20
Fifteen minutes later they were on the road to Kingwood. The search of the garage had yielded nothing useful, but the shed held a plethora of bladed implements. Tiffany came away with a sickle, and Violet supplemented her carving knife with a hatchet. Cynthia considered replacing her knife with a shovel or a hoe, but finally opted not to; they would require two hands to swing effectively, and she wanted to keep one hand free to use the air freshener, which she still felt sure would be anathema to a creature that counted scent as a primary sense, as many animals did. She just hoped the leucrota was in fact such a creature.
Before they set out Calvin insisted everyone equip themselves with a flashlight.
“We don’t know if the power’s still on in the building,” he said. “And in any case, we don’t know where the light switches are. We probably shouldn’t turn the lights on anyway. Not unless we want to attract attention.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lauren said with a small, nervous laugh. “A little police backup might not be a bad thing.”
“It is if we want the leucrota for the Collection. And I do. But if you don’t want to come, that’s fine. I won’t hold it against you. Or any of you,” he added, looking around.
“No, no,” Lauren said. “I’m game.”
So was everyone else.
They soon hunted up enough flashlights for everyone, many of the flashlights coming from their cars’ glove compartments. Then Calvin and Cynthia grabbed their investigator’s kits, and everyone piled into Brandon’s black van, which had been deemed the best vehicle for the job despite its decrepitude. A single vehicle was less likely to attract attention in the warehouse’s otherwise empty parking lot, and Brandon’s van was the only vehicle they owned big enough to fit all seven of them inside. It even had room for a dead leucrota, assuming the creature wasn’t too much bigger than the bestiaries said. And a van, even an unmarked one, had a vaguely commercial air that would help it blend into a busy industrial area.
Brandon drove. Calvin sat in the passenger seat, the map book open in his lap. There were no seats in the back, forcing everyone else to sit on the carpeted floor.
They arrived at the Mad Hatter Novelty Company’s Kingwood Distribution Facility at ten to nine. The sun was just about to set, leaving them nearly an hour before full dark.
Aside from the sign that bore the company’s name and the top-hat-and-smile logo, the warehouse looked much the same as every other warehouse in the area. It was broad and deep and boxy, consisting of a single high-ceilinged storey constructed mainly of steel and concrete, its colors bland grays, browns, and creams.
After making sure no one else was around—fortunately all the nearby businesses had already closed for the night, and the only traffic in sight was a pair of cars passing through the Miller Road intersection a few blocks north—Brandon pulled into the lot and crossed row after row of empty yellow-edged parking spaces toward the building. A large sign that read “Closed No Trespassing” hung across the main entrance, and the doors were sealed tight with an industrial-strength lockbox.
“I just realized,” said Brandon. “How’re we gonna get in?”
“If the leucrota is using this place, it found a way in,” Calvin said. “And if it can get in, we can too.”
“I’m still not convinced it’s here,” Cynthia said.
“You might be right,” Calvin said. He scanned the front of the building, but aside from the locked front door, he saw no other way inside. There weren’t even any windows. To Brandon he said, “Drive around the building slowly.”
Brandon did. The side of the building sported a single brown door halfway down. It too was secured with a lockbox.
“Keep going,” Calvin said.
The back of the building was dominated by ten numbered loading docks with metal overhead doors, all of them locked tight. Halfway between the corner of the building and the nearest loading dock was a brown door that stood slightly ajar, the twisted wreck of a lockbox dangling from its handle.
“Oh, boy,” Lauren muttered.
“There,” Calvin said. “Park near that door.”
Brandon did so, then shut off the van. With the growl of the engine no longer rebounding back at them off the building’s outer wall, the ensuing silence seemed total and startling. Everyone stared at the slit of blackness visible through the cracked door. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.
Calvin slung his messenger bag over his shoulder, then twisted around in his seat and looked at everyone in the back of the van.
“Like I said before, if anyone wants to sit this out, I would totally understand.”
“Fuck that,” Violet said. “I’m ready to kick some monster ass. It’d be better if we had some guns, though.”
“Yeah, and even though I feel like I’m practically hyperventilating here, I know I’d hate myself if I didn’t go,” Lauren said, her voice a little shaky. “So count me in.”
Weapons and flashlights in hand, they climbed out of the van and crept toward the door. Calvin reached out and laid a hand on the knob. The broken lockbox gave a hollow rattle. He took a deep breath. Then he wrinkled his nose. Through the cracked door he could smell the faint but unmistakable stench of rotten meat.
“Do you smell that?” he whispered.
The others started sniffing too.
“Yeah,” Cynthia whispered. “It smells like something died in there.”
“Or someone,” Tiffany said.
“I don’t smell anything,” Donovan said.
“That’s probably because you smoke,” Cynthia said.
Calvin pushed open the door and raised his baseball bat to clobber anything that might spring out. Nothing did. Inside, a yellow-walled, tile-floored hallway extended off into darkness. With the door open, the smell was much stronger, and underneath it a second, fainter odor was now noticeable, a rank animal stink that reminded everyone of zoos.
