The lever action bucked against his shoulder, almost instantly the creature that had begun to stand was flung violently off the other side of the roof. He wasn’t sure if he killed it, but the spray of blood coating its partner indicated he’d done significant damage. That one snapped its head in his direction, with petals flapping rapidly in agitation, then turned its attention towards the woman and child who screamed in shock at the sound of his rifle echoing into the valley below.
As he was chambering his next round a wave of nausea momentarily overwhelmed him as his newly acquired sixth sense flared in his brain, threatening to black out his vision by way of a sudden and instant migraine. He grunted in pained frustration, then adrenaline fueled terror that every predator in the area would soon be coming for him gave just enough edge to stay in the fight and gain some clarity. Too late for the woman in the drive below.
“MAAAAAAAAAAAAA! NO! MOOOOOM!” The kid below screamed so loud he probably damaged his vocal cords.
Andy focused on the roof where the second creature was rising before his newfound ability nearly overwhelmed him to find it gone. He chastised himself for the wasted time with a curse, he swung his rifle around to aim down into the driveway where he’d last seen the woman and her son. Bile that he had just managed to push down attempted to bully its way back out of his mouth.
The creature from the roof had managed to pounce on the woman and was in the process of attempting to choke her down headfirst. She was convulsing violently, blood spraying out of the monster’s butthole shaped mouth. Her son was frozen between screaming at the creature to release his quickly dying mother and climbing into the now open front door of the SUV.
Just he was lining up the sights on the creatures’ neck, the woman stopped shaking, her body hanging limp from its mouth. Andy pulled the trigger and smiled in satisfaction as the creature was slammed into the cement driveway. Green blood sprayed into the air as it kicked about on the ground. Its petals flapped rapidly, and Andy watched in morbid fascination as they slapped across the dead woman’s shoulders. He assumed he hit an artery because the spray slowed to a trickle, at the same time the creature stopped struggling to stand, though it never released the woman’s head.
The boy, initially, looked around in confusion, then stared numbly at his dead mother, too afraid to go to her, yet too terrified to do anything productive. Andy considered yelling for the kid to get in the SUV, but his sixth sense was tugging for his attention. As it seemed to be a more singular warning, he allowed it to surge forward into his consciousness, in doing so his eyes were guided further up the road where another trio of the monsters were approaching to investigate.
Andy estimated the range to be just over two hundred meters. He struggled with deciding to attempt the shot, or leaving the kids fate to chance by taking the time to retrieve his AR which was setup for this kind of work. The advantage he had with the bigger caliber lever-action was that it definitely put the mastiff sized monsters on their asses. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out if the AR would get the same effect.
The kid stood at the door of the SUV, still trying to decide where to go while looking around for whomever was taking shots at the butt-faced monsters. “C’mon kid, get in the car at least.” Andy muttered while topping off the magazine of his weapon. As he watched the kid seemed to just collapse in front of the SUV and start bawling his eyes out.
“Fuck.” With a final curse, Andy lined up the first creature in his sights, let out a steady breath, adjusted his aim for the distance and pulled the trigger. Rather than sending it down the monsters’ throat like he’d intended, the round removed its topmost flapping petal in a spray of green blood and gore. It screeched in pain, flinching back behind the other two, which chose to dive away from their injured companion. It howled in the middle of the street, a visceral thing that drove terror into the core of his being, like a gladiatorial challenge in the ancient roman arenas.
For a moment he felt the urge to rise to that challenge and bellow a hateful retort in response. Then his military training kicked in and he simply responded in the way his drill sergeants had taught him, their words echoing from the recess of near forgotten memory, “You shoot, private! You shoot until he’s fucking dead! Then you shoot him again! Just to be fucking sure! And you know what you do next, private!? YOU FIND HIS FRIENDS AND YOU FUCKING SHOOT THEM TOO!”
He chambered the next round on autopilot, muscle memory doing the tedious work while he focused on sighting in his follow-up shot. The creature made it easier by continuing to scream in his direction. Again, he slowly released his breath, squeezing the trigger at the end. He barely noticed the recoil against his shoulder, his mind so focused on the work before him.
His second round took the creature in its wide-open mouth. Green blood splashed from its foul opening, before it closed in reflex. Unlike the monsters he’d killed before that had tumbled violently in the direction of impact, this one just stumbled sideways, then collapsed in the street.
“Now for your friends.” He lifted his head slightly to get a wide-angle view of the street and spotted the other two creatures casting their sick heads about in agitation, clearly confused at how their friend had died so suddenly and violently.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
He stroked the trigger again, catching the one on his right center mass, just above its left front leg. Since it was standing in profile it was flung off its feet to tumble in the yard next to it. The third creature flinched at the sound of his rifle, then seeing what happened to its other companion chose to dart between the houses to Andy’s left where he could no longer see it.
“Damn it, I’ll get you later.”
