Husk (45 page)

After uncounted eons of watching the failure of those who’d come before it—after waiting throughout the full scope of human history for its chance to return power to its kind—the nameless entity finally saw freedom drawing closer, pulled by a boy who would soon be dead at its newborn hands.

Returning to the Mercedes, the entity relished its impending triumph.

In minutes, it would kill Mallory and use her life force to reactivate the spells etched in Kane’s flesh—carvings that had long since become irremovable scars—thus releasing him back into this world, bonding them in an unholy coalition. United, they would be unstoppable, free to unleash the others of its kind from their torment and take back the world that was rightfully theirs.

Then, the real battle would begin.

Watching the children from a distance, it cursed the Other’s power, unable to fully perceive what the teens had discussed near Kane’s grave. No matter. Tim strode toward the car, dragging Kane’s coffin, and soon they would all be flesh for its brethren.

Upon reoccupying the vehicle, it found Mallory had broken free.

Impossible. She shouldn’t have regained consciousness so quickly.

She tried for the door, but the entity activated the locks, sealing her in. Revitalized, the girl moved with the agility of a spirit, dodging its attempts to recapture her with the seatbelt. She leaned back in her seat and kicked the damaged windshield with both feet. The gummy, shatterproof glass popped loose, folding away, and the girl scrambled out over the hood.

* * *

Tim approached within arm’s reach of the graveyard’s fence when half the Mercedes’s windshield broke outward.

The glass burst away from its frame and folded over on itself. A split second later, Mallory came crawling out through the gap, clambering onto the vehicle’s hood.

Tim dropped the line to Kane’s coffin. “Mallory!”

With a spray of gravel spitting from its tires, the Mercedes reversed away from the fence. It rocketed backward, jerking out from under her. She lost her balance and slid headfirst off the car’s front end.

Tim abandoned the coffin and bound over the fence after her. “Mallory, hang on.”

The possessed Mercedes slid to a halt a mere twenty feet away, its engine roaring.

“
Look out,” he screamed. “Run. It’s coming.”

The car shot forward. Geysers of dirt and rock streamed into the air behind it. Tim’s pumping legs turned to jelly when he realized he’d never reach her in time to help. 

The headlights found her. They glinted on her bloodstained clothes.

To Tim’s astonishment, Mallory lunged to the side, rolling clear of the Mercedes as its dented bumper closed in for a bite. The car roared past, missing her. It raged on to the far end of the lot, where it slammed on its brakes and slid around to face them.

Tim ran to her. “Mallory, are you all right?”

She spun around and seized his reaching arm. “Tim, what the hell’s going on?”

“
Come on,” he urged, “we have to get back in the graveyard. Can you stand?”

By the time he finished the question, she’d already pulled herself upright. “Yeah, I’m okay now.”

He gaped at her chest wound, seeing only healthy, unmarked flesh through the rip in her blood-soaked shirt.

At the far end of the lot, the car’s headlights blazed with the white-hot intensity of a blast furnace.

“
Let’s go,” he started to say, then fell silent when the ground beneath their feet began to quake and rumble. The hard soil fractured, ripped apart by a thousand jagged cracks that spread outward in a twenty-foot radius around them. 

“
What’s happening?” Mallory cried. She reached out and grabbed Tim for stability.

Their feet sank into the crumbling dirt like two explorers trapped in quicksand.

Tim opened his mouth to reply, but his words came out in an unintelligible moan when several dozen withered arms jutted from the split ground and clasp tight around their legs, dragging, yanking, hauling them downward. In seconds, they were up to their knees—then their waists—in the dry, churning dirt.

Their screams interwove to create a helix of hellacious noise.

The clammy arms of the dead lashed over Tim’s shoulders and around his neck, a dozen knotted, flailing arms, two dozen, reached upward, gripped his hair, slapped down across his face, clawed his skin.

No,
he thought.
Not corpses, not here in the parking lot. Roots. Old tree roots!

Knowing the nature of their spirited fetters made no change in the situation. They were still trapped, with nothing in reach to free them.

“
Tim,” Mallory wailed. “Oh, God, no, Tim. Stop!”

These were no longer wild shouts of panic, he realized, but focused screams of terror. Twisting with all his might, he angled his head in her direction and saw the cause of her newfound fear.

Mallory had stopped sinking at chest level.

He hadn’t.

“
Tim,” she shrieked. “Oh, shit, try and grab my arm.”

Immobilized by the entangling roots, unable to reach for her, all he could do was watch while the dirt dragged him down, coming closer and closer to pulling him beneath the surface.

Then he saw something.

Headlights. On the driveway. Racing closer.

A noisy red station wagon exploded into view at the far end of the lot and rammed the Mercedes at full speed. It punched into the driver’s side door like a huge metal fist, propelling the whole car halfway into the woods, slamming it against a line of trees with a deafening crash.

The lights blinked out.

Both vehicles became enveloped by dust.

And Tim stopped sinking.

* * *

“
All right, now, get out.”

Paul had his door open and one foot already on the ground before Frank finished shouting the command.

He’d been warned to move fast. On the way down the driveway Frank had him transfer the duffle bag into the backseat so his movements wouldn’t be hindered.

Disengage the seatbelt. Grab the gun. Get the hell out.

Frank sprang into action, too, shotgun in hand. Once clear of the car, he turned and pumped two loud shots into his side of the wagon, blowing the tires flat.

Following his half of the instructions, Paul aimed the muzzle of his weapon and pulled the trigger, shooting out the front tire, then the back. With that done, he hurried around the wagon’s rear end and ran for the children, praying they were safe. They’d spotted them through the trees during their approach, illuminated in the high beams of the other car.

