Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,35
to be human
It rushed towards us.
ELIEN (7)
Branches and dead pine needles crackled as the pale thing—the monster—shot toward us. Grabbing Dag, I stumbled between a pair of sugar maples. The monster streaked past us in blur of white, and Dag swore. He slipped, his back connecting with my chest, and we both stumbled. As he caught his footing, he thrust the shovel into my hands and pulled out his pistol. He turned slowly.
I set my back to his and brought up the shovel. We rotated in place, both of us scanning for any sign of the creature. The hashok. The thing in the grass. The thick growth of the forest made it hard to see anything beyond a few yards. Veils of Spanish moss fluttered when the night breeze picked up; the broken limb of a pine sagged in the wind, bending, exposing a white tongue. Dag’s back was hot and solid against my own; he was about my height, and for some reason that was ridiculously comforting at the moment.
Something scuffed to my right. I jerked to face it.
“Slow,” Dag whispered, setting himself against me again. “It’s going to try to trick us.”
I took short, shallow breaths, sliding my hand along the composite handle of the shovel. The blisters stung, but the sensation was so real and grounded that it was almost pleasant compared to the panic crawling up my throat.
“Just call out its position,” Dag said, still whispering. “Don’t stumble around, or it’ll separate us.”
My breathing sounded like a steam whistle.
“Elien?”
“Yes. Ok. Call it out.”
More of that scuffing came from my left, like something being dragged through the fallen pine needles.
“My left,” I said.
“I hear it.”
Twigs snapped.
“Right,” I said.
“I hear it.”
Dag released a slow, controlled breath. “It’s going to come from your right.”
“What? How do you—”
“When I tell you, I want you to run for the house.”
“No way, I’m not—”
“One,” he whispered.
An owl cried off in the darkness, and my hand jumped along the shovel.
“Two,” he whispered. “You can do this.”
The breeze picked up again. For a moment, the canopy parted overhead, and I saw stars, and the October air was cool on my superheated skin.
“Three,” Dag shouted, and he spun, grabbed my shoulder, and shoved me toward the house.
The creature shot out of the woods from the right, like Dag had predicted. It was just a blur of white at the corner of my vision, moving faster than any animal I’d ever seen. Maybe a cheetah ran that fast. Maybe a grizzly at full speed. Then it was past my field of vision, and I lost track of it.
Dag fired. In the forest’s stillness, the sound was so loud that I felt it hit me physically, like it would bowl me over. I stumbled, caught myself on the bole of a pine, kept going. The next shot came. Then two more came.
Dag was fighting this fucking monster for me. By himself.
“Oh fuck,” I screamed, and I veered around the broad trunk of a magnolia and sprinted back toward Dag.
He was running toward me; there was something funny about how he moved, and I realized he was cradling one arm against his chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” he roared. “Go, go, go!”
The hashok appeared on the other side of a line of brambles, just a ghostly flicker of movement that ran parallel with Dag, keeping up.
“The bushes,” I shouted.
Dag kept running and fired wildly into the brambles: one, two, three. He screamed through each shot. It was a wild noise, a berserker cry. I started screaming too.
And then Dag’s foot caught on a root, and he went down.
The noise of pain when he hit the ground was terrible, but even worse was the dull shape of the pistol flying from his hand. I grabbed the flashlight I’d been carrying, turned it on, and ran it back and forth across ground. Nothing. Nothing. Dirt and pinecones and more fucking dirt. Roots. Dag was groaning, rolling onto his back, and then he clutched at his arm and started swearing. I swept the beam of my light faster.
Something white moved at the edge of my vision.
I didn’t let myself focus on it. If I focused on it, I’d be lost. Frozen. I stumbled a few yards one way. Then the other. I kept that white spot right at the edge of my sight. It was coming closer, but slowly now. It knew we were helpless. The hashok was enjoying this game.
It feeds on human lives, Suzette had told me, and