“Is that him,” Becky asked, “the guy that shot at us?”
“Keys,” Tim demanded. “Is there a spare or not?”
“N-no,” Lisa stuttered. “They’re at home.”
The dummy closed the distance with long strides, only forty feet away now. The glowing light had vanished from its eye sockets, leaving them dark and lifeless.
Thirty feet.
Twenty-five.
Unable to come up with a better idea, Tim opened the driver-side door.
“Everyone in the car,” he said.
They locked themselves in, Mallory and Tim occupying the two front seats while the others got in the back. Tim punched on the car’s cigarette lighter, wondering if maybe he could burn the creature’s current body once it came close enough, thereby gaining them some time to flee.
Everyone held their breath while the walking abomination of cloth, tape, rubber, and wire strode forward. The eerie details of its silhouetted appearance became clearer with each closing step.
The lighter popped out, ready for use. Tim made no move for it.
The dummy approached the front driver-side window and tapped the knife against the glass, staring coldly at him through empty eyeholes. The beast bent forward, bringing its sinister face closer, and everyone in the car screamed when a human hand burst from its rubber lips and smacked against the glass.
The severed limb clawed at the window with momentary life then fell limp and slipped from the thing’s mouth, leaving a thin trail of blood on the rubber lips when it dropped to the ground.
Tim gaped, but then noticed the firelight flickering across the creature’s face had taken on curiously new colors. Besides the yellow-orange of the fire, there flashed red, white, and blue.
Tim jerked around in his seat and looked out the back window, exhilarated to see the wavering beacons of a squad car making a cautious advance past the barn.
“The cops,” Becky cheered.
“Thank God!”
Tim laid his palm on the Mercedes’s horn to signal the nearing cruiser.
Yes, he thought to himself, witnessing the beast take a step away. We made it. We’re safe, and Mallory will be okay. We’ll get her to a doctor and she’ll be fine.
He was confident that in the presence of authority, the killer would withdraw, no doubt wishing to keep its inhuman presence hidden, like it had at the church. It would come after them later, of course, but at least they’d have time to convince others of its existence and devise some kind of a defense. The creature would probably take great satisfaction in leaving them facing a barrage of unanswerable questions, labeled suspects in regard to the fire and the four murdered teens, their only explanation of what had occurred an incredible tale no one would believe.
Alongside the Mercedes, the suicide dummy collapsed, dropping to the ground where it broke apart, reduced to ordinary scrap.
Tim fell back in the seat and exhaled a heavy breath of relief, looking to Mallory.
“I think it’s gone,” he said.
Functioning by itself, the Mercedes’s engine turned over and revved into operation.
The lights flicked on.
The instrument panel glowed.
“What are you doing?” Adam shouted.
Tim shook his head, equally puzzled. Before he could word a reply, the car sprung forward, flailing twin tails of gravel and dirt as it sped off to an unknown destination.
Melissa and Frank jumped out of the Blazer, weapons drawn.
“On the ground—” Melissa yelled, but the looming figure standing beside the Mercedes collapsed into a heap before she could finish.
Then the vehicle beside it roared forward.
“It’s in the car,” Frank bellowed, climbing back behind the wheel.
Melissa followed his lead, keeping her gaze on the fleeing car as it raced away amidst a flurry of dust and gravel tinted orange by the roaring barn fire.
“It can do that?” she exclaimed, then remembered the scene in the Pattersons’ garage.
Frank put the SUV in gear and they lurched forward in pursuit, almost taking off the right side-view mirror of the State Patrol cruiser beside them. “Be thankful that’s all it did,” he said. “If it were at full power, it could use its telekinetic abilities to crumple this vehicle into a wad of scrap. It’s saving what power it has. Each time it changes form it’s using up more energy. If we can keep it on the move, force it to keep switching bodies, we might wear it down.”
The Mercedes swung a wide circle around the barren lot before the barn, then tore off past the opposite side from where she and the others had approached. It burst through a small cluster of bushes and scraped past an ancient maple tree, shooting between the forest and the silo, mauling a path toward the driveway. Frank followed.
“But how?” Melissa asked. “It’s so damn fast and nothing hurts it.”
“Same as at the car crash with those teenagers,” Frank replied. “We’ll destroy whatever it leaps into.”
Melissa looked forward. “It’s going for the cemetery, isn’t it?”
Frank nodded. “It’s going to kill that guy’s daughter, then use her energy to complete the spell on Kane.”
He swerved the Blazer left, around a tree stump, then right, thundering over a rotten log. “Children are more susceptible to the supernatural than adults; animals, too. They can sense things we’ve lost the ability to detect.”
Melissa held tight to the door and dash, stabilizing herself and squinting against the rushing wind coming through the open windshield.
Only yards away, she could just make out one of the teenagers through the Mercedes’s back window—a young girl—staring back at her with a pleading, frightened gaze.
Paul chased after Officer Hale’s cruiser when he took off in pursuit of the two detectives and their retreating suspect. They passed in front of the devastating inferno the moment the barn’s roof cracked and caved in, causing an exhale of fiery breath out the open forward doors. The blazing walls toppled inward. Paul shrank away from the heat radiating through the paneling of his door, but he couldn’t pull his gaze from the cloud of hot embers that rose skyward like a mob of angry spirits.
He exchanged a glance with Rebecca after it happened, not daring to voice the dread he knew they both shared.
Instead, he focused on navigating the woodland terrain and following the others, praying that Mallory and Tim were two of the people inside the Mercedes.
CHAPTER 49
Mallory bounced in her seat when the Mercedes plowed out of the woods and onto the farm’s main driveway, low-hanging tree branches scraping her window like a dozen inhuman hands groping for her throat.
The car fishtailed when it hit the gravel, and the wild movements hurled Mallory against her door. A sharp pain manifested within her wound, but still nothing like she’d expected from such a serious injury. She couldn’t help but wonder if the lack of sensation resulted from the shock her body had taken, or if it meant she’d lost such a dangerous amount of blood that she was sliding placidly toward death.
Free of obstacles, the Mercedes shot forward.
Although lightheaded and groggy, Mallory remained coherent enough to be aware of the situation, almost wishing she’d black out.
Beyond the windshield, the flanking foliage blurred past on the periphery of the headlights. The narrow dirt driveway rushed toward them at such a nerve-ripping pace that fear prompted her to let go of her chest wound and feel for her seat belt.
Then, suddenly, she froze.
Out of the darkness, a T-intersection became visible at the end of the drive where it connected with another road, nothing but large trees and weeds on its opposite side. The perilous junction flew toward them, raising shouts of panic from the other passengers, everyone bracing for what would surely be a fatal impact.