Chapter 21
Malcolm wiped blood from his eyes and kept grim focus on the task at hand.
Pain spider-webbed across his back, and his head throbbed.
He didn’t remember much about the derailment, but he knew he’d banged his skull pretty good, so he figured he must have been knocked out.
The blood seeped from a gash on his forehead, but there was no telling how severe the injury might be.
Head wounds always bled like crazy. He was more worried about the ringing in his ears, the dizziness, the nausea. Felt like one hell of a concussion.
“Snap out of it!” Violet shouted.
He blinked. For a moment, he’d been drifting, swaying on his feet, about to drop Maggie’s crate. He pressed his eyes closed and drew in a breath.
“I’m okay,” he lied.
He shifted his stance, and together, they hefted the crate out of the upside-down baggage car.
Trunks and traveling cases were everywhere.
Some were intact while others had burst open.
Busted windows and smashed wine bottles had scattered broken glass on the ceiling, which was now the floor.
It occurred to him how fortunate it was that the chickens and other animals had been taken off at the last station, but then the cries of the injured reached him again, and he felt foolish.
“What now?” Violet said, the words clipped and breathless.
He forced himself to focus. Narrow lines of blood streaked Violet’s face—his or hers, he didn’t know. She seemed to be favoring her right leg, but was otherwise intact. The crate was also more or less intact, one side partly staved in, but it held together.
“For God’s sake, Malcolm!” Violet shouted.
Her eyes shone with wild expectation. He was the soldier, after all. He’d been through hell before.
Farther east along the tracks, away from the wreckage, was a road.
He could see the railroad crossing signs from here.
A road meant homes, somewhere nearby. There was no telling how far, but he needed a moment to clear his head.
The pale thing from the train might be dead, but he had to assume it was not.
Same with Elias—Ah, fuck, Elias, what did you do, brother?
“This way,” he said. He balanced Maggie’s crate with one hand, wiped the blood from his eyes again, and they started moving, stepping over debris.
Violet stumbled. Malcolm took the weight of the crate, and pain shot through his back, but he’d been in pain before.
Been wounded before. Violet steadied herself, and they hustled across brush and tall grass.
There were trees on the other side of the road.
He could see them in the moonlight now, and thought they might be able to hide, catch their breath.
A flicker of hope, and then he glanced back toward the crash site and saw the thing, Root.
Its mushroom skin gleamed in the moonlight, pearlescent.
Tall but bent, predatory, it moved like a praying mantis.
Root had seen them, and it had seen the crate that held its prize.
It stalked through the tall grass, leaving most of the wreckage behind, but its motion scared survivors who had seen it and hidden in the grass, and now shrieked as they fled.
Root wanted Maggie, but its predatory instinct must have been stronger.
It lunged after the two people who’d been hiding in the grass, bringing down the first.
“Hurry!” Violet screamed.
Go, go, don’t trip! Malcolm wanted to shout in return, but his head pounded, and he had to focus on moving his feet. They were on either side of the crate, which made every step awkward, but they held on, grass whipping their legs.
The road was only forty feet away, but what then? Across the pavement, into the trees, but Root would find him. And if not Root—
Another voice filled the air, calling his name. “Malcolm!”
The thing that had been Elias strode through the tall grass.
His features were hard to read, but Malcolm knew this wasn’t really his brother anymore.
Elias wasn’t coming to help them. Even if he’d been himself, still alive, not oozing with the hunger and evil of this thing, he would be coming to hurt them for what he perceived as their betrayal.
But Malcolm didn’t think it was that simple anymore.
Violet stopped short.
Malcolm stumbled, tried to keep the crate from falling.
Failed. The thick grass provided a bit of cushion, but the crate hit the ground.
Wood that had already cracked sounded as if it splintered a bit more.
Malcolm went to his knees and found himself looking at the side of the crate that had been partially staved in during the train crash.
The edge of something had smashed in the upper-left corner of the wood, leaving a jagged hole.
His mother’s glassy, dead eye stared out at him from that hole.