“Okay,” Donovan said with a nod, his nose crinkling. “Now I smell something.”
Calvin switched on his flashlight and shone it inside. The hallway ended after thirty feet in an unmarked gray door with a small square window in it. Two doors faced each other across the hallway halfway down. The tile floor was tracked with dirty footprints. In the corner to the right of the brown door were two empty bottles of Rolling Rock. Cigarette butts lay scattered about like spent shells in the aftermath of a shootout.
“Looks more like the bums’ve been hanging out here,” Violet muttered.
Calvin stepped inside and advanced down the hallway, treading slowly and carefully to muffle his footfalls. The others followed, Tiffany first, then Cynthia, then Brandon, Lauren, Donovan, and Violet.
They paused at the two doors. A sign on the wall beside the door on the left read “Administration.” A sign beside the other one read “Accounting.” Scrawled in bright red spray paint on the Administration door was a big A in a circle.
“Anarchy, dude,” Brandon whispered. “Rock on.”
Calvin tried the Administration door’s knob. It was locked.
The Accounting door, however, was not. Calvin didn’t even need to try the knob to know that: The door had been forced open, leaving the knob askew and the metal around it dented. The latch plate lay on the hallway floor in front of the door.
With the tip of his baseball bat, Calvin gently pushed against the door. It opened halfway, then stopped with a muffled clunk, blocked by something inside. Thankfully, the blockage sounded like something hard and metallic, not something organic and prone to biting off faces.
Calvin shone his flashlight into the office. The place had been wrecked. File cabinets lay overturned, their drawers yanked out. Desks and chairs had been torn apart. Computers had been reduced to heaps of gray plastic shards and shattered green circuit boards. A couple of the light fixtures had been yanked partway out of the ceiling and dangled aslant on colored wires. The walls were covered with spray-painted slogans and symbols and crude drawings of faces and phalluses and women’s torsos with gigantic
breasts and gaping vaginas.
“Wow,” said Lauren. “Somebody sure went medieval on this place.”
“I bet it was those two graffitists,” Brandon said.
“Pretty safe bet,” Calvin said.
Tiffany walked slowly past Calvin and into the center of the room, her gaze roving over the graffiti as if she were searching for something. Calvin realized with a jolt of alarm that all these symbols and scribbles must remind her of the bizarre graffiti she had written during her breakdown. He fought off an urge to pull her out of here and move on to the rest of the warehouse. If he did that, she would probably realize he knew about the breakdown, and very likely get upset. Instead he watched her closely, ready to step in if she started reacting badly, though he wasn’t entirely clear what it was he was afraid she might do.
Tiffany’s eyes flicked past “Anarchy Rulez!” and “Debbie is a slut!” and “Wildboyz,” then settled on another, odder piece of graffiti, which read, “You are being watched.” It had been written in black magic marker in a small, careful hand. The writing and the sentiment expressed were different enough from the rest of the juvenile gibberish scrawled on the walls to give Calvin a chill. It was like a coherent message in the midst of white noise. A glance at Tiffany showed that she too found it disturbing; her eyes were narrow as she regarded it, her brows drawn down in a small frown, her lips pressed tightly together.
Then her attention was drawn to another part of the wall. There, between a water cooler and another piece of giant red graffiti that read “Whore’s galore!” was another neatly black-markered message, too small and distant to read from here.
Tiffany strode over to it, Calvin following close behind. The graffito read, “A stranger, unafraid, in a world of sheep he slayed.”
“Whoa,” said Brandon, who had come up behind Calvin and was looking at the graffito over his shoulder. “That’s kinda messed up.”
“Yeah,” Calvin said quietly. In his opinion “messed up” was something of an understatement. The graffito seemed like a reference to the leucrota, but if so, who wrote it? If it wasn’t a reference to the leucrota, it was a hell of a coincidence. Then again, coincidences had been abounding ever since he met Tiffany. Or perhaps he was simply noticing them more.
“You ready to go on?” he asked Tiffany.
She didn’t respond for a moment, just kept staring at the black words on the off-white wall. Just when Calvin was about to repeat the question, she tore her eyes from the graffito, looked at him, and nodded.
They returned to the hallway and crept toward the door at the far end. As they drew near, they saw that this door, too, had been forced open and stood slightly ajar.
Calvin tried to look through the small square window in the door, but the glass was too bleared with dust and grime and the interior of the warehouse too dark for him to see anything. He held still and listened but heard nothing except the nervous breaths and rustles of the others behind him, the sounds magnified in the narrow, confined space of the hallway.
He nudged the door open with his toe. The door swung about two-thirds open then stopped. The odor of rotten meat and zoos billowed over them, stronger than ever, the stink shoving rancid fingers up Calvin’s nose and into his throat, making him gag. Behind him, he heard Lauren mutter, “Oh, that’s bad,” in a small, choked voice.
