The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave (11 page)

Reason bolted and then so did he.

CHAPTER 20

A
NTIC
S
HIFTS

H
is lungs ballooned and deflated at a frenetic rate, struggling to keep pace with his hammering heart. Wilma and Betty were almost a mile behind him. He’d sprinted the entire distance. Scott felt ashamed, believing his actions were indefensible.

He skidded on a patch of gravel and stopped. The pace he had set over the last mile had left his body numb. He locked his knees and arched his back, interlacing his fingers behind him, extending his arms in a stretch. Queasiness hacked at his insides, and he attempted to throw it off by holding air in his lungs then whooshing it out.

Scott had stopped in the middle of Smithfield. On his left side stood the tall Protestant church. Much of the glass was original, bubbles rippled the surface of the windows. The creative messages posted on the billboard by the church entertained and, occasionally, inspired him. The current one read, “To be almost saved is to be totally lost.” Clever.

Next to the church sat a centuries-old cemetery crowded with tombstones, some as much as 300 years old. A sharply pointed wrought-iron fence framed the graveyard. The town had annexed the ancient burial place, did some restoration, and prominently posted a brass plaque on the archway over the entrance. “Our pro-active board has shown great concern in both managing Smithfield Cemetery and planning for its care in perpetuity.”

Advertising, even in death, was inescapable.

A rustic breakfast-and-lunch place sat directly across from the church. “Ruth’s Café” had been built in a large Victorian home, its white paint now peeling. Strings of unlit Christmas lights bordered a meticulously painted white billboard in the front, which read “OPEN SUNDAYS!” to attract famished parishioners as they left after long sermons.

Behind the café, the road curved in a sharp right turn that then ran straight uphill at a steep thirty-five-degree angle to a newer residential neighborhood of about fifty homes—a perfectly bundled small New England town, ready to be scooped into a snow globe.

Scott was still berating himself over Betty and Wilma.
How could I be afraid of two little old ladies? What if they were hurt?

His rational mind reasserted control. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, he’d run away from the chance to help someone. When he’d gotten out of his van to help the stricken man in the parking lot the night before, it was as if a giant hand shoved him back into his car. He’d had the soul-thumping impression he must leave immediately.

It had bothered him the entire way home. He wouldn’t forgive himself if he abandoned those little old ladies, too. He turned around, preparing his apology for jack-rabbiting away.

Just as Scott took a skipping start from the Smithfield town center, headlights flared from the neighborhood above, seizing his attention. A Dodge Ram pickup truck exploded into view, rocketing down the steep grade with reckless speed. Scott watched as it approached the tight left-hand turn at the bottom of the hill. Its large tires screeched, somehow holding onto the road and miraculously avoiding the cemetery fence and the crumbling grave markers within.

The Dodge swerved crazily from one side of the narrow road to the other. Bright beams from the headlights danced erratically around buildings and trees in a strobe-like effect that lengthened, shortened and shifted the shadows around him, revealing the silhouettes of several clustered people walking near the road between Scott and the truck. They walked in exaggerated fits, resembling misshapen marionettes, dancing and bouncing crazily toward him.

Ear-splitting, mechanical wailing from the truck’s engine jolted him out of his nanoseconds-long reverie. The whine pitched higher as the behemoth hurtled at him. Adrenaline super-charged his senses. Tiny details snapped into focus.

The truck was painted a dark red that contrasted starkly the bright silver of the chrome grill. Pale hands flickered behind the windshield, spinning the steering wheel to send the truck skidding in a deliberate effort to run him over. The metal-stamped figure of the ram literally charged him, horns lowered.

Scott stood momentarily paralyzed, staring dumbly at the machine streaking toward him. Reflex finally jerked him out of the way a fraction of an instant too late. The driver’s side mirror smacked his left shoulder, throwing him to the ground. He rolled into the bushes surrounding the church. The bone-jarring collision left a grey haze over his mind. He barely hung onto consciousness.

Slowly, Scott returned to himself. Landscaping bark blanketed the ground underneath him cushioning his fall. A crisp pine scent emanated from the dew-laden shrubbery above him.