Part of the canvas shroud had come unstitched, her face revealed. That one eye seemed to watch him, furious with expectation.
They were going to die. Maggie’s remains would never make it home to Shediak. He wished he’d never made this promise, that she had never asked it of him.
He glanced at Violet, heart breaking, knowing he’d let her down as well. But Violet wasn’t looking at him. She stared toward the road, and when Malcolm turned to see what had her attention, he was doubly sure they were dead.
Another of the monsters stood at the edge of the pavement, waiting for them.
This one seemed more bent than Root, twisted to one side as if its spine had broken and been reshaped.
He had seen one outside the train. They’d heard the screaming from the engine as it murdered the man driving the train.
In the mayhem, he’d blanked it out. Get Maggie’s crate, get away from Root and Elias.
But now he remembered—there were more of them.
How many more? Violet was speaking to him, but the words were muffled and far away.
Malcolm glanced back at the wreckage of the train, people milling about, helping the injured or just aimless and broken.
Root stalked toward them from the left, Elias from the right.
Farther back, toward the derailed coaches, the moonlight showed another one, holding a screaming woman off the ground, its hands clamped on both sides of her head.
Malcolm couldn’t look.
“What do we do?” Violet asked, her voice small. “How do we fight them?”
He wanted to just sit on the edge of the crate and wait. They had seconds. But he’d never surrendered before, and it didn’t sit right with him to do so now.
“Use what you can. Fingers, teeth. Go for their eyes, throats, smash their skulls if you can find a rock.”
“They’ll kill us.”
Malcolm said nothing. He loved her, didn’t want to watch her die or see it happen to him, but Violet had her answer.
Root was so close now they could hear the swishing of its legs through the grass.
Malcolm could almost feel the creature closing in.
His skin prickled with slick revulsion and his pulse quickened.
He felt somehow small, like the boy he’d once been, huddled under his sheets, fearful of the darkness under his bed.
It was hard to breathe, and his guts churned.
Malcolm patted the top of the crate. “Sorry, Maggie.”
Blue lights flashed over the grass and across Elias and Root. Somehow they hadn’t heard the siren or the car’s engine, but now it gave a roar, and then they heard the sound of tires skidding to a halt on the road.
Police.
Sirens wailed in the rain, but they hadn’t come from the police car.
Off in the distance, around a curve in the road, came the first fire truck.
Its klaxon made a throaty bellow, soon woven together with the donkey bray of an ambulance siren.
Whatever town was nearby, their emergency crews were either light sleepers or very serious about their jobs.
A pair of uniformed policemen stepped out of the car. They spotted the monster at the edge of the road, the pretzel-spined, pale creature that looked more dead than alive, but in the rain and the dark, they mistook it for human.
“Sir,” the tall white cop said as he approached the thing. “Sir, are you injured?”
His partner paused to look out at the carnage. His gaze landed on Root. Malcolm knew the moment it happened because the cop’s head rocked back at the sight of the thing.
Malcolm glanced at Violet. “Let’s go! Move!”
They’d both been numb. Paralyzed. Now she grabbed her side of the crate. Malcolm could no longer see Maggie’s dead eye staring at him through the hole, but her corpse shifted against the wood as they lifted. It thumped, and scratched inside the crate as they ran toward the police car.
“Come back here, Violet!” Elias screamed as he broke into a run. “I’m not done with you! I’m your husband!”
“You’re dead!” Violet cried, not glancing back toward him. “But even alive, you were a shitty excuse for a husband!”
It might’ve been funny, if it weren’t all so real.
The cop who’d spotted Root started into the tall grass toward them, one hand on his holster.
“What are you waiting for?” Malcolm screamed at him. “Shoot them, goddamn it!”
The wrong thing to say. The cop had enough worry in him now that he drew his service revolver, even raised it, aim wavering back and forth between Root coming on the left and Elias on the right. But he glanced at Malcolm in confusion, trying to make sense of the words.
They passed him, carrying the crate.
Violet shouted at him as they passed, “They’re killing people! It’s a slaughter! Shoot!”
Even then, he didn’t pull the trigger.