Gulping back his nausea, Calvin shone his flashlight through the doorway. Thirty feet ahead stood a steel shelving unit lined with red plastic bins that were filled with various objects too small to identify at this distance. The unit was about twenty-five feet high and fifty feet long and ended on either side in a wide aisle, across which another shelving unit laden with red bins stretched away beyond the reach of his flashlight. Behind these units were more units, one after another until they too faded into the darkness beyond his flashlight’s beam. They probably extended all the way to the far end of the warehouse like rows of giant dominoes lined up and ready to fall.
He saw no monsters, or signs of monsters. The silence from the warehouse was total yet also somehow worrying.
His heart pounding like a jungle drum, he took a deep breath, raised the baseball bat high above his head, and stepped out onto the warehouse floor, swiftly turning to his right with his back to the open door.
A huge, hulking figure loomed ten feet ahead and to his left, the flashlight’s beam gleaming off what appeared to be two long, gray tusks. Calvin gasped and stumbled backward, bumping into the door and sending it swinging open another foot.
Then he realized the “monster” wasn’t moving and was way too big to be a leucrota. And it had wheels.
No, not a monster, he saw now, but a forklift. The tusks were its forks, which had been left half raised.
“Are you okay?” Tiffany whispered from the corridor, her worried face dim and ghostly in the hazy backglow from her flashlight.
He nodded, not speaking, afraid his voice would waver in a horribly unmanly fashion if he did. He hadn’t been prepared for how scary and stressful this would be. He almost wished he had brought a gun after all. Then again, he was so jumpy he probably would’ve just fired half a clip at the forklift and gotten struck by a ricocheting bullet.
Beyond the forklift the flashlight picked out stacks of cardboard boxes with the Mad Hatter logo on the sides and a cube-shaped gray plastic bin big enough to take a bath in.
More red graffiti on the wall to the right of the door caught his eye, and he started to turn to look at it. Then he realized he ought to check behind the door and make sure a monster with bear-trap teeth wasn’t sneaking up on him.
Moving with what he had hoped would be fluid grace but felt more like pathetic galumphing, he spun around the edge of the open door and trained the flashlight beam on what lay beyond it…
Which turned out to be only the entrances to the men’s and women’s rooms, and a drinking fountain between them. Farther down along the wall, hazy and dark at the outer edge of the flashlight’s range, were more big gray plastic bins, stacked one atop the other to a height of twenty feet like children’s blocks.
The coast apparently clear (at least for the moment), Calvin stepped away from the doorway and waved for the others to follow.
They filed out of the corridor and looked around, their flashlight beams swinging this way and that like a light show at a rock concert.
“So, which way now?” Brandon whispered.
“I’m not sure yet,” Calvin whispered back.
“We’re gonna stick together, right?” Donovan said. “Safety in numbers and everything?”
“Yeah,” Brandon agreed. “Because in the movies when they split up in situations like this they all get picked off one by one.”
“Don’t say that,” Lauren said with a wince.
“Sorry, but it’s true.”
“I think we will have to split up, though,” Calvin said. “I mean, look at the size of this place. If we don’t split up, the leucrota could easily slip past us and out the building without our ever even being aware of it. Instead we should probably split into…uh…”
His voice trailed off. While he’d been talking, he had continued exploring the area with his flashlight and had finally directed the beam at the red graffiti he’d seen on the wall.
The problem was, the redness wasn’t just spray paint.
Someone had sprayed “Wildbo” and then started to write another letter, no doubt a Y, the first line of which suddenly veered straight down and disappeared beneath crimson splashes that covered the lower half of the wall in great looping arcs.
The phrase arterial spray bobbed to the surface of Calvin’s mind. He forced it back down. That wasn’t something he wanted to think about too coherently. His nerves were strained enough as it was.
A puddle of dried blood several feet wide caked the floor below the aborted graffiti. A can of red spray-paint lay at the edge of the puddle, its label mostly obscured by blood. Long, curving lines cut through the puddle, showing where something had been dragged through
the blood while it was still wet and had thinned the blood enough for the gray concrete floor to show through. Following these tracks with his flashlight, Calvin saw that as they exited the puddle an inversion occurred, whereby the tracks became lines of blood on bare concrete. The lines stretched off toward the interior of the warehouse, thinning as they went until they faded out altogether about fifteen feet away.
“Oh, man,” Brandon said. His face was whiter than paper. “Oh, man. This is some serious shit.”
“Yeah,” said Cynthia. She looked at Calvin. “Are we sure we want to go through with this?”
Calvin nodded vaguely, only half aware of what she was saying. His attention had been arrested by Tiffany, who stood frozen, her mouth agape, her startled eyes and her flashlight pointed at something on the wall above the blood. Following her gaze, Calvin saw that she had discovered another black-marker graffito, this one to the left of “Wildbo.” It read:
This is the house that Jack built
This is the dog that lives in the house that Jack built
“What the fuck?” Brandon murmured. “This is getting more and more messed up by the second.”
“Look,” Tiffany said in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. She pointed at the graffito’s last few letters, which overlapped a splotch of blood. “This was written afterward. After the graffitist was killed. After the blood was dry.”