When he rolled to get up, fiery pain lit in the depths of his shoulder. He squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth in anticipation of more pain as he rocked slightly to test the extent of damage. No grinding nor sliding of bones. At least those weren’t broken.

Scott’s neck, chest and arm were drenched in something wet. He dabbed at it. It lacked the thickness and the metallic smell of blood. Confused, he caught sight of the armband he used to hold his water flask and safety light lying on the road 15 yards from him. The bottle had taken the brunt of the mirror’s impact, saving his arm from more serious trauma.

The flashing red beacon of the safety light hadn’t worked in months. Perhaps if it had functioned, the Dodge wouldn’t have rammed him, but the collision with the mirror had caused the light to start working again. Life had a snarky sense of humor.

Somebody walked in front of the red flashers. He saw the outline of a tall man, thin with the exception of a paunch. A smaller feminine shadow shuffled into view. Behind her, another person shambled just outside the perimeter of the glowing crimson strobe. Scott presumed they were rescuers arriving at the scene of the accident.

He inhaled a short breath, just about to call them over. Before he could utter a sound, an internal force seized his throat, choking him off before he could exhale any noise through his vocal cords. Ice coursed through his veins as his instincts insisted, “Don’t move! Watch!”

Each figure moved stutteringly, as if multiple factions fought for mastery of its body. None appeared to be winning. Faces blinked red from the runner’s light. Dark, sticky-looking smears covered mouths and chins. Jaws opened and shut. Their expressions spun through confusion, insanity, menace, rage, craving, and emptiness. When they stopped, they landed on hunger.

The hunt was on. Scott was the prey.

He retreated slowly into the darkness by the hedge, hoping to stay undetected. He pressed his body more deeply into the damp landscaping wood. Hands whispered loudly around him, probing the bushes to both his right and his left. Dirt-encrusted feet stepped within six inches of where he lay.

Scott’s heart pounded violently. Strength surged into him. Instinctively, he knew they were on the verge of discovering him. He lunged to his right just as two hands reached through a gap in the shrubs, grasping empty air where he had lain an instant before.

Twigs and needles showered him as he punched blindly from the hedge. His injured shoulder struck a shirtless old man, whose ribs cracked audibly as he stepped backward. He showed no sign of being hurt, despite having a shard of bone that pierced obscenely through the sagging skin above his hipbone. Undeterred, he moved forward again, his eyes fixed on Scott. He stretched out his gnarled hands.

Scott dodged right to avoid him and felt the wind as the hands passed him. Shivers crawled across his skin, like hundreds of millipedes traveling his body. Fingers snagged his shirt, but he broke free. Another near miss.

Distracted by the old man, he missed the two others that had crept up behind him. In the inky blackness, he heard the rasping sounds of more converging on him.

Sparked by his fear, his legs finally got moving. He skirted around the church, slipping on wet grass at the entrance to the cemetery. He scrambled inside. Fallen headstones tripped him. His right shin grated painfully against a knee-high grave marker. The branches of ancient oak trees clutched at him.

Scott finally reached the wrought-iron fence.

Exhausted, Scott pulled high on the metal bars and hoisted himself over the top, dropped to the other side, and promptly fell onto his damaged shoulder, exacerbating the pain. He bit back a groan. With no time to get on his feet again, he frantically crab walked into the dense vegetation of the forest.

Scott stilled, sank slowly to the earth, and quietly covered himself with loose undergrowth, which shrouded him completely in the blanket of fallen leaves and densely packed trees. The warmth was rapidly incubating the faster-growing vegetation and afforded him even more concealment. He took shallower breaths and completely stilled himself, becoming inaudible as well as invisible.

From his hidden vantage point, Scott saw the frightening old man leading a small army of others to crowd against the metal bars of the fence. Their heads shook in a seizure-like fashion as they sought him. They didn’t reach mindlessly through the openings in the bars. They just stared quietly, patiently, waiting. Gradually they turned away, one by one, and disappeared into the aged necropolis.

