The first bullet zipped past Tim’s head, displacing the air inches from his left eye.
Before the introductory round smacked into the barn, five successive shots boomed out of the dark, kicking up dirt and hissing past at a heart-stopping proximity.
Everyone scattered, racing for cover. Tim was already facing the barn, but the open terrain between him and the doors would’ve made him an easy target. Instead, he ran to the right, toward a bank of old hen houses.
He glanced behind just long enough to catch a view of the gunman emerging from the forest. To his surprise he saw a man. Given all he’d been through, he’d expected to see another walking gestalt of mismatched garbage, something like the grass-monster from the church cul-de-sac. Regardless of the assailant’s human likeness, he knew the creature had arrived, just in another form, and that realization made his quest to reach Mallory all the more urgent.
Suddenly something sharp cut into Tim’s legs. He flipped forward, sailing off his feet, and slammed hard to the dirt, rolling painfully. At the edge of his awareness the scrape of metal on metal reached his ears. It accented each tumble and twist, and he quickly realized that while he’d been looking over his shoulder at the gunman, he’d run headlong into a sagging barbwire fence.
Sharp spikes bit into his shins and calves, ankles and knees. He looked down to discover he’d become entangled in the fall.
Footsteps crunched through the dry weeds. He craned his head to look behind him.
Thirty feet away, the killer strode past without even a glance.
After the sixth shot, the gunfire ceased, enabling the fleeing teens to reach safety before another assault. Troy, Chris, and Elsa all made it back into the barn unscathed, but upon their arrival, Mallory discovered that Becky, Adam, Lisa and Tim had become separated from them in the frantic rush to get away.
“Oh, God, where are the others?” Mallory cried.
“And my sister?” Derrick added.
They’d come to the edge of the loft, across from the trapdoor, miserably aware they’d become instant targets if they descended the ladder with the barn’s main doors standing open.
Chris’s breath came and went in quick bursts. “I think I saw them run for the cars.”
Elsa asked, “Who the hell is that? Why was he shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to,” Troy huffed. “I say we find a back way out of this place and haul ass.”
“We can’t go without our friends,” Mallory snapped.
“Wanna bet!”
Chris peered around the door’s edge. A volley of lightning flashes flickered across the sky. “Oh, shit, he’s still coming,” he whispered. “We better do something fast.”
“Like what?” asked Elsa.
“The others are on their own,” Troy said.
“Shut the hell up,” Derrick hissed. “I’ve got an idea. I think we can take this fucker.” Pushing away from Mallory, he crossed the loft and grabbed hold of the armchair.
“What are you talking about?” she asked after him.
Without answering, he dragged the piece of furniture back to the loft’s ledge. “Okay, listen up,” he said, speaking quickly to the others. “You three grab some boards from the firewood pile, then go hide in the last two stables and wait for him—”
“Us?” Troy gasped.
Derrick made a fist at him. “Just listen, you idiot. There’s some furniture up here. We’ll wait for him to come through the doors then drop this chair on him. Once he’s down, you guys come out and beat the shit out of him.”
“Yeah, and what if you miss?” Chris challenged.
“We won’t miss,” Derrick snarled. “But even if we do, we’ll have distracted the asshole long enough for you three to take him by surprise.”
Mallory grimaced. “We don’t want to kill the guy.”
“Speak for yourself,” Troy replied.
“There’s not much time,” Derrick growled. “Now hide!”
Clad in an exoskeleton of flesh and bone, the entity marched forward, striding through the weeds toward where Mallory had taken refuge. The time for games was over. Too many people had become aware of its presence.
After departing from its encounter with Frank and the policewoman, it had returned to where it abandoned Judge Anderson’s van and took possession of his corpse, arming itself with the man’s revolver.
But now it tossed the empty firearm aside, along with a handful of extra ammunition. Conventional weapons were never its preferred instrument of destruction, and its skill in using them had already proved insufficient to meet its current needs.
Time was no longer on its side, either.
