Emma saw real fear on her boy’s face. She suddenly felt rising panic in the pit of her stomach.
“Zach, please, help me understand. I, um, had another of my memory blackouts. Tell me what’s happening?” She stopped him and stared down into his face that seemed drained of color.
“The time, the desmos; remember?” He began to drag her to the basement. But as she approached, she saw it was somehow different. The previous wooden door leading down the stairs was now a fortified sheet of steel set into reinforced concrete.
“The what?” she asked.
“Shush, they’ll hear us.” Zach looked past her, his eyes wide. “The sun’s down. They’ll be out now.”
“The desmos? What are they?” She started to raise her voice as panic took hold.
Zach put his finger to his lips, but looked past her, and his eyes widened even further. “Oh no, the bolt.”
She turned. Beside the door was now a thick beam and two metal braces where it was supposed to slot on behind the door to hold it. He left her and sprinted toward it. On his way, he knocked her coffee cup from the table, where it hit the tiled floor and exploded into a hundred pieces. He froze from the loud noise, his hands up and teeth bared in a fearful grimace.
Emma had never seen such fear on his face like this, and it broke her heart.
“Zach?” She stepped toward him, just as one of the huge side windows blew inward with a massive spray of glass.
And something came in with it.
It hit the ground and immediately came upright. The thing was roughly man-shaped, but taller and thinner. However, not frail as it was covered in a dark, sinewy muscle, and when it turned to her, Emma felt her blood run cold.
The head was rounded and the face flat with a large mouth and protruding fangs. There was no nose, just a triangular-shaped double slit that operated wetly as it sniffed the room. And above that nasal cavity were two huge black eyes. Though standing taller than a man, it used its long front arms for locomotion as its back legs looked almost comically stunted, and between the arms and legs was a thin membrane.
It clicked, mewled, and squeaked as it sniffed and craned toward them. Emma had frozen in shock, but Zach broke the spell.
“Run!” he yelled.
Her muscles unlocked, and she headed to the front sitting room. Zach scurried away in a different direction, and the thing hopped and flapped leathery wings trying to get after her, but found the confines of the room hard to navigate. Still, it was fast and strong. Furniture was pushed aside as it skipped over some and bullocked other pieces out of its way.
“Hey, hey.” Emma was frantic, trying to stay ahead of it, as well as consciously trying to lead it away from her son.
Desmos, Zach had called them. Now she made the connection after seeing the monstrosity; she’d come across something like them before when she was cave climbing down in Brazil—Desmodontinae—the scientific name for a bat. And not just any bat, but the ones that drank blood; the vampire bat.
She winced as she wedged herself in beside the broom closet. They were different than other bats in that, while bats mostly lost the ability to maneuver on land, vampire bats could walk, jump, and even run by using a unique, hopping gait, in which the forelimbs instead of the hind-limbs are recruited for locomotion, as the wing arms are much more powerful than the legs.
This was the ability the bat thing was using now. She wracked her brain trying to remember more details — they had good vision, a sense of smell like a bloodhound, and one other thing, saliva that was an anticoagulant, so when they bit, the blood didn’t clot and continued to flow for them to drink.
She heard the thing snuffling and smelled the acrid stink of it. Emma wedged herself in deeper and looked about for a weapon. She didn’t get it; vampire bats were tiny and usually no bigger than her thumb. But this creature was huge, standing about seven feet tall. The other horrifying fact she recalled as it closed in on where she concealed herself was they could eat nearly their entire weight in blood. She had no doubt that this beast could completely drain both her and Zach if it got the chance.
Oh God — she had another horrifying thought — it probably wouldn’t be alone for long.
Now she knew why the basement was fortified, and why there was a huge bolt for the front door and shutters on all the windows. Zach knew about them, but she didn’t. Whether she liked it or not, being immune to the changes going on around her was no advantage and would get her and Zach killed.
Where was Zach?
The creature was closing in on her, and she was at least thankful for that. Because if it wasn’t searching for her, it meant it was searching for her son.
Emma needed a weapon, and the gun that Ben had left her was in its holster and hanging by the front door. She looked about; close by was the knife block. She carefully reached out and withdrew the largest carving knife she had, the one with the 14-inch stainless steel, laser-sharpened blade. She gripped it, hard.
Emma had stayed in shape, continuing her rock-climbing routine, and the one thing she could count on was a grip-strength well beyond that of a normal person.
She held her breath as the acrid fumes surrounding the thing grew stronger. She heard it sniffing along the floor, obviously tracking her footprints.
She lifted her knife arm higher.
“Hey!” Zach appeared in the doorway and threw something that shattered near the creature. He then darted away, and the monstrous bat immediately turned to follow. Emma launched herself from her hiding space and buried the blade between its bony shoulder blades. The knife sunk in a good four inches, but the bat turned and the hardened blade snapped in half, leaving its tip behind.
It swept an arm back, knocking her off her feet, but she was up and sprinting hard while the thing skittered and jumped, trying to dislodge the piece of blade still in its back.
Emma rounded the corner and saw Zach at the basement door, holding it half ajar — his teeth were bared and his eyes were as wide as she’d ever seen them. She could tell by the way his eyes moved from her to just behind her that the thing was bearing down on her.
“Move!” she yelled.
He stood aside and she dived. In a single motion, he slammed the door, just as a huge weight crashed against it.
Emma rolled onto her back and placed her feet against the door. She didn’t really need to as the solid steel was designed to keep the monsters out — she just didn’t know it until then.
She turned to face Zach, still breathing like a steam train. “Desmos, huh?”
He nodded slowly. “Did you have one of your forget-about-things times again?”
She nodded and smiled.
He came and hugged her. “I’ll remember for you.”
“Thank you.” She returned the hug, and then held him back so she could talk to him. “How did they get so big?”
“They’ve always been that big.” He seemed to get it then. “Oh, you don’t know. Well, Mr. Abernathy, our science teacher, said they used to feed on big animals like the land whales, but… ”
“Land whales?” Emma lifted her head for a moment before easing it back down. “Save it for another time.”
Zach nodded, “… they used to feed on big animals like the land whales, but when they all died out, they started looking for other things to eat.”
“Like us.” She snorted softly.