Chapter 1
Robert Hernandez struggled to fathom the bizarre appearance of the patient in the rear compartment of his ambulance. He had been a paramedic for more than five years and had been tested on more occasions than he cared to admit. He had witnessed his share of gruesome accidents caused by individuals who chose to mix drugs and alcohol with driving, dealt with uncooperative overdose victims who resisted his treatment in lieu of death, and even had a naked man attempt to hijack his vehicle. The instances he’d experienced, though shocking, had not disturbed him the way the man on the gurney did now.
He did not consider himself to be a jaded man. He did, however, view himself as seasoned to circumstances that would make most others faint. It was seldom that a patient in his rig unsettled him as intensely as the one currently on board did. Generally, calls involving injured children shook him, as did circumstances concerning the mistreatment of the elderly. Beyond children and senior citizens, little else affected him. He had been told by several of his medical school professors that his ability to compartmentalize his feelings was a gift, a gift that would make him a fine doctor in the near future. That is, if medical school and ambulance calls did not kill him first.
He was good at keeping his work and feelings separate, both in school and on the job. But still, he felt an aversion to his current patient, a distrust of him. He could not explain it, could not explain why he felt so uneasy. It was a mystery to him. After all, his patient was half dead. Yet, even in his condition, eyes closed and seemingly lifeless, his patient seemed sinister. His patient was enormous and dangerous looking. There was nothing new about that, though. Big, creepy patients had been in his rig before. This was different. There was more to it, something else; something instinctive.
Whatever it was, he needed to push his inexplicable feelings aside and do his job. He needed to transport his patient to the hospital.
“How’s he doing, Joe?” Robert asked his partner, fellow paramedic Joseph McCauley.
“I don’t know, man. His pulse is thready; I can barely feel it. He’s lost so much blood with these holes blasted in his shoulder and chest. I’ll be surprised if he makes it to the ER,” Joe stated as he depressed his middle and index finger along the point of the carotid artery on his patients neck.
Holes. The word struck a chord within Robert, primarily because the word “hole” did not adequately describe the bloodied chasms that littered his patient’s body. Notwithstanding the wounds, the patient still breathed and maintained a pulse much to their astonishment. He and Joe, both trained professionals, had had difficulty detecting the slight throb that signified life in their patient. The faint beat, along with weak breathing, denoted life. The patient not only breathed, but surprisingly managed to be an intimidating presence as well, though logically incapacitated beyond intimidation.
While Robert contemplated the frightening nature of the man in the back of his ambulance, he had been depressing the accelerator with his right foot unconsciously. The road conditions were treacherous and he drove just slightly faster than the speed limit indicated, carefully navigating the rain-slickened streets of Harbingers Falls. He realized his marginally hastened speed and the unnecessary risk it posed and immediately compensated by slowing down as he approached an intersection.
“We gotta move things along, man,” Joe called from the rear. “This guy’s circling the drain.”
Circling the drain was Joe’s shorthand for dying, fast.
As Robert moved toward the intersection, the traffic light facing him turned red. Slowing to a near halt, he immediately checked the flow of traffic in all directions. Every vehicle was stopped in response to the wailing of his ambulance siren and its accompanying flashing lights. For good measure, he sounded his horn, which issued less of a blare and more of an electronic buzz, to warn any vehicles who dared entertain the notion of proceeding along on their route and getting in his way.
Once he safely passed the intersection, Robert called back to his partner.
“Hey Joe, how’s he doing?” he asked.
“Not good, man. Not good at all,” Joe replied solemnly as his hands worked frantically over their colossal patient.
Found at the Martin residence and assumed an alleged attacker, their patient had sustained multiple gunshot wounds. Robert and Joe were not informed of the giant’s name. According to Melissa Martin, a very frightened teenage girl, she and her friends had met in the woods behind Harbingers High School and had been ambushed and chased by the startling leviathan. Their patient had apparently intruded in the Martin home shortly thereafter and had threatened her and her father. He was ultimately met by Melissa’s shotgun-wielding father.
The nameless man’s behavior and the details surrounding it were for the police to investigate and determine. Keeping the anonymous hulk alive until they made it to the hospital was Robert’s job.
He was curious to see and hear the reactions to his patient’s appearance from the emergency room staff. After all, the man on the gurney looked unlike any human being he had ever laid eyes on. He wondered whether he would be alone in his bewilderment of how his patient came to look as he did. The unidentified titan’s face and stature were dissimilar to any he had ever seen before. Robert estimated he stood nearly seven feet tall and weighed more than three hundred pounds. Both he and Joe were fit and strong, but had struggled to load the massive man into the rear of the rig.
