It wasn’t a bear. This creature was slightly smaller. One of its legs stepped between the pines. Long and clad in coarse fur.
Was that a… wolf?
It made no sense. A wolf and a bear stalking them together? Different species didn’t team up to form a hunting party. It wasn’t natural.
Micah watched the wolf-thing creep forward. Its paw came down near one of the larger birds on the grass. Micah squinted, his head cocked at the inconceivability of what he was seeing—
What he saw was—no, no. The thing’s paw and the dead bird seemed to… to merge. The bird’s body broke apart, liquefying somehow, passing into the other thing’s body. It was absorbed. The thing’s flesh rippled as the bird became a part of it. But that couldn’t be. The starlight bent at weird angles, refracted unnaturally so that it merely seemed this was what had happened.
A growl rippled out of the blackness. Cold, furious, infused with a silvery note of menace.
“Go,” Micah said.
They ran. They left everything. Ebenezer’s rifle, Micah’s second Tokarev, the food. The trail scaled up into the hillsides. It was darker under the trees. The beams of their flashlights—Minerva and Ellen were both carrying one—skipped over the earth, over roots cresting from the soil like fingers. They tripped and stumbled and kept motoring.
Crash and thunder from behind. Micah had hoped the creatures would have been satisfied ransacking the tents. No dice. They were giving chase. Goddamn it all.
Micah whistled sharply. The others turned to him. He slung his pack off.
“Give me some light!”
Ellen trained the flashlight on his pack as he rummaged through it. They were in there somewhere, he knew it. Three waxy cylinders. He had bought them back at the camping store. An impulse buy.
The things were scrambling up the incline toward them. There was nothing stealthy about their pursuit—he could hear them snapping tree limbs and scraping against their trunks. The sound was enormous, out of scale with any animal Micah had ever known. It was as if a blue whale had grown legs and started blundering after them.
They were closing in. Sixty yards, now fifty, now forty—
Ebenezer flanked behind Micah. He squeezed off four shots. The muzzle flash lit the trees, illuminating the shocked face of an owl perched on a low branch. He pulled the trigger again and got only a dry click.
“Give me another magazine,” he said to Minerva.
“I’ve only got the one.”
The things kept coming. If the slugs had hit, they had done nothing to deter them. The sounds intensified—eager squeals like a hog snuffling for truffles.
“Better me than you.” Eb spoke with an eerie calm. “The clip. Now.”
Tight-jawed, Minerva handed it over. Micah was still rooting through his pack.
“Jesus, man,” Ebenezer said, tugging Micah’s arm.
Thirty yards, twenty—
Micah couldn’t find them. They started to run again, putting distance between themselves and their relentless pursuers. They hit a straight stretch. The trees opened up. The moon shone against the clouds to provide a weak welter of light.
Minerva spun, waiting for Ebenezer and Micah to ramble past before she unloaded her Colt. Bullets ripped into the darkness. There was no way a few of her slugs couldn’t have hit their mark—providing the things were using the path, which they might not be.
For a drawn-out moment, silence. The softer sounds of night enveloped them.
Then the thud of pursuit amped up again. Harder now, more intense. The night bristled with screeches and yowls and hisses.
What in Christ’s name are these things? thought Micah.
They ran hard, their lungs shuddering. Ellen tripped and fell, skidding a few feet across the dirt. Her chin was cut, blood cascading down her neck. But she got up and ran on pure adrenaline. The path dipped through a dry creek bed. Micah slung off his pack. He tore stuff out, clothes and other vital supplies, not caring anymore. How would he eat with his jaw torn off? What use were socks when his feet had been gnawed to the bone?
“Shug!” Minerva called out.
He ignored her. The beasts were closing in. Blood-hungry bastards.
They will be in for a rare fucking disappointment if they catch up and sink their teeth in, he thought. They will find our kind to be stringy, all tendon and cartilage. Not good eating, are human beings.
His hand closed on what he’d been searching for. He pulled out an emergency flare and tore the strip. Bright red phosphorus fanned from its tip. He tossed it into the creek bed. He scampered up the other side and thumbed the safety off his pistol.
“Go,” he told the others. “I will meet you directly.”
They obeyed him, scampering farther up the trail. Micah stood rooted. He had to see what he was dealing with.
They came. There were two of them, Micah was almost certain. The sounds of their chase indicated they were coming from both left and right: a scissoring maneuver, the way pack animals hunted, flanking their quarry from each side, cutting off the escape angles, and then—snik!—snapping shut.
The flare shed bloody light over a ten-foot radius. He had shot animals moving at a good clip before. Animals and other creatures, too. It was a matter of putting the bullet where they would be, not where they were at present. He listened. They might try to skirt the flare instead. But the quickest path, the one leading directly to their prey, would carry them through its—
A shape fled through the light. Micah’s mind flinched—though not his body, which remained motionless. The shape was unlike anything in nature. It was composed of too many parts. A seething mass of hysterical dimension, a ball of limbs and tails and teeth, so goddamn many teeth.
It flashed across the riverbed at terrific speed. Micah tracked it with his pistol and fired three times. The thing screeched and withdrew into the trees on the far side of the creek.
The second one was coming now. The big sonofabitch. There was something terrible about its approach—the blundering, crashing awkwardness of its body. It sounded like a creature in almost unspeakable pain.
Micah saw it. Not everything, but an outline. It was huge. It rose up before the light could engulf it and stood there, as a grizzly might on its hind legs. The dry earth of the creek bed cracked beneath it. The rotten stink of its body was overwhelming. Micah had smelled its equal only once before, when he had stumbled across a mass grave in a small village in Korea. The creature made the softest noises imaginable. Little clucks and pips and peeps, gentle exhalations that sounded like a baby drawing breaths in its sleep.
It is a bear, Micah thought, shutting his mind to other possibilities. A rabid bear.
He emptied a clip into the bear, center of mass. He did not feel good doing it, but the creature was ill and it would die by his hand now or days later, crazed with brain fever and foaming at the mouth. At close range, he could hear the slugs smacking into its meat. If that did not kill it, it ought to at least flatten its tires a little.
The bear dropped. A rag of snot or bloody meat hit the flare and made it sputter…
Then it began to advance on Micah again.
Why don’t you just die? he thought tiredly.
He retreated up the trail to find the others. The bear was still chasing them—and he could hear the other one, too, farther down and to the left of the path.
“Go!” he shouted.
They fled again. Slower this time, as they were exhausted and banged up. Just keep moving, Micah reasoned. Both animals had been hit. All they needed to do was keep hustling until their pursuers bled out.