The Narrows(109)
It was a symbiotic exchange, where the child fed the mother and the mother fed the—
“Run,” Ben said.
6
She burst from the silo and streamed across the muddy field to find daylight cracking the sky. She tried to scream—and perhaps even thought she had—but no sound came out.Yet in her head, she was screaming.
7
Ben aimed the shotgun toward the abomination at the center of the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening. Bats swarmed over the two creatures, which remained locked in their otherworldly symbiosis, filling up the space like darkness in the absence of light. The flashlight dropped and the beam cut off, leaving only the rectangle of pallid predawn light that issued in through the doorway at Ben’s back. Ben fired two, three more shots at the ceiling, the tornado of bats whirring in the muzzle flashes and spiraling like a hurricane down the throat of the silo toward him. Dead ones rained down on him, while others struck his face and shoulders, still partially alive, screeching like tortured cats. He went to fire a fifth round but found the shotgun empty. Stupidly, his mind whirled. Above him, something large was moving through the darkness—had become the darkness—and was descending upon him.
Ben remembered the extra shells in his pockets. He pulled out a handful, losing most of them in his panic, and tried to reload the weapon with hands that shook like seismographs. Bats whipped his face and he threw himself backward, hoping the wall of the silo would catch him. But he was too far away from the wall and he fell backward into a mound of reeking, partially hardened feces.
Something large continued to move down the throat of the silo, its formless bulk temporarily cutting in front of the slivers of daylight that cut through the slats in the wood.
Ben groped blindly at the darkness with both hands, desperate to reload the weapon and continue firing.
It seemed to take him an eternity to realize he had dropped the shotgun.
8
She stopped running by the time she hit Gracie Street. Her lungs burned, as did her eyes, and she collapsed to her knees in the mud by the side of the road where she unleashed a woeful, terrified sob. Her terror was great, but she forced herself to close her eyes and count to ten in an effort to reclaim some semblance of control. It took her to twenty before she began to feel steady again…and to fifty before she was able to open her eyes and stand.
It was her brother she was thinking of, but it was her father who forced her to stay and stand her ground. Unlike him, she would not run away.
She turned and ran back up the hill toward unimaginable horror.
9
Oddly enough, it was the fact that he was thinking of his own father at the same moment that probably saved Ben Journell’s life. He recalled the Zippo he carried in his breast pocket, felt for it…and gripped its solid, heavy, cold frame between two fingers. It ignited on the first spin of the knurled wheel. Dim yellow light illuminated the erratic fluttering of the bats’ membranous wings all around him. He swatted at them and cried out as they battered against him, shrieking in their unnatural, high-octave voices. When he dared glance up, he could make out something pale and formless creeping down the throat of the silo toward him—the extended dual limbs of impossibly long arms and eyes that gleamed briefly like mirrors facing the sun…
The shotgun lay several feet away. The shotgun shells had vanished into the shadows. The hand holding the lighter trembled and the flame threatened to blow out from the air stirred by the wings of the bats.
He thought of his father at that moment, in the weeks before his death when the old man had stood out in the back field of the farmhouse off Sideling Road and had held a conversation with a wife who was no longer there.
His hand still shaking, Ben brought the lighter down to the ground. The flame touched a heap of guano and the guano, rich with nitrogen, ignited instantly. The flames wasted no time spreading across the terrain of feces, the firelight a dazzling yellow-white and reeking. Ben rolled over just as the fire rushed toward him, slamming down onto the ground with a shoulder that immediately thronged with pain. One hand shot blindly out, his numb fingers closing around the butt of the shotgun. He slid it toward himself as flames raced up the dry wood of the silo’s walls, the bat shit providing fuel that bested the sodden state of the wood.
He stood and raced out the open door, the entire floor ablaze while flames crawled up the walls of the silo. Cold, wet air struck him like a wall as he burst through the door and into oncoming dawn. He spun around and grabbed the bracket-shaped handle of the silo’s door. He gave it a tremendous yank and it slid along its rusty runners until it closed. When he let go of the doorhandle, he left a bloody handprint behind.
10
He caught Brandy as she came rushing toward him. Her eyes were fearful but there was a set determination to her jaw. She screamed and struggled to break from his grasp, her eyes locked on the silo. Ben hugged her to his chest, cradling the back of her head with one hand.
“Calm,” he told her. “Calm down. I need your help more than ever right now.”
She broke out in tears and began crying audibly against him. He held her while he watched the flames shoot out from the staves at the base of the silo. Columns of thick, black smoke poured out of rents in wood, and the bats, whipped into frenzy, spiraled out of the open cracks, filling the sky in a black blizzard.