Chapter Ethan
ETHAN
Outside, Ethan heard one of those creatures rip a metal bar off their window.
The metal let out a squeal and a twang, like a mangled engine fan.
Another bar came away. Glass shattered. Fabric was shredded as a talon tore into the mattress they’d barricaded over the window.
One of the things outside slammed against their front door with a heavy thud. The bolt creaked in the frame.
These barricades weren’t going to hold for long. If the boys were lucky, they might have a few seconds.
Hunter said again, “Run.”
Ethan was already moving. He didn’t have much of a plan, but he knew that staying in this room was a death sentence.
Ethan hadn’t taken two steps down the hall before one of the night creatures heaved itself against the back door.
The door’s bolt shattered and swung open, a bloom of sawdust in a shaft of starlight.
A massive figure stood on the porch, silhouetted against the night.
The creature raised its wings. It SHRIEKED.
Ethan brought up the revolver in his hand. He fired. In the flash of the muzzle, he caught stray glimpses of the thing in the dark: bright talons, black feathers, black scales.
He saw the shape of the thing’s head. In his gut, he felt another squeeze of that ancient primal terror that had gripped him all night.
But the revolver’s rounds hit home. The creature stumbled backward with a startled wail, a furious hiss. Whatever the hell it was, it wasn’t immune to bullets.
The thing fell off the porch, twitching and prone. Hunter slammed against Ethan’s shoulder, the shotgun still in his hands. “Go!”
Ethan was overclocked with adrenaline. He felt like he could see further, clearer, than a normal man. He could absorb every detail around him. He saw time collapse into a series of frozen, vivid moments:
The porch, empty and cold.
Black clouds, faint reflections of starlight.
The creatures of the desert everywhere: a feathered darkness in the cosmic afterglow.
Ethan was running. Hunter was behind him. They were running up the porch, toward the rear of the motel. Toward the mountain? Not exactly.
They rounded the corner of the porch and there it was: the two-story house at the foot of the mountain, its upstairs window shining with silver light. It was calling to them. Ethan knew, way down deep in his soul, that something in that old house was waiting for him.
Ethan said to Hunter, “It’s our best shot.”
Hunter made a grunt. Whether it was another yes or another wad of phlegm, they just kept running.
A creature rounded the corner of the porch, raised its wings.
Before it could finish its SHRIEK, Ethan fired.
The bullet hit. The creature staggered sideways.
Hunter said through a cough. “You’ve got one shot left.”
The boys were off the porch. The old house was twenty yards away, maybe a hair less, but in the dark the distance seemed to last forever. Dead ahead, the mountain loomed over them, larger than it had ever been before.
The mountain moaned. The earth shook so violently Ethan feared he’d lose his balance.
A SHRIEK came, right beside him.
“Son of a bitch,” Hunter said. The shotgun went off with a deafening boom. Ethan kept running. He felt a strange sensation somewhere along his right leg. It felt like a twitching nerve, a second pulse. He ignored it.
The old house was getting closer. Was Ethan crazy, or did its front door look wider than it had a moment ago? Had the wooden porch somehow grown shorter? Had the house’s walls been brick when they’d arrived at the motel, or had they always been clad in this gray wooden siding?
It was like every time Ethan looked away from the house, it changed.
A creature whisked past Ethan, all feathers and yellow eyes. Ethan’s foot caught a stone and he went sprawling forward. He fired as he fell. The last bullet in the revolver hit nothing.
When he landed, the gun tumbled from his hand and went skittering away into the dark.
In that moment, the clouds parted, bathing the desert in stark starlight. When Ethan looked up, he saw a dozen of the night creatures watching him from all directions. He finally saw clearly what they were made of. He saw horror made flesh.
He felt another pulse in his pocket.
One of those things stood between the boys and the house’s front porch.
It was a creature like the others, but it was taller than its companions.
A towering thing, eight feet high, standing on two long legs like a man.
It had long arms, with hands that ended in gleaming black talons.
Its limbs and chest were blanketed with black feathers, the same feathers that coated the enormous pair of wings that sprouted from its back.
Where the thing’s head should be—where one might have imagined the beak and eyes of an enormous bird—Ethan instead saw scales, a long curving neck, and the head of a great black serpent with yellow eyes and bared white fangs.
They were all like that, all the creatures around them: the arms and legs of men, the bodies of birds, the heads of snakes, like something out of some old legend. They had Ethan and Hunter surrounded. They were circling, coming closer.
The massive creature before Ethan raised its black wings in a glorious display. It opened its serpent mouth wide and released a SHRIEK that stopped Ethan’s heart.
“Stay down!” Hunter shouted. He fired the shotgun over Ethan’s head.
Its boom was so loud that all Ethan could hear for a moment was a high, tinny whine in his ear. He saw the massive creature skitter sideways, a great chunk of its wing and arm blasted away.
Ethan felt a hand on the back of his shirt, hoisting him to his feet. Hunter shouted, “Go!”
Ethan didn’t think. The massive thing had stumbled out of the way of the door and so he was running, running, running up to the house.
He clambered up a short flight of stone steps (hadn’t they been wooden a moment ago?) and over the stone porch and threw himself against the front door. It was unlocked. Ethan shoved it open.
He turned back, expecting to see Hunter directly behind him.
Instead, as he turned, Ethan heard a wet squelch. He heard two choked words. They might have been, “Thank you.”
Ethan looked back in time to see Hunter staring at him from the porch’s steps, the man appearing almost normal until a bubble of blood burst from his mouth and the talons buried in his neck wrenched him backward into the desert.
Hunter’s eyes widened in surprise. He pointed toward the house.
He tried to speak, but the massive creature with the shattered wing flung Hunter to the ground and buried two serpent teeth into Hunter’s eyes.