“Soon,” the entity growled.
It paced the church parking lot, pretending to keep watch for police. Around it, the encircling trees bowed their branches in compliance with the growing wind, and their undulating shapes emulated its excited state of anticipation.
Not far away came the musical sound of shovel blades scraping against earth. It waited, listening to the harmonic excavation. Fuller and Dupree grunted and swore and gasped while they dug, heaving off load after load of soil, bringing Kane closer and closer to the surface.
The wind blew.
Thunder rumbled.
The teens cursed.
Shovels cut into the dirt.
“Soon.”
But suddenly the shovel sounds stopped. Wind-tossed leaves fluttered, filling the void with their rustle. Then, out of the waist-deep weeds enclosing Kane’s grave, the two teens emerged into the car’s headlights, slouched and empty-handed.
“Why’d you stop?” it demanded from the cemetery fence.
“Union break,” one of them said.
“Yeah,” the other added. “You try digging that bastard up while getting eaten alive. There must be a million mosquitoes in these weeds.”
Its highjacked hands tightened on the iron fence, gripping the cold bars hard enough to split flesh and break bones. It clenched its vessel’s jaws, casting off pearl-white shards of fractured teeth that sparkled in the lamplight. No pain. Only rage.
Fuller climbed over the fence. “Man, that’s a lot of work.”
It stepped to the rear of the car, letting shadow fill the sweatshirt’s hood. It wanted to rip the defiant creatures’ heads off, impale them on the fence posts, but it forced the urge away, focusing on the task of regaining Kane.
“The grave is only a week old,” it said, concentrating to keep Brad’s voice sounding human. “The ground can’t be that hard.”
“Easy for you to say, you aren’t doing any of the work,” Fuller replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here and go get something to drink. We can come back later.”
“But there’s a storm coming,” it growled. “We should finish up before it rains.”
Dupree cursed under his breath and batted away a mosquito. Smears of dark soil covered his skin and half a dozen red insect bites peppered his sweaty face. “Hey, man, you want to finish this up so bad, you go do it yourself. I’ve had a pretty shitty night so far, and I’m not going to spend the rest of it being ordered around by you.”
The two teenagers got into the car and slammed the doors, both ignoring its repeated demands to get back to work.
No other choice remained but to force them to obey.
It opened the trunk. Extracted the shotgun.
They would either retrieve Kane, or they would join him.
Returning to the driver’s side door, it tapped the steel barrel on the window.
“Get out,” it ordered.
The two teens looked up and the expressions on their faces fluctuated, morphing from fear, to skepticism, then back to fear again. In spite of the evident danger, they still saw their friend, not the being within. To alleviate all doubt of the threat, the entity fired a blast through the rear window.
The glass exploded, showering into the night.
“I said, get out of the car,” it roared.
Both teens scrambled out the passenger door, shouting and swearing.
Clear of the car, Fuller backed against the cemetery fence, babbling incoherently.
Dupree ran.
He dashed into the night, heading for the far corner of the church, probably under the impression that “Brad” would lose him in the dark. The entity leveled the shotgun over the top of the car and fired.
Dupree spun away from the church’s staircase railing when it exploded into a cloud of splinters. He threw himself to the ground.
“Oh, Jesus,” Fuller exclaimed.
The entity expelled a malicious howl of laughter over the wail of Fuller’s screams. Dupree crawled through the dirt with feverish speed, clambering toward an open gate in the cemetery fence. He lunged through it and rose into a hunched run, trying to stay concealed by the headstones. It fired again. The third shot ripped into the church wall beyond him, striking so close the buckshot must have rolled across his back.
It fired again and again.
The forth roar of the Remington obliterated a marble angel effigy seated atop a tombstone. Dupree dodged the collapsing statue, but the fifth blast caught him in the back, opening a honeycomb of red holes in his shirt. He went down hard, smashing his face on the granite arm of a cross.
It bellowed with pleasure, its concentration fixed on the bloody memorial where Dupree dropped out of sight. It plunged one hand into the sweatshirt pocket and withdrew additional shells, loading them single-handedly.
The boy’s body had disappeared behind walls of thick weeds and tall grass, but the flicker of energy departing from his dead body glowed bright and visible. It glimmered on the church wall and nearby tombstones. The entity paused in reloading the shotgun, captivated by the growing light only it could see. Concentrating, it attempted to draw the force toward it, to absorb it, to feed.
A large rock smashed down on Brad’s left shoulder.
It hammered the shotgun out of the entity’s grasp, simultaneously knocking Brad’s body to the dirt.