Instead, it decided to rely on its own assortment of powers in capturing Mallory and killing whoever tried to stop it.
The entity crossed the barn’s threshold and moved to where a crackling fire burned unattended just inside the main room.
Mallory.
It sensed her presence above it, detecting her glorious life force that churned like a near-bottomless reservoir of nurturing energy. Such a powerful reserve stood out like a nuclear fire in a starless void when compared to the others around her. It knew that three of the children hid near the back of the building, believing themselves to be cleverly concealed, much like Mallory and her friend above assumed their location was unknown.
Manipulating Anderson’s mouth into a wide smile, the entity directed its attention upward, to where the reward for its efforts waited.
Squinting like a frightened moviegoer in the grip of a horror film, Mallory watched the armchair drop into the gunman’s face, impacting at the precise moment he turned around and looked up.
It hit him dead-on, right in the head.
Mallory flinched.
He’s dead, she thought. Oh, Jesus, we killed him.
It seemed absurd to be concerned for someone who’d just fired six bullets at her, but despite whatever hatred he harbored for her, she didn’t want to see someone get murdered. She wished they could’ve found something else to restrain him with, something less damaging, but Derrick had disagreed, having argued that the chair was the only piece of furniture besides the couch that could incapacitate the gunman long enough for them to escape. But what if he’d miscalculated? What would happen to her and the others if the man died?
But the chair didn’t kill the stranger.
It didn’t even knock him down!
He staggered a few steps to the side from the impact, then regained his balance and angled his eyes upward again, looking right at her. His pale skin adopted the orange light of the fire when he stepped closer to the flames, and his cloudy eyes looked like twin blisters on an enormous burn.
Then she saw the blood.
It didn’t glisten in the firelight, as if caused by the chair, but it coated his shirt, neck, and chin in a frightening quantity. The hair at the back of his head stuck up like a crown of red spikes.
Worst of all, he wore an ear-to-ear smile of perverse anticipation.
Mallory shivered, shaking her head, thinking, I take it back—Hurry up and throw something else at him.
The stranger continued to stare at her in that unnerving manner while he moved toward the loft’s ladder, not taking his eyes off her for a second.
“He’s still coming,” she said.
Like they’d planned, Troy and Chris dashed out of the shadows. They charged the man from behind, boards raised over their heads in preparation to strike. Troy reached him first, swinging his timber at the back of the man’s head with enough force to crack a skull.
Whack!
“Yeah,” Derrick bellowed, adding, “Take that, fucker!” when Chris landed a hit to the man’s midsection.
The combined damage inflicted by the boys’ attacks should’ve killed a normal person, or at least brought him down, but the stranger withstood their assaults without making a sound.
Mallory gaped. He didn’t even flinch.
Below, Troy readied another swing.
And the man’s head turned around to meet him.
With the stomach-wrenching sound of snapping bone and torn tendons, the stranger’s head swiveled one hundred-eighty degrees to face Troy.
Mallory shrieked with surprise—then cried out again when she saw the huge empty hole in the back of the man’s head.
The leaping flames of the fire illuminated the petrified look in Troy’s eyes when the stranger pivoted and lunged. The madman struck out with one hand as if grabbing a fistful of the boy’s shirt, but his clawed fingers stabbed into Troy’s chest—stabbed—plunging between the ribs all the way to the last knuckles.
Gasps and screams resounded off the barn’s walls, while a concussion of thunder hailed it from outside. On the floor below, Chris dropped his two-by-four and backed away, slumping to the ground. He clenched his teeth, caging a scream.
Gripping him the same way an eagle would hold its prey, the stranger lifted Troy off his feet and hefted him over his head. He threw the boy away with such force his body crashed through one of the partitions dividing the horse stalls, blasting the boards asunder.
Mallory’s knees weakened.
“Hell with this,” Derrick screeched, his voice cracking. He dashed from the loft’s edge and went straight for the rubbish-cobbled coffee table. Heaving away the blotched particleboard, he hoisted one of the four cinderblock-supports.
