Chris’s breath came and went in quick bursts. “I think I saw them run for the cars.”
Elsa asked, “Who the hell is that? Why was he shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to,” Troy huffed. “I say we find a back way out of this place and haul ass.”
“We can’t go without our friends,” Mallory snapped.
“Wanna bet!”
Chris peered around the door’s edge. A volley of lightning flashes flickered across the sky. “Oh, shit, he’s still coming,” he whispered. “We better do something fast.”
“Like what?” asked Elsa.
“The others are on their own,” Troy said.
“Shut the hell up,” Derrick hissed. “I’ve got an idea. I think we can take this fucker.” Pushing away from Mallory, he crossed the loft and grabbed hold of the armchair.
“What are you talking about?” she asked after him.
Without answering, he dragged the piece of furniture back to the loft’s ledge. “Okay, listen up,” he said, speaking quickly to the others. “You three grab some boards from the firewood pile, then go hide in the last two stables and wait for him—”
“Us?” Troy gasped.
Derrick made a fist at him. “Just listen, you idiot. There’s some furniture up here. We’ll wait for him to come through the doors then drop this chair on him. Once he’s down, you guys come out and beat the shit out of him.”
“Yeah, and what if you miss?” Chris challenged.
“We won’t miss,” Derrick snarled. “But even if we do, we’ll have distracted the asshole long enough for you three to take him by surprise.”
Mallory grimaced. “We don’t want to kill the guy.”
“Speak for yourself,” Troy replied.
“There’s not much time,” Derrick growled. “Now hide!”
Clad in an exoskeleton of flesh and bone, the entity marched forward, striding through the weeds toward where Mallory had taken refuge. The time for games was over. Too many people had become aware of its presence.
After departing from its encounter with Frank and the policewoman, it had returned to where it abandoned Judge Anderson’s van and took possession of his corpse, arming itself with the man’s revolver.
But now it tossed the empty firearm aside, along with a handful of extra ammunition. Conventional weapons were never its preferred instrument of destruction, and its skill in using them had already proved insufficient to meet its current needs.
Time was no longer on its side, either.
Instead, it decided to rely on its own assortment of powers in capturing Mallory and killing whoever tried to stop it.
The entity crossed the barn’s threshold and moved to where a crackling fire burned unattended just inside the main room.
Mallory.
It sensed her presence above it, detecting her glorious life force that churned like a near-bottomless reservoir of nurturing energy. Such a powerful reserve stood out like a nuclear fire in a starless void when compared to the others around her. It knew that three of the children hid near the back of the building, believing themselves to be cleverly concealed, much like Mallory and her friend above assumed their location was unknown.
Manipulating Anderson’s mouth into a wide smile, the entity directed its attention upward, to where the reward for its efforts waited.
Squinting like a frightened moviegoer in the grip of a horror film, Mallory watched the armchair drop into the gunman’s face, impacting at the precise moment he turned around and looked up.
It hit him dead-on, right in the head.
Mallory flinched.
He’s dead, she thought. Oh, Jesus, we killed him.
It seemed absurd to be concerned for someone who’d just fired six bullets at her, but despite whatever hatred he harbored for her, she didn’t want to see someone get murdered. She wished they could’ve found something else to restrain him with, something less damaging, but Derrick had disagreed, having argued that the chair was the only piece of furniture besides the couch that could incapacitate the gunman long enough for them to escape. But what if he’d miscalculated? What would happen to her and the others if the man died?
But the chair didn’t kill the stranger.
It didn’t even knock him down!
He staggered a few steps to the side from the impact, then regained his balance and angled his eyes upward again, looking right at her. His pale skin adopted the orange light of the fire when he stepped closer to the flames, and his cloudy eyes looked like twin blisters on an enormous burn.
Then she saw the blood.
It didn’t glisten in the firelight, as if caused by the chair, but it coated his shirt, neck, and chin in a frightening quantity. The hair at the back of his head stuck up like a crown of red spikes.
Worst of all, he wore an ear-to-ear smile of perverse anticipation.
Mallory shivered, shaking her head, thinking, I take it back—Hurry up and throw something else at him.
The stranger continued to stare at her in that unnerving manner while he moved toward the loft’s ladder, not taking his eyes off her for a second.
“He’s still coming,” she said.
Like they’d planned, Troy and Chris dashed out of the shadows. They charged the man from behind, boards raised over their heads in preparation to strike. Troy reached him first, swinging his timber at the back of the man’s head with enough force to crack a skull.
Whack!
“Yeah,” Derrick bellowed, adding, “Take that, fucker!” when Chris landed a hit to the man’s midsection.
The combined damage inflicted by the boys’ attacks should’ve killed a normal person, or at least brought him down, but the stranger withstood their assaults without making a sound.
Mallory gaped. He didn’t even flinch.
Below, Troy readied another swing.
And the man’s head turned around to meet him.
With the stomach-wrenching sound of snapping bone and torn tendons, the stranger’s head swiveled one hundred-eighty degrees to face Troy.
Mallory shrieked with surprise—then cried out again when she saw the huge empty hole in the back of the man’s head.
The leaping flames of the fire illuminated the petrified look in Troy’s eyes when the stranger pivoted and lunged. The madman struck out with one hand as if grabbing a fistful of the boy’s shirt, but his clawed fingers stabbed into Troy’s chest—stabbed—plunging between the ribs all the way to the last knuckles.
Gasps and screams resounded off the barn’s walls, while a concussion of thunder hailed it from outside. On the floor below, Chris dropped his two-by-four and backed away, slumping to the ground. He clenched his teeth, caging a scream.
Gripping him the same way an eagle would hold its prey, the stranger lifted Troy off his feet and hefted him over his head. He threw the boy away with such force his body crashed through one of the partitions dividing the horse stalls, blasting the boards asunder.
Mallory’s knees weakened.
“Hell with this,” Derrick screeched, his voice cracking. He dashed from the loft’s edge and went straight for the rubbish-cobbled coffee table. Heaving away the blotched particleboard, he hoisted one of the four cinderblock-supports.
He rushed back to the loft’s open ledge and slung the concrete at the stranger.
Below, the man stood gazing in the direction where Troy’s body had flown, oblivious of their movements in the loft. He opened his arms in a peculiar gesture, looking ready to receive a hug—then crashed forward as Derrick’s shot hit him square in the back.