Husk (34 page)

“
Get out,” it ordered.

The two teens looked up and the expressions on their faces fluctuated, morphing from fear, to skepticism, then back to fear again. In spite of the evident danger, they still saw their friend, not the being within. To alleviate all doubt of the threat, the entity fired a blast through the rear window.

The glass exploded, showering into the night.

“
I said, get out of the car,” it roared.

Both teens scrambled out the passenger door, shouting and swearing.

Clear of the car, Fuller backed against the cemetery fence, babbling incoherently.

Dupree ran.

He dashed into the night, heading for the far corner of the church, probably under the impression that “Brad” would lose him in the dark. The entity leveled the shotgun over the top of the car and fired.

Dupree spun away from the church’s staircase railing when it exploded into a cloud of splinters. He threw himself to the ground.

“
Oh, Jesus,” Fuller exclaimed.

The entity expelled a malicious howl of laughter over the wail of Fuller’s screams. Dupree crawled through the dirt with feverish speed, clambering toward an open gate in the cemetery fence. He lunged through it and rose into a hunched run, trying to stay concealed by the headstones. It fired again. The third shot ripped into the church wall beyond him, striking so close the buckshot must have rolled across his back.

It fired again and again.

The forth roar of the Remington obliterated a marble angel effigy seated atop a tombstone. Dupree dodged the collapsing statue, but the fifth blast caught him in the back, opening a honeycomb of red holes in his shirt. He went down hard, smashing his face on the granite arm of a cross.

It bellowed with pleasure, its concentration fixed on the bloody memorial where Dupree dropped out of sight. It plunged one hand into the sweatshirt pocket and withdrew additional shells, loading them single-handedly.

The boy’s body had disappeared behind walls of thick weeds and tall grass, but the flicker of energy departing from his dead body glowed bright and visible. It glimmered on the church wall and nearby tombstones. The entity paused in reloading the shotgun, captivated by the growing light only it could see. Concentrating, it attempted to draw the force toward it, to absorb it, to
feed
.

A large rock smashed down on Brad’s left shoulder.

It hammered the shotgun out of the entity’s grasp, simultaneously knocking Brad’s body to the dirt.

Fuller scooped up the shotgun and backed toward the idling car. “D-don’t frigg’n move, man. I’ll blow you away, I swear I will.”

The teen’s eyes gleamed with tears. His body trembled.

Contorting Brad’s facial muscles into a grin, displaying broken teeth, it pushed itself to a stand.

“
Don’t move, man,” Fuller shrieked. He reached back with one hand and opened the Lexus’s door. “I’ll shoot if you make me.”

Aiming the gun across his body, he slipped into the driver’s seat.

And the car went dead.

The kid stared in disbelief. He groped for the ignition keys.

There were none.

With its ability to manipulate electricity, it killed the car’s engine but left the lights on, so Fuller could witness everything that happened next.

“
Where do you think you’re going?”

The boy flinched. “W-what happened to your voice?”

It stood up, peeling back the sweatshirt hood. “We have unfinished work to do.”

“
No. Stay the fuck away!” He jump out of the car and leveled the shotgun.

Reaching up with its commandeered hands, the entity hooked Brad’s fingers into his own eye sockets, bursting both orbs and ejecting twin spurts of liquid. Fuller paled at the sight. His mouth dropped open. Before he had a chance to react, the entity seized fistfuls of the skin just below Brad’s ravage sockets and yanked down, ripping his face from his skull.

Fuller mewed with the tone of an injured puppy, and a stream of piss spilled out the right cuff of his pants.

The entity concentrated its energy, and the air thrummed around them. Churning within the human disguise, its true form burned under the flesh, converting the life-energy it had consumed over the last few days into raw power. Smoke streamed from Brad’s eye sockets, cooked by the heat given off in the process. Silvery-white light burned through the meat where the boy’s eyes had once been.

Fuller fired the shotgun.

Buckshot tore through Brad’s midsection, knocking it backward. The pellets exploded from his back in a ghoulish rain of red water. It staggered, but remained standing. Laughter bubbled up from its insides at the sight of Fuller’s increasingly panicked expression, and it howled with unbridled amusement as a second shot blew open the flesh over Brad’s breast bone.

A third shot boomed, striking it in the head. Teeth and bones shattered, pushed throughout Brad’s cranium by the intruding pellets. For a second, the broken skull sagged beneath the remaining skin, threatening to fall apart, but the entity immediately willed the bone back into shape.

Fuller shot again, aerating Brad’s liver, kidneys, and spleen.

The teen tried to chamber and fire another round, but the entity had only replenished four shells before being attacked. 

Fuller had closed in to make his last two shots count, and now he stood just several feet away. He hefted the unloaded shotgun like a medieval club, backing against the car.

It smiled.

High aloft, lightning crackled across the heavens in erratic bursts, adding horrific detail to its butchered shell of a body.

“
You—you’re not human,” the boy mumbled.

“
No.”

Without averting its gaze, it seized two handfuls of the tattered sweatshirt and tore it in half, revealing the dozens of dark holes that marked the bloodless skin of Brad’s chest and abdomen. While the teen gaped in horror, it utilized its total control over Brad’s corpse and made his torso explode.

Skin and bone erupted with an annihilative force, ejecting a shower of gore into the night. Multiple tentacles of intestines launched from Brad’s abdomen and lashed forward, wrapping around the shotgun’s barrel before yanking it from Fuller’s grasp and heaving it away.

The boy teetered on his feet, looking ready to faint.

The organs retracted, sucked back into Brad’s chest cavity, and the splintered ribcage slammed shut like a gargantuan mouth.

