Whistling sounded in the distance.
The tingling hand of fear gripped Bill by the balls and his stomach sank. He stood frozen, listening. After what seemed like an eternity, he heard it again. It was more distant now, and he realized it was coming from somewhere outside the store. He found himself wondering how many of those creatures were beyond the smashed doorway, standing between here and the highway with their teeth and their scythes, but he quickly shook it off. If he thought about it too much, he’d find himself crying in a corner like Hobbs, or worse: he’d run off screaming and end up like poor Deputy Jackson over there.
After a moment of nothing but the throb of his own pulse in his ear, Bill resumed his slide along the café wall. He focused on the rifle, on the keys. They seemed a long way away from him, but he was there in four running steps.
Bill grabbed the rifle, checked the chamber to make sure it still held a shell, then knelt down and yanked the ring free of Deputy Jackson’s belt. He stabbed keys into his cuffs, their too large teeth scratching the metal around the hole. Finally, one slid inside the lock, turning with a click that was sweet music to Bill’s ears. His hand jerked free of the manacle and he stood up, aiming the rifle in all directions, finding nothing. The creature trapped in the store with them had been alone.
“The coast is clear,” Bill proclaimed.
The boy, Ryan, moved out from behind the counter and walked over to the animal’s body, the redhead latched to his back like a lamprey. He kicked its foot with his boot, watching its bloody talon rock to and fro. “We saw one of these things climb a telephone pole this morning,” he said. “It was using these big claws like a repairman’s cleats. Went right up the pole, fast as could be, and jumped into a second floor window.” He chuckled a bit at that, but Bill could see he was unnerved. “As we were running, I could...they were screaming, the people inside. We could hear them screaming.”
Bill frowned, trying to picture one of these creatures climbing in through somebody’s window, then worked the second lock. “The quake hit, and my bunk threw me like a mechanical bull. Then the overhead fluorescents blow, and it’s raining sparks on us.” His shackles dropped to the floor and he rubbed his worn, aching wrists, smearing the blood that encircled them. “Next thing I know, these monsters are rushin’ the cells, pushin’ their feathery mugs between the bars. They were jumpin’ up on people’s backs as we ran down the hall to get away.”
He knelt down beside Jackson’s corpse. I may not have liked you, but wherever you are, thanks for gettin’ me outta that hell. Bill dropped the keys and searched the deputy’s pockets, finding more shells. He took them.
The redhead cupped her chin in her hand, her fingers and thumb pressing dents into her own cheeks. “What are these things?”
“Looks like a deinonychus,” Ryan said. “Either that or a Utah raptor.” He realized they were looking at him as if he were speaking in tongues. “I’m studying paleontology. We go out on digs all the time. There’s some great fossil beds around here.” He nervously rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, this looks like one of the dinosaurs we’ve studied. Lived here about 144 million years ago.”
“Dinosaur?” The redhead swallowed. “But...it’s got feathers.”
“Dinosaurs had feathers, Kim,” Ryan assured her. “My professor likes to teach all the new theories, the stuff that gets old school scientists all pissed off. T-Rex was a scavenger. Dinosaurs were birds. This looks like one of the new-wave paintings he’s showed us. But, I mean...it’s not really a dinosaur. It can’t be.”
Laughter came from behind the counter.
Hobbs. Deep, dark wrinkles creased the skin under his eyes, like fault lines in his porcelain face.
“We did it,” he said abruptly. “We brought them here.”
Bill thought the day’s events were driving this man to insanity, if they hadn’t already left him stranded there. Then he remembered the Taggart Labs ID badge. “You a scientist?”
Hobbs shook his head. “Public Relations. I write press releases, wine and dine senators...get investors laid.” He gave another half-hearted giggle. “It was supposed to be a simple test. We were just going to give them a taste of what it could do.”
The redhead, Kim, tightened her hold on Ryan’s arm. “What what could do?”
Hobbs smiled. “The SK64...Einstein’s Slingshot.”
A sudden chill cut through Bill like a gust of arctic wind.
