Tim pushed his way through the bulwark of staggered trees and bushes planted along the far side of Terrace Street, those set up in an organized attempt to blend the landscaped embankment into the surrounding wild forest.
Once under windblown treetops, it only took him a few seconds to locate the earth-packed lanes of the bike trails. Even in the darkness he maneuvered his way along the paths with ease, having traveled them enough to be familiar with every twist, turn, and fork. Choosing a route that would take him to the railroad tracks—which he could follow all the way back to Loretto in half the time of traveling normal roads—he started home.
In the woods, he wouldn’t run into Mallory and her friends again, either.
Before he’d made his discreet exit from her house, he’d overheard her suggestion of a trip to the old barn. Walking along the street, they might have spotted him on their way out to the fields, and he didn’t feel like explaining why he’d left the house without telling anyone.
Wind gusted hard into the surrounding trees, and their branches moaned in protest. Off in the forest smaller plants mimicked the noise, sounding like the muffled whispers of unknown creatures.
Tim trod forward without pause, his eyes focused on the dirt.
A three-foot long branch had fallen across the path, and he kicked it out the way, imagining it was Derrick.
Two paces later he scooped up a rock and hurled it after the branch.
“Asshole,” he yelled.
He stormed onward, unzipping the jacket he’d taken from his mother’s car and put on to armor himself against mosquitoes. The night’s breeze was keeping them at bay and the added clothing only made him sweaty.
Someone laughed.
It sounded sharp and squeaky against the tranquilizing shift of nature, and Tim snapped up his head to see a huge black figure emerged into view barely fifty feet away. It glided toward him on the path with frightening fluidity, moving like a sentient glob of darkness out of a Lovecraftian nightmare.
Tim stopped dead in his tracks, rooted in place by fear. His nerves charged with energy, prepping his muscles to run, but then the advancing hulk broke apart, separating into the silhouettes of three teenagers riding bikes along the trail.
Fear melted into humiliation, and Tim’s shoulders sagged as the tension drained from his body. He wiped his brow, now picking up the first hints of jocular conversation and laughter. He started forward once more, composing himself so he wouldn’t look too geeked-out when they passed him.
But his fear returned when he recognized the loudest voice in the group.
Brad Hill!
“Oh, shit.”
Tim scrambled off the trail and took cover within the foliage, wincing with each sound made beneath his shoes.
He didn’t know if Brad still wanted revenge for the dodge ball incident, but if he did, Tim could only imagine what the larger boy would do to him out here in the woods.
The three drew closer. Thirty feet away now. Twenty-five.
Tim wondered how brave Mallory would think he was if she could see him now, cowering like a rabbit in the presence of a wolf.
He positioned himself behind a tree trunk less than four feet off the trail, not daring to chance looking for a better spot deeper in the woods. If he stepped on a brittle stick, he might call their attention.
Smarter to ease around as they pass. Just keep the tree between us, hide in the shadows.
From where he crouched, he saw the occasional red glow of a cigarette flare brighter when one of them inhaled, and he could vaguely make out their black shirts and dark jeans.
Tim held his breath, hoping they’d pass without—
Suddenly, the plants thrashed with movement at his back, rustled by something deeper in the trees. Before he could look, an object shot over his head like a bullet, sending shredded leaves fluttering to the ground behind it.
Tim held his breath to keep from gasping when he realized what had happened.
To confirm his fear, the silhouette on the far right of Brad’s group jerked backward, crying out in pain.
“Oh God, no,” Tim whispered.
The boy fell off his bike and crashed to the ground, howling through clapped hands locked over his mouth. Tim heard one of the others say something about a rock.
Tim looked over his shoulder and tried to find the attacker, but saw nothing past his own hiding spot. Just black plant stalks on a blacker background.
A light clicked on and swept over the bushes. It caught the back of Tim’s head in its beam, causing his shadow to flee over the plants ahead of him.
“There,” Brad’s voice boomed.
“Get the fucker,” another roared.
Their bikes hit the dirt, followed by the sound of footfalls thundering toward the tree he squatted behind.
“It wasn’t me,” Tim cried. He lunged from his hiding spot and sprinted onto the trail. “It wasn’t me!”
“It’s Flemwad,” Brad hollered.
