Kevin Anderson regained consciousness and found himself on the brush-covered floor of the wooded area behind his high school. Rain and sleet pounded him. Intense pain radiated from his fractured kneecap.
Cold, wet and wounded, he rolled to one side to ease the pressure on his broken bone. As he turned, he felt his face throb. Instinctively, he raised his hand to his cheek. Beneath his fingertips, he felt swollen, tender flesh. He squeezed his eyes shut in agony.
Kevin opened his eyes to a sight that had gone unnoticed earlier. In his blurred line of vision he saw his friends, Chris Mace and John DeNardi, struggling to their feet in the thicket. Both had been bruised and beaten. But he no longer cared about them. Gabriel was nowhere in sight; his friends failed him.
Despite pain searing through his body, Kevin seethed. Word of his fight with Gabriel would spread quickly. Respect for him would be lost, impossible to regain. Something more than his body began to hurt: his pride.
He realized he would not be superior to his peers anymore; it was a realization more painful than he could articulate.
A noise interrupted Kevin’s self-pity. It directed his attention from his friends, as well. His eyes were drawn to a dense cluster of bushes that moved noisily.
From inside the bushes came a rustling louder than the lashing elements. Rain and sleet pelted his face as it cascaded and whipped about from overhead. With his vision obscured by the elements, Kevin squinted at the brush as it parted.
Kevin stared in shock and disbelief at what emerged from the bushes. It appeared to be a man, but it wasn’t. It was larger and more heavily muscled than any man he had ever seen. Kevin gaped at what loomed in the distance.
The being’s brawny body was impressive, intimidating. But the genuine horror of its manifestation was its gruesome face. It was not human.
Like a nightmarish apparition arising from a cryptic tomb, the immense creature stepped out from the brush.
Through precipitation that poured and pounded, feline yellow eyes glared at Kevin hatefully, murderously.
Instinct urged him to flee, but his injured knee prevented him from doing so.
Instead, Kevin squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He was certain the figure before him was a hallucination, a result of a severe concussion. He shook his head from side to side, tried to clear the image from his mind.
Yet when he stopped shaking his head and opened his eyes again, the monster remained. And it had busied itself.
Kevin looked on in shock as the creature grabbed Chris Mace, writhing, off the ground by his neck and hoisted him high in the air to meet his unnatural honey-hued gaze.
Chris squirmed and flailed to free himself from the clutches of the veritable boogeyman. He cried out in terror, pleaded for his life. But his pleas were pointless, it was impervious to appeal.
Kevin watched as the leviathan glowered at Chris. He heard a loud cracking sound as it squeezed his friend’s neck.
Chris stopped moving, his body hung limp.
The yellow-eyed behemoth threw his friend’s corpse to the forest floor and shuddered. He seemed to rejoice in killing him.
An intense piercing noise suddenly echoed through the woods. It clawed at Kevin eardrums. He moved his hands to cover his ears before realizing the noise was coming from him; it was the sound of his own panic-stricken screams.
The goliath remained, unperturbed by his shrill cries. He seemed intensely focused on John DeNardi. John sat motionless on the ground, paralyzed by shock, catatonic from fear. Kevin watched as the beast lifted John by the front of his T-shirt, raising him with ease.
The spell of unresponsiveness was broken and John suddenly comprehended his fate. Sobbing uncontrollably, he tried to maneuver his body out of his T-shirt, but could not. The giant had him throttled.
Then, in one sinuous motion, the fiend slammed John’s flailing body against the trunk of a mature tree. He stopped moving. The blow killed him. The monster released his body, allowing it to fall to the saturated copse.
He turned toward Kevin and advanced, quickly closing the distance between them.
Kevin no longer worried about Melissa Martin or Gabriel James. His reputation at Harbingers High School was suddenly irrelevant. A gush of fluid warmed his lap.
Wounded and saturated in his urine, Kevin Anderson looked up pleadingly into the face of pure evil and saw not the vaguest capacity for mercy. He saw hatred.
The monster lifted his leg and suspended his foot over Kevin’s head.
With tears in his eyes, Kevin Anderson drew his last breath as he stared up at his final vision, the sight of an enormous booted foot as it came crashing down on his skull.