Thor seemed unusually quiet. As soon as the SUV had begun moving, he had stepped off the seat and curled up in the leg space under the passenger side of the console in the equivalent of a doggy fetal position, his eyes never straying from her face. She didn’t think he was hurt; he just seemed…afraid.
She passed the open garage and swung the vehicle around the farthest corner of the house. Slowing to a crawl, she carefully navigated the SUV around the blind corner, almost dislodging a drainpipe with her mirror.
Beyond the corner of the house was a clear stretch of field several acres deep and at least as wide that spread out toward a copse of trees on the farthest border. Just outside the umbra of the headlights’ reach, Emily caught a brief flash of movement. It was too quick for her to be certain she had actually seen what she thought she had seen. She began to accelerate gently in the direction she thought she had seen the movement, then braked hard as the lights revealed Simon, moving away from her, a limp bundle tucked under each arm as he scuttled across the open field toward the trees.
Emily accelerated a little more until her lights fully illuminated Simon and his load. She was right; he had the children.
But there was something else with him, too. Something massive that seemed to shrink from the touch of the SUV’s light. Emily had a sense of thin pale limbs that disappeared into the nearest shadows when her headlights played over them.
Simon halted midstride as the light engulfed and surrounded him. As Emily pulled closer, she could see the three black tentacles she had noticed earlier. Now that she could see them more clearly in the headlights, she thought they reminded her more of umbilical cords; rotting, serrated umbilical cords from some monstrous birth. They flexed and arced as the thing they were attached to maneuvered deeper into the shadows.
Simon turned and faced her, his eyes boring through the darkness to her.
Both children hung limply from the arms that cradled them. Emily had no idea whether they were alive or dead. Their arms and legs draped limply toward the ground like they had been caught trying to touch their toes. Then both kids’ heads lifted—first Rhiannon, then her brother’s—and Emily could see their faces grimace as they looked directly into the light.
Alive! They were both alive.
In that split second of recognition, Emily saw a smile spread across Simon’s face. It was like he was tempting her, taunting her to try, just try to get the kids. Come and get them, that smile said. Try to take what’s mine. Come and see what they see.
Emily knew the sane thing to do would be to turn the vehicle around and head back to the other house, pack the supplies waiting there, and leave. But she could not leave these kids to a fate decided by the hands of a father controlled by an alien mind.
“Fuck that,” she spat and floored the accelerator.
She felt the power of the V-8 engine surge up through the steering column, along her arms, and set her head ringing. She welcomed the pain this time; she embraced it and allowed it to fuel her anger as nearly a ton and a half of made-in-Detroit gas-guzzling metal and leather leaped forward like a bull with a matador fixed firmly in its sights.
The Durango sped from zero to forty-five, racing across the open space and devouring the distance between them in just a few seconds. By the time the speedometer hit fifty, there was less than ten feet separating her from Simon and his captives. She saw Rhiannon look up again, her attention drawn by the roar of the oncoming SUV. Emily saw the glint of the headlights reflect off the girl’s eyes and the look of sheer terror when she realized how fast the SUV was bearing down on the three of them.
This close, Emily could see that Simon no longer looked completely human. His skin was tinged red with lighter blotches here and there that made him look like an oddly colored cheetah. His chest rose and fell in rapid succession as though he had just run a marathon. Dark varicose veins, plump and seemingly close to bursting, crisscrossed his face just beneath the skin and the exposed flesh of his arms, pulsing obscenely. Despite the imminent impact, Simon’s expression did not change.
“Sorry, Simon,” Emily whispered.
When there was less than five feet between them, Emily threw the steering wheel hard left. Instead of Simon, she aimed for the darker shadows where the alien hid, and she yelled in triumph as the lights finally illuminated the monstrosity.
It was balanced on six impossibly thin legs that hung like wilted, wet stems from an elongated corpse-pale body. An extended compound eye stretched around its bulbous head.
There was no mouth that Emily could see in the brief flash of time the thing was visible in her headlights, but she could see the three tentacles attached to Simon as they writhed and flexed their way back to three nodules extruding from just above the insect-like eye.
The Durango tore through two of the creature’s fragile legs with a satisfying crack like snapping branches that she could hear even over the roar of the engine. Black liquid splattered across the windshield as chunks of the creature’s legs, the color of dried wheat stalks, bounced off the hood and spun off into the darkness on either side of her.
From the corner of her eye Emily saw the thing stagger sideways, illuminated by the bloodred paint of her taillights. She pulled hard on the steering wheel while stomping on the brake, swinging the SUV around to face the direction she had just come.
Emily cautiously edged the SUV toward the group. Emily could see the creature, Simon, and the kids he still held firmly under his arms. She had managed to smash through the creature’s two front-left legs, tearing them from the body about two-thirds of the way up. More of the black liquid spewed from the open wounds, cascading to the ground as the creature silently writhed and bucked, sending a spray of its blood over the three figures beneath it.
The tentacles suddenly detached from Simon with three wet pops and a spray of liquid, rewinding back to the creature like a power cord on a vacuum before disappearing into the nodules on its head. Instantly Simon collapsed into an unmoving heap on the ground, the children spilling from his grasp next to him. Emily saw Rhiannon pick herself up and glance at her father’s still form with a look of horrified despair, then at the towering wounded creature blocking the route to Emily, the SUV, and safety.
Emily could see the cogs working in the girl’s brain. Could she risk it? Could she make it past the thing to Emily? No, Emily thought, run, just run.
Maybe the kid was psychic or maybe she was just smarter than Emily gave her credit for, but she grabbed her little brother’s hand, pulled him to his feet, and began to run back toward the house, pulling her stumbling brother behind her, his free arm windmilling through the air as he struggled to keep up with his sister.
The thing could barely stand; its legs splayed out wide to counter the loss of the two front limbs as it teetered for a moment, regaining its balance. Emily was sure it was going to fall, but somehow it managed to stabilize itself. Its head swung from side to side in a weird caricature of Simon’s earlier head movement; the single eye focused on Emily, then swung back to the fleeing kids. It was deciding which it had a better chance with, Emily thought.
It made its decision, and, with ridiculous agility for something that had just lost two of its six legs, spun around and began to limp after the children, its remaining oh-so-thin legs undulating across the ground in a wave of motion. Emily had no doubt that if the thing had its full set of legs still, it would have caught up with the fleeing kids in a matter of seconds. While it was certainly slower, it still moved with a swift rolling flow that reminded her of the graceful movements of the tai chi practitioners she sometimes saw in Central Park. There was no way the kids were going to make it to the house before the thing caught up with them, no way.