Shifting

Thirteen

It was the most savage storm I’d ever seen. Earlier, there had been no thunder, but now there was plenty of it crashing in the sky with more red flashes deep up in the clouds, lighting them up from the inside like a light bulb under a gauzy blanket. Here in Indiana we are a long way from open seas and hurricanes, but we do get a tornado now and then. I’d always heard about them, and we had the warning system, but I’d never seen an actual funnel cloud up close until today.

“What the heck is that?” demanded Vance, and I saw that the black clouds were passing over the area of the Lake where we had seen the lights in the water a few minutes before. A silver gushing cloud rolled out over the lake centered on this point. It rose higher as we watched and formed a swirling dark conical shape that aimed down into the lake. The mist and winds it kicked up at the bottom swallowed the trees along the lakeshore.

I gazed at the storm for a second, thinking hard. I realized that the storm had touched down just about where I had met the changeling and spoken with her the night before. Were the two events related? I had no idea. But I wondered if that pile of rocks I’d set out there would still be there to mark the spot after this storm. I doubted it.

“It’s a water cyclone,” I said, “we’ve got to run, and we might have to find a cellar to hide in.”

Holly was pulling desperately on my coat. I worried instantly that she had hurt herself. She had no shoes on and I’d been wondering all along when I was going to have to pick her up and carry her.

But it wasn’t her feet. She pointed behind us and screamed something but I couldn’t make out the words. I looked behind us and I yelled myself.

They were coming. The flying ones.

I’d developed a theory about them that differed from everyone else’s. Some people thought the flying ones were birds, because they ranged in size from about that of an adult crow to that of a goshawk. Others theorized they were leaves originally, because they were shaped like leaves and had the skin-texture of a leaf-if you can imagine a leaf that is fleshy, like a big slab of steak. Worst of all was the sucker-like mouth that could chew through the back of your coat and latch onto an artery to suckle. I myself figured they were too leaf-like to be birds, and too big and mobile to be leaves-I figured they were both. Somehow-I felt in my bones I was right the very first time I thought of it-I knew they were both bird and leaf, merged together in whatever unnatural fashion these changelings were made, like two colors of candle wax melted and molded together to form a new color in a new shape. Except that these new shapes were abominations, things like flying kites that wriggled through the air and which seemed to catch currents and glide like flying squirrels down upon their fleeing victims.

Behind and above us, moving in wild swirling patterns in the turbulent winds were perhaps a dozen of them. I could see glittering eyes like black marbles. Their open maws worked beneath those eyes, contracting and expanding in anticipation, seeking our flesh to latch onto.

We ran.

I took Holly’s hand with my left arm and drew my saber with my right. Normally, you could hear them coming when they swooped down on you from out of the sky, but today with the storm beating down on us we couldn’t hear a thing except for the roar of the cold silver sheets of rain pouring on the asphalt and the wind screaming in the trees. Still, I sensed their nearness and whirled and slashed just as two of them dived for us. One sheared apart to flip and slap on the wet pavement like a gasping bass in the bottom of a fishing boat. The second made it down and adhered itself to the back of Holly’s head. She shrieked, hitting that special, ear-splitting high-pitched note that only young girls can reach.

I lifted my saber but realized I couldn’t do anything without risking her life. I reached out and tried to rip the thing out of her hair. It felt like a wedge of muscle. The cold rubbery flesh was strong and I thought that a stingray must have felt like this. Vance had joined us then and he gripped the thing and tugged at it too. His lips curled back to bare his teeth in disgust, but he did it. Our efforts only made Holly scream louder. Blood trickled down her face as her scalp opened up.

Then there was a silvery flash as her hand raised up and punched at the thing. It was the screwdriver she had been carrying. She stabbed at it repeatedly. I saw one of the black spherical eyes pop. Then it let go and Vance and I stomped the unholy life out of it.

We both took up one of Holly’s arms and ran. We half-carried Holly the rest of the way into the parking lot. Jimmy Vanton and Carlene Mitts were there to greet us with shotguns. They boomed at the things that darted about like kites in the sky. We didn’t stop running until we slammed open the glass doors and stumbled, dripping with rainwater and blood, into the waiting room.

We had made it.

Doc Wilton gave Holly a dozen or so stitches in her scalp and there was a spot up there she would have to comb over and hide for the rest of her life, but she would live. When I came to see her, munching on the sandwiches and coffee Monika had given me so long ago, but which I had never had a chance to eat, she was still gripping her screwdriver resolutely. I nodded in appreciation, she was a survivor. I didn’t know whether to be glad for her or to mourn the rest of her childhood she had already missed out on.

“Thanks guys.” She gave us a smile.

Vance and I mustered up smiles of our own. For the next hour or so while the storm raged on outside, we were heroes. We felt relatively relaxed inside, confident nothing could breach our walls. Even if it did, there were too many of us, too well-armed and too battle-hardened to be taken. The center had been vandalized back in the seventies and the owners had taken pains to put in thick, wire-filled windows that were hard to crack much less to break through. We felt safe inside, the way that medieval armsmen must have felt in their stout stone castle walls. Let the storm do its worst, we thought.

After the strange storm blew past and the winds died down, a fog settled over the town it left behind. The fog was of a peculiar quality, and I was reminded of the silvery cloud of vapor I’d seen earlier today swallowing up the lakeshore. I had to wonder what might wander out of that fog. Soon, we could only see half-way across the parking lot. Half an hour later, even the nearest of the cars drifted in and out of sight behind patches of heavy white vapor.

Still, with the storm gone and Holly rescued, we felt safe inside our walls. We felt it, a rising confidence. We had turned the corner on this whole thing. We could understand it and we could beat it.

We could not have been more wrong.