He gave a brief glance to the Mercedes; dark and vacant, it huddled between the station wagon and a thick tree, now a crumpled shadow of its former glory. But what about the driver?

He’d just passed the wagon’s rear bumper when the station wagon lurched backward at him, its engine suddenly alive.

“
Watch it,” Frank shouted.

The car jerked to a stop inches from his hip, dust shooting from beneath its whirling wheels. Its front bumper had punched a hole in the other car’s door, snagging it like a fishhook and preventing it from moving farther. Paul leapt away from the machine with a curse, all too aware he could’ve been crushed beneath its tires. He brought up the gun and aimed at the car. But he saw nothing to aim at; no one sat behind the wheel.

Who would be?
We were the only ones in there a second ago.

Frank had told him the creature they sought possessed powers, mentioning fantastic words like electrokinesis and telekinetics. But now Paul realized he’d only agreed with the man in the hopes it would get Mallory back, never expecting to actually encounter such extraordinary things.

The wagon jerked back and forth, its engine growling.

“
Go,” Frank yelled over the commotion. “Get the kids.”

Paul didn’t hesitate. He turned his back on the crazed wagon and dashed to where he’d seen the children.

“
Dad,” Mallory shouted, screaming for him like an injured toddler. “Daddy, help us.”

“
The church,” Tim kept saying. “We have to get to the church.”

Tearing at the pale restraints, Paul freed the kids and lifted them from the shattered landscape. He stood up, helping his daughter to her feet when a strange noise emanated from behind him—an ominous, metal-wrenching sound.

And whatever made it caused Mallory to scream.

CHAPTER 56

Becky flinched at the harsh concussion of sound generated by the colliding cars, wanting to know what was happening at the front of the church but too terrified to investigate alone. She prayed Mallory and Tim were safe, prayed the new arrival was an ally and not another monster.

As if the noise of the collision were the crack of a whip across her back, Lisa scrambled over the cemetery’s fence and joined Adam on the other side.

“
Come on, Becky,” he urged. “We have to get out of here.”

He leaned on the fence’s bars for support, favoring his left foot over his right. Blood oozed from numerous shallow lacerations scattered across his body, but he had enough strength to hobble on his own. “I’m going, with or without you.”

“
You son of a bitch,” she hissed. Tears of fear and frustration rolled down her cheeks. “Tim saved your life a minute ago, and you’re still willing to turn your back on him and Mallory.”

“
We don’t have a fucking choice.”

“
He’s right,” Lisa sobbed. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

“
But Tim said not to leave the—”

Gunshots boomed at the front of the church, at least half a dozen of them, and Adam and Lisa ran, leaving Becky where she stood.

“
Adam!”

He and Lisa vanished into the darker gloom of the forest without looking back, abandoning her.

She fidgeted beside the fence, shivering with fear and alternating her line of sight between the darkness in the direction of the parking lot and to where the Adam and Lisa had fled.

Tim told her to stay in the graveyard, that the creature couldn’t get her here, but he never said anything about guns. A bullet could reach her here just like anywhere else, right? And by the sound of the shots there was more than one firearm involved. She wanted to stay, wanted to be certain Mallory and Tim were still alive, but she couldn’t handle being all by herself, not knowing what the hell was going on.

A new noise arose from the front of the building.

Mallory. Screaming.

She grabbed hold of the iron bars and hefted herself over, breaking into a sprint the second her feet hit the ground. She stumbled across the twisted pile of the elm tree ruins and charged into the ramparts of waist-high weeds. Her foot landed in a depression and she fell to her knees, needing to bite her lip to keep from screaming at the surprise. Then she was up again, trudging forward with thistle barbs snaring her clothes and nettle spines stinging her skin.

She pressed onward, toward the hungry darkness that consumed her friends.

Wait,
she wanted to scream,
don’t leave me.
She looked to the graveyard, fearing even the thought of crying out would draw the creature’s attention.

“
Becky.”

She spun to see Lisa emerge out of the gloom. The girl stood on the opposite side of an overgrown dirt access road that ran behind the cemetery, waving her forward.

“
Look, look,” she said. “Look what we found.”

Becky squinted in the direction Lisa pointed and couldn’t believe what she saw.

Just off the side of the road, a white ambulance sat wedged between the trunks of two giant pine trees, its front end facing into the forest.

Adam hobbled into view from around the tree on the driver’s side, returning to the rear of the vehicle.

“
Adam,” she whispered. “What’s going on, what’s this?”

He looked up but didn’t appear surprised to see her, or even grateful that she’d escaped unharmed. “It’s abandoned, I think,” he said. “The front doors are jammed shut by the trees, but I saw a CB handset inside. If the battery still works, maybe we can use it to call for help. Come here and help me try the back.”

The two girls descended into the heavier growth along the road, toward the double rear doors. “Don’t you need the ignition key to make the radio work?” Becky asked.

“
I’ll hot wire the bastard if I have to.”

“
You know how to do that?”

“
Under the circumstances, I’ll learn,” he replied, and reached up for the handle.

The latch clicked and the doors flew open, expelling a humid breath of repulsive mist and the overpowering odor of decay. The blast hit them like a toxic cloud, and all three staggered away in disgust, coughing and wheezing and gasping for air. The vehicle’s battery did have a charge, and the moment the doors began to open, the overhead lights popped on to reveal the unimaginable horror that lay waiting inside.

Becky shivered, unable to take her eyes from the sight.