Unconvinced the chase had ended, Scott stayed put.

A sudden snap of branches to his right confirmed his fears: more were drawing near. He shook off his improvised camouflage and raced into the forest. He ran with his arms outstretched to avoid slamming his body into trees. Pine needles stung his hands. Springy branches whipped his bare skin. He tripped over fallen trees and thick roots, somehow staying on his feet. The woods seemed to stretch on endlessly before finally ejecting him onto a dilapidated country road.

Disoriented from his blind plunge through the forest, he searched for a landmark. Red lights from the new firehouse glimmered in the distance; his home was less than a mile away. He bent down, recovering his breath while his eyes swept the surrounding fields, turning up nothing. Only the hum of insects filled the vast emptiness in front of him.

Barely ambulatory, Scott limped the final mile on legs throbbing from fatigue. He reached the driveway and walked up to the fence around his backyard, shoved the gate open, and locked it securely behind him.

Home.

CHAPTER 21

W
ITHIN
T
HE
W
ALLS
O
F
H
OME

S
cott cursed himself for taking his run despite all the signs that the world was in chaos, that his family could be in danger if not already harmed. He charged up the stairs to check on them. He stopped just short of throwing their doors open, instead listening for a moment at each girl’s room until he detected the sounds of their breathing. He checked on Laura. She was asleep and appeared to be having an active dream, her body twitching in response.

Relieved that his family was safe, Scott slid a chair to the front window that gave the best view of the neighborhood. With a half hour before dawn, the darkness shifted from charcoal black to graphite grey. Counterintuitively, the fading darkness made it even harder to see. Contrasts softened. Nebulous shapes folded into spectral shadows. He almost expected a host of otherworldly beings to appear in the front yard.

His eyes started to burn from looking so intensely. He pressed them with the palms of his hands. Hazy afterimages swirled behind his eyelids, fueling his imagination. In his mind, a company of ghouls crawled and lurched toward his house, their advance invisible under the camouflage of a murky, grey dawn. He stared even harder into the void and waited.

Nothing came.

The more Scott focused, the blurrier his vision became; eyelids drooped, nearly succumbing to the urge to sleep. “This is pointless,” he grumbled to himself. “There is nothing out there. There probably never was.”

He stood, stretched, and walked into the family room. He sat on the thick carpet near the couch and eased his head back to rest. He ran over his recollections of the freakish morning. Within the safety of his home, he thought how silly it was, his fear of being stalked by a score of unearthly, hungry creatures lurking in darkened forests. “In these strange days, it’s possible there were people wandering the roads of Smithfield in the dark. The rest wasn’t real!” his rational side argued, but his instincts refused to capitulate.

While that imaginary debate droning on in his subconscious, Scott shifted his position and his arm protested in a deep, angry ache. The pain from his shoulder was very real.

It took a concerted effort for Scott to push himself up from the floor and onto his feet. He collected three icy gel packs from the kitchen freezer and returned to the sofa, where he made himself a pillow of frozen bliss. His shoulder sank into the revitalizing cold, satiating the pain that consumed his muscles and bones.

The air conditioner sent cool air blowing gently across his still hot, almost feverish, skin. The sweat that streaked his face and neck had evaporated into salty, dry rivulets. Sweet oblivion beckoned. He floated into it.

An hour passed before Scott convulsed into consciousness. When he rubbed the itchiness of sleep from his eyes, tiny scales of dried sweat floated onto his black running shorts.

Details from the morning’s events floated away like smoke from a dying fire. He couldn’t explain his impressions and firmly rejected the idea that he had been hunted by a staggering collective of hungry, nocturnal, no-longer-human aberrations.

Scott knew three things. One: he had, in fact, run before daybreak. Two: he had definitely wrecked his shoulder in a collision with a truck. Three: he needed a shower. Badly.

From upstairs came low thumping sounds. His oldest daughter Madison had woken up and charged to the bathroom. She always snapped out of bed early, even on the weekends, and burned every minute of wakefulness with a furious efficiency.