“But…” Lauren swallowed. “But who would have…”
“Somebody very comfortable around blood,” Calvin said. “And death. And monsters.”
“Oh,” Donovan said, pointing his flashlight at the bottom of the forklift. “Look. There’s another one.”
They looked. Peeking out from behind one of the forklift’s wheels was a second can of red spray-paint.
“Poor dudes,” Brandon said. “They came to leave a little street art and got chewed up by a monster instead.”
“Street art, my ass,” said Cynthia. “They totally trashed that office back there.”
“Unless the guy with the black marker was the one who trashed it,” Brandon said.
Cynthia glanced at the black writing on the wall.
“Maybe,” she said. But she didn’t really think so. The smallness and neatness of the writing, not to mention its accurate spelling and grammar, suggested someone calm and smart and calculating, not a juvenile rowdy who smashed stuff just for the kicks. Jesus, what kind of person would see and smell this kind of carnage then take the time to ink these spooky little missives?
What was it Calvin had just said? Someone very comfortable around blood. And death. And monsters.
Then again, they’d only just begun their exploration of the warehouse. Perhaps somewhere in here they would find the remains of a half-eaten corpse, a black Sharpie still grasped between its cold, stiff fingers.
But somehow she doubted it. Somehow she suspected that the leucrota would recognize and respect a fellow monster when it saw one.
She smiled grimly to herself. She was making an awful lot of assumptions and extrapolations from just a few silly scribbles. But when she glanced at the others, she could tell they felt exactly the same way.
“So do you still think we should split up?” she asked Calvin.
He hesitated, and she could see he was having second thoughts about not just his search plan but this whole monster-hunting safari.
“If we want to stop this thing, we’ll have to,” he said. “Like I said before, this building’s so big it’ll be able to slip past us and slink right out the door. As long as we stay in groups of two or three—”
“Being in a group of two didn’t help these guys,” she said, gesturing at the puddle of blood.
“No,” he mused, staring at the blood. “No, it didn’t, did it?”
“What about two larger groups?” Tiffany said. “Of three and four?”
Calvin glanced at the weapons they held, then at the puddle of blood again. He shook his head.
“We’d better not. We’d better just stick together.”
He looked around. His gaze settled on the big gray plastic bin.
“Over here,” he said, walking toward the bin. “Somebody help me with this thing.”
The bin’s sides were four feet square, and it was made of thick, dense plastic, making it far too heavy for one person to lift. The twin slots running through its base indicated it was meant to be moved with a forklift.
Calvin, Brandon, Donovan, and Violet got around the bin, one on each side, and while the others used their flashlights to guide them, they lifted the bin and carried it toward the door that led to the corridor they had just come down.
“Close the door,” Calvin told Cynthia as they approached.
She did so, and they set the bin in front of the closed door.
“Now it can’t get out,” Calvin said.
“It might be able to push the bin out of the way,” Lauren said.
“Maybe. But not without making a lot of noise. We’ll hear it if it tries.”
“So now what?” Cynthia asked. “Follow the tracks?” She gestured with her flashlight at the streaks of blood leading into the depths of the warehouse.
Calvin looked at the blackness that loomed beyond the flashlights’ reach, then turned and shone his beam at the can of spray-paint under the forklift.
“Let’s go this way,” he said. “That can didn’t get where it is from over here. I’m betting that one of the two teenagers died next to the door here, and the other one ran off that way. Let’s see if we can figure out what happened to him after that. Besides, I’m thinking it would be best if we make a circuit of the warehouse and get a sense of the layout, then work our way inward.”
With Calvin in the lead, they followed the wall north. Twenty feet past the forklift the wall fell away on their right, dropping back sixty feet to the building’s outer wall where the first five loading docks were located, their metal doors glinting in the flashlight beams. Here and there stood more stacks of cardboard boxes, along with a few stacks of wooden pallets. They also passed a stack of what at first glance looked like gray plastic pallets, but which a closer inspection revealed to be more of those big gray bins with their hinged sides uncoupled and folded inward.
A large office divided this group of loading docks from another farther down. The office sported a long window on the side that faced the interior of the warehouse, and a door on the side the group was approaching from. A sign beside the door read “Shipping/Receiving.” The door was wide open.
Baseball bat raised high, Calvin led the others to the open doorway, then shone his flashlight inside.
Work stations. File cabinets. Bulletin boards. Computers nearly as outdated as Mr. May’s. Overall it looked like any normal office, except…
A dark, humped shape like a long, low heap of filthy laundry lay against the far wall beneath a bulletin board that hung askew. The floor was stained dark red all around the shape. Four thin red lines that could only be the tracks of someone’s fingers ran down the wall above the shape. The smell of rotten meat was nearly overpowering.
It was pretty much a no-brainer that the shape was one of the ill-fated graffitists, but Calvin felt compelled to make sure. Plus, there might be evidence in here that would provide some insight into the leucrota’s behavior or biology and help them defeat it.
“You guys wait here,” he said.
“Absolutely not a problem,” Lauren said with a glance at the shape on the floor.