“It was a brand new propulsion system,” Hobbs continued. “We...they designed it for NASA, was going to revolutionize the whole space program. ‘Mars in minutes’ they kept chanting.”
“How?” Ryan wanted to know.
Hobbs looked annoyed. “How the hell should I know? Wormholes, tachyons...the guys in lab coats were throwing words around like they meant something. I don’t know what they were doing. I just know they fucked up big time.”
He wiped at his eyes again with the back of his hand. Beside him, the dark-haired mother still rocked to and fro. Hannah had thankfully found sleep, but she squirmed even in her unconsciousness.
“We had the money people there,” Hobbs went on to say, “the chairman of the Senate committee, everybody who was anybody. They had a chair hooked to the engine and a chimp belted to the chair. It was just supposed to be a short trip...once around the globe, just like a boomerang...”
His voice trailed off and his sunken eyes grew vacant.
Bill moved to the counter, his hand gripping the butt of the rifle so tightly his fingers grew numb. “What happened?”
Hobbs snapped back into his recollection. “Somebody screamed about a systems overload, that the field was unstable. Next thing I know, computers are exploding and there’s this huge...wall of energy, like a big bubble of blue electricity that kept expanding. The earth started shaking, and we all ran. We ran from the bubble, then we ran from...” He tilted his head toward the dinosaur’s corpse. “We ran from those things over there. The fuckheads opened a door in space and time, and let these... these monsters waltz right through it.”
Bill closed his eyes, thinking of all the crappy sci-fi movies he’d seen as a kid. Evidently, the white coats at Taggart Labs had never watched them.
Ryan made a bold announcement: “We have to go turn it off.”
“We don’t gotta do shit except get outta Dodge.” Bill indicated the Liberty blocking the entrance. “I say we just drive. When we get someplace safe, you can tell whoever you want.”
“Listen to him,” Kim said, pulling on Ryan’s beefy arm. Bill found it amusing that the girl now cared about what this “rapist” had to say. “You don’t always have to be the hero, y’know. Let the state police or the National Guard take care of it.”
“I’m not going back out there,” Hobbs told them. “We should just stay put and wait for help.”
Bill propped the rifle barrel on his shoulder. “It took ‘em a week to get help to New Orleans after Katrina. Wanna hang out here with those things for a week?”
Hobbs rested his head on his knees and said nothing.
Kim spoke up again, “I tried using my cell phone to call for help, but I can’t get any bars. I dial a number and the screen just says ‘no service.’”
“The quake probably took out some signal towers.” Ryan rubbed her back and nodded at Hobbs. “Or that weird energy he’s talking about might be causing some kind of interference.”
Bill reached out to the dark-haired mother on the floor, gently touching her arm. “What’s your name?”
She blinked. “Sarah.”
“How much gas in your Jeep, Sarah?”
She shook her head. “Mark filled it last.”
“Is it even drivable?” Kim asked.
Bill glanced at the damaged grill, then shrugged. “Won’t know for sure ‘til I go over and start ‘er up.”
He tilted his head to glance at the watch on Kim’s wrist. It said eight o’clock. They had about an hour of daylight left. “We’ll give it a shot first thing in the morning.”
“You mean...” Kim’s eyes widened. “...spend the night here?”
“The quake could’ve knocked out a bridge, dropped live electrical wires everywhere, or it might’ve brought down a whole fuckin’ building and blocked the street. During the day, we can see those things before we’re right on top of them.” He looked at Ryan. “How well can dinosaurs see in the dark?”
The boy shrugged. “You can’t tell things like that from fossils, but it looks like our friend here has alligator eyes. Alligators have great night vision.”
Bill nodded and turned back to Kim. “That’s what I thought.”
She ran her fingers through her red hair. “Well...how are we going to even see in here without power?”
“I’d say make a pile of books and light a fire,” Bill said, “but that might attract them.”
“What about these?” Ryan reached out to a spinner rack next to the café counter. It was filled with bookmarks, batteries, and small reading lamps. He took one of the lights off its hook and tossed it to Bill.
