Breeds (28 page)

The flash from the top of the hill distracted Ross from the people ahead of him. He watched how the fire swelled with eerie delight, burning through the night’s malaise. The conflagration was close to Alvin’s house, if not the source of the blaze itself.

“Sweet Jesus,” Ross muttered to himself, the words lost in the gale surrounding them all. If it was Alvin, he hoped the man survived.

“What was that?” asked Phil Crout, holding onto his wife, Jessica, both looking towards the top of the hill. The retired fisherman was perhaps the most stubborn to convince to move, if only until the storm died down and the power was restored, and they only managed to do it after he locked the property up. Roger and Caramel Moore’s outlines stood huddled together only a stride ahead.

“Alvin’s place,” Ross bellowed into the storm, the tension making his nerves quiver like stressed wires. “Keep moving.”

The little line Ross had collected crawled along the lower road, stepping into each other’s tracks, heading towards the unseen home of Leo and Bertha Tucker, a retired couple from Lab City. Most of the community knew their history. Leo had retired five years ago as a well-respected geologist. Bertha had made a sizeable chunk of coin drilling wells in northern Saskatchewan before tiring of it. Like a few of the inhabitants, they’d discovered the little cove and fell in love with it.

Ross guarded the rear, squinting and holding his shotgun close. The night hemmed them into the smallest box of vision, and he hoped they would be able to reach their destination. Then the house materialized out of the night, snow-lashed and haunting. A steep driveway as groomed as a ski slope led to a corner that faded in and out of sight with every gust.

The four seniors ahead of Ross regarded him, features swathed in shadow, projecting apprehension. He’d rooted them out of their warm homes, and taken on the responsibility for their safety.

“Go on,” Ross shouted. “Get to Tom Dawe’s and hole up there. I’ll get Leo and Bertha.”

Hesitantly, like little children leaving the safety of their parents for the first time, they moved towards their final goal. Having sent them on their way, Ross trudged up the driveway. He turned a corner of the house and headed for the main door. Putting his shoulder and back to the wall, he elbowed three hard raps against the frame, aware of the tracks he’d left behind, painfully taking note of the shifting, tenebrous blackness licking at the house.

A flashlight beam shone through the glass. The door opened a moment later, and Leo held onto its edge with a rough hand. He stood eye-to-eye with a weary Ross, scowling his question as loud as any shout. “D’hell you want?”

“Let me in,” Ross barked. “I’ll tell you inside.”

Tucker didn’t budge. His eighty years had slumped his shoulders and shrunk his height, but he projected an aura of not to be trifled with at any age. Though a geologist, he’d also served with the military and seen action in the Korean War. Some even said that on some evenings, when Leo really got on the beer, he could be prodded for war stories and operations some folks hadn’t even heard of before.

“Don’t think so,” Tucker replied sternly, gazing at his visitor over a pair of bifocals thick enough to protect his eyes from the glare of a welding torch. “I don’t take kindly to men holding illegal firearms. In any weather pattern.”

“All right, listen. You’ve been hearing the gunshots tonight? There’s a bunch of crazies running around shooting the place up. They already got Walt Borland, Jacob and Alice Moseby and probably the Sprees. I think they’re coming this way so I’m pulling everyone back to Tom Dawe’s. Strength in numbers and all that.”

A harsh blow of wind whipped around the corner of the house and almost ripped the open door out of Tucker’s grasp. When he composed himself, he grudgingly bade Ross to enter, shutting the blizzard out as it droned curses.

“Now then, say all that again,” Tucker ordered him, practically nose to nose in a short hallway.

“Who is it, Leo?” Bertha asked from somewhere within the house.

“Ross Kelly from up on the hill.”

“Oh hello, Ross,” Bertha chimed, her pleasant voice lilting. “Dirty old night out.”

“Dirty is right,” Ross agreed. “You both had better come along with me and leave the house.”

“And head over to Tom Dawes’s,” Tucker said.

“That’s right.”

“Folks are barricading themselves over there.”

“Yes.”

“And who are these crazy people, you say?”