The man’s enormous body was also enshrined with thick ropey muscle tissue. So dense were the fibers that Joe, who had ten more years than Robert as a paramedic and also served his country as part of a medic unit dispatched overseas to aid in a Middle Eastern conflict, had struggled to run an intravenous line. Penetrating what seemed to be foreign matter beneath the man’s skin had proved to be nearly impossible. Robert surmised that the staff at Harbinger’s General Hospital would have an array of questions regarding the gargantuan man’s physical composition. He would love to hear the answers to all of those questions, but for now, he was charged with his patient’s safe arrival.
Robert proceeded along Hoyt road, a residential street. He would follow it to the next intersection and turn onto Route 53, a road that would lead him directly to Harbinger’s General.
Rain, which had been mixing all night alternating between sleet and wet snow then back to rain again, had picked up in intensity. Large droplets pelted the ambulance issuing a fitful drumming against it. The windshield wipers delivered a rhythmic accompaniment to the cacophonous pounding of the rain. The beating of the rain and thumping of the windshield wipers in conjunction with the howling of his ambulance siren became a maddening musical arrangement, an insane symphony. Normally, such noises were mildly annoying but easily tuned out by Robert. However, something more than the loud, disjointed noises unsettled him, something far more profound. His mind kept drifting back to his patient.
Approaching the juncture where Hoyt Road led to Route 53, he saw that no cars were present. Though it was not a heavily frequented crossroad, he depressed the horn and issued the electronic buzz once again both before and while he proceeded across the interconnected streets. As he traversed the connected roads, a black van appeared out of nowhere.
He could not see a driver. He did not have time. The black van rushed toward him, seemingly unable to stop. Blurred by wind-driven rain and not appearing to break, the black van deviated slightly askew, as if avoiding a direct impact. Robert had nowhere to go. He stomped on the brake pedal. Decelerating too quickly, the ambulance went into a full skid.
Frantically, Robert tried to direct the rig. If he turned left, he would crash his ambulance squarely into the black van. Continuing straight would place a telephone pole directly in his path.
With no time to react, Robert veered right, hard. The black van veered right as well, forcing its bumper to roughly graze the port side of the ambulance. Metal shrieked, offended by the abrupt encounter, sending angry
sparks thrashing and flaying about briefly in the descending rain.
The impact of the black van colliding into his ambulance sent Robert careening farther to the right.
“What the hell!” Joe shouted from the rear.
“We’ve been hit!” Robert yelled back as he tried to regain control of the ambulance.
But it was too late. Landscape rushed at him faster than his mind could comprehend. The needled boughs of an immense pine tree loomed just a few hundred feet ahead.
Without a second to spare, he jerked the steering wheel of his ambulance to the left, barely avoiding a head-on collision into the trunk of the pine. Instead, the passenger side bumper met with the trunk and exploded against it. Wood splintered as the tree sagged and drooped, dangerously canopying the ambulance.
Beneath its bowed trunk and the covering of innumerable green spines and barbs, the front half of the ambulance was buried. He found himself pinned beneath a mangled mess of metal. His right leg, in particular, was trapped below a collapsed and crumpled dashboard.
Dazed and dizzied, he touched his fingertips lightly against his forehead and immediately inspected them. Wet and bright red, his hand revealed a bleeding wound in the vicinity of his hairline. He had been slammed headlong into the steering wheel. His head had also ricocheted off of the safety glass of the driver’s side window. Had he not employed his seatbelt, he would have certainly gone straight through the windshield.
Pain radiated from his pinioned right leg. But he was too thankful to be alive to focus on the pain. Immense gratitude for his life was abruptly interrupted however, as something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.
He turned his head, slowly, to the left to look out the driver’s side window of his ambulance. To his surprise, the black van that had sideswiped him drawing the accident had pulled off the road parallel to his rig but just slightly farther down the road. More curiously, there was activity at the rear of the instigating vehicle. He lowered the window to get a clearer view.
Not taking his eyes off the mysterious and perplexing van, he called to his partner Joe.
“Joe! You all right back there?”
Robert waited for an answer.
“Hey Joe, this is not the time to mess around! Something’s going on here. I’m not sure what,” Robert mumbled more to himself. “Hey, you okay?”
When Joe did not respond, Robert attempted to turn in his seat but was immediately met with a blistering ache that smarted and throbbed, white hot and intense. He was forced to train his gaze to the rear-view mirror. When he did, he saw that his partner was slumped over their patient, motionless.
