John Saul - Creature

A moment later a man's voice blared through the darkness, amplified by a bullhorn.

"It's all right, Mrs. Tanner. It's the State Patrol. It's all over. You can come down."

Sharon froze. Was it really possible? But how?

And then the voice came again.

"We're here to help you, Mrs. Tanner. Your husband called us this afternoon when they wouldn't let him speak to you at the sports center. It's over, Mrs. Tanner. We have them all."

Blake! Blake had finally believed her and called the State Patrol! Almost crying out with relief, she struggled to her feet, but Mark's hand closed on her wrist.

"They're lying, Mom," he whispered. "It's just a trick!"

"No!" Sharon whimpered. "It's all right-we're going to be all right!" She couldn't see Mark's face at all in the darkness, but she felt his hand tighten on her wrist. She spoke again, struggling to keep her voice calm. "Mark, what if it is a trick? We can't get away. I don't think I can take more than a few more steps. So let me go out, darling. Please? If it isn't a trick, we're all right. And if it is, well-" Her voice caught for a moment, then she went on. "If it is a trick, you'll have time to get away from them by yourself. If you don't have to carry me, they won't be able to catch up with you." She paused, and could almost feel his indecision. "Please?" she breathed.

Slowly, she felt Mark's grip on her wrist ease, but then he pulled her close.

"I love you, Mom," he whispered. "No matter what happens, I love you."

She kissed him then, her lips brushing against his distorted mouth, her fingers tracing the rough line of his swollen brow. "I love you, too," she whispered. Then, her ankle threatening to give way beneath her, she stepped out into the trail.

"I-I'm here," she called out, and instantly the night was filled with lights, all of them trained on her. She took a step forward.

And then the guns began to sound.

The night exploded with shots, and Sharon's body crumpled, dead before it even hit the ground.

Bullets ricocheted off the boulders, screaming like angry hornets as they flew through the night.

The sounds of the shots echoed and reechoed through the mountains, but even as they began to die away, Mark dashed from the shelter behind the boulder, slithered through a narrow gap between two others, and began scrambling up the mountainside, threading his way between some of the rocks, clawing his way over others.

"Turn the dog loose!" he heard a voice shout behind him. "Let her go, damn it!"

Then the night was filled once more with the barking of the dog as it hurled itself after him, ignoring his scent now, easily following the sounds he made as he scrabbled up the mountainside. The men were coming, too, doing their best to keep up, but they weren't nearly as fast as either Mark or the dog, and within less than a minute he was well ahead of them.

Suddenly there was a furious snarl behind him, and Mark whirled around just as the huge shepherd threw itself at him.

He caught it in midair, grasping it by the throat, holding its snapping jaws well away from his face.

This time he didn't waste time strangling it to death, for this time he knew exactly what he was doing.

It was either kill the dog or let the dog kill him.

His fingers tightened on the animal's throat, then he raised it over his head, slamming its body down onto one of the rocks.

There was a sharp cracking sound as the dog's back broke over the rock, and it went limp. Dropping it instantly, he turned and darted away once more into the safety of the darkness.

Without the dog, he knew the men had no hope even of following him, let alone of catching up with him.

He breathed deeply of the night air and his lungs filled with scents he'd never experienced before, all the subtle odors the human nose can never respond to but which lead an animal through the night.

Then he was out of the maze of boulders, finding himself on a gentle slope of grass-covered earth dotted with pine trees and clumps of aspen. He ran through the night then, his powerful legs once more taking on the easy rhythm that he felt could carry him forever.

He began moving up the mountain, upward into the vast reaches of forests and meadows where he could almost smell the rarefied scent of true freedom that only a wild animal ever knows…

It had been nearly two weeks since the funeral at which they'd buried her family. Every morning since then, when she'd awakened, totally disoriented, in the unfamiliar surroundings of the small bedroom next to Linda's that theHarrises had moved her into the day her family had died, Kelly Tanner felt the dampness on her pillow and knew she'd been crying. But this morning-a Saturday-Kelly knew where she was from the moment she came awake.

And the pillowcase was dry, which meant she hadn't been crying that night at all. Or at least not enough to get the pillow wet.

She lay in her bed for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of theHarrises's house. It wasn't really much different from the way her own house had sounded in the morning, and if she closed her eyes and concentrated very hard, she could almost imagine that nothing had changed, that she was back in her own room in the house on Telluride Drive.

The shower going on would mean that her father was already up, and the clatter of pans in the kitchen meant that her mother was making pancakes. She could even imagine that thethumpings from down the hall were coming from Mark's room; that he was doing the exercises he'd started a month ago.

But it wasn't Mark, and it wasn't her mother and father. It was just theHarrises, and even though she knew they were trying to be very nice to her, she always had a niggling feeling at the back of her mind that they didn't really care about her, that they thought they had to be nice to her because she was an orphan now.

An orphan.

She turned the word over in her mind, kept examining it, until suddenly it had no meaning at all. It was a game she played sometimes with herself-taking the simplest word and repeating it over and over and over, until instead of meaning something, it wasn't anything but a sound.

For the first time that morning she was able to think about the funeral without crying. She didn't know whether it had been like other funerals, because she'd never been to one before. There hadn't been very many people there, and it hadn't taken very long, and as she sat in the front pew of the little church, listening to a man she'd never seen before talking about her family-and she knew he'd never even met her family, so how could he talk about them?-she tried to convince herself that it really was her father and mother and brother in the three coffins lined up in front of the altar.

But the tops of the coffins were closed, and nobody had let her see the bodies at all, and it had been hard for her to accept that any of it was real. In fact, when she'd heard the door open at one point, she looked back, almost expecting to see Mark walking down the aisle toward her. But it hadn't been Mark at all. It had just been another stranger, so she turned back and faced the front again. And then, when they'd gone out to the little cemetery behind the church, she had the strangest feeling as they put Mark's coffin into the grave.

He's not in there!

The thought had come into her mind out of nowhere. She tried to tell herself that it was dumb-that if Mark wasn't in the coffin, they wouldn't be burying it.

But the thought stayed with her. Several times since the funeral-she wasn't sure how many-she'd come awake in the middle of the night, the memory of a dream fresh in her mind.

It was like she was in the grave, too, and Mark was with her, and they were both pounding on the sides of the coffin, but nobody could hear them. They knew they were buried and that they weren't going to be able to get free, but they weren't dead.