“Fuck, Leo, we don’t have time––”

“Ross,” Tucker interrupted in a schoolmaster’s voice. “I’m eighty-one years old. Retired in two professions where it’s either common sense or practice to clarify situations before proceeding into the unknown. A lack of intel is a lack of thought and purpose. I’m also bullshit-intolerant and I fucking refuse to simply move for no one unless given a damn good reason to, regardless if they come knocking on my door with a sawed-off shit flinger. So if it’s all the same to you, and you aren’t too keen on using that miserable piece of metal in your hand there, I’d appreciate you answering my questions.”

Ross sighed. “I don’t know who they are.”

“Yet you know they’ve killed Borland, the Mosebys, and the Sprees?”

Bertha’s dark outline shuffled into view at the end of the short hall.

“Yeah.”

“I see.” Tucker pulled back a bit, pointing the flashlight down and illuminating his furry slippers, complete with plastic claws.

“Alice Moseby is dead?” Bertha asked nervously.

“According to this shit disturber, she is. And a good many more.” Tucker swung his attention back to Ross. “And you say they’re heading this way? The crazies?”

“That’s right.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Jesus, Leo.”

“For a fact?” Tucker insisted.

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Only one,” Ross said. “Over at Walt Borland’s place.”

“That’s a long ways out in this weather.”

“We figure they used the treeline, came down around to the cliff’s edge and just headed for the closest house.”

“Who’s we?” Tucker asked.

“A guy I found at Borland’s place.”

“You don’t know him?”

“No, but he knows what’s going on.”

“That him there?”

Ross blinked for a moment before spinning around. There, just beyond the glass, appearing out of the raging nebula of the storm, was the outline of a man approaching the door as if stalking prey. Tucker flashed the light on the glass, ruining the scene for a moment, but then the creature pressed its face up against the glass and snapped at it with teeth as curved as tusks.

Ross hissed his fright, raising the shotgun as a claw smashed through the glass, sending shards inside the hall. It grabbed Ross by the front of his snowsuit and jerked him forward, crashing him into the door and ruined window, once, twice, trying to bend him backwards as it pulled him through the opening. Bertha shrieked. The man outside garbled furious syllables. A blast of freezing air invaded the house. Ross tried to bring up the shotgun but a third yank bounced his forehead off the unyielding wood of the upper frame. The skin burst apart. A metal knob, half of a pair from which a parted curtain hung, missed impaling his right eye by a finger. The shotgun slipped from his hand. Then, the pressure on his snowsuit grew. In a daze he heard seams pop, felt his back extend three uncomfortable degrees past his limited arc of flexibility. Oddly enough, his feet suddenly became awash in orange light.

The shotgun pushed past his hip and fired point-blank in the attacker’s face, scrubbing flesh from its skull and snapping the creature back. Ross dropped to the floor, gazing up incredulously at Leo Tucker, holding the smoking weapon close to his chest.

“Leo!” Bertha shouted as she pointed.

A long arm reached through the window, over Ross’s head like the pallid underbelly of some vicious serpent. Leo fiddled with the dry shotgun. Claws swished the air, inches from the old man. Ross looked down, saw how the zipper of his snow pants had pulled back from his boot, revealing the hilt of the Bowie knife.

In a blur of speed where the eye, mind and body coordinate in near-perfect sync, Ross yanked the knife free and slashed at the forearm. The silver blade parted flesh and stroked bone. Something outside squealed hideously enough to split eardrums. The arm jerked and yanked outside as if torched. Senses returning, Ross scampered away from the window, joining Leo and Bertha in their kitchen. Back in the entry area, Leo’s flashlight rolled on the floor where he’d dropped it, the light illuminating an oblong section of the door’s base.

“I think we should do what Ross says,” Bertha panted into her husband’s shoulder.

“I agree,” Tucker gasped, eyes on the smashed windows. Cries of horrific pain and rage echoed sharply from outside. “Get my semi.”

Bertha left them.

“You got any more shells for this?” Tucker asked Ross.

“Yeah.”

“Then here.” He handed over the gun while Ross stooped to sheathe the knife. “We best leave out the other door before––
Jesus
.”

There, behind the door and framed in a ghoulish portrait of glittering crystal, the thing whose face had been surgically removed by Tucker’s lead pellets slammed a heavy arm into the wood. The door bucked. The house shook. The force dislodged the flashlight on the floor, the beam rolling to partially illuminate the shotgun’s shredding. The thing had no eyes now, and its nose was a ragged hole, but even robbed of its senses, the monster reared back its powerful arm and smashed the door aside.