Tim heard the sound of combat boots pounding the ground behind him as the older boys gave chase, and Tim took off like it was qualification day at track tryouts. He knew they wouldn’t give him the slightest chance to explain if they caught him—not that they’d believe him, even if they did. The mere thought caused tears to slide from his eyes and stream down his cheeks.
“Someone’s not going home tonight,” one of the pursuers laughed.
They closed fast, bearing down on him like charging bulls.
At the last second, he dodged to the right and took one of the forks in the path, hoping to double back to Mallory’s neighborhood. But no sooner had he made the turn when he discovered a massive cottonwood had collapsed across the trail ahead, its thick branches cutting off his escape with the effectiveness of a ten-foot-high fence.
Trapped!
“You’re dead, asshole,” Brad yelled. “Dead!”
Tim stopped hard, skidding on the dry soil. He wheeled around to face the teens.
The two boys sprinted forward. They had sticks.
With barely enough time to think, he scanned his surroundings and managed to locate a broken glass bottle to the side of the trail. He snatched it up by the neck and thrust its jagged end forward.
“Stay back,” Tim hollered. He thrust the broken end of glass bottle forward. “Keep away or I’ll use this, I swear I will.”
Brad and his friends kept their distance, but the confident looks on their faces didn’t waver.
“What are you gonna do?” Brad’s friend asked. “Give a speech on recycling?”
Tim ignored the comment. “I didn’t throw that rock.”
“Screw you, Flemwad,” Brad roared. “You drop that thing, or I swear I’ll shove it up your ass.”
“No!”
“Drop it.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“I’ll count to three, you little shit.”
“I didn’t throw the rock!”
“One.”
“Honest, I didn’t.”
“Two.”
Fresh tears bunched at the corners of Tim’s eyes, then spilled down his cheeks. He could smell the reek of alcohol on their breath.
Brad and his friend edged closer, testing Tim’s threat.
He backed up a step, a move that only brought a wider smile to Brad’s face.
A white flash appeared at the edge of Tim’s vision, a faint undulation of light that pulsated from within the forest. It flew at him like a lightning bolt, vanishing again before he had a chance to see what it was.
The fight exploded like an avalanche blasting out of a mountain tree line. Everything happened at once. In contrast, time seemed to slow while Tim’s mind recorded and processed every action, and the oncoming assaults advanced in slow motion.
Brad surged forward, hands out—one reaching for the bottle, the other going for Tim’s throat. The second kid hefted the stick he’d been carrying and readied it like a baseball bat.
Unable to bring himself to use the broken glass, Tim closed his eyes and tensed in preparation for the first blow. In the same frozen second the sleeves of his jacket slipped down over his hands and constricted around his fists. The jacket’s cuff crushed down on the hand holding the bottleneck, forcing the blood out of his knuckles. Before he could react, the remaining jacket material replicated the sleeve’s action around his waist and torso, trapping him in its grasp.
Brad’s reaching hand came within inches of Tim’s wrist when the ensnaring clothing exploded with a life of its own. An irresistible force caused Tim’s arm to swing at the bully, propelling his captured limb with too much power to counteract. The pointed end of the makeshift weapon came between them and—
Shlick!
—something warm and wet spattered across his face.
Brad sucked in a sharp breath and heaved away from him, toppling into the woods, vanishing in shadow.
Oh, God, Tim thought.
Even as Brad went down, the second kid lunged forward, swinging the gnarled chunk of wood.
The jacket shifted again, this time thrusting Tim’s empty left hand at Brad’s friend in a counterattack. The strike hit the kid in his throat, hammering Tim’s restrained fist into his opponent’s Adam’s apple. The stick dropped without ever making contact, and the teen clasped both hands to his brutalized neck.
The jacket sleeve loosened its grip on Tim’s wrist and slid farther off his arm, twisting him around to snake over the other boy’s shoulders.
With the zipper still open, Tim seized the opportunity to shake himself free of the possessed jacket. He stumbled backward, anxious to get away, but his eyes remained locked on the animated coat while it grappled with the other teenager, engulfing him.
“What the hell!” Brad’s friend shrieked, thrashing his arms. But the nylon material wrapped itself around his face, smothering his cries.
Shivering with fright, hardly able to believe his eyes, Tim stood and watched the choking juvenile fall to his knees. Every so often the kid managed a short burst of strength and struck harder at the coat, coughing Tim’s name through the material.
He thinks I’m doing it.
“Help,” Tim screamed. “Someone help! Anyone!”
