Scary Out There (32 page)

The last Cloak turned to sneer at her.

A burst of blinding light made her cry out and shield her eyes. The Cloaks began to scream, and she heard the ripple of their leathery wings as they jerked backward. They turned their backs to the enormous battery of solar lamps that shone down from above the ER entrance, and smoke rose from their flesh. The Cloaks stood up straight, wings wrapped around them as they padded away, unable to fly as long as they needed the wings to shield them. Wings furled, they looked like darkly hooded men, sinister figures in cloaks, lurking in the dark corners of human nightmare.

Just beyond the reach of the lights, the Cloaks began to shriek at the nighttime sky and spread their wings once more, leaping up into the darkness.

Kayah aimed Quinney's gun at the moon, hoping to shoot them, before remembering that she had run out of bullets.

The truck began to roar in reverse, Delmar coming back for them. Or at least for Quinney.

With a loud clanking, the metal doors in front of the ER began to roll upward.

Kayah and Quinney spun to see a scowling, white haired man step out into the glare of the solar lamps with a pair of women in
security uniforms behind him. The guards carried assault rifles and hustled out, trying to cover Kayah and Quinney and the rumbling truck and the perilous night sky all at the same time.

“Idiot kids,” the scowling man said. “Get inside. You've got about thirty more seconds of this light. We don't have the power to keep the lamps on for longer—that's why the damn doors were closed!”

The skids were already running from the truck, lured by the promise of the open door. They would be safe in the hospital until morning came, and they could go back to their lives.

Quinney gave Kayah a push and she started moving too.

“My mother—” she began, and the two of them turned together. They would take Naira inside, and the doctors would see to her.

Except that her mother had begun to writhe on the ground. Smoke rose from her face and seeped out from inside her clothes. Kayah couldn't move. The breath froze in her lungs, and the tears dried on her cheeks.

Beside her, Quinney spoke her name, oh so gently. That made it worse. His tenderness made it real.

On the pavement between Kayah and Quinney and the open doors of the ER, Naira began to howl in anguish. The armed guards and the white haired man jerked backward, ducking back inside. Beyond them, in the darkened corridor of the ER, Delmar and Tynan reappeared, trying to get a glimpse of what transpired outside.

Naira's scream cut off.

She bucked against the ground, more smoke rising from her flesh, and then she began to crawl. Kayah moved then, reaching for her, whimpering a word that might have been “momma.” Quinney slammed into her, wrapped his arms around her, and yanked her out of the way as Naira scrabbled and slithered past them, dragging herself out beyond the reach of the sunlamps.

The sunlamps, whose battery life was ticking down to nothing.

The doctor and the security guards shouted at them to get inside, but Kayah felt as if they spoke to her from some other world, from beyond the wall between day and night. Hollowed out inside, she watched her mother rise from the pavement, there in the shadows at the edge of the pool of light.

Naira rose, shuddering, and the sound was like tearing leather.

The wings ripped out of her back and spread wide, then wrapped around her in a healing cocoon. A shroud. A cloak.

Quinney grabbed her face, turned her toward him. “Kayah!”

She fought him off, watching as her mother took flight, slipping up into the night sky as if she had been born to the moonlight. Almost beautiful.

“Come on!” Quinney shouted in her ear.

Kayah looked at him, met his gaze, and saw his regret.

“They bled her,” he said. “You did everything you could, but they're gonna come back, Kai. We've gotta go inside!”

Voices were shouting from the ER. She glanced over and realized that she had been hearing a grinding noise for several seconds—the sound of the metal barriers rattling back down in their frames. The sunlamps flickered and began to dim, leaving bright afterimages in her eyes.

“Come inside!” Quinney insisted.

Kayah breathed. She stared at him. “You know I can't.”

“Kai—”

“You know where she's going.”

Quinney swore. He pressed his eyes shut for a second and then turned to stare out at the black silhouettes of the city at night, the buildings in the distance and all the open space in between.

They both knew where Naira would be flying. When the Cloaks bled someone, when they reproduced like that, the newborn monstrosity rose into the dark with only one objective—to return home and kill everyone they found there.

