ADAM

 

Tuesday January 14 - 2005 CST

One day until Turbocharger activates

 

The big van-truck thing making a slow turn onto the street was trouble. Somehow I just knew it. It could have been a food truck or someone making deliveries but it just seemed so out of place. That and the driver didn't seem to care that every resident in town was flooding down the street as a herd fleeing from gunshots. Just doing his part in whatever job he'd been hired for.

Whatever that job was it involved pulling that truck around in front of the gazebo. The truck itself wasn't enough to block off the street, so I was bit a confused about their plan. All I knew was that if the cultists wanted it then I had to stop it. Dominus came up to my shoulder and I sighted in on the driver. As my finger took up the slack on the trigger I thought back to the big mansion on the coast where I had shot the guy running at me with a gun in a darkened hallway. He'd turned out to be some terrorist and would have shot me had I not shot him first, but it still haunted me. I'd taken a human life and seen first hand the dramatic carnage that Dominus could unleash.

I couldn't do it again.

My job was protecting human life, not taking it. So I let my aim slip further down to the truck's engine block. Dominus had enough power to not only split the engine block but to keep on going through whatever the cultists had stored in the back. That would work for me. With the growing sound of a terror filled mob coming up behind me I only had time for one shot before they were past me and in the way. My finger caressed the trigger. Whatever was in the back of that truck was about to get a taste of fourteen thousand foot pounds of energy. But before the trigger broke, I heard a voice.

Don't shoot.

Voice may have been the wrong word. It was more like a very strong instinct or feeling. This one I'd only ever felt a couple times before, and those times were when my lightning went off. I'd come to recognize it as a feeling I should listen to. Unfortunately, it came right as the screaming mass of Port Moreau's residents came rushing by me like a flash flood. And like a flood they threatened to carry me off. I thought being a lot bigger, heavier, and stronger would be enough to stand up to the human wave, but I was abjectly wrong on all counts. You should never underestimate the power of a mob.

Hands, elbows, and shoulders pressed against me and forced me forward despite my protests. I noticed the people at the front of the wave were fighting against it too. They didn't want to go this way, but were powerless to stop the momentum behind them. And I could understand their reluctance.

The gazebo in the town center that we were being herded towards had collapsed. There was a swiftly growing black cloud above it that had me doubting my own eyes. But it was really there and spreading outward like a mold on a petri dish. Down below the growing cloud was an even worse sight.

Something was reaching out of the ground and scattering the wreckage of the gazebo's roof. Broken splinters of wood were swept aside by a gigantic appendage that could only be described as dark and slimy. That was when I caught my first glimpse of the owner of that arm. The entire surface of the gazebo's floor was gone, replaced by a humongous lidless eye that was black like a shark's.

There was a shimmering, ethereal purple light running over the bulbous eye like a glaze. My sparkler was now burning with the same shade of violet. That was incredibly bad. It was the end of the spectrum where ancient demon gods liked to hang out. My feet suddenly felt motivated to fight extra hard against the press of the mob pushing me ever closer to the mega-demon trying to force its way into our world.

Then someone screamed to my right and a man was plucked right out of the crowd before disappearing into a narrow alley space between two homes. The way he just got swept up right off his feet told me he hadn't gone in there willingly or lightly. Someone—or more likely something—had snatched him.

A force stronger than the press of the mob overcame me. It wasn't anything mystical though, just the desire to go after whatever abomination had decided to show itself. And that really shows how much I had changed, because a smart and reasonable person would go away from a danger that dragged off grown men into dark alleys. I was long past smart and reasonable and knew only one thing—I had to go after whatever it was.

The crowd had other plans though and kept on washing me down the road like a spring flood. I had to resort to shoving and pulling my way through the mob like I was swimming upstream in a current. Someone got accidentally elbowed in the face, which made me feel incredibly bad because I knew that must have hurt, but I didn't have time to stop. The alleyway was only a few yards away and stopping would only get me swept farther away downstream. Then I finally made it.

No one in the mob had fled into this particular alley and for good reason. There was a black creature coming out of the ground with its…mandibles digging into the corpse of the guy it had just pulled from the mob. Yeah, I would run from that too if I had any common sense.

The thing stopped crunching into the corpse's rib cage a moment to look up at me with its alien eyes. Those eyes weren't normal. They were orbs with thousands of smaller eyes in them like the multifaceted eyes of insects. They studied me with a curiosity that betrayed an intelligence far above anything that an animal should have. It was determining if I was a rival or its next meal.

It made its decision and leapt.

As it surged forward I got to see the full horrifying mass of its body as the ground practically blew apart. What I thought was a long bush running down the middle of an alley was actually some sort of covering made of intertwined pieces of vegetation woven together into an enormous blanket. This thing had made it as camouflage and it didn't click until it had leapt at me. Animals weren't supposed to make ghillie suits like military snipers. That upset the balance of nature where mankind was the hunter and animals were the dumb prey. That terrible feeling of suddenly becoming the dumb prey wrapped its toxic fingers around my guts.

Then the monster knocked me to the ground.

Dominus was pinned between us but it didn't matter. Because if I let go of the thing's mandibles to handle Dominus it would rip into my throat and face with them. The monster was really heavy too and as I saw it stretched out to its full length I could see why. It was a ten or twenty foot long super-centipede. Had I not been filled with adrenaline and fighting for my life the sight of all those legs and the armored body would have given me goosebumps.

We were at a stalemate with it unable to force its way past my upper body strength and me unable to let go. I cranked its head hard hoping something would snap. Then its head turned towards a deep, rumbly boom that was too low to be a gunshot or fireworks. I felt it come through the ground and looked where the creature was looking. We both watched as the pillars around the gazebo shook with the bassy rhythm of the boom and then another tree trunk-sized appendage burst through from the other world.

Whatever barrier was holding the thing back was weakening and leaving openings for the demon-god to squeeze parts of its body through. A terrible thought hit me then. As big as those tentacles bursting through were they seemed pitifully small compared to the eyeball staring through the tear in space. Like eye lashes really. That was all that could fit through.

One of the flailing demon appendages lashed out and swept up one of the fleeing people. A mouth opened in the side of the appendage and the guy disappeared into it. A moment later the violet barrier holding the eyeball back flickered briefly. It could have been my imagination but I thought it was thinner. I really hoped I was wrong because that would mean the energy released by death was being funneled into the spell that was whittling away at that barrier. And there were now a whole lot of helpless people right around it.

The centipede monster came to the same conclusion as well. At least that's what I thought, because it decided I wasn't worth the effort anymore and it had to leave in a hurry. The thing could move fast too. Way too fast for something so big. But I was determined to not let it get away. It was on my world, killing my people. So I did the first thing that came to mind and grabbed hold of its tail as it streaked off. And like a lot of my snap decisions it wasn't a particularly wise one.

I got dragged into the street and through about a million kicking shins, elbows, and feet.