Fuller scooped up the shotgun and backed toward the idling car. “D-don’t frigg’n move, man. I’ll blow you away, I swear I will.”
The teen’s eyes gleamed with tears. His body trembled.
Contorting Brad’s facial muscles into a grin, displaying broken teeth, it pushed itself to a stand.
“Don’t move, man,” Fuller shrieked. He reached back with one hand and opened the Lexus’s door. “I’ll shoot if you make me.”
Aiming the gun across his body, he slipped into the driver’s seat.
And the car went dead.
The kid stared in disbelief. He groped for the ignition keys.
There were none.
With its ability to manipulate electricity, it killed the car’s engine but left the lights on, so Fuller could witness everything that happened next.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The boy flinched. “W-what happened to your voice?”
It stood up, peeling back the sweatshirt hood. “We have unfinished work to do.”
“No. Stay the fuck away!” He jump out of the car and leveled the shotgun.
Reaching up with its commandeered hands, the entity hooked Brad’s fingers into his own eye sockets, bursting both orbs and ejecting twin spurts of liquid. Fuller paled at the sight. His mouth dropped open. Before he had a chance to react, the entity seized fistfuls of the skin just below Brad’s ravage sockets and yanked down, ripping his face from his skull.
Fuller mewed with the tone of an injured puppy, and a stream of piss spilled out the right cuff of his pants.
The entity concentrated its energy, and the air thrummed around them. Churning within the human disguise, its true form burned under the flesh, converting the life-energy it had consumed over the last few days into raw power. Smoke streamed from Brad’s eye sockets, cooked by the heat given off in the process. Silvery-white light burned through the meat where the boy’s eyes had once been.
Fuller fired the shotgun.
Buckshot tore through Brad’s midsection, knocking it backward. The pellets exploded from his back in a ghoulish rain of red water. It staggered, but remained standing. Laughter bubbled up from its insides at the sight of Fuller’s increasingly panicked expression, and it howled with unbridled amusement as a second shot blew open the flesh over Brad’s breast bone.
A third shot boomed, striking it in the head. Teeth and bones shattered, pushed throughout Brad’s cranium by the intruding pellets. For a second, the broken skull sagged beneath the remaining skin, threatening to fall apart, but the entity immediately willed the bone back into shape.
Fuller shot again, aerating Brad’s liver, kidneys, and spleen.
The teen tried to chamber and fire another round, but the entity had only replenished four shells before being attacked.
Fuller had closed in to make his last two shots count, and now he stood just several feet away. He hefted the unloaded shotgun like a medieval club, backing against the car.
It smiled.
High aloft, lightning crackled across the heavens in erratic bursts, adding horrific detail to its butchered shell of a body.
“You—you’re not human,” the boy mumbled.
“No.”
Without averting its gaze, it seized two handfuls of the tattered sweatshirt and tore it in half, revealing the dozens of dark holes that marked the bloodless skin of Brad’s chest and abdomen. While the teen gaped in horror, it utilized its total control over Brad’s corpse and made his torso explode.
Skin and bone erupted with an annihilative force, ejecting a shower of gore into the night. Multiple tentacles of intestines launched from Brad’s abdomen and lashed forward, wrapping around the shotgun’s barrel before yanking it from Fuller’s grasp and heaving it away.
The boy teetered on his feet, looking ready to faint.
The organs retracted, sucked back into Brad’s chest cavity, and the splintered ribcage slammed shut like a gargantuan mouth.
Spattered with blood and screaming, Fuller turned and sprinted toward the driveway, running so fast he threw off a shoe.
The entity watched him go, savoring the moment.
Walking on Brad’s dead legs, it reacquired the shotgun and loaded fresh rounds into the pump-action magazine, chambering the first shot. The Lexus’ engine once again revved to life. It seated Brad’s shredded corpse behind the wheel and swung the vehicle around.
It caught up to Fuller in no time, coating the back of his fleeing form in the car’s headlights. Rapidly losing ground, the boy tried again and again to find a route off the road, an egress into the woods where he could escape the oncoming vehicle.
He lunged to the right, and a fence of broken sticks sprang up in his path.
He dodged to the left and found himself in a whirlwind of gravel.
If only it could’ve used its telekinetic abilities to rip out one of his leg bones; that would’ve been a treat. But flesh couldn’t be directly harmed by its powers any more than the force around the cemetery could be breached without consequences.
The boy made another dash for the trees, and this time the ground split open like a gaping maw. The boy teetered at the brink, then rushed onward.
Though the entity’s magic wouldn’t work to injure his living tissue, his attempts to flee mimicked the futile thrashing of a fish already trapped in the jaws of a shark.