Cruel World Read online

  In the second-to-last folder, he found the generator’s manual. He paged through it, the word ‘troubleshooting’ standing out in bold print. Maybe he could even get the generator fired up tonight if he hurried. Quinn closed the manual and grabbed the flashlight from the desktop. Outside, the first lashings of rain fell, streaking the glass in silver rivers that shone in the halogen’s glow. Stepping into the loft he paused, shining the light over the places that he and Foster had sat. Ghosts of memories trailing to him through the years were replaced with the image of the man sitting behind the wheel of his truck, waiting for Mallory to leave the house for the last time. Leave him for the last time. And there had been no goodbye.

  A harsh scraping came from the far side of the room.

  Quinn’s chest tightened and he shone the light to the furthest corner. Nothing moved but the sound continued. It was as if a tree branch were sliding along the outside of the house. Shhhhhhhhhhhhik.

  The sound cut off and he waited, breath suspended in his lungs, eyes wide-staring across the room. The seconds ticked by and the light’s beam shook.

  Something moved past the picture window.

  He spun, only catching the faintest hint of movement out of the corner of his eye, every hair on his arms and neck standing upright. Darkness had crept from the forest and surrounded the house, the yard barely visible through the hesitant rain. What had it been? A bird zipping past? Quinn swallowed and lowered the light before flicking it off. The window became more transparent without the halogen’s glow and he walked toward it, the floor creaking with each step. Lightning lit the yard, the flash far off and only providing a moment of ambient luminance. Something must have blown by the window, a piece of debris carried by the wind. Maybe it was the same thing that had slid along the wall. But it hadn’t looked like something untethered floating on the air. In the brief glimpse he’d gotten, it had looked steady and lithe.

  Like something walking.

  A thump came from downstairs in the direction of the kitchen. The direction it had gone.

  Quinn hurried to the stairs and clambered down them, holding the unlit flashlight like a knife. He stopped at the base of the stairway and peered around the entry to the kitchen with one eye. The window over the sink was dark, nothing moving outside its glass. He took two steps to the middle of the living room and the same sound as before came from the rear of the house. Shhhhhhhhhhhhik.

  The image of the pistol came to him again and he turned, following the sound. It stopped as lightning flashed, immediately overlaid with a concussive blast of thunder so close it vibrated against his skin. In the brief flare, he spotted the heavy gun safe in the corner of the living room and crept toward it. Foster hunted deer every year, always taking a full two weeks off to stay at his cabin in Pennsylvania. But his guns he kept close to home.

  Quinn found the safe’s handle in the dark and turned it, letting out a sigh as the door clunked open. He triggered the light and swept it around the inside of the steel box.

  It was empty.

  Of course Foster would have taken all his weapons with him. Why had he thought otherwise? Quinn moved back to the front door and looked out into the storm. Rain fell in sheets across the yard, obscuring the road that led to the main drive. The trees swayed and sawed at the sky, their branches bony, reaching hands. A thump came from the rear of the house and he grasped the knob, his muscles trembling like those of a racehorse moments before the horn. With a lunge, he heaved the door open and sped into the rain, its touch cold and instantly soaking through his t-shirt.

  He left the door standing open and tore across the yard, not looking back, only running. The rain was a solid curtain that draped the driveway from view, but he ran in its general direction, his hand gripping the flashlight that he left off. The wind sang in his ears, his breath a jagged rhythm. The driveway materialized and his feet splashed through a puddle, the water icy through his pants leg.

  A tree snapped behind him.

  It wasn’t the creaking break of the storm doing its work on a branch. Something was following him.

  He ran harder, pushing himself down the lane, rain filtering into his mouth. Quinn swiped at his eyes, trying to clear them. He gasped, sucking down more rainwater as he pelted on. He was drowning on land.

