“I hit it three times already!” Adam snaps. “How can it still be moving?”
He aims again, but the figure has disappeared into the forest now.
“It’s hurt,” Adam says firmly, lowering the gun. “Time to finish it off for good!”
With that, he starts running toward the forest, racing out across the mud.
“Wait!” Donald calls after him. “It’s dangerous!”
“We can’t let him go alone,” Dean points out. “We need to at least find out what this thing is.”
He hurries out across the field, and after a moment Craig and I follow too. I’m already a little breathless, and running through all this mud isn’t exactly easy, but I have to get closer to that creature and see what it really looks like.
As Adam gets to the treeline and follows the creature into the forest, Craig and I stop as we find part of the creature’s body on the ground. There’s a dark, glistening arm, and some trailing sections that seem to have been blasted away from its chest.
“It looks like oil,” Craig says, crouching down in the rain to get a closer look.
“It looks exactly like my dream,” I whisper, stepping closer and peering down.
Sure enough, the edges of the torn arm are ringed with tiny, sharp black shapes, like the teeth that seemed to form the creature’s entire body. I only caught a glimpse of the creature last night when it escaped from the barn, so it’s impossible that I could have picked up enough detail for the dream, yet now it’s as if every aspect of that dream is starting to become real.
Another gunshot booms in the distance, and then another, and then Adam’s voice rings out from the forest.
“I got it!” he screams. “Hurry! I finally brought the bastard down!”
Eighteen
Rain is still pouring as Craig and I pick our way through the forest. The ground is uneven beneath our feet, and I have to support myself against the soaking wet trees, but up ahead I can already see Adam and Dean standing at the edge of a clearing.
Just as we get closer, Adam raises the shotgun and fires twice, aiming at something on the ground. Almost immediately, the air around us fills with an agonized, howling cry of pain.
“What is it?” Craig gasps, getting further ahead of me and then stopping next to the others.
I can barely breathe as I reach them, and then I stop as I see the writhing, wriggling shape of the creature on the forest floor. Several chunks of its body have been blown away, including both of its legs, and the damaged body parts have been left strewn across the ground. The main part of the creature, meanwhile, is struggling desperately to drag itself away from us, while emitting a sound that seems to switch constantly from snarl to scream.
“I’ve only got one more shot left,” Adam mutters angrily as he aims the gun again.
I open my mouth to tell him to stop, but I’m too late. He fires again, hitting the creature in the chest area and sending it rolling across the ground as it cries out.
“Okay,” Adam snarls, turning and thrusting the gun into Craig’s hands before heading away and grabbing a fallen branch from the forest floor, “now it’s time to really put this thing out of its misery.”
“Let me see,” I say, limping after him as I try to get a better look at the creature. “It’s hurt!”
As I get closer, I see that this is the exact same creature that I encountered in my dream. It turns its head toward me, and for a moment I see ripples of sharp little shapes struggling to break through the surface of its smooth black face. The shapes are in two patches near the top of the face, and finally I realize that they look a little like eyes. Not that they are eyes, of course, but I can’t help feeling that perhaps the creature is attempting to mimic the human face.
Adam steps past me with the branch raised high.
“Wait!” I snap, trying but failing to grab his arm and pull him back. “You can’t just kill it!”
“Keep out of this, old man,” he replies, stepping around the side of the creature.
“But—”
Before I can finish, he slams the branch down against the creature’s head. The creature emits a low howl as it falls to one side, and then it cries out again as Adam hits it several more times.
“Stop!” I shout. “Don’t you want to know what it is? Don’t you want to try to communicate with it?”
“There’ll be time for questions later!” Adam snaps, as he hits the creature with more and more ferocity. “Once it’s dead, you can cut it open and see how it works! Right now, I’m going to make sure that it can’t attack our farm ever again!”
I watch with a growing sense of horror as he continues to strike the creature, until suddenly I see more and more of the little teeth starting to burst through to the surface.
“Wait!” I call out. “Adam, be careful!”
“I’m gonna bust this thing apart!” he replies.
“No, stop!” I shout, watching as more and more of the teeth appear, until the creature’s entire body seems to be made of a swarm of those things. “It’s in pain! It’s going to fight back!”
“Not if I finish it off first!”
He raises the branch again, but suddenly one of the little black teeth snaps away from the creature’s body and hits Adam’s arm, slicing clean through and then bursting out the other side.
“What the—”
Clutching his arm, Adam takes a step back as a small patch of blood begins to soak through the fabric of his t-shirt.
“You have to be very careful,” I tell him. “I think that was a warning. You don’t know what this thing is, but you can’t just keep attacking it and not expect it to defend itself. Please—”
“Oh, you think you’re smart, do you?” Adam hisses, before stepping closer to the creature and hitting it several more times. “That hurt! You just made a big mistake, my friend. You just made me even angrier than I was before!”
He hits the creature again and again, battering it with the branch.
And then, suddenly, the creature’s entire body seems to fall apart. All the sharp little black teeth come away from one another, and after a moment they rise up in front of Adam and hang in the air. It’s almost like that moment in my dream when the creature rushed at me.
“Get away from it!” I shout, as Adam stares at the thousands of floating teeth. “Don’t—”
Before I can say another word, the teeth all rush straight at Adam, slamming into his body and slicing straight through before emerging from the other side and then falling to the ground, when they immediately begin to reform themselves to recreate the creature’s body.
Horrified, I stare at Adam as he takes a faltering step forward, and then he turns to reveal that all over his body there are thousands of small bloodied cuts where the teeth passed straight through him. There are even cuts on his face, as if some of the teeth went through his brain.
He opens his mouth and lets out a faint groan as blood starts trickling down his face. He takes a step toward us and drops the branch, and then – as rain continues to crash down – he drops to his knees and then topples over.
“Adam!”
Donald rushes past us, hurrying to his son and scrambling to pull him up.
Craig, Dean and I step closer, but it’s already clear that we’re too late. Thousands upon thousands of those sharp little teeth sliced straight through the poor boy, no doubt causing untold damage to his organs, and blood is now starting to soak out through his clothes. He’s still twitching slightly, and he lets out a faint, rattling gasp, but then he falls still in his father’s arms and I realize that he’s dead.
Turning, I look down at the creature and see that it has already reformed the central part of its body. Meanwhile, some of its severed sections are starting to break down and swarm back to rejoin the torso, although it’s clear that overall the creature is extremely weak.