Chapter 6 #2
“Bloody traitor,” Ross whispered venomously.
“It’s not Will,” Melissa decided. “Whatever’s there, it’s not him. It’s… It’s the elders. It’s the things. It’s them making themselves immortal at our expense. It’s living off the young. I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t leave us. It just makes them go on longer.”
They let the car crunch away, waited until its headlamps were lost in the tree-draggled tunnel that the paths out of Enderby became. Then Melissa tapped them both on the arm, not even needing to speak, and they went.
Not through the woods, this time. Because the going was harder and they’d make worse time.
Because the woods weren’t untenanted. Instead, Melissa picked a path out, and they clung to the very skirts of the trees, weaving in and out of them, keeping in their shadow enough that a sudden burst of light approaching from behind wouldn’t catch them in its glare.
They kept their own torches off as much as possible, getting them out only where roots and undercutting made the going too complex to feel out.
They tripped and stumbled. Ross turned his ankle, but swore he’d just walk it off, that he wouldn’t slow them.
The sense of refugees fleeing a war zone, a police state.
When Elena realised that the singing had started up, she was simultaneously aware that it had been on the air for a while.
Melissa had slowed to navigate a tricky verge where the footing was just a hollow cage of roots with emptiness beneath them, where erosion or tunnelling animals or the ripping force of a toppled trunk had carved out an unknowable space.
“I hear—” Elena got out, and Ross grunted, “I know.” Stray moonlight showed his jaw set. His whole body was taut and shaking when she touched his arm.
A lament for their fallen sibling? she wondered.
But if so, there was no change to the chorus.
Perhaps the things had no fellow-feeling, their malice extending even to their own kind.
The voices exalted out into the night with the same manic energy and Elena felt her focus blur, even as she tried actively to hold onto the moment.
Melissa thrust something into the hand that wasn’t clinging to Ross’s coat sleeve.
Foam earplugs. The sort of thing she’d used on the flight over, when she’d tried to catch a few hours’ disjointed sleep on the plane.
And she could still hear the shrilling voices when she stuffed them in her ears, just as she’d been able to hear the engines or the tinny chirr of the music in the headphones of the man across the aisle, but the plugs took the edge off.
They robbed the sound of its hypnotic edge.
“Is it louder, ahead?” Ross had to ask three times, the last one with his torch under his chin like someone telling a ghost story, exaggerating the lip shapes grotesquely, gesturing with a stage actor’s oversized gestures. He made a roundabout motion of his hands. Is there another way?
Melissa shook her head. An emphatic point.
Onwards. Ahead. And she doubled her speed, scrambling and parkouring over whatever the edge of the woods threw at her, almost daring the other two to keep up.
And they kept up, because being three people against the dark wasn’t great odds, but the alternative was to be just two.
Something whirled overhead. Through the earplugs its wings battered dully at the air, the blunted sound of a helicopter a dozen blocks away.
Elena ducked, heard a volley of snapping noises as its heavy body fought through the branches.
Somehow the clumsy physicality made it all the more terrible.
No thing of fey and gossamer this. She had skin-crawling thoughts of it just crashing into her, clutching with idiot blindness with its little claw hands.
Something moved in the darkness ahead. Something big.
For a moment she thought it was a rider again, that their run was up despite all of Melissa’s precautions.
But it was too low for that, and moved a different way, lurching out of the trees and onto the path.
It made a sound like a goat, a weird sick bleating that went straight from the ears to the stomach.
Melissa was backing away, at last faced with something she couldn’t just vault or duck under.
It swayed and gurgled. Elena had only a vague sense of shape, of something big blundering about ahead of them. It was Ross who broke, in the end. Turned the pen torch onto it, because right then not knowing was far worse than being detected.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, God.” But in tones of relief, because even that thin and wavering beam robbed the thing of its horror.
A deer, only a deer. A big one, probably a stag although it was too early in the year for antlers.
One broad brown eye blinked bewildered in the light.
It bleated again, a sound like the one she’d made being sick, and stumbled one more pace into the road. And they saw.
“Fuck,” said Ross. The beam shook wildly, but he didn’t drop the torch somehow.
They all got to see the thing clamped to the deer’s side, bulking out the line of the beast’s spine like a tumour.
The hard, hunched curve of its back gleaming shiny in the torchlight.
Crooked arms dug into the poor animal’s lacerated flanks, and the filigree-and-plastic mosaic of its folded wings, a full six feet long, extended far past the deer’s tail, glittering half-seen like dust-motes.
The eyes, red spheres. The beak almost hidden, driven all the way into the deer’s body as it drank.
The deer lurched round and Melissa let out a horrified kind of yap because a second thing was latched onto its other flank, a grotesque, swelling tick.
Aligned vertically, the fringes of its wings trailing in the dirt.
This one must have been there longer, or was less thirsty; at Melissa’s cry, it scrabbled onto the deer’s shoulders, balanced there precariously, and then thundered into the air, the draught from its suddenly spread wings coming at them like the sound of a party when the door is opened.
Freed of half its burden, the deer made another weeping, choking sound and lurched off the track and into the trees on the far side.
Both the things had been bigger than the creature that had forced its way out of Godfrey, and brighter too, patterned across their backs and wings. Advertising health and potency.
“Oh, God,” Melissa breathed.
“What the Fff… What the…?” Ross sounded close to tears. “Fuck. What the fuck? What even…?”
Elena let her own breath out in a long shudder. “We’ve seen them before,” she got out.
The other two stared at her, Ross half-blinding her with the pen torch.
“In ’21. You remember? They were all over. You got freaked out.”
“What are you…?” He caught up. “Wait, no… I mean, they were… They weren’t…”
“I mean, they were smaller than my thumb,” she admitted, “and they didn’t drink goddamn blood.
But that’s what they were. That’s what we were looking at, right then.
And the ones in Baltimore, that was their time.
The time they all just hatched out and… sang.
Mated and died. Their life cycle. Every seventeen years or thirteen years or whatever it was. ”