was: a five-year-old kid getting equal parts ticked and thrilled by what was happening.
“They’re not playing right,” Patrick said.
A skeletal hand shot through the needle thickets above Patrick’s head. Michael automatically raised the gun, discharged a round, exploded a branch. A body fell in the shadows and slid down the hill. Michael’s hands shook with adrenaline, but that did not stop his smile.
Patrick covered his ears, whined, “Hey, watch it.”
Then he pointed at the twitching shadows down the steep hill by the bridge.
“THEY’RE NOT—THEY’RE—RIIIIGHT—NOT PLAAAAAY–ING!”
Michael’s heart frosted.
There weren’t two Bellows. There were ten, at least.
“There’s so many. Fourteen, I counted ’em up,” Patrick said, bewildered. “They’re never in groups. You know?” And stood, suddenly furious. “Hey, cheating! You’re cheaters!”
“Patrick, shut up!” Michael hissed, and seized him back from the edge of the overlook.
“But they’re bein’ buuuutts!”
Michael smothered Patrick’s mouth, gently, beneath his fist. “Right and it’s not that I don’t agree, Bub, but just this sec we need to concentrate on getting our butts outtie here.”
Because holy hell, where did all those Bellows come from? Why why why are they moving in a pack? Michael thought. The Game Master never said they would!
“PATRICK—UPPPP—SHUUUTTTT, PAAAAATRIIIICK!”
Images burned into Michael’s head:
Bellows, in greater number than his bullets, would surround him and Patrick.
Block the bridge.
He and Bub would be trapped. Among the dead trees. And dead screams, and claws—
Stop it! If you lose it, it’s Game Over.
The car, he thought. Like now.
“You don’t get it?” Michael said. “Seriously?” He chuckled and then stopped—as if trying not to mock Patrick.
“What?” Patrick said.
“They’re not cheating.” Michael stood and strapped the rifle over his shoulder and took his brother’s tiny mitten-hand in his own. He led him back through the pines. “It’s just a surprise, that’s all. Like a surprise attack.”
“Surprise attack?”
Michael nodded.
They got back to the clearing.
The Bellow with the shattered arms stood fifteen feet away. “ATTTAAAAAAACK!”
Michael swallowed a shout and instinctively hurled the flare at the creature. The flare landed two steps in front of it and the Bellow raised its broken arms, trying in vain to block the dazzling light that tortured its never-closing pupils. The Bellow staggered backward, the illumination driving it momentarily away, like the crack of a lion tamer’s whip.
At least five more Bellows than there had been a minute ago screamed in the forest beyond the creature, imitating the pain of their fellow.
A finger of terror crawled up Michael’s throat.
Go move quick move quick go.
He grabbed his pillow and their duffel. He jammed a box of raisins into Patrick’s hands and pocketed their small cardboard box of .22-caliber rifle rounds.
“Aw,” Patrick said, “we leavin’?”
Michael rushed Patrick to the dirt road and the car. He slid his hand through the tire of the bicycle bungee-corded on the back, popped the trunk, shoved the bag and food in there. He felt his blood. Calmed.
He pulled the square ammunition box from his pocket.
Patrick said, “What about our beds?”
The bullet box was upside down: its cardboard flap came open. The little missiles fell into the snow: wet, ruined.
Michael slammed the trunk. “What, our what?” he snapped.
Patrick pointed at the sleeping bags back in the clearing. The flare had landed on top of the bags, and the bags had burst into flames. Past the bags, held temporarily at bay by the flare light but still visible, were a dozen Bellows.
Michael said, “Uh, we’ll get new ones.”
“NEEEWWWWWW OOOOOOOONES!”
Bellows screamed this almost as one over the hill down by the bridge. Michael jogged to the hill. Fifty: fifty of them. Down the mountain, in front of the bridge, the mass stumbled nearer on the dirt road that curved up toward their car.
The terror-finger grew another knuckle, nudged his Adam’s apple.
No. Why? How the hell are we supposed to fight them? What are they doing?
Having a rave. Beginning a shindig. Doesn’t matter. Plow through them.
That many’ll crack the windshield!
Then you shoot. You shoot as many as you can.
“Get in the car, Bub,” Michael said. “Go ’head and start it, then lay down in the back.”
The prospect was candy to Patrick. “Okay! Really? Wait, in the trunk?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to lay down in the—”
“Just the backseat, Patrick! Go!”
Michael jammed the keys into his brother’s hands and watched him go to the car.
Then Michael turned back. He picked a Bellow at random by the dark shore under the bridge and raised his scope on it, amplifying the enemy. Once it had been a man, twenty-five years old perhaps. Now its loose jawbone swayed, a pendulum clicking on a hinge;