Without thinking, Ross stepped forward and stabbed the beast straight through its raw nasal cavity. The thing squealed, a curt note not unlike a sneaker twisting on a basketball court, before convulsing and slumping across the threshold. An adrenaline-charged Ross extracted the blade and picked up the shotgun––not remembering even dropping it––though he no longer held any faith in the weapon.

Tucker’s hand fell on his shoulder and pulled him back. The older man closed a second inner door, and withdrew both of them deeper into the house. “Tactical retreat,” he breathed and shuffled towards a coat closet. Bertha appeared a few seconds later, holding a long shotgun by the barrel and placing it against a wall.

“Give him the shells,” Tucker said, and Bertha held out a small box. Ross sheathed his knife first before taking it. He ripped open the box and thumbed red cartridges into the magazine.

A resounding crash came from the kitchen, startling the three.

“Head to Tom’s,” Ross said, working the pump and turning away from the couple before they could say anything. Wiping his bleeding scalp in a sleeve, he edged up to the kitchen, and peeked around the corner.

One of the man-things was hunched over, standing in the wreckage of the inner door. Its arm dribbled blackness onto the floor. The face whipped towards Ross as he stepped around the corner and fired nearly point blank into its abdomen. The naked midsection exploded with a meaty
chuff,
driving it backwards
.
The walls spattered. The creature gasped and staggered into the entryway. Ross pumped the shotgun, charging across the kitchen in pursuit. He spun around the corner to find snow coating the floor, the gore-soaked remains of what looked to be a crossbreed of terrier basking in half a halo from the discarded flashlight. An evil, blowing miasma of ice and snow festered beyond the wrecked entrance.

Jacked up on fear as before, Ross kept his shoulder to the corner and peered out into the blizzard, fingers flexing on the gun, waiting for something else to pop into sight. The little body of the dead animal caught his attention for a brief moment, just enough to realize they reverted back when truly dead, and that only the knife killed them. He’d remember that.

Nothing tried to enter the house.

But something screamed outside, the sound eerily warped by the winds. It only took a few seconds for Ross to realize he was hearing more than one voice. Believing it was time to leave, he backed away and felt his way along the walls, through the now-empty house, until he found the second door and let himself out.

Into hell.

A savage wind blew Ross two steps towards the cliff side, some forty feet to his right. Snow snake-danced before his eyes. He righted himself and searched for tracks, couldn’t see any, and decided to plunge ahead anyway. Voices yelled out somewhere behind him, some pissed off, some in pain, all sounding closer than he wanted. Worse, the feeling of a presence on his heels haunted him. He found the road leading up the hill and stopped in the middle, shotgun leveled at the freezing dark.

The wailing cut through the storm. Ross’s teeth chattered.

A voice, closer now, but visibility was so poor that a dog-thing could be five steps away and he wouldn’t know. Ross didn’t want to fight out in the open. He got moving and a short time later, the glow from lit windows lifted his spirits considerably. The house slowly took shape, and he rounded a corner to find a deck facing the bay. A set of stairs climbed the side. Recent boot-crushed drifts told him that the folks he’d gathered up had arrived in one piece. He stumbled up the steps, collapsed against a wall, and slammed a fist on the nearby door.

It opened and a bushy Tom Dawe, the silver-haired uncle to Bigfoot himself, reached out. Faces crowded over his shoulder. Flashlight beams flooded the deck.

“Tom,” Ross muttered.

“Get in quick. My God,” Tom said, arm still outstretched, mouth hanging open and pointing a flashlight beam. Ross glanced back and felt his stomach drop somewhere around ankle level.

There, bathed in the artificial light and mottled with possible frostbite, stood a naked man appearing risen from a dismal grave. It squinted in the harsh beam, retreating from the lowest step, while frozen tatters of flesh and blood adorned his face and neck.

More faces crowded over Tom Dawe’s plaid-checked shoulder, their voices cooing startled amazement. Tucker was one of them. Roger Moore stepped out onto the snow-caked deck, holding an additional shotgun at the ready. Caramel stood behind him, covering her mouth with a very old hand while shining a powerful flashlight at the newcomer.