After-holiday greetings all! Had a few hick-up over the vacation (my laptop got hit with a bunch of Blue Screens of Death) so I spent most of the time trying to fix that. Anyways, here's the latest chapter with a reveal at Fitz true nature! (I wonder who can guess what he is?)
If you notice any typos/errors, let me know so I can quash those pesky things.
This chapter has been proofread by BlissForgotten. Many Thanks!
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Of Monsters and men
Chapter Seven
The Mustang shot forward like a bullet from a gun, and the sudden acceleration threw me back into my seat. One hand clutching his seatbelt strap, Gary made a quick Sign of the Cross and muttered a prayer beneath his ragged breath.
“Tsk,” the ratman sneered, its reflective gaze growing brighter and brighter as the car’s headlights bore down upon it. Setting its feet, the monster spread its spindly arms wide and the swarm around it swelled with hundreds—thousands—of rats. The writhing mass of flesh and fur blanketed the garage before me.
But I had thirty-five hundred pounds of moving steel and a boldness bordering on insanity. My straight-shot trajectory didn’t shift even a single inch, and seeing that, the ratman’s haughty expression flickered.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit! It’s not moving!” Gary wailed, his hand pressing against the glove box to brace himself as we barreled toward the ratman.
Thirty feet…
Fifteen...
One…
The ratman’s defiant, pock-scarred visage dominated my vision. But at the last moment, it leapt high into the air, its knees pulled up to its sunken chest. The ratman’s curled up body smashed into the center of the Mustang’s windshield.
Crunch!
Cracks spider-webbed across the now bloodied, half caved-in glass, and the ratman gracelessly tumbled up and over. Its wickedly keen nails scraped across the roof with a piercing shriek as it tried to stubbornly hang on.
But then we crashed into the chittering horde.
And the rats…
The rats were everywhere.
Their bodies turned into gory paste beneath the spinning tires, and more than a few carcasses pelted the windshield as the Mustang relentlessly plowed through them. In my white-knuckled grip, the steering wheel fought against me—twisting and turning—for every jarring inch I gained, as if the car had a mind of its own. And one with a mean fucking temper, too.
Bang!
I jumped. The ratman pounded against the roof, and three grime-stained nails, curved into deadly points, punctured the steel and vinyl right above me. Shit, that’d given me a good scare!
“Turn, turn, turn!” Gary insistently jabbed his finger forward then, pointing. Closing in fast was a row of cars lined up against the wall at the end of our ‘L’ shaped aisle, one of which the ratman had originally been perched upon.
“Hold on tight, Gary! This here is a little trick I picked up a couple years ago, back when I was cruising with some friends in Hong Kong!”
I shifted the Mustang into second gear. My foot still pressed hard on the gas, I twisted the steering wheel into the sharp turn and yanked the handbrake up. The car began to slide into a controlled drift around the tight corner.
Hell yeah! Even being a couple of years out—
“Oh fuck!” I’d misjudged the turn’s sharpness, and as the Mustang’s ass-end swung around, with the gore-slick tires skidding across the paved concrete, it smashed into the rear bumper of a parked convertible.
My seatbelt bit hard into my chest at the dead stop, and a grimace twisted my lips at the painful tugging on my tender wounds. The ratman fared far worse though, being flung from the roof with a raspy yowl, its long nails—still embedded in the roof—ripped out from their roots.
It tumbled into the open-roof convertible, a tangled mess of skeletal limbs and filthy rags, and vanished into the back seat.
“That,” Gary sucked down a sharp breath, “That trick sucked.”
“It worked out a lot better in my head,” I groggily admitted.
Claws scraped upon metal, then, and a renewed terror filled Gary’s eyes as the Mustang rocked—it actually rocked—from the vermin onslaught now engulfing us.
In the brief seconds since we’d been stopped dead in our tracks, rats skittered up the car’s entire frame. They scrambled over tires, over steel, over their own brethren. Dozens of the maddened rodents managed to climb onto the Mustang’s hood, to press themselves against the windshield, searching.
Searching for a way in.
One rat scrambled up the windshield itself, and it let out a chittering cry when it discovered a tiny hole, a little bigger than a half-dollar, in the cracked windshield. Gary let out a strangled shout as the rat began worming its way through a small hole, its body contorting—collapsing—to fit.
In my side-view mirror, I saw an emaciated hand bang onto the convertible’s trunk, shaking the car. Three bloody nubs dragged across the car’s smooth surface before it found a grip, and then the ratman hauled itself up, its uneven breath coming out in hissing wheezes.