“Joe!” Robert called out, emotion cracking his voice.
With his leg wedged beneath the battered control panel of the ambulance, Robert was incapable of helping his partner, his friend. Helplessness was an alien feeling to him. His life had been shaped by helping others, his career precipitated as a result of his unique ability to act and react wisely and swiftly when others could not.
Despite his knowledge and training, he sat, unable to attend to Joe, or free himself, and in need of help. Exasperated by his predicament, Robert gripped his head in his hands and gently squeezed his temples before raking his fingers through his thick, brown hair. Movement around the black van distracted his frustration at once, however.
The rear doors of the van swung open and out of the back, two figures emerged. Though obscured by hammering, wind-driven rain, Robert was able to discern that the pair differed dramatically in size but were both decidedly male. The smaller of the two was bespectacled and gave the impression of instructing the larger, gesturing animatedly with his hands as his lips moved. The smaller man’s face was hardened, serious. The larger man moved immediately, as if on command.
Something about the nature of their interaction unnerved Robert though, and alarmed him. An indescribable feeling of terror settled upon him. He could not pinpoint exactly why. He was reluctant to take his eyes off of the man with the glasses and his apparent subordinate.
After several seconds of spirited signaling, the smaller man of the pair seemed to have impressed whatever point it was he sought to make. The more imposing of the duo began looking at the ambulance, at Robert.
As the larger man came toward him, Robert gasped as he realized it was hardly a man at all. Advancing was a creature more bizarre looking than the one on the gurney in the patient compartment of his ambulance. He nimbly moved toward Robert’s disabled vehicle. Robert was surprised by how agile the being was considering its lack of discernible facial features.
The closer it progressed, the more horrific the image became. Nearly transparent skin did little to sheathe the expansive, vivid entanglement of veins and capillary networks that webbed its malformed head. Lidless eyes shrouded in a thick, milky film darted from left to right, seemingly unfocused, searching. A defined nose was absent from its facial construct but two asymmetrical holes appeared to serve the purpose of nasal openings. Lips were also missing from the abomination, though a line gave the impression that a mouth may reside beyond it. Robert pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed vigorously. The logical voice in his brain dictated that what he was witnessing was a concussive effect, a hallucination. He had just been in a car accident. His memory of it was clear. He had hit his head more than once.
With his eyes still pressed shut, he reasoned that the horrifying image progressing in his direction must be a product of a trauma to his brain.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
The blasphemous image was gone. Robert nearly laughed out loud, relieved. But relief was a luxury he could not afford himself as two men remained in the rear of the vehicle, one with mortal injuries, and his partner whose injuries had not yet been assessed. He breathed deeply to calm himself and formulate a plan of action. He needed to release himself from the tethering of the safety harness in order to unpin his leg enough to reach for the radio transponder and call for help. With the press of a button, another ambulance would be en route with the assistance of the police department and fire department. He just needed to free himself.
Suddenly, he saw that his partner’s Swiss Army Knife lay behind the passenger seat.
He twisted his torso rearward. Squirming and wriggling sent an intense flare of pain from his ankle that continued up his leg to his hip. The slightest movement had a similar impact. But the actions, no matter how excruciatingly painful, were necessary. He needed to get the Swiss Army Knife.
Deciding against prolonging the pain, he turned in one swift motion. A wail of agony sounded from him, a voice that belonged to him but sounded foreign to his ears, as he finally succeeded in rotating to the rear section of the ambulance. As he did so, he was met with a pair of cloudy black eyes.
The monstrously deformed atrocity was in the patient compartment of his vehicle. It appeared to be looking at him, though its filmy eyes refused to focus. The line of its mouth turned up at each corner revealing small, pointed, bud-like teeth. The creature’s expression became even more offensive, more hideous as it appeared to smile demonically at him. Dizzied by what resembled a six-foot fetus leering at him, Robert felt an inherent need to scream, to flee. But sound escaped his lips.
His mind struggled to process what his eyes beheld, the impossible arrangement of virtually absent features. With his heart knocking violently against his ribcage, Robert felt an innate fear the likes of which he had never felt before. His survival, the most primitive aspect of his humanity, took precedence over all else in the presence of the faceless man.
“No!” Robert heard himself screaming over and over again.
Seemingly unperturbed by Robert’s cries, the ungodly fiend calmly turned from him and busied himself in the rear of the rig.