Joli
, Kayah thought.

“Quinney,” she said, taking his face in her hands. Turning him toward her, just as he had done a moment ago. “She's all I have left.”

The truck still idled, engine growling, not thirty yards away.

Kayah and Quinney stood face-to-face as the metal doors of the ER rattled all the way down and locked into place and the sunlamps flickered out, leaving them in darkness.

They began to run.

Christopher Golden
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Snowblind
,
Dead Ringers
,
Tin Men
, and many other novels for adults and teens. With Mike Mignola, he cocreated the comic book series Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective
.
His books are available in more than fourteen languages around the world. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family.

Website:
christophergolden.com

Twitter:
@ChristophGolden

Facebook:
facebook.com/christophergoldenauthor

KENDARE BLAKE

H
e'd called her a mermaid, but he was the only one who did. She moved through water like she was made for it, he said. Like she had fins. Gills. She supposed it was a strange compliment. But it was nicer than the things that other people said. Things like Darla the Doberman. Darla the Dog. They barked at her when she took her mark. They barked again when she won her race. Even her teammates—and over time the insult had become almost a cheer, as if she really were Darla the Dog, their amazing swimming mascot, who jumped in to fetch floating balls and shook herself dry upon leaving the pool.

Darla never grew to like the names. She never accepted the role they cast her in, though sometimes it was hard. People liked dogs, after all, and after she won her breaststroke event they liked her plenty. They rubbed her head, and she almost let them. Being the Dog was degrading, but it was still an improvement over the things she'd been called before she made the swim team. Ugly Darla. Fugly Darla. Butterface. As in, sure, she's got a nice body . . . but HER FACE!

And then Jason Fahle called her the Mermaid. Right out in the open. Right in front of everybody. And what Jason Fahle said, nobody thought to question.

Darla sat at a table near the windows of Tom's Anchor and looked out at the quiet docks of the marina after sundown. No one out there now besides a few hunched fishermen, working under swinging lamps. The rich folks had gone home to their stationary houses on green hills, and their boats and daysailers would float quietly, untouched until the weekend. Darla liked the ocean at night. The ocean in the day was a bimbo with a broad smile, distracted and dumb. But at night what waves there were lapped restlessly at the sand and the wood, as if trying to puzzle them out. At night the ocean cared more about watching than being watched, and staring into the dark water felt to Darla almost like company.

She often came to Tom's Anchor at night, after her shift ended down the street at the Bay Club, the fancy restaurant where she'd worked for the last year, part-time during school and full-time in the summer. The manager who hired her had said she'd be out of the kitchen and waiting tables in three months. Almost a year later she was still in the back, washing dishes. They only let her out to bus after closing. A face like hers didn't belong around people trying to eat a meal. No one had said so to her directly, of course, but she knew what they were thinking.

Darla sighed and propped her feet up on the chair opposite. Her feet always hurt after she worked or stood for too long.
It didn't matter how many supportive insoles she bought. Her feet were useless things, unable to bear weight. She looked out the window back at the waves until her eyes lost focus. The corners of the windowpanes at Tom's were dirty and speckled with fly dirt. Enough to be visible even during the late hours, when the only light inside was from the dusty lamps and equally dusty and cockeyed wall sconces. She thought how she ought to stop holding out hope of fattening her wallet on rich people's tips, and come to work here. Here, they'd let her out front. She could bust the fishermen's chops when they lost their sea legs on beer. She could get a better nickname. But there were so many rich people. And so many tips.

Jobs, she thought, and kicked her heel against her schoolbag, where it sat like a loyal pet. Green canvas with frayed edges and a brown leather buckle. It looked old, and a little filthy. No one ever bothered it or asked to see inside. That was a lucky thing, tonight.

“Here you go, hon. No tomato, and steak fries doused with sea salt and vinegar, just as you like.”

Rose set down a platter of cheeseburger and fries, and a refill on Darla's Diet Pepsi. She had stuck her thumb into Darla's ketchup, and wiped it dry on her red apron.

“You okay, sweetie?” Rose asked. “You've seemed a bit down, these last few weeks.”