Ours gazes locked in the mirror—me smirking, and its left eye twitching with an undisguised loathing. I gave it a wink and slammed down on the gas.
Its wheels screeching as rubber burned, the Mustang jumped forward like a prized race horse out of the gate and shot down the new aisle. “Stop them!” the ratman croaked, its crooked finger stabbed accusingly in our direction, ordering the tide of rats after us.
Still in the side-view mirror, an ever-shrinking figure, I saw as the ratman leapt onto roof of the car beside it. And then it bounded over to the next one. Dropping to all-fours, the ratman vaulted from one roof to the next, trailing after me and alongside its horde.
It was gaining on me, too.
Thankfully, though, there was a light at the end of this dark, rat-infested tunnel—or aisle, in this case. At the end of my current lane was a ramp leading into the night, its automatic security gate stuck half open, as if someone—or something—had forcefully raised it up to get inside.
The weak, flickering glow of a street lamp, almost smothered by the blizzard, poured through the exit and pressed into the garage’s gloom. My foot weighed heavy on the gas as we got closer.
“It got inside!” Gary screamed, then, as a rat squirmed through the hole in the windshield and fell onto the dashboard. It sprang at Gary, who swatted it away with a terrified shriek—
—and knocked it onto my lap.
“Dammit, Gary, not on me! Why would you hit it onto me!?” I roared, more concerned as to where the vermin was rather than the rat itself.
In my outburst, the Mustang had unintentionally served to the left, side-swiping the cars lining the aisle. My side-view mirror was torn off in a shower of sparks, and I lost sight of the ratman behind us. Quickly, I jerked the wheel straight and swerved back into the aisle’s center.
The rats still scrambling on the windshield slid helplessly across the glass at the wrenching maneuver, and their flailing bodies tumbled off into the darkness.
In my lap, though, a lone rat—a real big bastard, too—writhed across my thighs, trying to get on its feet. And when I say big, I mean big. Like, able to eat a fucking cat big.
One of my hands lunged down at the rat, like a coiled viper striking at its prey, and my fingers wrapped around the rat’s throat. Hauling the thrashing animal into the air, I pounded it into the center of the steering wheel. “Stop!”
Honk!
The car horn sharply blared, and the rat’s resistance noticeably lessened. But in a flash it shook off its stupor and angrily squeaked, its struggling renewed as it sought to claw and nip itself free of my iron grip. I smashed its head into the steering wheel again. “Squirming!”
Honk!
The rat’s furious chittering was cut short and its body went slack. I viciously flung the rat away from me, right into the leg space of Gary’s side, to his absolute horror. His feet stomped down to finish off the rat, his legs pumping up and down as if he were pedaling in the Tour de-fucking-France.
A fleshy crunch announced Gary’s ultimate success.
The Mustang violently rocked then, and her suspension ominously squealed. My eyes flashed to the rear-view mirror. Bathed in the eerie blood-red of the Mustang’s taillights was a figure desperately hanging onto the car’s trunk.
The ratman.
One of its skeletal arms draped over the trunk, and its nails were deeply planted into the top of the trunk, with the rest of its body dragging behind. Glancing at the speedometer, I saw the needle pushing past forty-five already. Holy shit!
Talk about fast!
“Oh Christ, he looks pissed!” Gary said as he saw the ratman. His eyes began to dart around the car’s interior and his head whipped around, as if searching for something to defend himself with.
Hissing out a wheeze of effort through clenched teeth, the ratman lifted itself up and slapped its other hand onto the trunk, its bloody nubs for fingertips searching for—
I jerked the wheel to shake off our unwelcome passenger. An aggravated growl rumbled from the ratman’s throat as its probing hand was torn free, and its body sagged down once more. But, its other hand still held on.
Fuck.
“A gun!” Gary suddenly cried out in happy surprise. “I found a gun!”
In front of the man was an open glove compartment, its contents—receipts, car manuals, napkins—spilling out. There was also a small box of ammo for a .38 inside. And in Gary’s hands was the weapon itself.
The snub-nose revolver fit snug inside a leather holster, one that’d be perfect to hide inside a waistband. His sweaty palm wrapped around the pearl enamel grip and Gary tugged it free, tossing the holster aside.
“How do I know if it’s loaded?” he hurriedly asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, sparing the gun a quick glance before returning my attention the exit ramp closing in fast, only a few seconds away. “Try to…Argh, fuck, I don’t know. Try shooting it!”
Hands trembling, Gary turned and aimed at the ratman still struggling to climb up. “Let’s see if you like eating hot lead!” he roared at the monster, if only to bolster his courage.
He squeezed the trigger and flinched at the anticlimactic click. Then he pulled it five more times in rapid succession. Nothing.