He rushed back to the loft’s open ledge and slung the concrete at the stranger.
Below, the man stood gazing in the direction where Troy’s body had flown, oblivious of their movements in the loft. He opened his arms in a peculiar gesture, looking ready to receive a hug—then crashed forward as Derrick’s shot hit him square in the back.
The man flew off his feet, knocked to the ground.
Derrick hollered a cheer of victory, but choked it off when the killer turned on his side and got up.
Mallory gasped. The impact of the cinderblock had ripped through the man’s clothing and gouged into his skin, having stripped away the meat to expose his spine. Bone gleamed in the wound. Yet he climbed to his feet once more. He stabilized himself and resumed his march toward the ladder.
“This ain’t real,” Derrick screamed.
“Just get more things to throw,” Mallory yelled.
Together, they hurried to the remaining furniture and grabbed hold of the couch, tugging it away from the wall.
“Malloryeee,” a hateful voice called from below.
Before she could recall where she’d heard that growling tone before, they pushed the reeking couch forward—the old frame of its hideaway bed scraping the loft’s floorboards like claws—until it plunged over the edge. It slammed down atop the stranger, hammering him to the floor, pushing him into the fire.
Mallory froze, breathless.
The man crumpled beneath the furniture’s weight, forced into the flames. Pinned under its bulk, he lay motionless while the fire closed in around him like the fingers of a giant hand.
Nothing moved this time.
Tears slipped from Mallory’s eyes, and she sagged to her knees. The couch became a hazy orange mass through her tears as the fire engulfed it. By the time she’d wiped her vision clear, the flames had spread to the nearby armchair. The rising air from the blaze soon became strong enough to dry the sweat on her forehead and flutter her bangs.
“Hey,” Chris called from below. “Are you all right up there?”
“Yeah, we’re okay,” Derrick called back.
“Troy’s not,” Mallory mumbled.
Derrick looked at her with the dazed expression of an amnesia patient. Then he gazed at the shattered section of the barn.
Chris rounded the far side of the fire. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Derrick nodded. He fished his car keys from his pocket and tossed them to Chris. “Go find my sister and bring my car up to the doors,” he said. “I’ll be down in a second.” After voicing those instructions, he softly added. “Man, that fire’s spreading pretty quick.”
Mallory leaned over the loft’s edge and saw that ranks of flames had radiated from the central bonfire, doubling its mass. Several fiery tendrils now stretched across the litter-cluttered floor, while others climbed the beam of the nearest stable divider.
“Which one’s the damn car key?” Chris called up to Derrick, shuffling through his key chain.
Mallory was still watching the gathering flames below, only half-hearing his words, when the garbage scattered across the barn’s main floor—rotten boards, paper scraps, aluminum cans, broken glass, plastic bottles, leaves, twigs, hay—suddenly rushed together all at once. Running like water, everything flowed toward a focal point just behind Chris while Derrick described which key belonged to the Mercedes.
Mallory gasped.
Derrick fell silent.
She shook her head in denial while the pile rose from the ground in the shape of a ten-foot-tall giant, its body a craggy mass of splintered lumber and trash. A face sculpted itself out of the collected rubble atop the heap—a vile, cadaver-like face—and two candle flame eyes sizzled to life within its sockets.
“Look out,” Mallory screamed, but her cry succeeded only in causing the teen to turn and face his demise.
The monster clamped a massive hand down over the boy’s head after he wheeled around. Mallory clenched her eyes shut before seeing it squeeze, but her ears caught the loud, unmistakable pop that declared Chris’s death.
She slapped a hand over her mouth, holding back a cry of revulsion and terror.
When she reopened her eyes, she caught a final glimpse of Chris’s body being flung aside. Derrick stared in horror, face pale. His frozen expression of fear resembled an ancient Greek soldier who’d locked eyes with Medusa.
The monster roared and lumbered toward them.
“This way,” Mallory urged. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll be trapped!”
