Husk (48 page)

Frank staggered and fell to his knees.

The creature caught him before he hit the ground, clamping his body in its arms. He twisted and kicked, squirming to break free.

Frank’s struggle slowed when he became aware of other movements pushing against his body. He looked down to see the creature’s hide bulge and swell, stirred from within.

A line of stitches unfurled along the monster’s right side and the half-skeletonized head of a dead woman emerged from the gash. It sprung forth on an impossibly long neck, trailing slime-soaked purple hair that dangled from the remnants of her scalp. Frank stared in horror. Trapped by the beast, he was unable to avoid the head’s lipless teeth when they bit into his abdomen.

On the other side, a mummified dog’s skull burst from the creature’s huge chest. Its jaws gnashed, sinking fangs into Frank’s shoulder.

He screamed and thrashed in its grasp, fighting to escape.

The creature laughed in his face. Its vertical mouth disgorged a foul breath of postmortem gases along with the bodies of five dead rattlesnakes that nipped at his face.

One tore off his eye patch, exposing the empty socket beneath.

The beast’s demonic voice boomed. “Now we’ll see how well
you
hold together.”

CHAPTER 61

“
Let me go,” Mallory yelled.

She struggled against Tim’s grip, knowing he was only trying to protect her but furious with him for keeping her from helping her dad get back to the church—even after the monster had dropped him.

She dug her nails into his skin. Kicked at his feet.

“
Please, Tim!”

“
No! You go out there and you’re dead!”

In the parking lot, her dad stumbled toward them. He’d reclaimed the gun with his good hand and kept it aimed at the creature.

“
Dad!”

Tim finally released her once her father reached the church steps, and she flung herself at him, clutching him around the neck. She wanted to remain calm, to be the action-oriented heroine she’d been at the barn, but once they were reunited her emotions overflowed, and she collapsed into sobs.

“
Are you okay?” she cried. “I heard your arm break. Oh, God, Daddy, I heard it all the way over here!”

“
I’ll live,” he said. “We have to help Frank, though.”

They looked to the parking lot and saw the other man hoisted into the monster’s arms, clutched in a titanic bear-hug.

Her dad aimed the gun with his good hand, but then lowered it again. “I can’t shoot with this arm. Even if I could, I’d probably miss or hit Frank.”

“
Guns won’t stop it,” Tim said. “But I know what will: Kane’s body.” He turned and pointed at the cemetery. “The coffin is right there. That’s what this thing wants.”

Her dad’s expression went gray. “Kale Kane?”

Tim nodded. “It made us dig him up. It had Mallory.”

“
Frank said the entity could bring that maniac back to life somehow. I don’t think I believed him at the time, but—”

Frank screamed.

Mallory flinched at the sound, not wanting to look.

“
Get in the doorway,” her dad ordered.

Mallory shook her head. “But—”

“
Do it, Mallory. I’m not leaving you.”

Tim slipped his hand into hers and pulled her to the top of the steps.

Her dad edged away from them, facing the graveyard. He snapped up the pistol, aiming at the coffin, and fired his final five rounds. Three of the shots missed, sparking off the fence and putting scars in nearby tombstones. The other two bullets opened dark holes in the cheap boards surrounding Kale Kane’s body.

Mallory spun to see if the creature had responded when—

“
Look out!” Tim screamed.

Before she knew what was happening, he yanked her through the church doorway. His quick action gave her only a second to glimpse the twelve-foot long log that hurled out of the darkness toward them. It smashed through the steps and tore the whole staircase off the building, leaving a dusty cloud in its wake.

Mallory rushed back to the opening to find her father already climbing the ruins.

“
Get inside,” he shouted. “It’s coming!”

Mallory didn’t hesitate this time. She joined Tim and dashed through the entryway.

Beyond lay a large, open room, lit only by fragile threads of outside light that stitched together the two opposing rows of boarded-over windows set in the building’s longest walls.

Another object rocketed toward them, this time a bolder the size of a car tire. It hit the church two feet above the double doors, punching through the forward vestibule and out the opposite wall, leaving two enormous holes in the building’s skin. Mallory and Tim ducked into the musty interior under a hailstorm of debris. Wood exploded across the one-room sanctuary, clattering over the rows of old pews and off the floor.

Mallory spun around, searching for her father.

He hurried close behind them. “Come on, kids, keep going.”

A second rock tore across their path. It shot through one of the windows, obliterating the wooden frame and covering boards, pelting them with more hazardous debris. It struck the end of a pew only two rows ahead of Tim, reducing the long bench to shattered kindling, simultaneously causing the one beside it to jump upward like a catapult.

“
It’s trying to flush us out,” Tim said over the noise of destruction.

The upended pew crashed to the floor.

“
All the way to the back,” her father cried.

They waded through the mess of splintered timbers as if navigating a jungle full of booby traps, but after the last rock, an ominous calm had settled over the scene.

They reached the halfway mark of the main chamber when an enormous, bone-jarring impact rattled the entire building.

Mallory glanced behind her and gaped in silent horror at the sight of Derrick’s Mercedes bulldozing through the ceiling, smashing apart the overhead crossbeams, barreling straight toward them.

* * *

The entity watched the Mercedes stab into the church, no longer caring if Mallory died before it had a chance to resurrect Kane and access her energy. She’d evaded its grasp again and again, and now moved too far out of its reach. It would rather leave with Kane to begin again knowing she’d perished in the one place she thought was safe.