“No way, man,” Brandon said. “I’m coming, too. Strength in numbers and all that. Our little monster friend might be hiding in there somewhere, just waiting to strike.”
“All right,” Calvin said, secretly relieved not to go alone.
He and Brandon crossed the room toward the shape, constantly sweeping their flashlights back and forth to ensure nothing was slinking out from under a desk or behind a cabinet.
As they neared the shape, Calvin began to wonder why it still looked like a shapeless heap of dark clothes. If it
was a body, shouldn’t he be seeing hair by now? Skin? A face? Then he took a few more steps, and the truth became horribly clear.
The body lay supine, clad in what had once been a blue jacket with white piping, blue jeans, white Nikes, and a dark-blue Cleveland Indians cap. All of these articles of clothing had been saturated with so much blood they were almost completely the same dark-red color as the puddle around them. The body had no face, the entire front of the head from the ears forward having been sliced right off, leaving only a dark bowl full of a thick, mucky mass of decaying tissue. The front of the jacket had been torn away and the flesh underneath devoured, in some places right down to the spine. Plump, pale maggots squirmed across what remained of the corpse’s rotting meat and organs.
“Oh, man,” Brandon said. “That’s…that’s…” He turned, bent over, and threw up.
Calvin had been sure he wouldn’t vomit. He was sickened by the remains on the floor before him, sickened as he had never been sickened in his life, and yes, his body wanted to vomit; a hot burning ball kept trying to force its way up his throat. But till now he had been able to swallow it back.
But when Brandon puked, Calvin lost the battle. It wasn’t simply the fact that Brandon puked that did it, and it wasn’t the sight of the puke, all tan and chunky. No, it was the sound the vomit made as it struck the tiled floor: a thick, heavy patter that swiftly grew wetter and splashier as the vomit piled up.
Calvin couldn’t hold it back anymore. His throat seemed to both tighten and bulge simultaneously as the vomit geysered up his esophagus. He barely managed to turn his head in time to avoid throwing up on his own shoes. The stream of puke struck the side of a file cabinet, making a hollow drumming sound and dotting his pant legs with warm specks of backspray.
When he was done, he straightened up to find Brandon dabbing at his lower lip with the bottom edge of his shirt with almost dainty care.
“Ugh,” Brandon groaned. “That’s the last time I look at a half-eaten corpse.” He tried to smile to show that the comment had been meant to be humorous, but the smile twisted into a grimace as he struggled to hold back a fresh wave of nausea.
“Let’s get out of here,” Calvin said.
“Awesome idea.”
As they turned to go, Calvin caught a glimpse of neat, black writing on a large white marker-board on the wall. The board was dominated by the words, “Thanks for the 55 years!” in blue ink, and, below that, “Party at Neil’s tonight! 7:30! BYOB!” in green ink. The black writing was in the lower right corner of the board, and it had been written in the same small, careful hand as the other black graffiti they had seen. It read:
It’s a dog-eat-dog world
Bon appétit!
“Shit,” Calvin muttered.
They rejoined the others outside the office.
“A body, right?” said Cynthia.
Calvin nodded. “A very well-eaten body.” He hated how shaky his voice sounded.
Tiffany put a hand on his arm and gave him a sympathetic smile. He smiled back, suddenly achingly grateful that she was there, that he had found a girl as amazing as her. He felt an urge to sweep her into his arms and cover her face with kisses. Probably not a good idea under these precarious circumstances, though. And not with the stink of vomit on his breath.
Violet shook her head. “We shoulda brought guns.”
“I told you,” said Calvin. “We—”
There was a series of quick, faint clacks from somewhere in the warehouse. The way the sounds echoed in the huge space made it impossible to tell precisely where they had come from.
“Did you guys hear that?” Cynthia whispered.
“Yeah,” Donovan said. “It’s—”
“Help!” a woman’s voice screamed from the darkness. “Help me! Oh, God, please help me!” The voice was shrill with panic.
Everyone aimed their flashlights in the direction they thought the voice had come from. All of the beams wound up pointing toward the interior of the warehouse, but otherwise no two quite matched up. Between them and the center of the warehouse dozens of those big gray plastic bins were scattered about like rubble from a toppled castle. Their flashlights picked out the sides of the bins in great, bright detail and sent the bins’ shadows stretching long and black across the warehouse floor. At the farthest reaches of the flashlights’ beams, they could just make out the hazy shapes of the foremost line of shelves and the red plastic bins thereon.
“Help me!” the woman’s voice screamed again. “Please! Help!”
Cynthia stepped forward. “Maybe we should—”
Calvin extended his arm, blocking her.
“No,” he said. “It’s the leucrota. It has to be.”
“But…” Cynthia shook her head and stared into the darkness. “How can we be sure?”
“So far this thing hasn’t left anyone alive to cry for help. Not even close.”
A moment later the voice said “help” again, only this time the word was low and half-formed, like someone absently mumbling under their breath. The leucrota must have realized they weren’t going to fall for its usual trickery.