She seized Derrick’s arm and they dodged an enormous hand of steel and dirt that reached up and clamped down on the decking.
“Look out!”
Splintering planks popped up in their wake, missing them by inches. A three-foot section of the ledge tore away. Mallory shivered at the realization that the loft had to be at least fifteen feet off the floor, which meant the creature had grown even larger.
“Mallory,” the voice rumbled. “There’s no escape.”
Derrick reached the hayloft’s trap door and stepped onto the ladder’s first rung when Mallory noticed movement through the cracks between the floorboards. She glimpsed the creature beneath them, but before she could issue a cry of warning, the whole loft began to disintegrate around them.
Huge fists punched through the boards with explosive force, obliterating tire-size sections of the floor. Chunks of demolished wood flew to the barn’s ceiling then rained down again in a shower of splinters and nails.
“Jesus Christ,” Derrick shouted.
Still clutching his arm, Mallory yanked him backward as the ladder ripped away in a dust cloud of destruction.
They made a fast retreat to the corner where the couch and chair had been. Mallory felt heat spreading across her entire right side. When she glanced in that direction, she discovered the flames from below now reached level with the loft, climbing higher each second.
“Oh, shit,” Derrick gasped. “What now? What do we do?”
“We’re going to have to jump.”
Derrick shook his head. “No way. We’re like twenty feet up, and that thing’s right below us.”
Mallory could hear the golem-monstrosity moving beneath them again. Derrick was right; the second they hit the ground they’d be finished.
Then it came to her. “The silo,” she shouted.
Derrick opened his mouth to reply, but something drew his attention to the center of the barn before he could speak. Mallory followed his gaze and saw a huge burning mass suddenly elevate into view.
Every muscle in her body tensed.
The creature had seized the burning couch in both hands and raised it above its head. Dark clouds of smoke spewed into the rafters while a shower of embers ignited the flammable material of the monster’s mismatched composite, setting its entire body ablaze.
“Look out,” Mallory screamed.
The creature heaved the flaming couch, and they vacated the area seconds before it crashed down where they’d stood. Sparks and burning hunks of fabric scattered in its trail. It slid into the corner and collided with the other items, dispersing flames to the other pieces of furniture and up the walls.
Mallory looked on in horror. The blaze fed, growing in size.
“We’re dead,” Derrick wailed. “This thing is going to waste us!”
“No we’re not,” Mallory yelled. “We can swing across on that.”
She pointed to where the rail-mounted rope and pulley crossed the center of the room.
“There’s another loft on the other side. If we can get across, we can climb down and escape out the silo chute.”
Derrick searched the surrounding area with wild glances, appearing hesitant at first. Then another blazing item—the armchair, perhaps—flew into the loft and smacked the ceiling before slamming to the floor.
Derrick darted away.
Black moths of ash fluttered through the air behind him as he ran to where the slide’s rope was wrapped around a wall hook. He untied it and rushed for the ledge without even looking back.
“Derrick!” Mallory screamed.
She sprinted after him, a vicious fear suddenly tearing at her resolve. She jumped from the loft’s edge a full second after Derrick went airborne and caught the rope just below his hands.
The two of them soared across the open area above the horse stalls, passing clear of the flames reaching from below. The runner wheels screeched along the old track overhead, but they kept moving.
The second loft materialized out of the smoke.
Behind them, Mallory heard the fiery demon giving chase.
Less than five minutes had passed since the gunman entered the barn, and every second of it had been agony.
Tim hissed when another corroded steel spike cut into his skin, skin now slick with blood from numerous lacerations. Groaning, he forced himself to breathe through the pain and keep working.
He had no other choice. He had to help Mallory.
Tim shifted another loop of the wire off his feet. It came away with a shred of bloody cloth. He had to be careful how far he pulled or how fast he moved; too much pressure on one side of the entangling wire caused more barbs to bite into his flesh on the other.
“Come on… Come one… Come on,” he growled through his teeth.
One by one, he slipped the rusty coils down, off his skin, over his shoes.