The ratman dug the fingers of his free hand into the crevice between the rear windshield and the trunk, heaving itself up. All while shooting Gary a knowing glare. “Oh God, he’s super pissed now,” Gary quailed.
“Stop staring and load the gun!”
“Right!” Gary hastily fumbled at the gun in his hands, often anxiously sneaking glances over his shoulder at the ratman. “How do I open this stupid thing? There’s got to be—”
The revolver’s cylinder snapped out. Mumbling a word of thanks to no one in particular, Gary snatched up the ammo box and opened it. The neat and tightly packed rows of bullets were within.
“We’re about to hit the ramp!” I said in warning.
In my periphery, I saw the speedometer’s needle drifting past sixty, and I had no intention of stopping. Not with the ratman and its rat swarm riding my ass.
“This is going to be rough,” I promised.
Up ahead was the exit ramp, and its already half-open security gate began to rise as it detected the electronic pass—reserved for residents—stickied to the inside of the Mustang’s windshield. It rose up by a foot. Then two.
Unfortunately, it stalled just there.
Wonderful. It must’ve been damaged when it’d been forcefully pried open. Either that, or it was due to the weird tech interference. Reasons aside though, it’d be a close shave for the Mustang to make it beneath the gate. Close, but not impossible.
Grabbing a small handful of bullets, Gary tossed the rest of the ammo box onto the dashboard. His nerves fraying, he tried to load a round into the cylinder, missing a couple of times before finally slotting it.
The next bullet proved just as difficult. So just after he loaded it, Gary snapped the cylinder back into place and twisted in his seat. He lifted the gun and aimed it right at the ratman.
“Round two!” Gary screamed. “Now, let’s see if you like eating—”
We hit the ramp.
Hard.
The open ammo box on the dash bounced into the air, and bullets burst free like a cheap party popper to spill everywhere. The car shot under the security gate, full speed a-fucking-head, and a shower of sparks rained down on us as the raised gate scraped across the Mustang’s roof.
Light flashed then, and a split second later an ear-splitting boom followed as Gary’s gun went off right beside my ear, its sound magnified in the enclosed car. Spider-webs of cracks appeared in the rear window’s laminated glass, but the bullet didn’t penetrate it.
The ratman seemed to be more than willing to finish the job, though. Perched upon the trunk, one hand in the crevice between the window and trunk to maintain its hold and balance, the monster pulled back a fist and slammed it into the glass.
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Crunch!
Its thin arm punched through the glass like paper.
“Oh shit, oh shit!” Gary’s muted voice filtered through the ringing in my ear. His despairing gaze swept over the backseat and the floor behind his seat. “I dropped it, man. The sudden jump just knocked it out of my hand, and now I can’t find it!”
“Sort of busy myself, Gary!” The Mustang climbed up the ramp at a breakneck speed, going higher and higher. And then we burst onto the streets, and into the midst of a raging snowstorm.
Snow bombarded the Mustang’s windshield. Its chill seeped in through the cracks, and even the heaters on full blast couldn’t suppress its frigid touch. But worst of all, I couldn’t see anything through the wintry scene. But, I wasn’t about to let something as little as blindness stop me.
Turning sharply, so that we’d drive along the street rather than across it, the Mustang’s rear end swung around once more, its tires sliding across the icy street.
Not to be shaken off again, the ratman’s gnarled fingers curled around the edge of its newly made hole. Jagged glass bit into what little flesh hung from the monster’s bony fingers as it held on tightly, its blood staining the glass a dark crimson.
The Mustang came to a jarring stop then, in what I presumed to be the middle of the street, as I couldn’t see jack or shit. And with the abrupt halt came a crackling rip as the ratman tore away a sizable chunk of laminated glass. One large enough to let it squeeze inside.
The ratman lodged itself, headfirst, through the hole without a moment’s hesitation. Bloodshot eyes darted over the car’s interior, and its wickedly keen claws shredded the leather upholstery as it tried to push itself further inside, squirming.
I undid my seatbelt and left the Mustang’s engine rumbling. “Gary, take the wheel and start driving! That rat horde will be on us soon if we don’t switch fast.”
“What!? Why do we need to switch?”
“Unless you want to handle Mickey-I’ll eat your fucking heart out-Mouse back there?”
“I’ve got the wheel!” Gary resolutely nodded, without even a shred of shame on his face. Unclicking his seatbelt, he maneuvered his bulk with surprising grace as I clambered over the middle divide and into the Mustang’s narrow backseat.
Halfway inside, the ratman’s eyes lit up as it spotted me. “You!”