Lifting his head to scan the neighborhood he was disappointed to find that the other monsters had abandoned their perches. He had no idea where they were, though, through his sixth sense he could tell they were still out there. Unfortunately for him and whomever remained, they seemed to have marked the sub-division as their territory. They all seemed to have joined the hunt. He got lost for a moment feeling through the connections his brain was making through the use of his newfound awareness. He had a rough idea of where all of the things that might see him as a meal were located in relation to where he was now, and how invested they were in their current activities.
“HEY! ANYONE THERE!?!?” The kid below finally snapped out of his shock to call out to whomever had taken down the monsters. From his position, Andy was virtually unseen to the naked eye, even in the low light cast from the multiple moons above.
“GET IN THE DAMN TRUCK!” He yelled back before crawling to his feet and moving to the back of his truck. “I’M COMING DOWN! JUST WAIT!”
The kid looked like he wanted to argue, instead he simply stooped back over the body of his mother, and gently began the process of dislodging her head from the monster’s mouth. Andy watched the kid, slightly irritated, then opened up the weapon case for his AR, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he dug into the duffel to retrieve a pair of sixty round magazines he’d gotten on discount, and another pair of standard thirty round magazines. Before he closed up the truck, he also pulled out his ‘race’ belt which had pouches for all his various weapon magazines and strapped it around his waist. It wasn’t actually the best for this kind of work and he figured at some point he needed to reconfigure it.
He took a thirty-round magazine, slapped it into the mag well, chambered a round, then replaced that magazine with a sixty rounder. He made a quick scan of the neighborhood around the kid, then returned the Marlin to the gun rack, laid the AR in the passenger seat, then hopped in and started up the truck. His senses told him the creatures were on the prowl, but they were being extremely cautious about approaching the edge of the neighborhood, so he carefully guided the truck down the hill.
As soon as he came over the edge, the kid stopped trying to free his mom and watched as Andy pulled up in front of his driveway. When he looked at the boy, he had to refrain from visibly recoiling, he looked like he’d stepped out of a horror show where the director favored tossing more blood on his actors than could ever possibly be contained in a human body. His dead mother still lodged in the mouth of one of the monsters reinforced the absurdity of the scene.
The boy stood before him awkwardly, grief streaked his face, wet red rimmed blue eyes shedding tears that rinsed away the combined filth of his mother’s and the creature’s blood. It did nothing for the amount of gore the boys’ clothes had absorbed while he struggled to free his mother from the creatures’ circular tooth filled maw. He suspected that if they really wanted to waste time on that operation she would have to be cut out. And Andy had no intention of getting that close to the dead nightmare creature if he could avoid it.
The boy sniffed loudly, then motioned towards his mother, “I can’t get her out.”
He stared at the boy from the driver’s seat of his truck for a long moment before responding, “You won’t be able to right now, there’s more coming. I’ve scared them, or at least made them think twice about approaching, but they’re on the hunt now.”
“There’s more?” Panic caused his barely pubescent voice to crack in fear.
“Further in. You got the keys to that SUV?”
“They’re in my mom’s pocket I think.”
“Can you drive?”
The boy nodded, followed by a brief sniffle.
“Then get the keys, get in the SUV, and let’s see if we can get somewhere safe. I’m going to get out now, check the area behind your house. Make sure the first one is dead. Keep an eye out, there’s also one that got away.”
The boy nodded numbly in response. Andy stepped out and hung his AR in front of him on its sling. He reached forward, turned on the combination light and laser designator. He’d reasoned the bastard butthole-faced monsters didn’t see in the visual spectrum, so he might as well make sure he could see clearly. Just as he stepped around his truck, AR in hand, the second creature he killed began to glow faintly in the mixing moons-light. Just as he noticed, the light swirled to lunge at him. He looked around for a way to escape it, unfortunately he had nowhere to go and no time to get there if he could have.
The light slammed into his chest, billowing around him just as the first had, then raced to find any available opening it could use to invade his body. Fire raced through his body seizing his muscles mid step. He barely regained control of his body just before he stumbled forward face first in the cement drive, catching himself in time to prevent an embarrassing loss of teeth. With a final grunt of pain, the energy once again settled into that place in his brain right behind his sinuses. He felt stuffy for a moment before the sensation passed.
“Wha… You ok!?” The kid stammered from where he himself had fallen on his rearend in his own attempt to evade the strange energy.
“Ugh, yeah. That happened after I killed one in the jungle.”
“What did it do?” Curiosity briefly replacing his grief.
“Not sure, I can sense them though…” As he spoke his mind wandered into that space where they alien energy rested, his conscious mind introspectively visualizing the connections that were being made. He realized he could now tell the exact number of the creatures that were hunting him, which was currently far too many. There was other information in his sixth sense that he didn’t fully understand. A rainbow-colored kaleidoscope of lines reaching out in all directions, the most intense being that of his current group of hunters.
“You’re saying you gained a superpower?” The kid stared at him as he lost himself in his mental analysis, then his mind hitched on the word “superpower”.
“Heh, yeah. I guess. Sorta’. I dunno’.” He looked at the kid realizing he’d never gotten his name, “I’m Andy. What’s your name, kid?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m NatHuRgK!”