Bill looked the package over and nodded. “Cool.”
“What happens if they get in here again?” Kim asked, nodding at the rifle in Bill’s hands. “We only have the one gun.”
And not more than a handful of shells, Bill was about to add, but stopped himself. He pointed behind the counter. “This place serves food, right? There’s gotta be some knives back there.”
Kim offered him a skeptical glance, as if to say she didn’t intend to get that close to the creatures, but she walked over to the drawers and rummaged around. She found a butcher’s knife and two long, serrated blades used for slicing bread and bagels.
“I’ll take first watch,” Bill told them. His eyes skidded over Sarah and Hannah, landing squarely on Hobbs.
“Don’t look at me!” the man whined.
“Kim and I can stand guard the rest of the night,” Ryan quickly volunteered. “We’re used to pulling all-nighters for school anyway.”
Bill glared at Hobbs. “Sounds like a plan.”
Within an hour, the sun had completely deserted them, leaving the store as dark as the inside of a cave. Bill sat at one of the bistro tables, his eyes on the front windows, on the empty street beyond. He ate a slice of spinach quiche from the display case with one hand and held the rifle firmly in the other. They said real men didn’t eat quiche, but they had never gone a day without food.
What struck him most was the silence. No traffic noise. No police sirens—a sound his ears had become quite tuned to over the years. And, of course with no power, there was no whir of air-conditioning or ceiling fans. Occasionally, he would hear the distant teakettle whistle of the animals on the hunt and his finger would instinctively move to the trigger, but they never drew near.
Moonlight cut through the gloom, making the faces of buildings across the street plainly visible. His attention shifted from one darkened window to the next. How many people were hiding up in those rooms?—under beds?—in closets? He had a nightmare vision of dinosaurs scrambling up telephone poles to eat them and quickly shook it off.
About the time Bill felt himself starting to doze, Ryan and Kim arrived to take their turn at watch. He reluctantly handed them the rifle and used his reading light to find a place to sleep.
***
“Mister?”
A female voice, soft and somehow familiar, filtered through the veil of slumber.
It was followed by a male voice, also familiar, “I think he said his name was Bill.”
“Wake up, Bill.”
He became aware of a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and when he opened his eyes, the backlit shape of a woman with a knife startled him to consciousness.
She held up her free hand. “It’s me, Kim. There’s something in here with us.”
Her words were like a splash of cold water on his brain. Bill remembered where he was, remembered the situation he was in, and was instantly on his feet. He followed Kim onto the tiled floor of the café where Ryan stood with the book light and rifle.
Bill looked at the silhouetted Liberty at the front of the store. “Where?”
“Listen,” Ryan told him.
And then he heard it: a rustling sound, like someone quickly flipping through the books that littered the sales floor. “You hear their whistle yet?”
Ryan shook his head. “We heard it outside, but not in here. This is something different.”
Something different. Bill’s stomach knotted and came loose in spasms. “Give me the gun.”
Ryan turned it over, and Bill took a step toward the bookcases. The soft, clandestine patter of tiny feet stopped him in his tracks. Whatever was out there, it had moved from the paper strewn across the floor to the wooden cases themselves.
“Sounds like rats.”
“Rats?” Kim’s shaking hands held out the butcher’s knife like a sword.
Bill could not help but grin. The idea of overgrown mice was somehow more frightening to this girl than dinosaurs run amok. “Welcome to life in the big city, darlin’.”
Lightning fast movement in the corner of his eye, something long and snake-like.
Whatever this thing was, Bill knew it was no rat. He took two steps back, aiming his lamp at the floor and surrounding walls, hearing the stealthy rustle become a rattling, banging sound. It was coming from above. Bill lifted his light and glimpsed a dark shape moving quickly across the ceiling tiles. At first, he thought it was a snake, but then he saw the legs...hundreds of tiny legs.