The clacks sounded again, louder this time, closer, though thanks to the way the noises echoed, it remained impossible to determine their exact point of origin. The steps grew louder and louder and faster and faster and soon blurred together into the unmistakable clatter of a galloping four-hoofed animal.
“Oh, shit,” Lauren said, swinging her flashlight and her can of Mace back and forth, unsure where to point them. “Where is it?”
Everyone else’s flashlights were likewise sweeping about. The clop of hooves rang out all around them now, resounding through the darkness.
And then the clatter abruptly stopped, and a tawny black-striped shape hurtled over one of the gray bins and landed twenty feet away, its hooves hitting the concrete floor with a sound as loud as a cymbal crash.
Slightly smaller than the lore books claimed—it was about as tall as Violet—the leucrota crouched there smiling its guillotine smile, its huge round eyes flashing yellow-green as seven flashlight beams converged on it. Flecks of dried blood caked its lips and ruff.
“Holy fucking shit!” Brandon said.
“Shoulda brought guns,” the leucrota said in a perfect imitation of Violet’s voice.
And then it bounded straight at Donovan, Violet, and Lauren, who stood apart from the others and farthest away from the office.
All three of them stood their ground, ready to fight. Lauren leveled the can of Mace, her finger on the trigger. Violet raised her hatchet. Donovan tightened his grip on his butcher’s knife.
At the last moment the leucrota veered left toward Calvin and Brandon, both of whom had started moving forward to aid the others. Now they were caught completely by surprise.
“Yah, fuck!” Calvin screamed, jumping out of the monster’s path. Brandon pirouetted away from the leucrota with surprising grace, swinging his tire-iron at it as he did so. The blow went wide, the iron whistling through empty air.
The leucrota proved defter. As it barreled past, borne along by momentum, it whipped its head at Brandon. There was a flash of bone and a loud clack, and when the leucrota skidded to a halt a few feet from the office door, it held a swatch of black leather between its mouth plates. Brandon glanced down. The bottom left corner of his leather jacket was gone.
The moment the leucrota stopped skidding, it was on the move again, spitting out the shred of leather and whirling around 180 degrees. This brought it face-to-face with Lauren, who had hurried after it, her can of Mace held high, ready to squirt the monster right in its ugly, grinning mug. Mouth open wide, the leucrota charged at her.
She yelped and stumbled backward, firing off a blast of Mace more from reflex than intent. Most of the spray passed harmlessly over the leucrota’s head, but enough of the stinging mist drifted into its face to make it stumble to a clumsy halt, snarling and blinking and shaking its head like a waterlogged dog. Lauren’s stumble, meanwhile, turned into
a full-blown topple as she lost her balance and crashed to her ass on the concrete. The can of Mace dropped from her hand and rolled away across the floor. Donovan tried to track it with his flashlight but it whizzed off into the shadows too fast for him to follow.
While this had been going on, Calvin had snuck up behind the leucrota, and now he raised his Louisville Slugger, ready to deliver a mighty, battle-ending blow.
The leucrota stopped shaking its head and crouched. Calvin thought it must be getting ready to leap at Lauren, and he lunged forward to strike his blow before it could spring. But then he realized—an instant too late for him to do anything about it—that the leucrota was crouching with its front end lower than its rear, all its weight on its forelegs. It had sensed him behind it and was getting ready to kick backward like a mule.
He tried to whack it with the bat anyway, but before the bat could travel half a foot, the leucrota’s rear hooves slammed into his thighs and sent him flying straight backward into Tiffany, who had come up behind him to help. The two of them crashed down in a tangle of limbs right in front of the office door, Tiffany’s tailbone striking the concrete floor and Calvin’s elbow ramming her in the solar plexus. Amid the pain and confusion, she lost hold of both her flashlight and her sickle. The flashlight rolled away in a swift, tight arc and thumped to a stop against the wall to the left of the doorframe, its cone of light picking out every pit and pebble on the concrete floor. The sickle skittered off in the other direction and joined Lauren’s Mace in the darkness.
The leucrota spun around to face them, its hooves clocking on the concrete. Its eyes were watering from the Mace. Its nostrils flared and dripped. A low growl rumbled from its throat. It sounded pissed off yet pleased to finally have such easy prey before it.
Calvin’s feet were just a snap from its lethal maw. But when he tried to swing his legs out of its reach, bolts of pain skewered his thighs, pain so bad it tore a scream from his throat. Oh, fuck! Had it broken his legs?
But the bat. He still had the bat. Throughout his fall, throughout his pain, he had somehow kept hold of it. Gripping its ash handle tight in one hand, he raised the bat above his head, ready to brain the leucrota the moment it got too close.
The leucrota’s eyes flicked to the upraised bat, then back to Calvin’s face.
“Well, well, well,” it said in a voice that was slow and deep and sludgy and that resonated far more than any human voice ought to. It was the eeriest voice Calvin had ever heard. What made it even worse was that there was something mirthful in its tone, a mirth that was black and cold and cruel. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
What did that mean? What was happening again? And whose voice was that? Why did Calvin have the sneaking suspicion it was the same weirdo who had Sharpied the black graffiti all over the warehouse?