He glanced around, searching for the third boy from Brad’s group, the one who’d been hit by the rock, but apparently both Brad and his friend had already fled.
He was alone.
Alone with the nightmare jacket and a dying boy who’d wanted to smash his skull open thirty seconds ago, his pleas for help lost in the trees and the wind.
Shaking, with his sanity teetering on a wire over a chasm of madness, Tim realized that his right hand remained clenched around the bottle. He raised the blood-streaked glass to his face as if he’d just found it lying in the dirt, but the awful wet substance glinting on its surface reminded him he’d had it all the time.
The sight of Brad’s blood splattered over the back of his hand conjured the urge to throw the weapon away and run. But what about the jacket? What if it came for him next? And the boy? He couldn’t just leave the kid to die.
But by the time he marshaled the courage to act, the teenager had slumped to the ground, unmoving. The encompassing jacket began to uncoil.
Tim raced down the path and found one of the teenagers’ abandoned bikes. Hefting it up, he looked back and caught a glimpse of the garment. Now free of the boy, it pushed up from the ground with hollow arms and shuffle-turned in his direction.
Tim stared in disbelief.
It scrambled after him.
Tossing the bottle aside, he lunged onto the mountain bike and for home without a second glance behind him, too afraid that he’d see those hollow arms reaching for his neck.
Three hundred yards later he came to the first fork that led home.
The bike’s tires thrummed on the dirt as he made the turn, and he sunk down, ducking low tree branches.
He knew he must’ve outrun it by now, knew that he should slow his pace to a safer speed, but his heart had become a wild engine within his chest, and he continued on at full strength, relying on his knowledge of the trails to get him home intact.
The surrounding trees rushed past in a blur. Ahead, the forest shifted from side to side with the night’s increasing wind.
A train whistle howled in the distance.
The noise came over Tim’s shoulder from somewhere in the east, sounding like a banshee scream from The Beyond. He flinched, causing the bike’s trajectory to wobble. For a tense second he felt himself hurtling toward a future of broken bones and stitches before regaining control.
The whistle came again, longer this time, closer, and he guessed the engineer was giving advance warning before crossing Pioneer Trail.
Which means it’s headed toward town.
Tim swallowed the thought with a helping of dread. It wouldn’t be long before the train rumbled down the section of tracks he planned to use to get home, and that meant he’d be stuck waiting for it to pass.
Alone.
In the dark.
With a haunted jacket running loose in the forest.
He raced onward, bringing the bike up to full speed again by the third wail of the horn.
Without slowing, he made a sharp turn to the right, plunging onto a narrow side path just wide enough for the bicycle’s tires. He soared along the shortcut for thirty feet. Overhanging branches whipped his arms and legs, until he finally remerged onto Tomahawk Trail, an unpaved back road.
Across Tomahawk, a new set of bike trails branched in several directions, and he raced down the course that led to the railroad. He crested a small hill and sped onward, entering an uninterrupted sixty-foot dirt lane that joined up with the tracks.
The bicycle’s frame vibrated with the train’s approach. He slammed on the hand brakes halfway down the straightaway, fishtailing to a halt atop crunching gravel. At the far end of the trail, a strengthening light illuminated the darkness until Tim could see the train tracks in its glow.
The train’s lead engine rolled into sight, moving eastward at a languid ten or fifteen miles-per-hour. Tim slumped onto the bike’s handlebars, gasping and out of breath. He could double back, return to the bike trails and take the long route home, but just the thought of turning around made him sag further with exhaustion.
He looked behind him and found the trail mercifully vacant.
Okay… Five minute break…
Tim leaned forward, catching his wind, when a strange sound caught his ear. It came from something nearby, close enough to be heard over the clamor of the train: the sound of sticks snapping in the darkness to his left. He bolted upright, tensing.
Ahead, out of a pulsating cluster of tall plant limbs, an enormous deer clambered onto the road. It was a ten-point buck, massive, with antlers that reached above its head like gigantic open hands. It meandered across the lane twenty feet in front of him.
Tim exhaled and tried to relax.
Get a grip on yourself. It’s only a deer. The train probably just scared the poor sucker.
The animal’s hooves tromped the dirt—Clup-Clup—but it didn’t run away. Instead, its dark shape turned and started in his direction.
“Shoo,” he told it. “Shoo!”
