The Nightmare People

5.

When the screaming began, Sandy and Smith struggled harder, hauling at the thing’s shoulders with all their strength, but they couldn’t move it. Sandy’s hands were bleeding again, which made it hard to grip, but he tried not to think about it.

Khalil wasn’t helping them, and Sandy started to shout a demand to him, but then he saw him running up with the axe, and he was swinging it at the nightmare creature’s back.

The screaming had been muffled to begin with, and within seconds it stopped. Sandy saw that Elias’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets until only the whites showed.

The axe struck the creature, and bit into it, but the thing didn’t seem to even notice, and Sandy realized that the flesh of its shoulders seemed to be softening.

“What the fuck?” he said.

His hands pulled free suddenly, ripping away pieces of Mary’s skin; the thing’s shoulder had become too soft to grip properly. He started to reach down again, then stopped as Smith’s hands, too, came away with nothing but skin in them.

He looked at its lower back, where Khalil had hit it with the axe, and the thing seemed almost insubstantial. Mary’s shorts were no longer filled out in a mockery of human sexuality; they were flattening even as he watched.

What’s more, the thing seemed to be crawling forward, as if somehow, despite its size, it was crawling into Elias’s mouth. Blood bubbled up around its jaws, spilling out of Elias’s mouth and running thickly down his cheeks.

Khalil hadn’t noticed what was happening; he was raising the axe again.

“Don’t,” Sandy said, “Look!”

Khalil, startled, looked.

“If you hit again, you might go right through her and hit Elias,” Sandy said. Smith nodded agreement.

“What’s happening?” Maggie called from the roadside.

Elias had stopped screaming and struggling. He had stopped several seconds ago, Sandy realized. He reached down for the boy’s wrist, his hand passing within inches of the nightmare creature. It ignored him.

He could find no pulse.

“He’s dead,” Sandy announced.

Smith shot him a glance. “You’re sure?”

Sandy nodded.

“What’s it doing?” Smith asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Sandy demanded.

“Sorry,” Smith said, turning to look at the thing, still wrapped around Elias’s corpse, its head now definitely being squeezed into the dead boy’s mouth. Blood was running steadily down the corpse’s cheek. As he watched, something white was forced up and out, and tumbled down the stream of blood to the ground – a tooth, or perhaps a piece of bone. Smith could hear a chewing noise now, like metal scraping on bone. He swallowed bile.

“What should we do?” he asked.

“I think we should go,” Khalil said.

“He’s right,” Sandy said, stepping back. “There’s nothing we can do for Elias now, or for Mary, and I think we’ve just made it pretty goddamn clear that we don’t know how the hell to kill these things, so I think we’d better just get the fuck out of here while it’s still doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t want to be next on its hit parade.”

Smith nodded. The three men slowly backed away from the creature and its prize; they gathered up the axe and the sledge and departed, leaving the stake still embedded in the earth, the fragments of the broken crucifix where the thing had flung them, the spattered blood undisturbed in the growing darkness.

Blood was beginning to pool under the two figures, locked in their fatal embrace; more teeth and bits of bone were coming up now, and the nightmare thing had its entire head forced into its victim’s mouth.

“I’m sorry, Elias,” Smith called. He turned away.

By the time they reached the road, they were all running.