With impossibly webbed fingers, the beast dexterously detached every line from the colossal patient. Then, effortlessly the faceless man tossed Joseph M
cCauley to the floor of the patient compartment. A sickly thud indicated that his partner had suffered grave injuries from the collision with the black van, and he was powerless to break his fall in any way.
The passenger side of the ambulance was puckered, the door a chaotic mess of contorted metal. Safety glass littered the seats. Robert frantically surveyed his every escape option. They were limited at best for one whose leg was not pinned down by a mangled dashboard, nonexistent for one in his predicament.
Flooded with fright, he recognized that Death loomed on his doorstep quite literally. A faceless Grim Reaper, devoid of his razor-sharp sickle, stood armed with a countenance created in hell and waited to claim him and drag him into the fiery depths from which he came.
As his pulse thundered in his ears, Robert guessed that if the ghastly fiend were able to cast his partner aside with ease, as if he were as weighted as a ragdoll, then the creature must possess superior strength, supernatural even. His heart rate accelerated dangerously at his last thought.
His head began to spin as sheer panic muddled and confused any coherent thoughts from evolving within his brain. Robert did not want to die at the hands of the faceless freak. He needed to free himself, immediately.
Rain lashed against his face through his open window as a gust blew and volleyed fine, needle-like barbs of icy precipitation across the ambulance. The imploded passenger-side window created a perfect cross-breeze for the sleet. He felt its moisture but not the sting of its coldness. Fear and shock dominated such sensations. Survival instincts prevailed.
Without allowing the scream that desperately desired to be released from the depths of his being to escape, Robert struggled against the agonizing pain emanating from his trapped leg. He wrestled and thrashed against the destroyed dashboard that imprisoned his limb. An animalistic instinct urged him on, enabled him to ignore the unfathomable pain in his leg.
As Robert fought to free himself from the wrecked console, he felt compelled to keep his gaze trained on the miscreation in the patient compartment. He looked on with equal parts horror and astonishment at how adroit the webbed digits on each hand worked. Expertly and rapidly, the featureless monster had detached and detangled the multitude of electrodes, tubes and probes that functioned to keep the near-dead leviathan on the gurney alive. The faceless devil had unbuckled the patient and was attempting to lift him.
Robert’s mouth hung ajar as he gaped in wonderment. Though he and his partner, Joe, struggled to place their patient on the gurney and in the ambulance, the faceless abomination hoisted him up with ease and draped him across his malformed shoulder. His featureless face attempted a smile once again, this one more malevolent and hideous than the last, before turning and walking toward the black van.
The sight of the deformed being moving effortlessly across the street with the gargantuan patient slung diagonally across him, nearly dragging along the wet pavement, was illogical, bizarre.
The rational voice in his head argued against what he was seeing, what he had seen, that all of it had to be a nightmare, a delusion. Logic dictated that monsters did not roam the earth and abscond with arbitrary patients from ambulances. Therefore, none of what had transpired could be true. Such occurrences simply did not happen.
Certain that his visions were mere fallacies of an injured brain once again, he felt a brief sense of giddiness despite watching the creature disappear into the rear of the black van across the street.
He gripped his head in his hands and laughed aloud, a frantic, crazed sound. He was overwrought, strained beyond acceptable parameters. Yet oddly his stress was tinged with relief, his mind comforted by assurances that what he was seeing was an illusion. But instinct balked at rationale.
His respite ended abruptly when the creature reappeared. And he was not alone. The small man with the glasses accompanied him and gestured animatedly again. Only this time, he pointed to the ambulance, he pointed to Robert.
The creature nodded and the small man climbed into the driver’s seat of the black van. The abomination followed.
He saw the faceless man emerge from the concealment of the black van once again and advance. In his misshapen hand, he held a bottle with a rag dangling from its opening. The container held a liquid of some sort. Robert squinted, strained his eyes to discern its contents.
The featureless beast reached his other hand into his front pants pocket and retrieved a lighter. He pushed a crude-looking thumb to the lighter then pulled it back, rolling a metal flint wheel. A bright, yellow flame appeared.
He watched in horror as the faceless atrocity placed the flame to the rag dangling from the fluid-filled bottle before hurling it toward his rig. It spiraled through the air with laser-point precision, careened through his open window and shattered against the dashboard.
Robert released a sound from his body, a hoarse, primal scream of sorts before a bright light more radiant than a thousand suns, burst before his eyes. The light consumed him, blinded him temporarily with its magnificence, before his body became enveloped in flames. He experienced the purest of pain, unbearable, overwhelming pain, before the world fell silent and darkened forever.