Clup-Clup… Clup-Clup…
The animal showed no sign of relenting. It quickened its advance. Afraid it might charge him, Tim backed the bike away one step at a time, ready to turn and flee if the beast got too close. He glanced around, searching for something to scare the animal away with. He looked down and he saw a small pouch affixed to the bike’s frame that contained a plastic water bottle and, in a side pocket, a mini-Maglight like the one Brad had used earlier. Freeing the flashlight, he directed it at the deer and twisted it on.
The animal didn’t freeze in the light like he’d hoped.
He did, however.
The deer’s mud-splashed hide hung on its bones like a moth-eaten sweater, pockmarked by dozens of dark holes where its decaying skin had peeled off. It had no eyes, just two dirty sockets, and the flesh of its snout had rotted away to reveal twin rows of teeth. Maggots rained from its underbelly with each shuddering step.
“Did you think you could outrun me, Timmy?”
Tim staggered, clapping his hands to his head.
With no further warning the deer exploded into a run, shedding parts of its decomposing flesh in the process.
Tim screamed. He yanked up on the handlebars, spun the bike around on its rear wheel, and hit the pedals the moment he faced the other way. The rear tire kicked up dirt. The decrepit deer lunged, lowering its withered head. Jagged antlers reached for his flesh like Death’s bony fingers.
Tim careened to the right and dodged off the path. The diving points missed him by mere inches. The creature brushed past him and crashed into a sapling on the road’s edge, trampling it to the ground.
Not looking back, he rode down the steep embankment, plunging into a nature-made sluice eroded from years of runoff rainwater. The bike bounced and slid over the mixed terrain of hard rock and soft sand, but the momentum of his initial run drove him through it with minimal interference. He headed down hill, picking up speed.
In his wake came the crash and snap of the deer fighting its way through the entangling brush.
Pushing the bike faster, he guided it down the trench, jerking and jolting over the rugged basin floor. Half-blind, he expected to strike a large rock and flip over at any moment.
Instead, he made it to the bottom of the hill where the ditch leveled out beside Tomahawk Trail. He turned hard right onto a footpath he knew paralleled the railroad, separated from the tracks by sixty or seventy feet of forest.
He shifted the bike to its lowest gear and raced down the trail. Rubber tires hummed on the packed dirt, wind whooshed over his head, and the panting wheeze of his own breath made him feel like a locomotive himself, a grisly combination of flesh and machine.
The ugly abstraction triggered a frightening realization; if he didn’t get to town before the train did, it would block his route home again.
From behind came the clatter of trampled foliage, and the quick repetition of hooves stomping the ground.
Tim wailed, pushing himself to the limit.
His legs burned, his heart beat in his chest with the pace of a machinegun, and sweat spilled down his face.
The train whistle cried into the night, shrieking closer than ever. Tim knew exactly what it meant; the first engine had reached town. In seconds, it would temporarily divide County Road 19, cutting him off.
Cranking harder, he exploded from the woods. The canopy of shifting trees gave way to night sky, and Tim made a right onto the same road the train rolled toward farther up. To his right the forest blurred past out of the corner of his eye. At his left, an army of corn stalks flanked the road.
Keep going… a hundred more feet… Lights to the right… Train’s entering town.
The railroad signals clanged just ahead, their red warning lights flashed. Tim thanked God the designers hadn’t selected the type of signals that automatically lowered crossbars over the road.
The deer smashed out of a cluster of bushes at his right, having apparently tried to gain ground on him by darting crosswise through the woods. It leapt in front of him, but he swung around it, passing close enough to smell the creature’s putrid flesh.
The train flashed into partial-sight ahead, glimpsed between the buildings. It powered onward, rumbling closer and closer.
Tim flew forward, his eyes sighted on the warm beacons of light coming from street lamps on the far side of the tracks. He knew that Fritz & Joyce’s was closed at this hour, but the Choo-Choo bar would still be open. There would be people there who could help him. It wasn’t far now. He could smell the food.
The train’s horn screamed to his right, and it thundered into full view like a gigantic bullet. In another inexplicable moment of slowed time, Tim saw the conductor’s face peering out the engine cab, eyes fixed on him while he soared into the light. The man’s lips moved in wordless spasms behind the glass. The horn howled again.
Exhausted, deaf, scared shitless in the headlamp of the oncoming freight train now crossing the road, Tim raced over the rails, moving so fast that he doubted the bicycle’s tires were even in contact with the ground when the monstrous machine hit him.