Cruel World(29)

Something tall and thin was striding down the driveway toward him.

Quinn felt his jaw unhinge as his heart stuttered. With arms he couldn’t feel, he pushed himself to his feet and ran up the back steps to the door. He’d lost the flashlight and generator manual when he’d fallen, but that wasn’t important. He needed the gun because what was that thing coming toward the house? It hadn’t been a bear. It had been tall. Much too tall.

His hand slipped on the doorknob and he let out a hoarse moan. It was right behind him, it had to be. Its hands, its hands were huge.

The door opened and he swung inside, slamming it so hard he expected the glass to shatter in its frame. His numb fingers fumbled with the lock and finally snapped it home. Lightning erupted above the house and flared the yard into a blizzard of light.

There was nothing there.

Quinn stumbled down the hall, afterimages dancing in the darkness. His feet tried to slip again on the wood floor as he went by the stairway and he latched onto the bannister to steady himself. Wind buffeted the house, its frame protesting in groans and pops that sent shocks through his nerves with each new sound. His hands shook as he opened the door to the solarium and stepped inside.

Rain pelted the half-dome of glass in a cacophony, splattering and running rivers down its side. Familiar shapes of furniture were oblong and strange in the darkness as he navigated around them, trying to hurry without falling. The table near the reclining chair was ahead, the XDM lying on its surface. Thunder rumbled again, very close, and Quinn groped in the dark for the table’s edge. He found it and ran his hands across its surface, searching for the hard polymer grip of the handgun. There was a horrifying second where his fingers met nothing, but then they closed over the heavy shape and he pulled it toward him as thunder became a war drum in his ears. His finger found the trigger and he stepped around the chair into the center of the solarium, freezing as the panes shuddered again. His skin prickled.

It wasn’t thunder vibrating the glass.

His thumb found the switch on the gun’s grip and pressed it. A lance of light shot from beneath the barrel and illuminated an enormous face staring down at him from the solarium’s roof.

Quinn squeezed the trigger and the gun bucked. The glass pane beside the face shattered and fell in shining pieces with the rain. There was a screeching hiss that fluttered his ringing eardrums and a hand the size of a hubcap shot through the hole on the end of a skinny arm that kept coming like a snake leaving its den. Its fingers were long and pale, their tips dark and scraped raw.

Quinn tripped over a chair and fell backward, his tailbone exploding with pain as his ass met the hard flooring. The XDM flew from his grip and clattered into the dark, its light winking out. A deep reverberation, like a bullfrog croaking, filled the room. It shook the center of his chest as if massive speakers were inches away with the bass on full volume. Cold, wet flesh brushed his face and something snagged his t-shirt, yanking him to the side. Quinn cried out, his voice high and airy. He was the rabbit now, its terror his own. Long fingers curled in the fabric around his neckline and pulled, drawing him onto his feet. Lightning cut the night, and in the brief flash, Quinn’s bladder released.

The thing’s huge head was human, but elongated and stretched as if made of taffy. Its mouth hung open revealing spaced teeth and a lolling tongue. It was naked, its torso skeletal and distorted by its towering height. It leaned over the solarium, the top of its skull patched with discolored hair at least ten feet above the ground.

It adjusted its grip, releasing the hold it had on his shirt so that its thumb pressed against his breastbone and the rest of its fingers dug into his back. It squeezed.

All the air rushed from him, the vice on his chest unrelenting. The thing croaked again, an eager sound, one of anticipation and barely restrained excitement. It drew him upward toward the hole it reached through, its skinny arm hoisting him easily. Flickers of light gathered at the corners of Quinn’s vision and he thrashed in its grip, the last of his air leaking out of him in a squeal. The world was losing focus, like a film heating up before a projector bulb. His arms flailed and he struck the thing’s wrist, but it continued to pull him up, its mouth open and waiting. Something scraped his shoulder, and as it passed, he latched onto it, trying to stop his progress, but it came free in his hand. It was sharp and heavy and the pain that it brought as it sliced through his palm delivered a single frame of clarity that honed every detail to an edge.

Quinn raised the shard of glass and brought it down as hard as he could on the thing’s arm.