Bill aimed his rifle and fired. Exploded fiberglass rained down, bringing the overgrown millipede with it. The insect writhed on the floor, then scurried toward Kim. She screamed, crashed back through the bistro tables and chairs, and then it was on top of her, long stalks of antennae batting against her chest, huge pincers opening wide.
Ryan was at her side in a flash. He grabbed hold of the segmented exoskeleton and yanked it off his girlfriend’s torso, countless tiny limbs swimming in the air as he peeled it back.
Kim’s screams turned to primitive grunts. She swung at the insect with her butcher’s knife, hacking into its thin body as if it were the green limb of a tree, stabbing its tender underbelly again and again. Dark fluid gushed from the wounds, further staining her Hard Rock shirt.
Bill ran over to help. The millipede’s barbed legs had latched onto Kim’s jeans. He dropped the rifle, took hold of the thing’s ass, and helped Ryan pull. Once free of the creature, Kim scrambled to her feet, tears clearing paths in the grime that now soiled her face.
They pinned the insect against the tile, and it continued to struggle in their grip. Its antennae waved around wildly, its pincers opening and closing with an odd clucking sound.
“Shoot it!” Ryan begged.
Before Bill could reach for the rifle, Kim grabbed hold of one of the bistro chairs. She brought it crashing down on the bug’s head, then picked it back up and repeated the clubbing until the millipede stopped writhing.
“It’s okay, honey,” Ryan told her. He rose up and held her tightly to him, forcing her to drop the battered chair. “It’s dead now. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” she cried. “I wanna go home. Take me home.”
Ryan smoothed her red hair with his hand. “I know, Babe.”
“We’re out of here at dawn,” Bill promised her.
She lifted her head from Ryan’s shoulder and glared at him. “If we live that long.”
Bill heard whimpering and shined his book light across the café, thinking he would find Hannah crying in her mother’s lap. Instead, he saw Hobbs rocking back and forth in his corner. The man’s hands were planted firmly over his ears.
Rage bubbled up inside of Bill, but he resisted the urge to run over, hoist Hobbs up by his tie, and beat the living shit out of him. Hobbs may not have opened Pandora’s Box himself, but his hands were far from clean. Whatever “Einstein’s Slingshot” was, Hobbs had better pray it didn’t fling anything else at them before sunrise.
***
The remainder of the night passed uneventfully, though none of them were able to get much rest. At first light, Bill slid behind the Liberty’s wheel and found the key still in the ignition. He turned it, listened to the engine purr, then checked the gauges. The gas needle hung half-way between empty and a quarter of a tank. He prayed it would be enough.
The others made their way to the vehicle as fast as they could. Ryan pushed Hobbs through the passenger door and helped the women into the backseat. Once they were all within the protective confines of the SUV, Bill grabbed the gearshift and threw it into reverse.
Glass slid from the hood like slabs of ice, plaster dust billowed around the tires, and the cab bounced as the Jeep retreated over the curb. With all four wheels firmly on the street, Bill floored the accelerator, driving east.
Unseen fires sent black smoke drifting across the road. Bill sped through the cloud to find deserted cars parked wildly along curbs and stalled down the center of the street, some with their doors left open. He turned the wheel to the right, then to the left, swerving around and between the abandoned vehicles. A station wagon sat atop the ruined stump of a water hydrant, but there was no geyser. The car’s owner stared at Bill from behind a windshield glazed in blood. He couldn’t tell if the mangled face belonged to a man or a woman.
A loud beep thankfully pulled Bill’s attention away from the carnage, and he saw a tiny red gas pump ignite on the dash.
“Shit.”
The Marathon station on the corner of Washington and Montgomery appeared deserted. Bill pulled the Liberty up to the Full Service pumps, eyeing the convenience store and garages for any sign of movement. There were three service bays. The door to bay #2 had been raised, but Bill saw only darkness within.
He turned off the engine and grabbed his rifle, his hand reaching for the door handle as he looked into the backseat. “Ryan, on three, I want you to get behind the wheel.”
The boy nodded.
“One...two...” Bill took one last glance around the lot and still saw nothing. “Three.”