Matt Hults - Husk

The creature stopped.

Adam—barely visible within the cocoon of sticks and twigs—hovered spread-eagle in the tree.

“You want Kane in one piece?” Tim hollered. “Then let him go, right now.”

“You dare—”

“I said let him go,” Tim repeated. He raised the shovel for another swing. “Let him go or I’ll chop this fucker into so many pieces you won’t know where to begin putting him back together.”

The multi-face demon snarled with unparalleled anger. “You’ll bring me Kane, or Mallory will be the one in pieces.”

“First put him down, then we’ll do what you want.”

The tree’s grotesque sculpture made one more vicious snarl then melted into nothing. Overhead, the network of branches disintegrated when the possessing force evacuated, raining to the ground in a shower of shattered wood. Adam fell through the storm of mulched branches and vanished into the wreckage at the base of the trunk.

“Adam,” Becky screamed. “Adam, are you okay?”

A weak, almost inaudible reply issued from the elm tree’s remains.

“Oh, Jesus,” Becky mewed. “He’s hurt. We have to help him.”

But Tim snared her shirt when she started to run.

“What are you doing?” she cried, struggling to break free.

He held on, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Listen, whatever happens, stay in the cemetery, got it? That’s why it needs us, because it can’t come in here itself. We’re safe as long as we stay where it can’t get at us.”

Her body still shook with aftershocks of fear, but she nodded her understanding. “Is that what you were talking about when we first got here? When you said there was a way for all of us to get to safety?”

“Yeah.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“Experience,” he replied. “Go get Adam, but have him come to you. You can help him over the fence if he needs it, but don’t make the same mistake he did. I don’t care if both his legs are broken; he comes to you.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

He took up the belt tethered to the coffin. “You saw how bad that thing wants this box of maggot food. Well, it’ll have to make a trade for it. Now let’s hurry, before it tries something else.”

While Becky and Lisa ran toward where Adam had fallen, Tim began dragging Kane’s casket through the thick weeds, closer to the cemetery’s fence and the ever-waiting Mercedes.

After the mysterious amber light dissipated, darkness took up its place, leaving Mallory shaken despite her unexplainable revival. She searched the car with frantic glances, finding the other seats vacant. She couldn’t recall when the car had come to a stop, or where the others had gone once it had. Why would they just leave her here? Or maybe they hadn’t, maybe the car had done something to them?

Outside, the headlights cast white beams into an old cemetery overrun with tangled vegetation.

She couldn’t remember coming to a cemetery.

Further distressed by her new surroundings, Mallory began struggling with her bonds. She unclipped the seatbelt and groped for the door handle.

After uncounted eons of watching the failure of those who’d come before it—after waiting throughout the full scope of human history for its chance to return power to its kind—the nameless entity finally saw freedom drawing closer, pulled by a boy who would soon be dead at its newborn hands.

Returning to the Mercedes, the entity relished its impending triumph.

In minutes, it would kill Mallory and use her life force to reactivate the spells etched in Kane’s flesh—carvings that had long since become irremovable scars—thus releasing him back into this world, bonding them in an unholy coalition. United, they would be unstoppable, free to unleash the others of its kind from their torment and take back the world that was rightfully theirs.

Then, the real battle would begin.

Watching the children from a distance, it cursed the Other’s power, unable to fully perceive what the teens had discussed near Kane’s grave. No matter. Tim strode toward the car, dragging Kane’s coffin, and soon they would all be flesh for its brethren.

Upon reoccupying the vehicle, it found Mallory had broken free.

Impossible. She shouldn’t have regained consciousness so quickly.

She tried for the door, but the entity activated the locks, sealing her in. Revitalized, the girl moved with the agility of a spirit, dodging its attempts to recapture her with the seatbelt. She leaned back in her seat and kicked the damaged windshield with both feet. The gummy, shatterproof glass popped loose, folding away, and the girl scrambled out over the hood.

Tim approached within arm’s reach of the graveyard’s fence when half the Mercedes’s windshield broke outward.

The glass burst away from its frame and folded over on itself. A split second later, Mallory came crawling out through the gap, clambering onto the vehicle’s hood.

Tim dropped the line to Kane’s coffin. “Mallory!”

With a spray of gravel spitting from its tires, the Mercedes reversed away from the fence. It rocketed backward, jerking out from under her. She lost her balance and slid headfirst off the car’s front end.

Tim abandoned the coffin and bound over the fence after her. “Mallory, hang on.”

The possessed Mercedes slid to a halt a mere twenty feet away, its engine roaring.

“Look out,” he screamed. “Run. It’s coming.”

The car shot forward. Geysers of dirt and rock streamed into the air behind it. Tim’s pumping legs turned to jelly when he realized he’d never reach her in time to help.

The headlights found her. They glinted on her bloodstained clothes.

To Tim’s astonishment, Mallory lunged to the side, rolling clear of the Mercedes as its dented bumper closed in for a bite. The car roared past, missing her. It raged on to the far end of the lot, where it slammed on its brakes and slid around to face them.

Tim ran to her. “Mallory, are you all right?”

She spun around and seized his reaching arm. “Tim, what the hell’s going on?”

“Come on,” he urged, “we have to get back in the graveyard. Can you stand?”

By the time he finished the question, she’d already pulled herself upright. “Yeah, I’m okay now.”

He gaped at her chest wound, seeing only healthy, unmarked flesh through the rip in her blood-soaked shirt.

At the far end of the lot, the car’s headlights blazed with the white-hot intensity of a blast furnace.

“Let’s go,” he started to say, then fell silent when the ground beneath their feet began to quake and rumble. The hard soil fractured, ripped apart by a thousand jagged cracks that spread outward in a twenty-foot radius around them.

“What’s happening?” Mallory cried. She reached out and grabbed Tim for stability.

Their feet sank into the crumbling dirt like two explorers trapped in quicksand.

Tim opened his mouth to reply, but his words came out in an unintelligible moan when several dozen withered arms jutted from the split ground and clasp tight around their legs, dragging, yanking, hauling them downward. In seconds, they were up to their knees—then their waists—in the dry, churning dirt.

Their screams interwove to create a helix of hellacious noise.

The clammy arms of the dead lashed over Tim’s shoulders and around his neck, a dozen knotted, flailing arms, two dozen, reached upward, gripped his hair, slapped down across his face, clawed his skin.

No, he thought. Not corpses, not here in the parking lot. Roots. Old tree roots!

Knowing the nature of their spirited fetters made no change in the situation. They were still trapped, with nothing in reach to free them.