“Me!” My fist clocked the ratman across its face. Blood, spit, and a couple of teeth flew out of the monster’s maw as its head snapped to the side.
Just as I was ready to follow up with a second punch, the Mustang bucked forward, its engine roaring like the king of some urban jungle. I face-planted into the tattered upholstery and sprawled out on the backseat, where Gary’s backpack pressed hard into my lower back, just beneath my shield’s bottom edge.
Its long tongue lolling from a broken jaw, the ratman shook away its daze and shrugged the rest of its body inside, tumbling in an awkward mess of limbs next to me as it bounced off the back of the driver’s seat.
Righting itself, saliva drooled from the ratman’s gaping mouth, and the light of intelligence now seemed lost behind a feverish gaze. The ratman’s panting became ragged, and around its maw a bloody froth bubbled, as if it’d gone rabid.
Not good.
It’s frenzying!
With blade work out of the question in such confined quarters, I tugged at a backpack strap and whipped out the bag itself from behind me. A couple of cans and chip bags went flying as the zipper broke apart.
Jumping on the ratman’s back—straddling it—I threw the backpack’s strap over its head. Then I yanked the nylon strap tight around the monster’s slender throat like a garrote.
Its air cut off, the monster’s hands frantically pawed at the strap as a wheezing gurgle slipped through its collapsing windpipe. I tightened the make-shift noose. “It’s nighty-night time, asshole,” I hissed into an infected, flea-ridden ear.
A choking wheeze was its only response. But then the ratman’s scrawny body shifted under me. Its skinny legs coiled beneath it into a crouch, and then the monster pushed itself up with an explosive strength.
My back smashed into the car’s roof, and my breath vanished with an ‘oof’! Junk food and sodas spilled out from Gary’s bag in a shower at the brutal movement. But the ratman wasn’t done yet.
It lurched to the left and rammed its backside—along with little ol’ me—into the side of the car, crushing me. Pain stabbed at my chest, maybe from a fractured rib or two on top of the strained wounds I’d gotten from the troll.
Yet I continued to hang on stubbornly. My forearms crisscrossed as I tugged at the strap’s ends even harder, to squeeze out the last breaths of life from this mutant rodent. “Just fuckin’ die already!”
Its beady eyes bulged even further out from its skull under the mounting strain. Gathering its waning strength, though, the ratman propelled itself to the other right of the car, and my muscles tensed for the inevitable impact.
The ratman twisted with a violent pivot, and my back crashed into car’s side, with the base of my skull bashing against metal. Stars danced in my vision, and my grip on the strap weakened as I slumped against the car’s side.
Straightaway, the monster tore away the strap, its claws slicing through the nylon with ease now that it wasn’t hidden within its matted fur, digging into its bruised and purpling flesh. It gulped down a deep breath.
“Holy shit!” Gary cried out in surprise then, his horn blaring. The Mustang swerved to the side to avoid a head-on collision. The bright glare of headlights briefly flooded the car’s interior before another vehicle recklessly shot past us, to be quickly swallowed in the snowstorm.
Caught off-balance, the ratman was sent reeling towards the driver’s side, and in my periphery, I saw an object—the missing gun—skitter out from beneath the passenger-side seat beside me.
A grunt of displeasure managed its way through the ratman’s broken jaw and shattered teeth as it pushed itself up, its unnerving stare settling on me once more.
Loathing, hunger, insanity. A swathe of emotions twisted its monstrous countenance as the ratman hurled itself at me. Its good hand drew back with its fingers splayed and its nails curled inward, as if it meant to plunge it into my chest and rip out my still-beating heart.
My perception of time slowed, then, in that thrilling moment of perfect, razor-sharp clarity found only in-between heartbeats, when one toed the line dividing life and death. I shot my hand out, and my fingers wrapped around the revolver’s cold grip.
There was one shot left. One bullet. I leveled the gun at the ratman nearly atop me, its hand outstretched and its mouth wide open to snap me up.
“I win.”
Then I squeezed the trigger.
Boom!
A flash brightened the ratman’s horrified expression before it ate a hot .38 round. The monster’s head snapped back, and a geyser of brain-matter and blood painted the Mustang’s roof. The ratman’s body instantly collapsed atop me, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut.
“Holy shit! Holy shit, you actually kill him!” Gary kept glancing over his shoulder to gawk at the dead creature, his face flushed as if he’d just fought the ratman too. “Damn, that was—”
His voice choked off as his full attention returned to the street, and I heard a bang of a gun and some muffled shrieks from nearby. The car swerved hard to the side, but then a tyrannical force smashed into the front of the Mustang.
