A large rock smashed down on Brad’s left shoulder.
It hammered the shotgun out of the entity’s grasp, simultaneously knocking Brad’s body to the dirt.
Fuller scooped up the shotgun and backed toward the idling car. “D-don’t frigg’n move, man. I’ll blow you away, I swear I will.”
The teen’s eyes gleamed with tears. His body trembled.
Contorting Brad’s facial muscles into a grin, displaying broken teeth, it pushed itself to a stand.
“Don’t move, man,” Fuller shrieked. He reached back with one hand and opened the Lexus’s door. “I’ll shoot if you make me.”
Aiming the gun across his body, he slipped into the driver’s seat.
And the car went dead.
The kid stared in disbelief. He groped for the ignition keys.
There were none.
With its ability to manipulate electricity, it killed the car’s engine but left the lights on, so Fuller could witness everything that happened next.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The boy flinched. “W-what happened to your voice?”
It stood up, peeling back the sweatshirt hood. “We have unfinished work to do.”
“No. Stay the fuck away!” He jump out of the car and leveled the shotgun.
Reaching up with its commandeered hands, the entity hooked Brad’s fingers into his own eye sockets, bursting both orbs and ejecting twin spurts of liquid. Fuller paled at the sight. His mouth dropped open. Before he had a chance to react, the entity seized fistfuls of the skin just below Brad’s ravage sockets and yanked down, ripping his face from his skull.
Fuller mewed with the tone of an injured puppy, and a stream of piss spilled out the right cuff of his pants.
The entity concentrated its energy, and the air thrummed around them. Churning within the human disguise, its true form burned under the flesh, converting the life-energy it had consumed over the last few days into raw power. Smoke streamed from Brad’s eye sockets, cooked by the heat given off in the process. Silvery-white light burned through the meat where the boy’s eyes had once been.
Fuller fired the shotgun.
Buckshot tore through Brad’s midsection, knocking it backward. The pellets exploded from his back in a ghoulish rain of red water. It staggered, but remained standing. Laughter bubbled up from its insides at the sight of Fuller’s increasingly panicked expression, and it howled with unbridled amusement as a second shot blew open the flesh over Brad’s breast bone.
A third shot boomed, striking it in the head. Teeth and bones shattered, pushed throughout Brad’s cranium by the intruding pellets. For a second, the broken skull sagged beneath the remaining skin, threatening to fall apart, but the entity immediately willed the bone back into shape.
Fuller shot again, aerating Brad’s liver, kidneys, and spleen.
The teen tried to chamber and fire another round, but the entity had only replenished four shells before being attacked.
Fuller had closed in to make his last two shots count, and now he stood just several feet away. He hefted the unloaded shotgun like a medieval club, backing against the car.
It smiled.
High aloft, lightning crackled across the heavens in erratic bursts, adding horrific detail to its butchered shell of a body.
“You—you’re not human,” the boy mumbled.
“No.”
Without averting its gaze, it seized two handfuls of the tattered sweatshirt and tore it in half, revealing the dozens of dark holes that marked the bloodless skin of Brad’s chest and abdomen. While the teen gaped in horror, it utilized its total control over Brad’s corpse and made his torso explode.
Skin and bone erupted with an annihilative force, ejecting a shower of gore into the night. Multiple tentacles of intestines launched from Brad’s abdomen and lashed forward, wrapping around the shotgun’s barrel before yanking it from Fuller’s grasp and heaving it away.
The boy teetered on his feet, looking ready to faint.
The organs retracted, sucked back into Brad’s chest cavity, and the splintered ribcage slammed shut like a gargantuan mouth.
Spattered with blood and screaming, Fuller turned and sprinted toward the driveway, running so fast he threw off a shoe.
The entity watched him go, savoring the moment.
Walking on Brad’s dead legs, it reacquired the shotgun and loaded fresh rounds into the pump-action magazine, chambering the first shot. The Lexus’ engine once again revved to life. It seated Brad’s shredded corpse behind the wheel and swung the vehicle around.
It caught up to Fuller in no time, coating the back of his fleeing form in the car’s headlights. Rapidly losing ground, the boy tried again and again to find a route off the road, an egress into the woods where he could escape the oncoming vehicle.
He lunged to the right, and a fence of broken sticks sprang up in his path.
He dodged to the left and found himself in a whirlwind of gravel.
If only it could’ve used its telekinetic abilities to rip out one of his leg bones; that would’ve been a treat. But flesh couldn’t be directly harmed by its powers any more than the force around the cemetery could be breached without consequences.
The boy made another dash for the trees, and this time the ground split open like a gaping maw. The boy teetered at the brink, then rushed onward.
Though the entity’s magic wouldn’t work to injure his living tissue, his attempts to flee mimicked the futile thrashing of a fish already trapped in the jaws of a shark.
CHAPTER 42
Frank turned onto County Road 19 and sped for the intersection of Highway 55.
He marveled at the dismal night around them. Turbid clouds had turned the heavens into such a deep and impenetrable murk that the transition between the silhouetted trees beside the road and the rain clouds in the sky appeared seamless. Thunder bellowed from above.
Frank angled his gaze to the right, looking to the darkened plot of land where the vacant Patterson farm stood.
“Frank, look out!” Melissa shrieked.
He jerked in surprise, shocked to see a teenager boy run into the road. He slammed on the brakes. The Blazer’s anti-lock system groaned beneath his feet. At the same time, he swung the vehicle right, trying to avoid the boy, when he caught sight of another car blasting out of the trees to the left, off a narrow dirt road hidden in the brush.
“Hang on!”
The scrambling juvenile thumped into Frank’s door, clawing at the window. Beyond him, the other vehicle screamed into a slide. Its rear end spun around ninety-degrees, spraying gravel, and smashed broadside into Frank’s Blazer, catching the boy between them.
Blood sprayed across the side window.
Oh, Jesus!
Frank’s air bag deployed. It sounded like a gunshot over the moan of stressed metal, tortured suspension, and the noise of bursting glass. Both vehicles jolted to a stop on impact, rocking on their shocks.
Frank shakily pushed the airbag out of his face. Dear God, what have I done?
He looked out his broken window, searching for the teen, and—
“Fraaaank!”
—locked eyes with the driver of the other vehicle.
Tremors of terror rippled through his body, his gaze locked on the grinning horror staring back at him.
The shredded skin. The protruding bones.
The collision had been fierce, but certainly not bad enough to produce the extent of damage he saw on the thing in the other car. Then he heard the guttural utterance of his name, saw the light beaming from the eye sockets of the driver’s near-skeletonized head.
This was no hallucination.
This was it; the thing he’d stared down five years ago in Kane’s basement, the malevolent entity that had been inside the madman’s body. But now, facing the beast for the second time, Frank’s remaining courage faltered. He shook his head at the thought of confronting the progenitor of five years’ worth of nightmares.