
It was hard to move slowly, but I knew I had to keep my head. The staircase was long, and the walls were so tight the shotgun could easily cover the narrow gap below. If you wanted a definition of dangerous ground, that would be the bottom of the staircase. If the bloodface was close — his back against the near wall, or standing directly beside the stairwell — he'd have a chance to grab the shotgun barrel before I entered the room.
A sharp clatter on the hardwood floor below. Metallic. like a machete. I judged the distance and moved quickly, following the shotgun into the room. And there was the bloodface. over by the front door. He'd made it that far, but no further. And it wasn't gunfire that had brought him down. No. Nothing so simple as a bullet had killed him.
I saw the thing that had done the job, instantly remembering the sounds I'd heard during the night — the scrapes and scrabbles I'd mistaken for nesting birds scratching in the chimney. The far wall of the room was plastered with bits of carved skin, each one of them scarred over with words, and each of those words had been skinned from the thing that had burrowed out of Roy Barnes's corpse.
That thing crouched in a patch of sunlight by the open door, naked and raw, exposed muscles alive with fresh slashes that wept red as it leaned over the dead bloodface. A clawed hand with long nails like skinning knives danced across a throat slashed to the bone. The demon didn't look up from its work as it carved the corpse's flesh with quick, precise strokes. It didn't seem to notice me at all. It wrote one word on the dead kid's throat. and then another on his face. and then it slashed open the bloodface's shirt and started a third.
I fired the shotgun and the monster bucked backwards. Its skinning knife nails rasped across the doorframe and dug into the wood. The thing's head snapped up, and it stared at me with a headful of eyes. Thirty eyes, and every one of them was the color of muddy water. They blinked, and their gaze fell everywhere at once — on the dead bloodface and on me, and on the words pasted to the wall.
Red lids blinked again as the thing heaved itself away from the door and started toward me.
Another lid snapped opened on its chin, revealing a black hole.
One suck of air and I knew it was a mouth.
I fired at the first syllable. The thing was blasted back, barking and screaming as it caught the door frame again, all thirty eyes trained on me now, its splattered chest expanding as it drew another breath through that lidded mouth just as the soldiers outside opened fire with their M4s.
Bullets chopped through flesh. The thing's lungs collapsed and a single word died on its tongue. Its heart exploded. An instant later, it wasn't anything more than a corpse spread across a puddle on the living room floor.
"Hey, Old School," the private said. "Have a drink."
He tossed me a bottle, and I tipped it back. He was looking over my shotgun. "It's mean," he said, "but I don't know. I like some rock 'n' roll when I pull a trigger. All you got with this thing is rock."
"You use it right, it does the job."
The kid laughed. "Yeah. That's all that matters, right? Man, you should hear how people talk about this shit back in the Safe Zone. They actually made us watch some lame-ass stuff on the TV before they choppered us out here to the sticks. Scientists talking, ministers talking. like we was going to talk these things to death while they was trying to chew on our asses."
"I met a scientist once," the sergeant said. "He had some guy's guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor's leg. I put a bullet in his head."
Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle along with it.
"But, you know what?" the private said. "Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean, really?"
"Well," another kid said. "Some people say you can't fight something you can't understand. And maybe it's that way with these things. I mean, we don't know where they came from. Not really. We don't even know what they are."
"Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I've cleaned their guts off my boots. That's all I need to know."
"That works today, Q, but I'm talking long term. As in: what about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?"
None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.
Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. "You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You'll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you're up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don't get eaten before nightfall."
The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MRE's. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. "Jamal Quinlan," he said. "I'm from Detroit."
"John Dalton. I'm the sheriff around here."
It was the first time I'd said my own name in five months.
It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn't sure what it felt like.
Maybe it felt like turning a page.
…
The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, "No, sir. I don't."
The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.
The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn't pay them any mind.
I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.
Things are getting better now. It's quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I've got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler's trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun — the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium — those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes — if he'd never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he'd never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?
But there's no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybe's and what if's.