“It’s like that goddamn Hitchcock movie,” Minerva said.
“They’re kites,” Ellen said softly. “Most of these birds, I mean. They’re called kites. Their coloring’s a bit different from the ones back home, but it’s the same bird.”
“Tippi Hedren,” Minerva went on. “That broad’s got a scream to wake the dead.”
Micah scanned the trees beyond the clearing. Nothing moved.
“I’ve heard about such a thing,” said Ebenezer. “In Dunchurch, a village in Warwickshire not far from my hometown. Birds fell from the sky there one day. Hundreds, they say. Their hearts had burst. Every damned one of them.”
Micah knelt before the largest bird. Its wings were tucked tight to its body, as if it had curled into a protective ball. He tried to pull a wing back to see if it had been shot, but the flesh and bone were locked in place. That was strange in itself. All bodies were softest in the minutes after death, after the muscle and nerve spasms and before rigor mortis set in. But he could not peel the bird’s wing back.
A sharp inhale. Ellen was staring at the woods to the east of the meadow. The blood had drained from her face.
“What is it?” Micah said.
“There’s something there,” she said.
Minerva trained her flashlight. The trees fringing the meadow shone whitely in the glare, the woods impenetrable beyond. They all looked, waiting. Nothing materialized.
“I swear I…,” Ellen said.
“What?” Minerva asked.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head as if to dispel a bad thought. “Just movement. Something… Hey!” she called out. “Who’s there?”
Micah clapped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and shocked above his hard-knuckled fingers. Micah held a finger to his lips. Ellen got the message. She nodded.
“Give him one of your Colts,” Micah told Minerva, nodding at Eb.
“He’s already got the rifle.”
“He is the best shot amongst us. You know it. Best he be armed.”
Reluctantly, Minerva handed Ebenezer one of her pistols; he stashed the Tarpley back in the tent and accepted the sidearm. Minerva pulled the second Colt from her waistband and thumbed the safety off. They faced the woods.
There. A flash. A pale flickering. It trembled through the flashlight’s beam, impossible to categorize.
Micah took a step back. He needed to widen his perspective. He couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen or was still seeing.
But he felt something out there. He suspected they all did. Watching them from the blackness past the trees. Its presence was unmistakable. It galvanized their blood and rashed their necks in gooseflesh. It seethed at them with a hunger they could feel squirming in their own stomachs—hunger, and a malignancy of purpose none of them could even guess at.
It’s nothing, Micah thought, his mind rioting just a little.
“It is nothing,” he said. “Not a damn—”
11
A FLASH. Nothing definite.
It wasn’t that it was too fast for the eye to chart—it was more that the eye rebelled, defaulting on its own optics and reducing whatever was out there to an indefinite smudge. Maybe their brains did this as an instinctive protective measure, to spare them the true contours of the thing.
What they did see was long and gleaming, like an enormous length of bone.
That was all they could make out. It was enough.
Ebenezer raised the Colt and fired. Three quick shots. Flame leapt from the barrel. Minerva’s Colt tore the night apart, making four concussive booms as she squeezed the trigger.
The gunshots trailed away. They squinted through a haze of cordite smoke. Nothing. It had left. They could feel it. That squirming insistence in their stomachs was gone.
But then…
Sounds to the left of the clearing—wait, the right? No, both sides. Twigs and pinecones snapped underfoot. With those came another kind of sound, more difficult to grasp. Snortings, gruntings, these weird high whistles… scrapings and whickerings and noises that might have made sense in isolation but taken together created a lunatic symphony.
Micah ducked into the tent and grabbed his pack. Minerva followed suit. Micah stepped into his boots; Eb blundered inside the tent to yank his own boots on.
They had one obvious escape: the trail that continued onward to Little Heaven. The one they had traveled was on the far side of the meadow, where the noises were coming from. And the meadow felt constricted now—a killing jar.
Ebenezer laced his boots with fingers that shook—just a little, but still. It took a lot to rattle him. He had seen things, done things. Once a man has witnessed a certain kind of human pestilence and seen some of it reflected in his own soul, well, that man turned hard. The last time Eb had been scared, really scared, was during the Suez crisis. But that had been a vital fear, one shared by every soldier in his regiment: of being blown to bits by an enemy mortar, his body scattered in wet chunks over the canal banks… of dying far from everything he knew and could draw comfort from.
But this fear—no, this worry, just a gnawing worry right now—was airy and dreamlike, because it was unanchored from any clear threat. Just noises in the dark. They could be anything. An overweight raccoon, for Christ’s sake!
But it really wasn’t that, was it? No. Ebenezer could not say how he knew that, but it was a fact. The thing (things?) in the woods was dangerous. So what he felt was, if anything, the terror of a boy who knows that something is lurking underneath his bed, even though he has never given that monster a name.
Minerva shone her flashlight on Eb. She saw the pinched worry on his face. Her breath rattled in her lungs. She wanted to run. More than anything on earth. She finished with her boots and picked up the flashlight and her Colt. The gun dangled limply at the end of her arm. It had never felt so useless. A mere toy.
The trees shook. Sixty-foot pines trembled as this thing, whatever it was, grazed their trunks. A smell wafted to her nose—decay and a sourness that reminded Minerva of something her father once said.
You ought to kill an animal with one shot, Minny. It should never die in fear, for two reasons. For one, no creature should have to die that way. And two, when a creature dies terrified, its meat tastes sour. One shot, one kill. Make sure the poor thing never knows what hit it—
She turned to Micah in time to see him raise his Tokarev and fire. Six shots in a tight grouping. He lowered his pistol and then, sensing movement, raised it again and emptied the clip. He ejected the mag and slammed a fresh one in. He was already backing toward the trail. He hissed at the others. They began to retreat, too.
A shape broke through the trees on the far side of the clearing. The night was too thick to make out its exact definitions, but it was enormous. Shaggy and lumpy and stinking of death.
A bear. It could only be.
Minerva fired while backing away. Ebenezer squeezed off a few shots. The thing kept coming.
Something broached the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. The moonlight glossed its contours. Another bear? Micah’s head swiveled. Events occurred more slowly, the way they always did when his adrenaline started to flow.