Sara Reinke - Backwoods

With her help, he stumbled to his feet, hopping to keep his weight off his injured ankle, keeping his arm draped across her shoulders. Even as she dragged him toward the doorway, he could hear Prendick moving behind them, recovering from his latest wounds. He glanced back and could see the convex curve of his tail as it raised once more into the air.

Dani followed his gaze. “Shit,” she hissed, tugging frantically against Andrew’s waist, urging him forward. “Come on. Hurry!”

The only way he could manage to keep in step was to force himself to rely on his wounded leg. Putting pressure down on his shattered heel left him almost instantly reeling from the pain, and he struggled to keep himself from falling over, taking Dani with him. By the time they made it past the threshold, ducking beneath the overhang of the garage door, he was breathless all over again, this time in pain, his body coated in sweat. When Dani drew her arm away, he fell to his knees, swooning.

“He’s coming,” Alice wailed.

“We have to get the door closed.” Shambling under the strain of her own wounds, Dani turned and went back to the garage.

Prendick was less than ten feet from the door. Both her aim and proficiency with the M16 had surpassed Andrew’s, and she’d shot off all but one or two of Prendick’s appendage-like ribs. Without them, he’d lost the advantage of his arachnid-like speed, but none of his murderous ferocity, that feral determination to kill. He crawled now toward the threshold, dragging himself forward inch by grueling inch with his arms, using the stump of his spine to shove him along from behind. When he saw Dani in the doorway, he paused long enough to lock gazes with her, to set the tips of his spilled entrails twitching again.

“ Bitch,” he seethed, the only distinguishable English he’d uttered since Moore had plowed into him with the truck.

Dani grabbed the door and grunted, tugging on it. “Alice, help me,” she cried after a futile moment. The little girl hesitated, shied next to Andrew, then scurried forward at Dani’s desperate beckon.

Together, they pulled frantically at the door and Andrew heard it scraping along the tracks as it rolled down an inch or so.

“ Bitch!” Prendick snapped from inside the garage, moving faster now, hauling himself forward, peeling his fingernails back, bloody, ragged, raw as he scraped them against the floor.

“Oh, God,” Dani cried, because within two feet, he’d be upon them, and already, the snaking tendrils of his intestines were spreading out ahead of him, nearly reaching her boots. “Pull, for God’s sake!”

With a hoarse groan, Andrew forced himself to stand, to shamble in a clumsy circle and return to the garage. Standing between Dani and Alice, he wedged his fingers in between the metal panels in the door and shoved. Again, the door screeched as it dropped another precipitous inch.

Alice screamed, a high-pitched peal of pure, unadulterated terror, and fell abruptly away from the door, like a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel. She hit the ground hard and Andrew had a half-second to realize one of the looping coils of Prendick’s entrails had wrapped, vice-like, around her ankle, and then she was jerked beneath the garage door, back into the shadows beyond.

“ Andrew!” she wailed, the last syllable of his name scraping out, shrill and frantic: “Ooooooooooooo!”

“Alice, no!” he cried and dove after her, turning loose of the door and forgetting that his damn ruined ankle would no longer bear his weight. He ducked beneath the overhang of the garage door, arms outstretched as he sprang, and as he hit the floor, landing on his belly, rapping his chin hard on the concrete, he felt his fingertips brush against Alice’s.

“I’ve got you!” He scrabbled, catching her by the wrist. “I’ve got you, Alice.”

“Andrew,” she squealed, caught now in a tug-of-war as Prendick jerked her toward him. “Andrew, help me!”

“I’ve got you,” Andrew said again, fighting to keep his grasp on her arm. “Let her go!” he shouted at Prendick.

Prendick wrinkled his teeth back in a gruesome parody of grin, then whipped his tail around, striking at Andrew. Alice screeched and Andrew rolled to the side as the tip of his coccyx struck the ground. Prendick may have been injured, but he was strong as hell, stronger than Andrew had anticipated, and in that moment of distraction, Andrew nearly lost his grip on Alice when Prendick gave a mighty heave on her ankle.

She screamed, piteous and panicked, and Andrew looked wildly around for anything he might use as a weapon. He heard the whistle of wind as Prendick drove the wicked hook of his tail bone at him again, and this time when he rolled, he felt the bone scrape against his cheek as it struck the floor millimeters from his face.

Fuck, that was close, Andrew thought, not wanting to consider the sort of damage could incur if one of those vicious strikes hit home. He saw a wink of light against metal to his left—the wrench Dani had dropped when Prendick had shot her. It had skittered across the floor when it had fallen from her hand and now lay within a few feet of his own.

I can reach it, he thought, stretching out his free hand, fingers splayed wide. Shit, almost! He cut a glance at Alice, then cried out, rolling again as Prendick drove his tail toward the base of his skull. The jagged tip whipped past his ear close enough to lacerate his scalp in a stinging stripe.

“Andrew,” Alice cried.

I have to get that wrench, he thought. Another glance at Alice, into those wild, wide, terrified eyes. If I let her go…

He shook his head. There was no way he’d risk it. The only thing keeping Prendick’s attention—and most specifically, his tail—diverted from her at the moment was Andrew, and if he turned her loose, even for a millisecond, it might be all that it took for Prendick to hurt her.

“Don’t let go,” she pleaded, as if having read his mind, clutching at him desperately with both hands. “Please, Andrew!”

“I won’t,” he said, teeth gritted as he strained to reach the wrench. His fingertips fumbled against it, knocked it further beyond his reach. Shit!

“Look out,” Alice cried and Andrew tucked his head and jerked again as Prendick’s tail smashed into the concrete beside him. He’d long since battered the sharpened wedge of bone to bits, but the regenerative capabilities of the retrovirus kept refashioning it, rebuilding it anew. Now more than one point, it had grown into three, a deadly triton of bony spines, each nearly as long as Andrew’s forearm.

Shit! Andrew thought as Prendick struck at him again, then again, forcing him to scramble and flip like a fish caught on a line, struggling all the while to keep his hold on Alice. Desperately, he strained as far as that grasp would allow and grabbed hold of the wrench. He heard the whip of air as Prendick attacked, and swung the heavy wrench around like a baseball bat, smashing the triton tip aside. He heard the definitive, sickening crunch of bony, and Prendick uttered a high-pitched screech.

“Let her go,” Andrew yelled, smashing at Prendick’s intestines with the wrench, bludgeoning the thick coils, pummeling them over and over until they began to squelch open and burst. “Let her go, you son of a bitch!”

Prendick lunged forward, gnashing his teeth, and from the doorway came a sudden, thunderous burst as Dani fired the M16. Bullets plowed into Prendick’s deformed trunk, punching wet craters into the meat of his torso, splattering the twining tentacles of his guts. He shrieked and thrashed, violent and enraged, and at last, Andrew felt the resistance against Alice slacken.