Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (23 page)

And for the first time in a long, long time, I felt fear. Real fear.

I hate when that happens.

So I continued scanning the forest, as my heart thumped in my chest for the first time in years. I literally couldn’t think of when anyone—or anything—had gotten the upper hand on me.

The forest was silent.

No, not quite silent. There might have been breathing. Except it was coming from seemingly everywhere at once. I kept turning in circles, doing my damnedest to get a handle on what was out here; in particular, on what it was, taking these small, shallow, controlled breaths.

I reached out with my mind. I can do this. I can do many things to hunt and kill and feed. Except I was having difficulty focusing now. Knowing there was something out there, something seemingly faster and stronger than me was unnerving.

Impossible, of course
.
I am the greatest hunter. The most successful hunter.
My own breathing intruded now, which is strange, since I don’t need to breathe. No, I was breathing out of habit. A habit of fear. A fear of being hunted.

There. Another sound. A tree branch snapping, and now I was on the move, covering the open space of the forest floor quickly, pouncing upon the site where I’d just heard the snap—

Except, there’s nothing here.

I spun around, when something reached around my neck, something much bigger than me, something more powerful than anything I’d ever encountered before. Something inhuman. Hell, something not of this earth.

It is a hand, clamped around my throat, lifting me off the ground.

I fight it, using my own great strength, strength that has let me hunt and kill and maim and spread fear around the globe for centuries.

Except I… cannot… fight it.

Sweet Jesus.

This isn’t happening.

The hand continues to squeeze. My hiking shoes dangle as I go down fighting, struggling, even as my neck is being literally crushed.

Now, I hear the sounds of more heavy footfalls.

Grunts, too.

And deep-throated growls.

Coming from seemingly everywhere. My eyes bulge, slowly being forced from their sockets as the powerful hand continues to squeeze.

Hazy images take shape before me.

Huge images. Hairy images. Unspeakably horrible images. They surround me, watch me curiously, heads tilted…

My vision fades. The pain is excruciating, unbearable. Even my supernatural ability to heal cannot keep up with the steady pressure. Still, I fight the clawed hand. The clawed and hairy hand. I dig into it, raking it with my nails, but this only causes the creature to tighten its grip.

The others draw closer, turning their heads curiously, and as their lips draw open, I smell that ungodly stink, even as their mouths drip saliva.

The snap I hear is my own neck.

And it is only when the creatures descend upon me, tearing at my flesh and making wet feasting sounds, do I realize that the hunter has been the hunted.

am a superhero.

Well, kind of. If you call a hulking man with a tail, two horns, and a bad attitude a superhero, then I’m your man.

Or whatever the hell I am.

Anyway, I haven’t always been this strong—or this weird looking. I haven’t always been known as The Bull. No, there was a time when I was very much like you. I call those the simple times—back when I had to only worry about paying my rent, or what TV show to watch, or if I hadn’t paid my cable bill, what DVD to watch, if I hadn’t paid my electricity, what Starbucks to hang out in, or, well, you get the idea.

Yes, there was some stress. Having creditors on your ass sucks. Not knowing if you will have enough money to get through the month sucks. Working for a pittance sucks.

But nothing—and I mean nothing—compares to the shit I put up with now.

I went from wild panic attacks from not making rent, to nearly daily heart attacks fighting villains. And it all started with that damn bull.

Every superhero has an origin story. Here’s mine:

I used to be a rodeo clown.

Not a very good one, either, hence my inability to find steady work. Still, I would occasionally get “the call.” That’s when they’d pull one of us out of a Rolodex for when a real rodeo clown gets sick or injured. Luckily, I live in Rustic City, Arizona, arguably the rodeo capitol of the world. So, yes, on any given day or night there is a rodeo in town.

