Chris Holm - The Big Reap

Topher’s body lay at the creature’s gnarled bare feet atop a forest floor slick black with blood. He’d been unzipped from crotch to sternum in one clean motion, no doubt by one swipe of razor-sharp claw. His viscera gleamed purple in the dim firelight.

As it drank from Topher’s severed arm, the whole creature seemed to swell, a process accelerated when it cast his arm aside and twisted his head off of his lifeless body, raising it to its mouth and sucking blood and brain from it as if extracting marrow from a bone. Muscles strained its leathery skin to the point of splitting. Teeth pushed through grayish gums, crowding a snout that grew ever longer by the second. Clawed feet knuckled harder into the dirt as the beast struggled to keep its feet through a growth spurt that plainly seemed to pain it.

It rose to eight feet tall. Then ten. Then twelve.

Guess all those years of strict rationing while it fed in dribs and drabs off the life-force of small children left the pump primed for some serious binge-eating. Kinda wish the end result was diabetes and Rascal scooters like the rest of us, and not, you know, “Hulk smash!”.

When it threw back its head and roared, I cowered like a frightened child.

But you know what they say: the bigger they are… the likelier they are to rip the head off your fucking meat-suit and drink lustily from its brainpan.

Then I thought of poor aged Ada, and the countless more like her loosed into the vast empty wilderness once they had nothing left to give, only to die of exposure or starvation because they were not so lucky as to be discovered and I thought, fuck it — let’s kill this creepy hellhound.

But first I’d need a weapon.

Scratch that, I thought, as the creature cocked back one massive fist and punched the shelf of rock that formed the cave lip so hard it cracked directly atop one of my protective runes. This thing wasn’t as dumb as it looked. So my first order of business was to keep it from breaching my hasty defenses and snacking on yet another hapless innocent.

It punched the rock again, so hard its bones cracked, its metacarpals pushing bloodily through the hairy skin. The creature bellowed in pain and animal frustration. Zadie screamed and crab-walked as far back as she could go — a whopping three feet. A chunk of stone the size of a cantaloupe fell from the underside of the lip, right where Zadie’s head had been. The rune was still intact, but damaged; it couldn’t take another blow like that one. No time for me to formulate a plan, I had to do something on the quick. So, as the beast brought back its ruined hand for another devastating blow, I fell back on an old standard: snark and false bravado, with shit-all to back it up.

“Hey, bitch! How’s about you try out a chew toy that might bite back?”

The creature turned toward me and cocked its head. Her head, I found myself thinking, because — warped though this creature was — the eyeshine reflecting off its retinas could not fully mask the humanity they contained, and her features had an inexplicably feminine cast to them at odds with her hulking physicality.

“That’s right,” I said to her. “Who’s a good dog?”

A low rumble started in her throat and trembled her lips. “Who are you to speak to me this way?” she said.

“I’m the guy who’s gonna end you,” I told her. “Just like I ended your friend back at the cabin.”

She chuffed in laughter. “Impossible,” she said.

“Lot of that going around,” I told her, making a show of looking her up and down. “But look at me — and at the runes that kept you from entering the lovely lady’s cave — and tell me if I’m bluffing. Oh, and by the way, Jain and Magnusson send their best — or, rather, they would if they weren’t dead as well.”

Doubt crept into her eyes, her voice. “You lie!”

“You’re right,” I said. “I do. But not about this.”

At that, she threw her arms wide, and let out a roar that shook the trees, and blew my hair back from my face.

And then she attacked.

She was smarter than her friend, didn’t blindly pounce like he did. Instead, she first uprooted a full-grown tree with her uninjured left hand ,roots popping as Topher’s shoulder had, and dry dirt sounding like rain as it pattered to the ground beneath, and hurled it at me with all her might, her own bulk following close behind. I dove aside, too late. The trunk drove hard into my shoulder blades, and I ate dirt. Honestly, that tumble probably saved this meat-suit’s life. The dog-beast sailed clear over me, rolling on one shoulder and springing upright in one fluid motion, once more facing me. On all fours, she was the size of a goddamn Clydesdale. Only every bit of her, from snout to what appeared to be a gnarled, half-formed fleshy tail, appeared designed to kill.

I shook the cobwebs from my brain and found my feet. She approached me slowly now: threatening, unconcerned. I backed up to maintain the distance between us — twenty feet, maybe less — but it was no use. Her every step — powerful haunches flexing, hot blood-tinged breath pluming iron-scented in the night — brought her closer.

My eyes locked on her, my feet carrying me ever backward, I stumbled and went down hard. Like a goddamn amateur. Like some fucking horror-movie-teenaged-twenty-something-bottle-blond. That’s when she leapt. I knew then I was screwed but good; no getting out of this one, Thornton. So I clenched shut my eyes, tensing for the killing blow, and thought of Guam.

I’ll tell you, I don’t know if it’s all the hiking or what, but that Zadie chick has got some muscle on that tiny frame of hers. And she’s damn quick, too. But then again, maybe I would have been as well, had I just watched my only shot in hell of leaving these woods alive just up and quit.

Tiny hands bunched the shoulders of my jacket within their grip, and yanked me backward. My eyes sprung open as I slid along the forest floor. A fraction of a second later, the dog-beast landed in the spot that I’d just vacated: too late, because Zadie’d dragged me back into the shallow cave.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, incredulous, as if the news surprised me. “You?”

“Yes. You’re not Nicky, are you?” she asked.

“He prefers Nicholas.”

Her eyes glinted with good humor. “No offense,” she said, “but so do I. Not so fond of being tied up.”

“Nicky’s got some audio files that argue otherwise,” I told her. “You ever make it back to camp, you might want to see about destroying them.” And though the light in the cave was dim, I could swear she colored at that last.

“So can you really kill this thing, or was that bullshit?”

“I can,” I said. “I think. Hey, how’s it feel to find a real, live monster?”

“Not great,” she said. “This was always Topher’s dream, not mine.” She smiled, then, not with any real cheer, but with sadness and fond remembrance. “For what it’s worth, I told him not to leave the cave. Once he got free from his restraints, I mean. But he wouldn’t listen. He said he hadn’t devoted his whole life to finding evidence of beasts like these only to go home empty-handed now. He said he’d rather die.”

“At least he found what he was looking for,” I offered weakly, as if the words would comfort her in the slightest.

“Yeah,” she said, eyeing his cave-side remains. “And I lost what I was looking for.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, and I meant it. After all, I thought, the image of Elizabeth rising unbidden in my mind, I knew exactly how she felt.

A huff of breath announced the creature’s presence outside the cave. I looked up to find it hunkered down on its haunches, its eyes staring back at me in the near-dark. Even crouching as it was, the damn thing was taller than my meat-suit at full height. Curled up to fit inside the cave, I felt pretty damn insignificant by comparison.