He had three tight loops to go when Mallory screamed.
Tim let go of the last two circles of barbed wire that still clung to his shins, letting them drop back into place. Instead, he turned his full attention to the concussive blasts of demolition now coming from the barn. It sounded like a wrecking ball tearing through the place.
He sat motionless, staring, listening. Insects settled on his sweat-glazed skin and landed in the rivulets of blood that trickled down his legs, into the fabric of his socks.
Whatever was happening in there had to be the work of something massive, something entirely unearthly this time, and the idea that he’d be able to do anything about it seemed comical, at best.
He also had the fire to consider now. Tim noticed it the last time he’d chanced a quick glance at the building, and the unmistakable shimmer of orange light appeared far brighter than before. The place was going up. Between that and the rage of demolition, Tim had the heart-wrenching feeling that Mallory was already—
He heard her.
During a lull in the roar of devastation she shouted, “The silo!” Then she and another person dashed across the open loft loading doors, each silhouetted by the firelight.
She was still alive.
And he knew how she planned to escape. He’d explored the barn dozens of times before. The loft. The chute. The silo. It had to be how she was getting out.
The silo’s exit hatch had a locking bar on the outside. It was old but sturdy, and if it was down, they’d be trapped.
Tim pushed the thought aside.
The locking bar wouldn’t be down. He’d make sure of it.
Tensing, he shoved off the last coils of barbed wire without heed to the pain.
Mallory let go of the rope and landed at the barn’s second hayloft, stumbling to a halt beside Derrick.
“We made it,” he cried.
Mallory turned on him and slapped him across the face. “You bastard!” she shouted. “What were you thinking?”
Smoke dominated this less-ventilated portion of the building and she gagged and coughed between words. But she was thankful for it. Had she missed the rope when Derrick tried to leave her, she’d be a burning heap right now.
The idea intensified her anger, and before he could say anything, she swung at him again. This time he parried the blow—
“Get the fuck away from me!” he yelled.
—and punched her in the face.
Mallory’s head rocked back, and for a moment everything went dark. She staggered away, clutching her mouth. Pain stung her lips, the flesh pulsing to her heartbeat. She looked to the hand she’d cover her mouth with and saw blood glistening on her fingertips.
Her gaze flicked to Derrick.
Rather than meet it, the boy glanced at the burning behemoth, prompting her to look. The monster blazed forward, completely engulfed in flames. It shook the building with each stride, punching through the stable walls and tearing away support posts that blocked its path.
Derrick pulled the hem of his shirt over his mouth and nose. “Go,” he ordered, pushing Mallory in the direction of a trap door leading downward.
Fresh tears filled Mallory’s eyes, but her fear urged her onward.
She scurried down the ladder—jumping the last six feet—and spotted Elsa huddled in the corner of the room.
“Elsy,” she cried. The girl had tucked herself into a ball, knees up, arms clasped around her legs, head buried in her chest. “Elsy, get up. We have to get out of here.”
The roar of the inferno vibrated in the air. Perspiration streamed off Mallory’s face, mixing with the hail of dust and debris that floated down from the building’s rotted timbers.
She heaved Elsa to her feet and dragged the girl across the floor. Derrick had already dove into the chute and clambered out of sight.
Elsa stumbled at first, then started moving on her own. Mallory lunged into the chute ahead of her.
The passage quaked in correspondence to a thunderous crash behind them. Mallory’s mind conjured an image of the creature flinging itself through the walls of the tack room, imploding the aged framework under its bulk in one last effort to seize her before she got out of reach.
Why me? Why does it want me?
But when she looked back, the beast had taken Elsa.
Mallory gaped, and a bullet of grief put a hole in her heart.
The chute had been cut in half. A burning heap of ravaged lumber now occupied the area where Elsa should’ve been.
Because of me, because I went first.
Wracked by sobs of anguish but unable to repress the animalistic urge to get away, Mallory hurried up the shaft, toward the silo. Hot air rose at her feet. She maneuvered her way through the opening and dropped to the floor.
