Matt Hults - Husk

The two men had been separated from the rest of the store behind tall racks of fishing poles and nets. Now, in the blackout, she couldn’t see them at all.

Penelope hurried onward. She caught up to Bird, finding him backed against a pyramid of stacked windshield washer bottles directly across from the registers.

“We shouldn’t go out the front,” she started to say, but fell silent when she saw his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open.

Penelope turned, afraid the man had reacted to someone who’d approached from behind her, but saw no one at the empty checkout island or near—

The display case.

The glass lay shattered across the floor, the metallic framing blasted out of shape.

All the knives were missing.

Then she noticed the blood. It sprinkled out of the darkness like some hellish rain, splattering the floor in the center of the clerks’ work area. Shivering with fear, acting out of instinct rather than on command, Penelope looked up, tracing the liquid path back to its origin. She found Jason’s gutted body stuck to the ceiling, pinned in place with the stolen knives. The corpse remained half-hidden from view by overhead storage racks of cigarettes and lottery tickets, but she saw enough of him to know that his belly had been slit open and emptied.

Penelope opened her mouth to scream but the sound failed to come.

“Would one of you answer us,” a customer shouted.

She faced the voice to see the two men standing in the light at the end of one of the aisles, followed by the silhouette of a third man dressed in a fisherman’s vest, waders, and fatigue hat. He stepped into view behind the two customers, walking out of a display of set-up camping equipment. Lost in shadow, the person’s face hid within an ovoid patch of darkness.

But there was no one else in the store . Which means—

“Look out,” Bird shouted, voicing the words already screaming in Penelope’s mind.

The men stopped, unaware that the figure had just lifted a double-bladed ax from a wall-mounted hanger.

“Run,” Bird hollered at the men. He lunged in front of Penelope and opened fire with the handgun. Dark chunks exploded off the assailant’s upper body, but the wounds didn’t stop him. He raised the ax over his head.

The tool came down on the skull of the closest man—

Thwack!

—spraying gore, driving him to the floor.

The second man threw himself away from the gunfire, ducking behind a display barrel of foil-wrapped Glow Sticks. Bird ejected the spent cartridges and the man scrambled to find better shelter. Trapped between Bird and the ax-wielding maniac, he clambered up the six-foot-high steel shelves dividing his aisle and the next. The sheet metal bent under his weight, spilling an avalanche of merchandise, but didn’t slow his ascent.

He reached the top when the first tent stake hit him.

They came out of nowhere. A dozen of them.

Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!

One after the other they plunged into his back like arrows fired from the shadows. Three more caught him in the head, casting him off the shelves and over the other side.

Bird cursed, thumbing fresh rounds into the revolver.

Penelope stood paralyzed by the sight. The shape at the end of the aisle advance toward her, moving with purpose. Bird grabbed her arm and hauled her after him.

“Come on!” He pulled her through the main doors, into the humid summer night. “My truck’s on the side of the building,” he said, locking the handgun’s cylinder in place. “It’s the blue one. The doors are—”

He fell to his knees with a shout, taking Penelope down with him. Three medium size knives jutted from his hip and side.

“Oh, shit, no,” she shrieked, trying to help him up.

She wrapped her arms around his midsection, struggling to lift his bulk. He gained one leg. Then the other. And five more knives jabbed into his shoulder and back, causing him to howl in pain. He collapsed.

Penelope pulled at his shirt, tears streaming down her face. “Get up.”

She looked to the store. The figure emerged from the doorway.

“Get up, Bird. Get up. He’s coming!”

The man had fallen silent, but his grip tightened on her arm. Pulling himself to a half-kneeling position, he pressed the handgun and truck keys into her hands. “Go. Hurry… Go.”

The words were still fresh from his lips when two more blades sunk into his flesh, entering his neck and the side of his head. His heavy body went slack and slipped out of her grasp.

Penelope staggered backwards, her gaze locked on the dead Indian. Five minutes ago he’d been an average guy doing his job. Now he was gone. She’d only known him by part of his name, but he’d helped her. Hell, he’d saved her life a moment ago. He didn’t deserve it, she thought. None of them deserved it.

Screaming, tears spilling down her face, Penelope pivoted away from Bird’s lifeless body.

She raised the revolver and opened fire on his killer.

Each shot jarred her arms to the bone. The recoil threatened to send the gun flying from her grasp, but she tensed her muscles and forced herself to hold the weapon level. At such close range—less than twenty feet away—the bullets pierced the killer’s body and punched into the walls of the building behind him.

Then, in a horrifying moment of heightened perception, she saw several sparks leap off a metallic cage of propane tanks near—

The building exploded.

Melissa could smell the bodies all the way from the roadside, thirty yards from the house. Even here in the country, surrounded by sprawling green fields of soybeans and corn, the vast open space and gentle morning breeze did nothing to dilute the stench in the air.

She turned off the county road and onto the property’s dirt driveway, pulling to a stop behind the two Corcoran squad cars already on the scene.

She got out of the car and found herself in the shadow of a tank-like man who identified himself as Officer Davis. Melissa put the man at six-foot-four from the soles of his shoes to the top of his crew cut blonde hair. Despite his formidable size, a sickly pallor dominated his facial complexion. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.

“I’m Detective Humble,” she said. “Hennepin County Homicide.”

After floundering for a response, Davis merely nodded.

“First body?” Melissa asked, giving the man time to recover.

“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“What can you tell me so far?”

“There’re, ah, two victims,” Davis said, leading her toward the farmhouse. “Mel and Florence Patterson, ages sixty-five and sixty-two. We found their IDs inside. One of’em’s in the house, the other’s in the garage.”

“Who found them?”

“Xcel Energy employee,” Davis answered. He pointed past the squad cars, to a white pickup truck with the power company’s logo on the door. “Guy’s name is Kevin Porter. He was doing scheduled maintenance both here in Corcoran and down the road in Loretto. He said he’d finished checking the transformer back near the road when he noticed the service pole feeding the house was down. He didn’t have a report on it, so he figured the people who owned the place were out of town and didn’t know their power was out. When he came up the driveway to have a better look at the damage, that’s when he saw the garage.”

The officer gestured to the large detached garage. The white aluminum door buckled outward at the center, as if someone had tried to drive out without raising it.

“That’s nothing compared to what’s inside,” Davis added in a whisper.

They approached the two-story home and ascended the front steps into the cooler shadows under the covered porch. Davis led her around the building’s front half, passing a cedar log bench swing and decorative bouquets made of dried cornstalks and sunflowers. He stopped at a side entrance to point out the first signs of destruction amidst the pristine yellow paintjob on the walls and the white trim of the doorway. Melissa crouched down to examine the splinters of wood that jutted from the doorjamb and strike plate like a vertical row of needle-sharp teeth.