  The lane widened and he almost launched himself across the main drive but managed to make the corner and keep going without breaking his stride. There was another crack somewhere behind him, but it was lost in a rattle of thunder as more lightning flared above the trees, giving him a brief view of the open drive ahead. The gun, he had to get the gun. Get in the house and get the gun. The words became a mantra in time with his steps. The air whistled past him and his feet splashed as he ran, arms pumping at his sides. The road curved, and he leaned into it, running faster than he ever had before.

  Lightning flickered, illuminating the massive face of his home through the veils of falling water and a bright burst of warmth surged within him. He was almost there, another hundred yards and he would be inside. The wind shoved the trees into a fury, their tops bowing and snapping back as if trying to uproot themselves and chase after him. His feet hit the soft grass as he sped around the end of the house, and as he tried to make the last turn, his sodden shoes slipped and the world tipped to the side. Quinn fell hard on his shoulder, sliding on the soaking lawn. The air flew from his chest, pumped from his lungs by the impact. He rolled to his stomach and began to push himself up as he looked back the way he’d come.

  Something tall and thin was striding down the driveway toward him.

  Quinn felt his jaw unhinge as his heart stuttered. With arms he couldn’t feel, he pushed himself to his feet and ran up the back steps to the door. He’d lost the flashlight and generator manual when he’d fallen, but that wasn’t important. He needed the gun because what was that thing coming toward the house? It hadn’t been a bear. It had been tall. Much too tall.

  His hand slipped on the doorknob and he let out a hoarse moan. It was right behind him, it had to be. Its hands, its hands were huge.

  The door opened and he swung inside, slamming it so hard he expected the glass to shatter in its frame. His numb fingers fumbled with the lock and finally snapped it home. Lightning erupted above the house and flared the yard into a blizzard of light.

  There was nothing there.

  Quinn stumbled down the hall, afterimages dancing in the darkness. His feet tried to slip again on the wood floor as he went by the stairway and he latched onto the bannister to steady himself. Wind buffeted the house, its frame protesting in groans and pops that sent shocks through his nerves with each new sound. His hands shook as he opened the door to the solarium and stepped inside.

  Rain pelted the half-dome of glass in a cacophony, splattering and running rivers down its side. Familiar shapes of furniture were oblong and strange in the darkness as he navigated around them, trying to hurry without falling. The table near the reclining chair was ahead, the XDM lying on its surface. Thunder rumbled again, very close, and Quinn groped in the dark for the table’s edge. He found it and ran his hands across its surface, searching for the hard polymer grip of the handgun. There was a horrifying second where his fingers met nothing, but then they closed over the heavy shape and he pulled it toward him as thunder became a war drum in his ears. His finger found the trigger and he stepped around the chair into the center of the solarium, freezing as the panes shuddered again. His skin prickled.

  It wasn’t thunder vibrating the glass.

  His thumb found the switch on the gun’s grip and pressed it. A lance of light shot from beneath the barrel and illuminated an enormous face staring down at him from the solarium’s roof.

  Quinn squeezed the trigger and the gun bucked. The glass pane beside the face shattered and fell in shining pieces with the rain. There was a screeching hiss that fluttered his ringing eardrums and a hand the size of a hubcap shot through the hole on the end of a skinny arm that kept coming like a snake leaving its den. Its fingers were l
ong and pale, their tips dark and scraped raw.

  Quinn tripped over a chair and fell backward, his tailbone exploding with pain as his ass met the hard flooring. The XDM flew from his grip and clattered into the dark, its light winking out. A deep reverberation, like a bullfrog croaking, filled the room. It shook the center of his chest as if massive speakers were inches away with the bass on full volume. Cold, wet flesh brushed his face and something snagged his t-shirt, yanking him to the side. Quinn cried out, his voice high and airy. He was the rabbit now, its terror his own. Long fingers curled in the fabric around his neckline and pulled, drawing him onto his feet. Lightning cut the night, and in the brief flash, Quinn’s bladder released.

  The thing’s huge head was human, but elongated and stretched as if made of taffy. Its mouth hung open revealing spaced teeth and a lolling tongue. It was naked, its torso skeletal and distorted by its towering height. It leaned over the solarium, the top of its skull patched with discolored hair at least ten feet above the ground.