“Oh, yeah,” Derrick breathed in the darkness. “No way that big-ass thing can get in here.”
“Help me find the way out,” she demanded.
Except for a weak orange glow pulsating through the chute, the silo was a pitch-black void. Mallory’s hands quested in the dark. She hunted for the exit hatch, unable to remember its exact position in correlation to the barn chute.
She alternated between searching the wall and wiping tears from her eyes. “We have to find the others and get the hell away from here. We may not have much time.”
Derrick’s labored breaths haunted the darkness like unseen ghosts. “What do you mean?” he wheezed.
She remembered how the stranger had seemed so unstoppable, able to resist their harsh attacks without the slightest sign of discomfort. And even when they had eliminated their opponent, the second beast had arrived, having taken shape from the medley of refuse scattered about the floor. Was it possible the two attackers were the same being? And if so, could it switch bodies again? She didn’t want to believe it, yet—
“Oh, my God,” she cried, realizing where she was.
“What?” Derrick pleaded.
Mallory trained her attention on the gloom above their heads. A lightning pulse lit the sky. Its blaze shone down through the silo’s broken cover and illuminated the suicide dummy overhead, dangling from its noose.
Mallory gasped.
Rather than hanging motionless, the dummy thrashed about, fighting its securing line like someone who’d survived the drop from the gallows only to die of strangulation.
“Oh, shit,” Derrick screeched, flattening to the wall. “What the hell is that?”
The lightning faded, and two globes of searing-hot light distended out of the darkness, radiating from the eye sockets of the dummy’s pallid mask.
Screaming a string of obscenities, Derrick turned and attempted to climb back inside the chute leading to the barn. He jumped up and grabbed onto the ledge with both hands, but the thin metal bent under his weight, and he dropped to the floor.
Looking down on them, the suicide dummy shifted and became more relaxed, as if sedated by their fear. With its free hand, it reached above its head and clutched the rope. Its fiery eyes made every action visible. The light gleamed off the old butcher knife Mallory had seen on her first visit and now the dummy’s fingers clamped down on the blade’s handle, changing the prop into a weapon. In one swipe it freed itself from the noose.
“Oh, shit,” Derrick continued to scream, “oh, shit!”
Machinegun bursts of lightning flickered overhead. Passing through the stroboscopic flare, the demonic dummy appeared to teleport toward them, its shape found, then lost, then found again in the blast.
Seconds before the beast cut itself free, Mallory heard the metallic shriek of rusty hinges. She scanned the room, looking for its source.
Ten feet across the silo, a fire-lit square hole opened in the darkness.
“Mallory,” Tim shouted. “Mallory, are you there?”
“Yes!”
The creature dropped in front of her, blocking the way, casting the cold shadow of a mountain.
Thunder clashed.
The monster lunged.
Tim yelled.
Mallory tried to dodge right, but Derrick’s strong hands seized her shirt and pulled her to the left. He caught her by the shoulders, fingernails digging into her skin. There came a sound similar to cutting through a watermelon rind. Then she collapsed against him, propelled backwards by an irresistible force. Agony clutched every nerve in her body. She looked left, to the strongest source of the pain.
The butcher knife’s handle jutted from her chest.
Her shirt turned red around it.
Stunned silent by disbelief and pain, she looked up from the wound, immediately finding Tim across the room, gazing back in shock. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. Then the dummy jerked the knife out of her in one quick action, the blade trailing thin streamers of her blood. Derrick released his grip at the same instant, letting her fall against the wall. Her legs buckled and she slid to the ground.
She glanced around in a daze—to Tim, to the thing, to Derrick edging away from her. Astonishingly, she didn’t feel any pain now, only a numbing ache that squeezed her upper body.
Maybe it’s not too bad? she wondered. Maybe the blade didn’t go too deep?
But when she raised her other hand to the wound, she reeled with alarm at the feeling of warm blood flowing between her fingers.
Gushing.