Nightcrawlers

9

Above, it was no better.

Confusion became chaos and it was every man for himself.

Troopers and deputies slammed into each other and handguns were discharged and voices were shouting, screaming. Flashlight beams were dancing around, aimed at the sky, the ground, the mist. Kenney tried to pull them together, but somebody slammed into him and pitched him into the ooze and he clawed his way back up, terrified of being pulled below like Kopecki.

Something fast and blurry white took a state patrol trooper and yanked him right off his feet into the mist. Kenney could not even honestly say what it was, other than some subjective impression in his mind of a tall white ape and a shock of equally white hair that hid its face.

“WATCH IT!” he heard Hyder cry out. “WATCH IT! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”

Kenney spun around with his 9mm and saw more anemic hands coming up out of the muck as the things from below pulled themselves up from the brown mud like corpse worms, white and maggoty.

A deputy stumbled into him, screaming in his face.

He saw why: his scalp had nearly been peeled free, his face a red, streaming mask like a child’s runny finger painting.

Hyder was right: they were everywhere.

Kenney saw a circle of white, blurred faces; leaping, vaulting forms. A deputy got dragged into the fog by a long-armed shadow. Two more got sucked down into the mud by pale, distorted, and raggedy things. Semihuman forms came up from the muck like nightcrawlers from their holes and disappeared just as fast.

Weapons were discharged out of pure panic and it was an absolute wonder nobody was hit.

One of the things vaulted in Kenney’s direction.

He saw red nails streak at his face, and he pumped three rounds into it until it fell back and away.

Another one clawed out of the darkness and a bony white hand—knitted with pulsing, flabby flesh—took Kenney by the arm. He shrieked and struck out at a grimacing, hideous face. He heard the butt of his 9mm Browning sink into that pulpy mess with such ease he thought there could be no bones beneath it. He pulled away and then grabbed it by its arm… and it yanked away, diving into the mud sea.

And was gone.

There was nothing to mark its passing but a sheet of white flesh in his hand, flesh that wriggled and squirmed like it was filled with insect larvae.

He tossed it aside and began to run, fighting his way through the muck.

A deputy nearly bowled him over and he soon saw why. Something was clinging to him, something which he at first took to be a wildcat, maybe a lynx or a bobcat or one huge tomcat. It clung to the deputy’s neck like a leech, claws firmly entrenched in his throat. Kenney reached out to yank it free, expecting to feel his hand grasp a pelt of dirty fur, but what it got instead was rutted, swollen flesh that came apart under his fingers like a wet newspaper. When he yanked his hand away, ribbons of it were tangled in his fingers.

He heard a snarling among the confusion.

He turned and there was… a thing standing there, only it was no thing but a child or something very much like one. It was small and rawboned. Long white hair was plastered to its face with mud and drainage. It reached out for him with hooked fingers, hissing at him with absolute wrath. Something in his head told him it was no child, at least not one of this world, but some horrible little hobgoblin that had come in the night to tear his bleeding heart out by the roots.

He squeezed the trigger more out of shock than anything else.

The round punched right through it and it made a weird, trilling sort of squealing sound and fell back into the mist

Drenched, sprayed with mud, bleeding and sore and quite beyond any terror they had known before, the survivors bunched together in a defensive circle, back to back, and made ready for what might come next.

And the night went on forever.