  It adjusted its grip, releasing the hold it had on his shirt so that its thumb pressed against his breastbone and the rest of its fingers dug into his back. It squeezed.

  All the air rushed from him, the vice on his chest unrelenting. The thing croaked again, an eager sound, one of anticipation and barely restrained excitement. It drew him upward toward the hole it reached through, its skinny arm hoisting him easily. Flickers of light gathered at the corners of Quinn’s vision and he thrashed in its grip, the last of his air leaking out of him in a squeal. The world was losing focus, like a film heating up before a projector bulb. His arms flailed and he struck the thing’s wrist, but it continued to pull him up, its mouth open and waiting. Something scraped his shoulder, and as it passed, he latched onto it, trying to stop his progress, but it came free in his hand. It was sharp and heavy and the pain that it brought as it sliced through his palm delivered a single frame of clarity that honed every detail to an edge.

  Quinn raised the shard of glass and brought it down as hard as he could on the thing’s arm.

  The glass cut through the pale flesh, unzipping it as if there had been a hidden seam there all along. The tip glanced off hard bone and ripped free, spewing dark blood onto the rain-soaked glass. A foul blast of air swept over him, reeking of old meat, and the baritone cry exploded inches from his face, sending an icepick into each eardrum.

  Then the hand around his chest was gone and he was falling back to the solarium’s floor. He hit hard, the entire world jarring in his vision and there was a sharp pain in his ankle that eclipsed the burning cut on his hand. He gasped and drank the air in as rain and blood pattered around him. The thing roared again, its cry rising from the croak to a keening as it reached for him with its good arm.

  Quinn scrambled back, sliding out of its reach as he searched the dark for the XDM. The sky fluttered with light, and he glimpsed the huge hand outstretched toward him, fingertips stabbing the floor as he pulled his feet away. Quinn spun and crawled to the far corner, his fingers knocking something away before latching onto it again. Glass shattered behind him and the thing bellowed, its sound filling the room, the world. Quinn turned and fired into the darkness.

  It was there in the muzzle flash, hunched and striding toward him, reaching. The bullet took its index finger off its left hand above the first knuckle. The digit dropped free and fell to the floor like a worm hacked in two. Its massive face constricted in a rictus of pain and clutched its wounded hand, blood jetting free in thin spurts. Its eyes found him in another flicker of lightning, and there was something there in them, something familiar.

  It leapt forward, long legs uncoiling, gapped teeth bared. Quinn fired again, the shot tearing out a chunk of flesh from its shoulder, but it kept coming. It hit him with the force of a car, sending the ceiling and floor into a spin as he flew across a table and slammed through a glass panel.

  He somersaulted on the wet ground before sliding to a stop. His spine was crushed, he was sure of it. The storm bared down on him, forcing an icy whip of wind across his skin, bitter rain into his mouth and eyes. The gun, where was the gun? He raised his right hand and found that he still gripped the weapon, though he couldn’t feel it. The thing in the solarium punched out two panes of glass and climbed through, its snarling face there and gone in the storm. Quinn sat up and fired a shot that went wide, blasting the window above the monster. A large piece of glass slid free from the broken frame, as it tried to struggle into the open, and sliced into the thing’s back behind its jutting shoulder blades. Its cry cut the night and overrode the thunder that cracked in the sky. It flailed first one way and then the other, the heavy chunk of glass in its back snapping off as it hauled itself free of the building. Quinn steadied the gun with both hands, flipping the light on as he squeezed the trigger.

  The pistol kicked, and the bridge of the thing’s nose collapsed inward. Matter flew free of the back of its head, spattering the remaining glass with bits of bone and flesh. It wavered there, wobbling on its stringy arms, nearly free of the solarium for a long heartbeat, and then tipped forward onto its side. Quinn kept the gun trained on its still form as he counted. When he reached a hundred he managed to stand, his legs barely holding him. There was a hornets’ nest buried in his back that sent a thousand stings up his spine as he took three shuffling steps forward then stopped. Training the light on the creature’s ruined head, he stood unmoving as the rain came down around him, stinging in scrapes and cuts.

