Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

Gwen roared up behind Gareth’s Mondeo until they were right on his bumper. Rhys could see why the driving was more unpredictable than ever. Gareth was tossing back his long hair and raising something with his left hand.

‘Look at him! He’s using a mobile phone! That’s…’ Rhys was going to say ‘dangerous’ until he acknowledged how stupid that would sound. ‘That’s illegal,’ he concluded lamely.

‘Oh sure, Rhys,’ laughed Gwen. ‘Three points on his licence is exactly what he’s worrying about.’ She veered right as the Mondeo slipped into a side road. ‘And I’m not convinced that is a mobile phone.’

The thing in Gareth’s hand was filling his car with bright light.

Coming down the narrow embankment carriageway towards them was a huge, growling pantechnicon. Its blank cab front stared them down, the impassive bulk defying them to continue. The square shape of its trailer loomed behind the cab, and the hiss of its air brakes made it even more like a bull about to charge.

‘Ha!’ crowed Gwen. ‘You are going nowhere now, Gareth!’

The Mondeo’s nose dipped and its brake lights flared. Gwen’s leg jerked forward as her foot sought the brake, but the Vectra screeched into a short skid and smacked the rear of the car in front. ‘Aww, no!’ yelled Rhys as the bonnet crunched up.

The light from the Mondeo increased. Gareth’s head and shoulders were a stark silhouette in the brilliance. Rhys blinked, thinking that the brightness was hurting his eyes. And shivered.

It had got very cold all of a sudden. He could see his own breath.

With impossible speed, a thick, freezing fog surged around the car. Frost patterns began to craze the front windscreen. Visibility had dropped to only a few dozen metres. Everything outside was rimed with ice – lampposts, parking meters, the road surface. A woman laden with plastic supermarket bags twisted, skidded, and fell headlong on the pavement. Her shopping spilled from the bags and over the slick surface.

Rhys heard the Mondeo’s engine revving again. Gareth swerved the car hard right, his wheels spinning furiously to get traction before he jolted up over the pavement and through a low barrier on the far side of the street.

Gwen flicked on the Vectra’s lights. And gasped at the sight through the windscreen.

The pantechnicon was slewing towards them. The driver grappled with the steering as he struggled to arrest the huge vehicle’s progress, and the cab slowly twisted from side to side like an enormous animal sadly shaking its head in resignation. It wasn’t going to stop, and the Vectra was right in its path.

Rhys grabbed for the door handle, but Gwen grasped his other arm. ‘I see where he’s gone!’ she hissed. Put the Vectra back into gear. And bumped the wheels onto the far pavement and through the gap that Gareth’s Mondeo had made in the fence.

Behind them, the pantechnicon slid on its unrelenting journey down the iced roadway, crunching against street lamps and tipping them over.

Rhys’s relief was short-lived. The nose of the Vectra dropped, and the car breached the embankment barrier. The car see-sawed briefly on the edge, then careered down a steep incline.

‘It’s the river!’ he yelled at Gwen. His voice quavered as the car bobbled and rattled its inexorable way over the uneven surface.

‘I know!’ she snapped back at him. ‘Just look at it.’

The car plunged onwards, out of control. Shreds of bushes and skeletal branches clutched and scratched at the paintwork like talons. The fog around them gave the briefest glimpses of their surroundings. The chipped, angled embankment blurred past the side windows, changing from grey to green where the river had lapped and splashed up the base of the concrete.

A bone-crunching thump rattled Rhys’s teeth in his jaw. At the bottom, instead of a splash as they hit the water, the car groaned and crunched when it struck the frozen river. The Vectra’s engine whined as the wheels spun helplessly and the vehicle described a lazy circle on the river’s icy surface. A large white shape appeared from the mist. The car slowly twisted and, with a crunch of metal on wood, its rear smacked into the side of the object.

They had struck a riverboat. Incredulous passengers stared out through the vessel’s windows, probably as surprised to see Rhys as he was to see his company car crash into them. The vessel had already come to an abrupt halt in the thick ice, and its captain was hardly going to be on lookout for stray Vauxhall Vectras mid-river.

Rhys caught his breath, and peered at Gwen. ’The insurance claim on this is gonna look pretty bloody unbelievable.’

He could hear screams of terror from the riverboat behind them. Rhys turned in his seat to see why they were yelling. The passengers were wide-eyed, pointing at something beyond the Vectra.

Rhys twisted back, just in time to see a dark mass smash down on the bonnet. The whole car shook with the impact. A slavering head splattered the windscreen with spittle as it bellowed a bestial cry at the occupants of the car. Something like a bulldog, only the size of a Shetland pony, scrabbled to get at them, tearing the wipers and trim off the windscreen. Rhys jerked back in his seat with a bellowing shout of his own, unable to get far enough away from the thing. It was gonna break the window. It was gonna reach in and devour him with those terrible, foam-flecked fangs.

Beside him, in the driver’s seat, Gwen released her seatbelt, then shuffled and squirmed. Rhys was terrified that she was going to get out of the car. ‘Don’t!’ he cried. But he didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t know what to do.

The bulldog monster slammed its head down, and the windshield cracked right across.

Gwen reached forward, double-handed, and pressed a handgun against the glass. That was why she’d removed her seatbelt – to get at her weapon.

She fired twice in rapid succession, a double-tap. The explosive noise of the gun filled the enclosed car. The windshield shattered into fragments. The alien monster’s head dissolved in a spray of gore and pus, and the body dropped off the bonnet and disappeared from view.

Gwen burst her door open, dived out, and moved as carefully as she could over the ice to the front of the car. She aimed her weapon, and fired two more bullets into the unseen creature beyond the bonnet.

Rhys sat for a moment and gasped in a desperate breath. His ears still rang with the sound of the first two gunshots. He dropped his chin down on his chest and expelled the air in a shuddering exhalation of relief.

At his feet were the MonstaQuest cards that had scattered out earlier. He scooped them up, straightening them to return them to the glove compartment.

Gwen got back into the car. She was furious, and slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. ‘Damn it. Gareth got away.’ In the icy cold, her exasperated words formed angry clouds in front of her mouth. ‘He abandoned the Mondeo near the opposite bank and hoofed it while I was dealing with that Mahalta.’

Rhys nudged her elbow. ‘Did you call it a Mahalta?’ He handed her one of the MonstaQuest cards. ‘This says it’s called an Antebellum.’

‘No, the last one we saw, Jack said it was…’ Gwen’s voice trailed off as she considered the oversized playing card. ‘Wait a minute… How can this be on here?’

‘That’s not the half of it,’ continued Rhys. He passed more of the creature cards to her, one by one. A Weevil. A bat-like creature. Something that looked like an angry diplodocus. ‘And there are these things called Element Cards, too, see?’ He watched her reaction as she studied them. Lightning. Sandstorm. Fog. Ice. ‘Too much of a coincidence?’ he asked her.