Spattered with blood and screaming, Fuller turned and sprinted toward the driveway, running so fast he threw off a shoe.

The entity watched him go, savoring the moment.

Walking on Brad’s dead legs, it reacquired the shotgun and loaded fresh rounds into the pump-action magazine, chambering the first shot. The Lexus’ engine once again revved to life. It seated Brad’s shredded corpse behind the wheel and swung the vehicle around.

It caught up to Fuller in no time, coating the back of his fleeing form in the car’s headlights. Rapidly losing ground, the boy tried again and again to find a route off the road, an egress into the woods where he could escape the oncoming vehicle.

He lunged to the right, and a fence of broken sticks sprang up in his path.

He dodged to the left and found himself in a whirlwind of gravel.

If only it could’ve used its telekinetic abilities to rip out one of his leg bones; that would’ve been a treat. But flesh couldn’t be directly
harmed
by its powers any more than the force around the cemetery could be breached without consequences.

The boy made another dash for the trees, and this time the ground split open like a gaping maw. The boy teetered at the brink, then rushed onward.

Though the entity’s magic wouldn’t work to injure his living tissue, his attempts to flee mimicked the futile thrashing of a fish already trapped in the jaws of a shark.

CHAPTER 42

Frank turned onto County Road 19 and sped for the intersection of Highway 55.

He marveled at the dismal night around them. Turbid clouds had turned the heavens into such a deep and impenetrable murk that the transition between the silhouetted trees beside the road and the rain clouds in the sky appeared seamless. Thunder bellowed from above.

Frank angled his gaze to the right, looking to the darkened plot of land where the vacant Patterson farm stood.

“
Frank, look out!” Melissa shrieked.

He jerked in surprise, shocked to see a teenager boy run into the road. He slammed on the brakes. The Blazer’s anti-lock system groaned beneath his feet. At the same time, he swung the vehicle right, trying to avoid the boy, when he caught sight of another car blasting out of the trees to the left, off a narrow dirt road hidden in the brush.

“
Hang on!”

The scrambling juvenile thumped into Frank’s door, clawing at the window. Beyond him, the other vehicle screamed into a slide. Its rear end spun around ninety-degrees, spraying gravel, and smashed broadside into Frank’s Blazer, catching the boy between them.

Blood sprayed across the side window.

Oh, Jesus!

Frank’s air bag deployed. It sounded like a gunshot over the moan of stressed metal, tortured suspension, and the noise of bursting glass. Both vehicles jolted to a stop on impact, rocking on their shocks.

Frank shakily pushed the airbag out of his face.
Dear God, what have I done?

He looked out his broken window, searching for the teen, and—

“
Fraaaank!”

—
locked eyes with the driver of the other vehicle.

Tremors of terror rippled through his body, his gaze locked on the grinning horror staring back at him.

The shredded skin. The protruding bones.

The collision had been fierce, but certainly not bad enough to produce the extent of damage he saw on the thing in the other car. Then he heard the guttural utterance of his name, saw the light beaming from the eye sockets of the driver’s near-skeletonized head.

This was no hallucination.

This was
it
; the thing he’d stared down five years ago in Kane’s basement, the malevolent entity that had been inside the madman’s body. But now, facing the beast for the second time, Frank’s remaining courage faltered. He shook his head at the thought of confronting the progenitor of five years’ worth of nightmares.

Half the skin around the creature’s mouth hung in torn strips, and it clacked its bare teeth in the parody of a smile. It opened the door to get out.

Shaking, feeling his muscles stiffen with fear, Frank panicked and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. Tires howled on the pavement, and white smoke billowed up from the ground. But the two vehicles had locked together in the crash, held by bonds of reshaped metal. The Blazer wouldn’t budge.

He was trapped.

* * *

“
Freeze,” Melissa bellowed.

She jumped out of her seat and pulled her gun, aiming it over the Blazer’s windshield.

She’d seen the sedan’s single occupant step out of the car, and she wasn’t about to let the man flee the scene.

Weapon held forward, she started around the Blazer’s passenger door to the front of the vehicles. Frank remained in his seat. She didn’t think he’d been injured, but when she called to him, he didn’t reply. He just stared through his window at the other car, his complexion the color of wax paper—

Frank tromped on the gas and tried to pull forward.

Melissa gasped. The Blazer lurched at her like an enraged animal, stopped short by its contact with the other car. She leapt backward, off the road.
What the hell’s he doing, didn’t he see me get out?

She opened her mouth to scream at him when a gunshot shook the night. The Blazer’s windshield imploded, spraying glass across her left side.

“
Shit!”

The acrid stench of burning rubber fanned out in all directions as she ducked down behind the right fender. She fired four blind shots over the hood, but the silhouetted gunman started around the two cars undeterred. Not giving her attacker a chance to gain ground on her, Melissa backed around Frank’s Blazer, keeping the vehicle between them. She dropped to a knee near the rear bumper and fired again when the man came into view.

She squeezed off four shots with perfect precision, planting the bullets in the attacker’s gun arm and shoulder. Despite the damage, the gunman didn’t drop his weapon or cry out in pain. He didn’t even slow his stride.

Then he emerged from the fog of tire smoke, and she saw his mangled face.

This can’t be happening
.

He strode forward, shotgun pumped and ready. She fired her last six shots with lethal accuracy, pulling the trigger even as the gunman sighted her over the shotgun’s barrel. She planted four rounds in his chest and two in his head. The last two bullets exploded through the man’s teeth and opened a dark hole in his forehead. Both projectiles hit at point-blank range and thundered through his brain with enough force to hollow out his skull.