  The storm faded away completely as he stared, disbelief pressing down on him until his legs finally gave out and he crumpled beside the skeletal figure, the gun’s light glinting off the gold earring in the thing’s left ear.

  Chapter 9

  Revelations

  He spent the night in his own bed with the door shut and locked, a chair shoved beneath the knob.

  Sleep was fleeting, coming in short spans that he woke from shaking and clutching the pistol so hard his fingers ached. The storm continued to crash around the house, howling through the destroyed solarium with a hollow voice. Near morning it moved off to the east and burnt out over the ocean, leaving the sky clear enough to see the gray edge of dawn creeping up from the water like fog.

  As the room lightened by degrees, Quinn lay on his side, his back throbbing, hand pulsing in dull strobes with each heartbeat. He stared at the wall, glancing occasionally at the painting his father had given him when he was twelve. It was a vibrant watercolor of a river valley filling with the first light of day. Rolling hills speckled with trees holding the orange and reds of fall on their branches fell down to a blue river, its surface cut by the heads of rocks peeking from its depths. His father had told him it was a real place, that he’d seen it firsthand. He’d commissioned an artist to capture it on canvas, saying that a photo wouldn’t have done it justice. You have to feel it, Quinn, and the only way to feel something that you haven’t seen in real life is through art.

  Quinn rose from the bed, his joints full of spiked rust. He hobbled across the room, his ankle flaring like a hot coal each time he put weight on it. He reached the painting and stood looking at it for a long time until the brushstrokes blended together into a haze.

  He tore the painting from the wall and flung it across the room.

  It hit the foot of his bed, the glass shattering and sprinkling the floor. The frame shifted and released its hold on the colorful canvas. The picture folded beneath itself and lay still. He breathed hard, each inhalation painful. He could still feel a giant hand squeezing his chest.

  He made his way downstairs to find the sun coating the floor in the living room gold. A cool draft leaked from the direction of the solarium and he shivered, pulling on a sweatshirt hanging in the closet. He opened a can of smoked herring and sat eating it at the counter, staring into nothing. The XDM lay beside the warm can of pop, its grip in easy reach. He would never go anywhere without it again.

  After choking down the last of the salty fish, he rinsed the can and threw it in the tras
h, which was almost full. It was starting to smell.

  He stood at the kitchen window looking at the puddles shining on the drive. They were splotches of blue, reflecting the faultless sky. A chill ran through him. The puddles were the same color as the thing’s eyes outside. Graham’s eyes.

  Dizziness swarmed him and the kitchen tilted. His briny breakfast made a leap for the back of his throat, but he gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose until it settled back in place. Fresh blood leaked from the makeshift bandage around his palm from gripping the counter so hard. He’d need to dress it properly. But first he had other things to do.

  On the way out the kitchen door, he paused at the junk drawer and sifted through the contents. In the very back was a small tape measure with a maximum length of twenty feet. He held it for thirty seconds before replacing it and slamming the drawer shut and heading outside.

  The day was cool despite its clarity. Quinn hugged the sweatshirt closer to him as he limped around the side of the house, waiting for the moment the solarium and the thing lying outside of it would come into view. It won’t be there. It will have regenerated somehow and dragged itself off. It’s watching you right now. The thoughts were enough to make him halt and bring the gun up from his side. He turned in a slow circle. Birds spoke somewhere in the woods, unseen in the branches. In the distance, waves crashed against rocks. When he managed to shuffle forward, the ends of pale fingers, upturned to the sky, came into view.

  It lay where it had fallen; it hadn’t moved overnight.

  Quinn approached it, going around its side to where he’d sat the night before. He’d lost track of time after seeing the earing hanging from its distended lobe and only come to when lightning struck a tree a hundred yards from the house, showering the ground with sparks that winked out like falling stars. He knelt, steadying himself with one hand on the ground as he took in the sight.