A growl replaced the eerie voice, and the leucrota dove straight at Calvin.
Calvin brought the bat down as hard as he could, and for one brief moment, as he watched the wide end of the bat blur toward the leucrota’s head, he really thought that this was it, the end of the hunt, the successful resolution of their first real case, that in a fraction of a second he’d hear the leucrota’s skull burst and feel the bat shiver with the impact…
And then at the last instant, the leucrota raised its head, caught the bat in its mouth, and bit down hard. The bat splintered with a noise like a rifle shot. Shards of ash clattered to the concrete. The handle twisted and fragmented in Calvin’s grip, driving splinters into his palm. With a cry of mingled surprise and pain, he let go of the disintegrating bat.
“What’s happening?” Tiffany cried. She was half-pinned under him, his head and shoulders blocking her view of the melee. “Calvin?”
Eyes fixed on Calvin, the leucrota spat out a mouthful of broken wood, then tensed, ready to spring again, this time to snap up something far tastier than old, dry wood. An arm, perhaps. Maybe a face.
And then Cynthia rushed in on Calvin’s left, pumping blast after blast of vanilla-hazelnut air freshener at the leucrota.
The leucrota started to turn toward her, then caught a shot of air freshener square in the face. With a clipped yelp, it leaped five feet straight back, out of the spray’s reach, and hunched there, hacking and snuffling.
Cynthia stepped in front of Calvin and Tiffany, her back to them, the can of air freshener and the butcher’s knife pointed at the leucrota. Three shadowy figures were creeping up on the leucrota from behind, their flashlights pointed at the ground at their feet to dim the light and help hide their approach. Reflected light flashed milkily off a pair of lenses on the face of the foremost figure. Brandon. He was the only one who wore glasses. A fourth shadowy figure was hanging back, its flashlight likewise held low. Probably Lauren, who had lost her Mace.
“Get inside,” Cynthia told Calvin and Tiffany over her shoulder. “Into the office.”
He wanted to be manly and protest that he could still stand and fight. Except given how his legs felt, he wasn’t sure he actually could stand anymore. And he no longer had a weapon anyway. Neither did Tiffany. Shit.
He rolled off Tiffany, who immediately let out a long, relieved groan. She started scooting backward into the office. Calvin crawled after her, his legs screaming. He could move them now, which he presumed meant they weren’t broken, but every movement made him wince and suck air between his teeth. To make matters worse, his stupid messenger bag kept getting caught underneath him, its dead weight slowing him down. When Tiffany saw the trouble he was having, she yanked the strap off his shoulder and shoved the bag aside, then grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him into the office after her.
Its muzzle damp from the vanilla-hazelnut spritz, the leucrota glared at Cynthia with moist, runny eyes, its bone-smile gleaming in the light from her flashlight. Its eyes flicked from the can of air freshener to Cynthia’s face, then to the knife in her other hand, then at her body. It was gauging its options with a lot more intelligence and calculation than Cynthia wanted to see.
“Don’t even think about it, bitch,” Cynthia said, her voice shaking. The sweat on her palms was making her grip on both the can and the knife slippery, unsteady. Her heart was racing. She suddenly wished she had chosen a more lethal weapon. A flamethrower, perhaps. Or a bazooka.
“Bitch,” the leucrota echoed in Cynthia’s own shaky voice.
Cynthia glanced at the quartet creeping up behind the monster. Brandon, now within striking distance of the beast, was raising his tire-iron. On either side of him Donovan and Violet were advancing toward the leucrota’s flanks, knife and hatchet clutched tight. Lauren, though weaponless, was close behind the others, ready to shine her flashlight on the altercation once it started. Any moment now they would strike and—
The leucrota spun around, crying “Holy fucking shit!” in Brandon’s voice, then lunged at Brandon.
With a startled cry, Brandon jumped out of the way, knocking shoulders with Donovan, who stumbled backward, arms outstretched for balance.
Seeing her chance, Cynthia dashed forward, both knife and spray can raised.
But the leucrota’s lunge at Brandon had been a feint, and with barely a pause the leucrota spun around again to face Cynthia, only this time it didn’t stop to stare at her; it streaked straight at her like a tawny missile.
Screaming, Cynthia blindly chucked the spray can at the leucrota. The can clonked off the leucrota’s forehead, making the monster flinch and briefly stumble. By the time it recovered, Cynthia had whirled around and bolted for the office.
As she barreled through the open doorway, she heard a low, guttural snarl, and there was a brief, sharp tug at her right foot as it kicked out behind her. She didn’t feel any pain, but she had heard that people who lose limbs in accidents or battles don’t always realize anything has happened until they see the oozing stump where a chunk of their body had been a moment before, and she felt horribly certain that when she brought her leg forward, it would come without a foot, just a stump and a strea
mer of blood, and then, since she couldn’t run on a stump, she’d crash to the floor and the leucrota would fall on her and tear out her throat before anyone could stop it.