The car spun in a vicious roll. My stomach jumped into my throat as a weightlessness took hold of me, but only for a single moment. Then my world came crashing down. Along with me.
My body bounced around inside the car like a pinball, and I saw the chaos of it all unfold, as if they came in single-moment snap shots.
I saw bullets and sodas tossed into the air. I saw the strained veins pounding on Gary’s reddened face as he was roughly jerked against the seatbelt holding him down. I saw the sparks as the Mustang’s roof skidded across the street.
Then I saw darkness.
An incessant, emergency pinging eventually roused my mind, with more than a few gunshots punctuating the night from close by. My nose twitched at the heavy smell of gasoline saturating the air, and I slowly cracked open my eyes.
The Mustang was flipped. I was laid out on the roof, atop the ratman’s corpse. Gary hung upside-down from his seat, the seatbelt keeping him aloft as his arms dangling beside his head. Blood trickled from his twitching fingertips.
“Gary,” I called out in a rattling whisper.
No response.
Fuck.
I took one glance at the passenger-side door, and saw its frame had warped under the weight of the Mustang’s undercarriage. So with my teeth gritted, I dragged my aching body through the hole that’d been ripped open by the ratman, each breath a struggle.
Glass bit into my forearms, going right through my woolen coat, and more than a few crystalline shards dug into my blood-slick palms. A vibrant scarlet stained the white snow as I belly-crawled out from under the wreckage, and a curtain of blood oozed from the hot, throbbing gash across my temple.
Outside was a scene pulled from a zombie flick. A few bodies lay strewn across the distant sidewalks, half hidden underneath a veil of white powder, and the looming shadows of dark apartment buildings lined the street.
Farther down from me a couple of cars in the street had been set ablaze. Flickering flames, battered and fed by the chilled wind, climbed into the night sky as they merrily danced and cast the scene in firelight.
Pop!
A gunshot echoed over from the street behind me. A small clump of people materialized from the storm’s blinding snow, their breaths coming out in white plumes as they sprinted down the sidewalk in a panicked dash. No one even noticed me.
I doubted anyone would’ve cared even if they did.
My skull throbbing even more now, I sluggishly staggered around the overturned Mustang to get Gary. But as I reached out to pull at the door’s handle, I froze. Instead, after a moment’s pause, my quickly numbing fingers wiped the slush off the car’s door.
There, reflected on the Mustang’s waxed steel was my face, but with a horrific twist. Around the gash that cut across my right temple were long cracks, as if my face was a damaged porcelain mask. Just then, a bloodied fragment of that mask broke off, and on this falling piece was a fearfully wide eye.
My eye.
It freely tumbled in the air, and strangest of all, I could still look through it, to gaze upon myself. To catch a small glimpse at the inhumanly beautiful face that’d been hidden beneath that fragment, with its blazing iris like liquid gold and its skin flawlessly bronzed.
The tumbling eye fragment blinked at me, and then it struck the asphalt with the glassy ring of shattering crystal, to burst into a bluish miasma.
Suddenly, as if a chain once constricting me had finally loosened, a surge of intoxicating strength flooded throughout my body, and my head began pounding as if something wanted out.
“Argh!” I reeled backwards and fell to my knees as pain exploded in my skull. My eyes squeezed shut, and both of my palms pressed against my throbbing head.
Whoosh!
The car fires behind me roared with a sudden vigor, and their wavering flames turned into an ethereal shade of blue. Pushing through my fingers, then, as my jaw clenched so hard my gums began to bleed under the pressure, a stag’s antler burst out from the pulsing gash on my temple, its smooth texture not the cool touch of bone, but that of wood.
Pop! Pop!
The gunshots were closer now. Much closer. However, my world had been reduced to one thing: pain. Pain as the antler continued to sprout and began to curl back over my head, and as the fissures split further across my face. I barely registered the deep roar that thundered out in response to the gunfire, or the rending of metal shrieking over the blizzard’s winds.
Finally, the skull-splitting agony finally abated, and the antler’s growth tapered off at a length rivaling that of a man’s forearm. My hands limply fell into the slush at my sides, and I sagged into a relieved slouch, too mentally taxed to even begin to understand what was going on with me.
A tremor shook the ground then.
Emerging from the wintry darkness was the faint outline of a towering shadow. Each ponderous step it took made the earth tremble, and in its fist was a bent lamp post, with some concrete still clinging to its uprooted base. I lazily tilted my head back to dully stare up at the shadowy behemoth, standing just beyond the firelight.
“Let me guess,” I spat out a glob of blood, “You must be the asswipe that fucked up my ride.”