“Just tired,” Darla replied.

Rose eyed her skeptically, but said, “All right,” and walked
away, her ample hips and long blond hair swaying. Rose was a kind woman, if not terribly bright, and if anyone cared that she sometimes spilled a drink on you or put her fingers in your ketchup, then no one dared to say so out loud. It was common knowledge at Tom's Anchor that Tom's anchor was Rose, the only woman pretty enough to keep him on dry land after fifteen years of working the boats. Fifteen years on the boats, and another fifteen behind the Anchor's bar, and these days neither Tom nor Rose had much of whatever prettiness had drawn them together. But Tom still smacked Rose's backside whenever she passed him through the kitchen, and Rose winked more often than she brushed his hand away.

It was nice, love like that. It was true. It wasn't meant for Darla, with her hound's face and trash name. Darla. A name for bottle blondes. One day maybe she'd do it, if she could manage to grow her thin, mousy brown mop long enough to bother.

She eyed her fries, and after some staring, ate two. Before she knew it, the platter was empty aside from the garnish of iceberg lettuce. She hadn't figured on eating so fast. Hadn't figured on having much of an appetite at all. But that was all right. Judging by the good-time girl wall clock with the swinging, gartered leg, Jason would already be at the pool, waiting.

•  •  •

The first day he spoke to her was after practice. He came over like it was nothing, towel draped around his neck, T-shirt wet and clinging to every indentation of his chest, and she could say she hadn't
blushed, but she'd be a bald-faced liar. Faces reddened routinely when Jason Fahle spoke. He was a man among boys, the kind that, had they been down south, would have been said to give girls the vapors. He had just broken up with Miranda Halverston, a rough, loud, soapy breakup that would have been humiliating for anyone else. But Jason walked the halls half smiling. Eyes front, he stayed in his lane. Darla had noticed that about him. Maybe he had noticed her noticing.

“That was good,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the pool, the tiles sloppy with splashed water. She was still in her cap.

“You shaved off a second, I think.”

She hadn't. She hadn't even swum particularly well. Darla was a competition swimmer. It was the challenge of unknown rivals that pumped her blood, not the tick of Coach Mathis's stopwatch.

“What are you still doing here?” she asked.

“Hot tub,” he replied. “I think I strained something in my shoulder. Maybe I'm overextending.”

“Didn't look like it to me. You looked fine. I got here early.” She bit down on her tongue before she could explain further. She was on the girls' team. They had practice. She could be at the pool whenever she liked.

“I can tell that about you,” he said. “You pay attention. You're focused. Outside of the water, that is.”

“I'm focused in the water,” she said, her voice low.

“You're driven in the water. There's technique but there's no precision. It's not an insult. You know you're the best on the team.”

He leaned down, so close she could count the droplets on his biceps without it seeming like staring.

“You're like a mermaid, Darla,” he said. “You swim on instinct.”

•  •  •

Darla sat in the alcove of shiny red lockers inside the girls' swim room. The place was tidy as always, with stacks of white towels folded and ready to use and the showerheads sparkling. The school wasn't rich, but what money it did have it threw at sports, swimming first and foremost after the program spat up a string of state champions in the 1990s. Since then the trophy case had continued to grow, with Jason Fahle and Darla the Dog set to bring home another pair of golds.

Darla took a deep breath and wrinkled her nose. The swim room still smelled like chlorine—of course it always would, but the smell of chlorine had never bothered her. Chlorine was her world. It smelled like home and tasted like candy. But chlorine wasn't the only smell. There was something else. Something different, and sinister. Once, when she'd been beachcombing as a child, she'd come across a dead shark. Not a freshly dead shark, but one that had been dead for quite some time, dead and worked on by the ocean as a dog worked down a rawhide bone. It had been covered over by a wave until she looked up, and then the sea rolled back, as if to show her what it had. That
shark, with the rotted, pockmarked, sandblasted skin, bits of itself drifting around like it was growing ragged seaweeds, had smelled a little like this. But not quite. That shark hadn't smelled so goddamn thick, so goddamn
heavy
, that it filled her head and made her legs go slack.