So, the moment I would get the call, it was a mad rush to get the makeup on. Once done, I’d be out the door and hauling ass in my old Hyundai. Mad clown in a clunker. More than once, I’d been pulled over. Don’t let anyone fool you. Clowns don’t make everyone happy, especially cops. And kids. More often than not, as I waited at a red light, drumming my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, I would look over at the car next to me and see a kid hysterically crying and pointing at me. Mothers and fathers would give me bad looks. I would shrug, point to my sad clown face, and sigh.

It was on such a night, having first earned another speeding ticket and making twin boys cry (and maybe even their mother), that I went from a mere Carl Gray, part-time rodeo clown, to Carl Gray, full-time superhero.

As most things in my life, this last clown-hurrah was in no way a smooth sail. I had been gored nearly a half a dozen times—all to the delight of the crowd—when the freak storm hit. In a flash, rain and hail pelted the outdoor stands and arena. Patrons went dashing for shelter. I would have gone dashing for shelter, too, except for one thing; I was in the middle of the arena with one very angry bull. A big and aggressive S.O.B we called El Diablo.

The Devil.

The bull rider had lasted all of 1.8 seconds on the snorting, furious beast before he went flying ass over feet through the air. He wasn’t the first—nor would’ve been the last, for that matter. Riding El Diablo was like riding anger itself… if anger had four legs, a tail, and two horns.

Anyway, I stepped out into the middle of the arena and did my best to distract the brute when the skies opened up. And El Diable
charged
. Charged me, for the sake of clarification.

Which reminds me of an old joke: How do you stop a bull from charging? Take away his credit card.

I wish. I scrambled to get out of his way. Scrambled and, sadly, slipped. Remember the rain? I swore and clawed at the dirt, trying like hell to find my feet when two things happened simultaneously: El Diablo lowered his head… and lightning struck.

Both at the exact same time.

That’s all I remember.

I awoke days later at the Rustic City Hospital.

I came to slowly, aware that, as usual, I was alone. Not even a friend sitting by my side to see if I would pull through. Well, I pulled through all right. Maybe too well.

As I lay there in the intensive care unit, blinking and trying to assess just how bad the damage was, I came to one conclusion:

I was doing very well indeed.

Nothing seemed to be broken. In fact, nothing about me seemed injured in any way. According to the nurse on duty who swung by to check on me, I had been in a three-day coma with a massive head wound. Apparently, the bull had done its best to trample me into oblivion. Except…

Well, except the exact opposite happened.

The nurse was impressed. Terrified too, judging by her quaver as she fiddled with the dials on the machines recording stats that showed I was, “R-right as rain, p… pardon the pun.”

As bedside manners go, hers left something—quite
a lot
of something—to be desired.

So, what did happen, you say? Why the bull. It had literally disappeared off the face of the earth.

No shit.

Well, I have an opinion about that. In fact, so do a lot of people. I’m kind of a celebrity these days. Go figure.

Anyway, the bull didn’t disappear off the face of the earth. No. Thanks to that freakish lightning strike, I’m fairly certain the bull and I became one.

At least, if these horns and my now famous tail have anything to do with it.

Yes, I now sport a longish tail that actually ends in a fluffy little ball.

Not as cute as it might seem. That fluffy little ball itches like hell and has a nasty habit of getting caught in stupid elevators and stupid sliding glass doors.

Stupid, stupid bull.

Anyway, it wasn’t long after my release from the hospital when the horns appeared. Within hours of being back at my apartment, the first bumps showed up above my temples. Another hour after that, two black, sharp horns tore through my skin to curve up and out, blossoming above my head like something out of the devil’s own garden.

Yeah, I was freaked, man.
Freaked.

I studied myself in the mirror. Pale faced and sick to my stomach as I ran my hands up along the thick horns, tentatively touching their tips with my own fingertips.

“This isn’t happening,” I said over and over (and sometimes still to this day).

The horns were firmly attached to my skull, as if screwed in. As if they’d always been there. Worse, as if they would
always
be there.

Stupid, freakish horns.

And as I paced in my small apartment while the cousin of that freak rainstorm, which had brought the even freakier lightning strike, pummeled the good town of Rustic City, I felt something appear in my pants.