Donald has taken a shotgun that was resting near the shoes, and once I’m out in the yard I can just about see him heading toward the barn. There’s a decent amount of moonlight tonight, bathing us all in an ethereal blue haze, but there’s no time to take in the beauty of the scene. Already, there are more loud bangs and bumping sounds coming from the barn, along with the clucks of disturbed chickens.
“I told you it’d come back!” Adam shouts. “It’s getting braver!”
“What is?” I ask, struggling to keep up with them all. I’m already a little out of breath.
Before anyone can answer, there’s another – louder – bang straight ahead, accompanied by an almighty growl that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
We all stop, and now it’s clear that something is causing havoc inside the barn.
“You’ve got to kill it this time, Dad!” Adam sneers. “You’ve got to make sure you hit it right. Give me the gun, I can do it.”
“Leave it to me,” Donald replies.
“But Dad, I—”
“I said, leave it to me.” After pausing for a moment, Donald starts making his way once again toward the barn. “Everyone else stay back.”
“I grew up on a farm,” I say, watching the yard ahead for any hint of movement coming from the barn’s large, bolted main door, “and I never knew of a fox that could make all that racket.”
“That’s because it isn’t a fox,” Craig says, turning to me in the moonlight. “We all know that.”
“Then what is it?” I ask.
“We haven’t seen it,” he replies, “not properly, but we’ve seen what it can do. And we heard about them, right before all the TV channels and the internet went off. People were saying that they’d seen them on the day the music went away. At first it sounded crazy, we just assumed everyone was imagining stuff, but then…”
I wait, but there’s fear in his eyes.
“Then what?” I ask.
“Then we realized one was here,” he continues. “I don’t know how, but it’s as if—”
Suddenly a shot rings out, and we both turn to see that Donald is racing around the side of the barn. Adam and Craig immediately start running after him, and then Dean goes too, while I limp along as fast as I can manage. My battered body is fighting back, begging me to rest, but as I reach the side of the barn I realize that pure adrenaline must be keeping me going. I can hear Donald and the others shouting, and a moment later there’s another gunshot.
And then silence.
I wait, standing all alone in the darkness. The barn towers high above me, blocking out the moonlight, and after a moment I realize that I can hear a series of bumping sounds coming from inside. I want to call out to the others, to ask what’s happening, but I tell myself that they must have fallen silent for a reason.
Watching the barn’s dark wall, I realize after a moment that the bumping sound seems to be coming closer. Something’s on the other side of the wall, coming this way, and finally I take a step back as I realize that I can feel the ground rumbling beneath my feet.
Before I can react, a shape smashes through the barn’s wall, sending pieces of wood flying in all directions. I turn away and slip, slamming down hard in the mud, and then as I start to sit up something brushes against me. After pulling away, I look around, and finally I spot a dark, human-sized shape scrambling away across the yard and heading toward the forest. Whatever that thing was, however, it seemed to have very long arms and legs, and I think I made out a domed, bald head.
“Where is it?” Donald shouts, and I turn to see the others coming up behind me.
“Did it come this way?” Adam asks breathlessly. “We have to kill it! It won’t stop until we do. And if it lasts much longer, it’s going to start coming for us.”
Turning, I look back toward the forest. There’s no sign of the creature – whatever it was – but I know that I saw something in-human. Something that looked as if it had crawled up from the depths of Hell.
Thirteen
“I only got a glimpse of it, very briefly,” Craig says as we sit by the window in the front room, with a single candle flickering nearby. “That was enough, though. I could tell that it was… not from here.”
“Not from where?” I ask. “From the farm?”
“From the whole world,” he replies, keeping his voice low as the others talk in the next room. “You saw it, you said it yourself, it didn’t look human.”
I pause for a moment, but at the same time I know that I can’t really argue with him. Every time I think back to the sight of that creature earlier tonight, I feel more and more certain that what I saw was some kind of monstrosity.
“I think these are the things that took the music away,” Craig says.
I turn to him.
“I know how it sounds,” he continues, “but hear me out. There were reports of them showing up right around the time that it all happened. It seems like they can usually hide themselves from us, unless something goes wrong. Apparently they were swarming in certain places, and then they were gone. For whatever reason, this one seems to have stayed behind.”
“You’re right,” I reply. “That does sound crazy.”
“It ripped through the side of the barn,” he points out. “That shows strength. But it keeps coming back, almost every night. I think maybe it’s hurt in some way, or there’s something keeping it from going home.”
“Home?” I ask. “Where would home be for something like that?”
“I have no idea, but it keeps going for the chickens in the barn.”
I open my mouth to tell him that none of this can be true, but then I realize that I saw the wretched creature with my own eyes.
“Has it ever attacked anyone?” I ask finally.
“Almost,” he replies, “but I think that was defensive more than anything. Donald and Adam want to kill it, but I think it’ll go away if we just give it whatever it wants. Not that I know what that might be. The thing is, I think Donald managed to hit it the other night, but he only managed to slow it down. Just going out there and trying to use brute force is never going to work. We have to try to understand this thing.”
Before I can answer, I hear footsteps nearby, and I turn to see that Dean has come through from the front room.
“We were thinking we should all get some sleep,” he says. “There’s a cold wind blowing from the south, and that usually means rain’s coming. Besides, Donald says that thing never attacks twice in one night, so we should be safe for now. And then tomorrow we can start trying to figure out exactly what’s going on.”
“How long are we going to stay here?” Craig asks.
“Hopefully just until things get fixed,” he replies.
“Which is when?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“We need a better plan,” Craig continues, and he sounds a little agitated now. “Right now, we’re sitting ducks. We’re going to run out of water at some point, and then things will get really bad. We have to consider the possibility that things aren’t going to get better, at least not any time soon.”
“The government—”
“There might not even be a government!” he hisses. “For all we know, everything has collapsed. The sooner we start making a proper plan, the more likely we are to be able to survive this mess.”
“He’s right,” I suggest, even though I don’t want to admit the fact. “I’ve been waiting for things to magically go back to normal, but I have to admit that if anything it would seem that we’re headed in the opposite direction. Most people seem to have lost their minds, and the rest of us seem to have little hope of being rescued. I think we might be better off trying to settle in for the long-haul.”