He ran.
His brain a hive of turbulent thoughts, he kept going, not caring if he ran into a pack of the psychos as long as they would make it quick. That girl… she was inhuman, a thing from the slime of evolution, an obscenity. All he could see was her grotesque form in his brain, inching forward like a slug.
He had a pretty good idea he was going crazy. But there was nothing to stop it now. He just went with the flow, a twig caught in a stream heading out to the dire, churning sea of eternity.
Then he tripped over something and went sprawling face-first into the street.
He split his lip, tasted the blood, and felt the pain. His eyes welled with tears at the hopelessness of it all.
He couldn’t accept this shit.
He couldn’t accept that some lunatic prick of a god had tossed his ass into this… this bedlam. So he lay there, waiting for the end. He had run blind from the snake-woman, didn’t even know where the hell he was anymore. At least before he’d been eyeing up cars, looking for one with a set of keys in it. Now… now he was just lost.
He pulled himself up, saw what he’d tripped over.
Another body.
This one was crushed, splattered.
A man, or what was left of him. It looked like he had taken a swan dive off the roof of the building behind him—three stories up—rather than become like the others.
Or maybe he’d been thrown off.
Lou went to him, not shocked by his slaughtered remains. A corpse was a corpse. Much better than those things that pretended to be people. He had something in one undamaged hand. Lou reached down to see. The dead man’s stiffened fingers were locked death-hard around it. Lou snapped them free.
A gun.
Sweet Jesus, it was a gun.
A revolver. A little .38 police special.
Lou broke it open. Not a shot had been fired. Looking around like maybe someone might take it from him, tell him it wasn’t allowed in the game, he clutched it tightly in his hands.
He saw the big building in the distance, the place he thought was maybe city hall or the municipal building, an island in the storm. Armed, he would go there now.
They haven’t beaten me yet.
This part of town, though partially lit up, showed the abuse of the storm. Trees were split open and tumbled across sidewalks. Cars wrecked. Plate glass windows shattered, storefronts ravaged, doors kicked in. And there were more bodies, of course. Four of five of them sprawled on the walks, another (headless) lying in the street.
It made him wonder how much was the storm and how much was the psychos out venting themselves.
It was about then that he heard the sound.
First he thought it was running feet in the distance. But as he listened, he understood all too well. Clomp, clomp, clomp. The sound of paws on concrete. The rattle of collar chains.
Dogs.
They came around the corner just ahead, three mongrels trotting side by side. Two bigger ones—shepherd and setter mixes—and a smaller beagle mix. They came forward, tongues flopping from side to side, moving with an ordered, businesslike efficiency that belied a set destination.
Then they stopped dead.
They saw Lou, raised their hackles, began growling.
Lou brought up the gun, made ready.
His heart skipped a beat when he saw the fierce yellow of their eyes, the foam dropping in clots from their tongues. The small dog launched itself first.
Lou put a bullet in its head.
The slug punched through its left eye and scrambled its brains. It flopped over, squealing. The other two approached it, more interested in their fallen comrade now than Lou. They sniffed its twitching corpse. Then, without hesitation, they began to devour it.
But were they devouring it?
They seemed to be ripping it open, yanking out lengths of viscera, chewing them, tearing them and vomiting them back out again. Their only purpose here seemed to be mutilation.
Quietly, very quietly, Lou backed away, one silent step at a time.
Then he slipped around a corner and ran like hell.
8
Lisa Tabano left her mother’s house in something of a daze.
Had she been able to think clearly, to process and sort the details of her little fugue, she would have known she was in shock. But that blood, all that goddamn blood, splattered, pooled. Like a slaughterhouse.
That crazy woman there… had she murdered her parents?
Maybe killed them in the kitchen, dragged them outside? Maybe that’s what she’d been doing when Lisa arrived. Feeding on them, maybe, mutilating their bodies at the very least. Just finishing up when Lisa arrived, taking out the scraps.
Yes, Lisa saw it all in vivid, shocking Technicolor and, seeing it, her traumatized mind simply closed-up shop, pulled in on itself. The reality of it was simply too much, so it was filed away in some dark shadowy closet where the worst nightmares were stored.
Then Lisa, bewildered and confused, her dazed brain running on auto, wandered off in an outraged stupor. Guitar case in hand she toured the city. She made it quite a few blocks before she was seen.
Two young punks, is what she thought.
Then she really saw them as they stepped into the glow of the streetlight. They wore leather motorcycle jackets that were crusted with filth, no shirts beneath. Their flesh was the color of tombstones, their ribs jutting like ladders of bone as they breathed. Their eyes were huge, empty, devoid of anything remotely human. Wide, staring pools of electric neon yellow rimmed in red.
Maybe this is what brought her out of it.
Like a slap in the face with a wet towel or a boot to the crotch.
She blinked, blinked again, felt a scream clawing its way to her lips. It brought her back to the real world, to reality, the reality of survival in her hometown which was now a barbarous netherworld. It showed her that Lisa Tabano was about to become a victim. And there she was, head full of dreams and dust, guitar case in one hand, purse thrown over her shoulder (gotta protect the stuff inside, God yes).
Then she did scream.
The two punks grinned, snarled really, lips pulling away from teeth, tangles of terrible translucent foam running from their mouths. Their chests were crusted with it.
“Oh, Christ,” she managed, knowing she was mostly fucked here.
The two punks separated, moved to either side of her, coming in slow and stealthy, breath rattling from their lungs with the sibilance of wind through pipes.
Lisa tried to go back, tried to duck forward, tried all the easy moves but they kept pace with her all too effortlessly.
The punk to her left got within three, four feet when there was a thunderous, distant crack and his head literally exploded, shattering like a crystal vase in an eruption of blood and bone. His head neatly split open, his face actually dangling by threads of meat, he took two, three drunken steps forward and went down in a heap. He should have been motionless, divorced of life, but his body trembled, his fingers clawing madly at the wet sidewalk with shrill scraping sounds.
Lisa let out some kind of cry, went down on her ass, confused as ever now.
The second punk studied his fallen comrade with amusement, turned back to her.
He bent his knees, made to leap like a cat on a sparrow. His hands clutched to either side, he actually moved maybe a foot before his face caved-in. One minute he was coming at her, whispering hungry death, and the next there was another loud report… and his face imploded, actually blew out the back of his head.