But when her right leg swung into view, she felt a surge of relief to see the white blur of her sneaker at the end of it. Thank God. Thank…
No, wait. Something was wrong with it. When she put her weight on it, it slid a little and felt lumpy, uneven. And her heel! It felt cold, as if she had stepped in something wet. Oh, God.
She started to reach out to close the door behind her, but saw that Tiffany was already there, half-hidden behind the open door. As soon as Cynthia was clear, Tiffany slammed the door with all her might, right in the leucrota’s snout. A pained yowl rang out on the other side of the metal door.
A moment later came an angry snarl, and the door shuddered as the leucrota flung itself against it. The latch held. They were safe in here unless the leucrota suddenly grew opposable thumbs. Or unless it decided to jump through the long window that faced the warehouse’s interior.
Tiffany fell to her knees beside Calvin.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I could be worse. Here”—he handed her his flashlight—“keep this on my hands.”
She trained the light on his hands, then gasped when she saw the blood that covered them.
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her as he began to pluck the splinters from his palm. He noticed Cynthia examining the sole of her right shoe. “What about you?” he called to her. “Did it get you?”
Cynthia didn’t answer right away. Had they been able to see her face they would have seen the color drain from her cheeks when she saw her foot.
The entire heel of her tennis shoe’s rubber sole was gone, and the heel of the white sock underneath it was torn open. The topmost layer of skin on the rear half of her heel had been sliced away, exposing the rawer, redder skin beneath. The wound wasn’t deep enough to bleed, and it didn’t even hurt when she touched it. She had gotten lucky. Very, very lucky. Half an inch closer, and most of her heel would be gone and she’d probably be infected with the monster version of rabies or ebola or something.
“I’m okay,” she said, her voice gusty with relief.
“So,” Tiffany said. “What should we—”
The leucrota snarled somewhere on the other side of the door. Brandon cried, “Fuck!” Violet screamed in pain. Something heavy and metallic clanged to the floor. A moment later there was a loud thump and the sound of something hard and heavy skidding on the concrete. Donovan let out a quick, clipped cry. Then there was a confused jumble of sounds: running footsteps, clopping hooves, growls, thuds. The sounds quickly receded into the depths of the warehouse.
“Oh, no,” Cynthia said, staring at the door with wide eyes. She looked at Calvin. “We have to do something.”
Calvin had finished picking the splinters out of his palms and was now dabbing blood away with the bottom of his shirt. He looked up at Cynthia.
“I’m open to suggestions,” he said.
It was only then that Cynthia realized how bad off they were: Among the three of them their stock of supplies had been reduced to a butcher’s knife, a can of air freshener, two flashlights, and Cynthia’s bare-bones investigator’s kit; Calvin was too injured to be useful in a fight; and Cynthia herself was hobbling about on a damaged shoe.
“Um…”
Distant noises echoed through the warehouse. Clatters. Bangs. Urgent voices too far away to be understood.
Cynthia and Tiffany hurried over to the long window and looked out onto the warehouse floor. Wincing at the shrieks of pain from his hands and thighs, Calvin struggled to his feet and staggered after them like something out of Night of the Living Dead.
The interior of the warehouse was pitch-black except for the beams of three flashlights waving madly back and forth as their wielders raced down the aisles. One of the lights was on the far left side of the window and swiftly moving farther and farther away. The other two were speeding in the opposite direction, one flashlight a few feet ahead of the other, almost parallel with Calvin, Cynthia, and Tiffany’s position and ten or twelve rows back. At first there were too many merchandise-laden shelves in the way to tell who was holding these latter flashlights. But then the pair of lights crossed one of the wide aisles that separated two rows of shelving units. As the rearmost light swept over the person in front, it revealed quick glimpses of a billowing black trench coat and a long brown ponytail.
“That’s Donovan,” said Cynthia, the relief in her voice palpable.
“And probably Violet right behind him,” said Tiffany. “See how the light’s lower down? She’s the only one who’s that short.”
As if in confirmation, they heard Violet shout something, her voice faint and tinny through the glass. They couldn’t make out much of what she was saying, but the word “fuck” was clearly audible. A moment later the duo entered an aisle in another row of shelves and mostly disappeared from sight again.
“Where’s the fourth flashlight?” Calvin said. “Damn it, where’s the fourth?”
“Maybe…” Cynthia swallowed. “Maybe somebody just dropped their flashlight.”
“Great. That means someone’s running around out there without being able to see where they’re going. They’ll probably run right into the leucrota. If they haven’t already.” Calvin felt himself on the verge of panic. This had been his idea, his mission-plan. If somebody got killed or maimed or…
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to rein in the sense of helplessness that formed the quivering, black core of his panic. He wasn’t helpless, damn it. There were always options.
He turned and shone his flashlight on the floor just inside the doorway. As he had thought, one of the longer shards of his baseball bat had gotten dragged in here along with him when Tiffany pulled him to safety. It was long and sharp, similar to the stakes traditionally used to kill vampires.
No, he wasn’t helpless at all.
He staggered toward the doorway.