The car blasted through the sanctuary’s roof, its rear bumper chased by the bell tower and most of the forward rooftop when those sections of the building caved in behind it.

Though it couldn’t detect even Mallory’s extraordinary life force from within the hallowed walls of the Other’s domain, it couldn’t imagine the girl surviving such an attack. She was only human, after all.

Turning from the ruined church, it reached out and grabbed Frank, savoring his cries of pain when it seized him by the arm.

“
Stay alive a little longer, old man,” it said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss this. Kane’s going to be so happy to see you again.”

It hauled him across the parking lot to the music of his anguished screams, dragging him toward the graveyard.

* * *

Frank battled to remain conscious while the creature hauled him across the clearing. Dozens of bites had shredded his shirt, leaving hundreds of bleeding tooth marks in his skin. His strength waned with the loss of blood, and his awareness had become muddled by pain and exhaustion. The world around him distorted at the edges, and it took him a moment to recognize the devastated church when they passed it.

The creature halted at the graveyard’s iron boundary, where it dropped him face-down in the dirt. Spasms of pain rippled throughout his body. Groaning, he rolled clumsily to the side in an effort to distance himself from the beast, gaining only a few meager feet before the agony of his wounds immobilized him.

He lay there on his back for a second or two before the clang of metal and the sharp crack of breaking bonds drew his attention to the right. Beside him, the vile heap of animated body parts tore away a large section of the graveyard’s fence and cast it away.

Kane’s coffin lay just several feet away.

“
At last!”

The beast took up another ruined section of the fence and used it to hook the end of Kane’s casket, pulling it within reach, free of the graveyard.

“
Time to complete it, Frank. Time to put things back the way they were. Beg of us, and maybe we’ll allow you be part of the New World, host to one of our own. How does that sound?”

“
Go to hell, you piece of shit.”

The monster’s rotten façade loomed closer. “Better yet, Frank, I’ll bring a part of it to you.”

The beast held its two largest hands over the filthy funerary box, and a sudden surge of energy charged the air. Amber light began to seep out from within the flimsy coffin, sizzling through the seams of its second-rate construction.

The box began to shake.

The thing inside was fighting to get out.

* * *

Mallory had trouble orienting herself in the church’s havoc-strewn darkness. To her right stood a thick iron cross that had chopped through the floorboards like a lumberjack’s ax; at her left lay a shingle-covered portion of what used to be the roof. Over her back came the
tick
and
thunk
sounds of loosened rubble still dropping to the ground.

She shuffled around and sat up. Five feet behind her, the hood of Derrick’s Mercedes had vanished into the floor’s splintered decking, buried up to its nonexistent windshield in debris.

“
Mallory,” her father’s voice called. His good hand closed on her shoulder.

Turning, she found her dad and Tim, dust-covered and haggard-looking but alive. She roped her arms around her father and hugged him tight, regarding Tim over his shoulder with a teary gaze. “Thank God you’re both alive.”

Tim opened his mouth to speak, then closed it when the foggy darkness encasing them begin to recede, revealing greater detail of the devastation heaped around them.

They stood and hurried to one of the tall, glassless windows, where her father knocked loose a trio of old planks to reveal a full view of the cemetery.

Mallory gasped.

The creature stood at the churchyard fence, a blazing amber light radiating from something at its feet. Mallory squinted against the glare, trying to make out the nucleus of the blaze, when Tim uttered, “It reached the coffin.”

And the moment he said it, the rectangle of light broke open.

CHAPTER 62

Melissa spotted the amazing lightshow through countless arms of outstretched tree branches, but nothing could’ve prepared her for what she saw once Jimmy guided the truck into the clearing.

“
What is
that
?” he howled, gawking at the huge figure silhouetted in front of the firework’s incandescent origin.

Melissa knew. She had no time to explain, but she knew what it was doing, what the light meant, and what had to be done next, before the creature’s sorcery could be completed.

“
Hit it,” she ordered, remembering the beast’s only known weakness.

“
What?”

“
We have to stop it. Ram the damn thing. Now!”

“
No way!”

“
Do it,” she shouted. She slid across her seat and tromped her foot down over Jimmy’s, smashing the gas pedal to the floor, propelling the truck forward.

“
Shit, lady, you’re nuts.”

Melissa held her position, pinning the accelerator all the way open. Even in their present gear, they closed the gap between the driveway and the monster with surprising speed. She spotted Frank crumpled at the creature’s feet, dangerously close to where they were headed.

She didn’t let up.

Amber light filled the cab.

The colossal figure pivoted, twisting around to greet them with three outstretched arms and a thunderous bellow of rage.

Jimmy pushed and squirmed, finally heaving Melissa off him. Screaming, he slammed both his feet down on the brake pedal, mashing it to the boards. The truck slid. Pneumatic screams joined the beast’s call while the semi’s air brakes strove to slow its advance. But regardless of its stopping power, the cab’s front end collided chest-level with the entity’s towering body, hitting the thing head on, propelling it into the one place she’d been told it couldn’t go.

Through the fence and into the cemetery.

* * *

Sprawled on the ground, Frank watched in semi-conscious wonderment when the two imposing juggernauts clashed together, the massive truck overcoming the entity’s humanoid configuration of flotsam with its inexorable momentum, launching the monster into the graveyard at the same instant one of its giant forward tires rolled over Kale Kane’s blazing coffin, crushing it like a snail shell and smearing its festering cargo.

The amber light vanished.