Jimmy’s truck still shifted from side to side on its massive shocks. Melissa dropped out of the cab and hurried around its front end to look for Frank.
She rounded the bumper and came to a skidding halt at the sight of the odd glow rising from Kane’s empty grave.
Tentacles of electricity leapt out of the hole where Kane’s coffin once rested, lashing through the air. They sparked off the nearby fence posts in a series of blinding flashes. She threw herself backward against the dented grill of the semi when one jagged tendril sputtered across a portion of fencing not far from her feet, scorching the metal, leaving it steaming. In its wake, the sturdy iron bars appeared cracked and colorless; even the grass around them was now ashen and brittle.
The lightshow ceased a moment later, replaced by a pallid mist that billowed out of Kane’s dilated gravesite. It flowed between the rows and swirled amongst tombstones. In seconds the churchyard vanished within the haze, leaving only the entity’s giant legs visible at the edge of the phenomenon.
Melissa froze where she stood. To her right, she detected the sound of people moving inside the devastated church building, and to the far left, she registered three separate voices exclaiming words of amazement pertaining to the lightning strikes. She knew she should do something—warn the people to stay back, see if anyone in the church was hurt, find Frank—but when she finally started to turn, a fleeting glimpse of movement redrew her attention toward the misty land ahead.
The entity lay trapped, unable to vacate its anatomy of interconnected corpses.
Kane was gone. Its powers were gone. All was lost.
The ground vibrated. Fear became a phantom saber cleaving wounds of pure terror to its core.
The time had come to return to the others, to the torment, to the place where numbness would be a sacred blessing.
Melissa screamed and fled backward when two gigantic, talon-tipped claws solidified out of the mist and lunged toward her with savage speed.
Pinned where she stood by fear, Melissa looked on while the massive hooks dropped down and closed around the entity’s body, clutching it in a ghostly grip. They jerked back, hauling the monster into the impenetrable haze and out of sight before her mind had a chance to contemplate a reaction.
Melissa remained flattened against the big rig, shaking, watching the spiraling plumes of vapor that coiled over the land where the monster’s shape had just been.
“Melissa,” Frank’s voice called.
She jumped at the sound of her name, raking an arm over the truck’s ruined grill, cutting herself and drawing blood. The pain enlivened her. Still shivering, eyes wide and directed forward, she shuffled back along the semi, averting her gaze from the mist-laden graveyard only long enough to sidestep Kale Kane’s extirpated remains. Nothing recognizable remained of the killer, save for a molted green arm that lay in a liquid puddle of half-rotten flesh and embalming fluid.
She found Frank near the cab’s midsection and almost forgot about everything else when she beheld his condition.
She knelt at his side. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you look like you went through a meat grinder.”
He smiled. “Melissa—”
“Keep your voice down,” she warned. “Look, I knocked the entity-thing into the cemetery and something weird happened. Something really weird. I don’t understand this supernatural shit like you do, but I think we better get the hell away from this place and I think we better do it fast. Can you move?”
“There’s nothing to fear,” he answered.
“You don’t get it. Something’s out there, something even bigger than the entity.”
Frank shook his head, wincing from his injuries. “Not anymore, there isn’t. You did it, Melissa. You sent it back to where it came from, back to where it belongs. You saved us… Look for yourself.”
She traced Frank’s line of sight to the stoical slabs of the old churchyard, finding most of them now illuminated by the truck’s headlight. The mysterious fog had already evaporated into the night.
The entity’s body was gone.
A wide trench cut across the ground where the beast had fallen. The scoured trail led deeper into the cemetery, to the vacuous pit of Kale Kane’s grave. Numerous headstones had been knocked flat to the right and left of where the body passed, some crumbled to ruins and imbedded in the dirt.
Melissa heard footsteps approaching. Paul Wiess and two children poked their heads around the front of the semi to gaze at her with questioning faces.
“She did it,” Frank said.
“It’s gone?” Paul asked.
Frank nodded, struggling to sit up. “We’re safe; you, your daughter, all of us.”
“What about you?” Paul asked.
“I’ll live. We’ll all live tonight.”
“Lay still,” Melissa told him. “We have to get you an ambulance.”
Off to the left, three more teenagers made their way out of the woods, approaching cautiously. “Mr. Wiess? Mallory?” a girl’s voice called.
“Becky, is that you?” Paul asked. “It’s all right, kids. It’s over.”
Above them, in the truck, Jimmy poked his head out the cab’s window and glared down at Melissa. “Can I please have my keys back so we can get out of here?”
She tossed the set back to him. “Get on your radio and call for an ambulance. Hurry!”
Directing her gaze skyward while they waited for backup, she discovered the menacing storm clouds that had been growling overhead for the last few hours had vanished without a trace. The nighttime heavens appeared clear and glowing, filled with glimmering stars from horizon to horizon.
EPILOGUE
September
Mallory met Tim at the usual spot by the lake. She pulled her car into the small parking lot and spotted him sitting in the shade on one of the nearby picnic tables, dressed in his tank top and running shorts. The moment he saw her, he jumped down and rushed over.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, exiting the car. “I suppose you’ve already gone through the warm-up routine, huh?”
“I have to show you something,” he said eagerly. “Follow me.” He took her by the hand, beaming like her little brother on Christmas morning. He led her across the grass, to where his gym bag waited on the table he’d been sitting at.
She regarded him with a quizzical gaze. “I take it we’re not going for our run today?”
“Yeah, sure we can. But you have to see this first.”
He stopped in front of the table and looked her in the eyes. She gazed back raptly, knowing his were the only set of eyes she could ever look into and find the level of trust and devotion she needed to get on with a normal life after their experiences at the churchyard.
“I went back,” he said, not having to specify a location.
Mallory gaped at him, blinking. Her mouth fumbled to make the words that would express her shock.
“It’s okay,” he rushed on. “In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s amazing.”
“But why would you want to go back there?” she asked. “That cemetery…”
“It’s changed.”
“What?”
He opened the gym bag, exposing a vibrant bundle of wondrous flowers. Mallory gasped in amazement at the radiant nebula of colors, hues so rich and powerful her eyes seemed unable to focus on just one color.
Like the stars.
“They’re all over the place out there,” Tim said, handing her a blossom that had to be half the size of a dinner plate. “Hundreds of them. Thousands!”
“But what are they?” she asked, testing the silken petals with her fingertips.