MINERVA JOLTED AWAKE. Firelight played through the gap between the tent’s canvas flaps. Micah was supposed to be keeping watch outside.
She got up. Grabbed Ellen’s gun. Crawled to the flap.
Micah stood outside with his back to her. He was staring at something across the fire. He held the Tarpley rifle at port arms.
He glanced over his shoulder. Saw her. Turned to face the woods again.
Minny’s eyes were adjusting. Inky darkness pooled past the glow of the fire. She couldn’t tell what Micah was looking at.
“Get Otis’s bow,” he said carefully.
Otis’s compound bow lay outside the other tent. Neither Charlie nor Otis had stirred. Minerva crossed to the tent quickly and brought the bow and the arrows to Micah.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
Micah chucked his chin toward something lurking in the first cut of trees. Minerva couldn’t see anything. Her vision was all staticky as her eyes adjusted.
“There is a flare in my pack,” Micah said. “And tape. Tape the flare to an arrow. Quickly.”
Minerva located the flare and a roll of duct tape. She peeled a strip of gray tape and paused. “Near the arrowhead or further back?”
“A few inches from the head,” Micah said calmly.
“We could burn the whole forest down,” said Minny.
After a moment, Micah replied with: “Good.”
Minerva became aware of a series of sounds coming from not far away: clicks and wheezes and peeps and other animal noises. It was like listening to a disjointed sound loop from David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, the voices of a dozen beasts all blurred together.
“What is that?” she said.
But she knew. It was one of those things that had chased them the other night. The things Otis and Charlie had tried to capture in the pit that had caught them instead.
She taped the flare to the shaft of an arrow. “Can you shoot a bow?”
Micah indicated his eye patch. “Not so well.”
Otis poked his head out of the tent. “What is it?”
“Come here,” Micah told him.
Otis came over at a low crouch. “It a bear?” he whispered.
“Or something,” said Micah.
Minerva could see it now. Its shape seemed impossible. She had seen bears before—not in the wild, but in photographs. This did not echo her understanding of a bear. It stood fifty yards away, motionless between the trees. Its body pooled upward from a wide base like a bell laid on the ground. It did not have legs, or if it did, they were stubby and deformed—or else it had a multitude of them and moved in the scuttling manner of a crab. Minerva could perceive a host of strange protrusions all over its body. Shortened limbs, bulbous growths. It looked to be covered in huge, throbbing lesions.
Otis saw it, too. “That’s no bear,” he said in a voice full of dread.
The sounds it was making were equally senseless. Syrupy exhalations, ticks and whirrs and chirps and growls and hoots. A cacophony of noise as if an entire menagerie were speaking through a single organism.
“Can you hit it?” Micah said.
Otis nodded shakily. “If it stays put.”
Micah said, “It has not moved since I saw it.”
Otis took the bow from Minerva and notched the flare-weighted arrow on the bowstring. Minerva pulled the strike strip. The flare popped alight.
Otis drew back the arrow and let it fly. It arced through the night, the flare fraying in the wind, and struck the thing. It did not move.
The glow of the flare spread, bringing the shape into sharper relief. It made no sense. It was not one identifiable thing. It was many, or parts of many.
“What am I seeing?” Minerva said.
The thing was never at rest. It twitched and jerked. Parts of it opened; other parts closed. A stew of parts. Heads, snouts, tails, limbs. It was enormous. A seething hillock of flesh. It was nothing God’s light had ever shone upon.
At last it shambled forward. Micah shouldered the Tarpley. Minerva cocked Ellen’s .38. Her hands shook.
A random strip of fur ignited down the thing’s side. The hair went up like a fuse. The thing shuffled toward them. It undulated, seemingly legless, hovercrafting across the ground. It shrieked and gibbered and emitted phlegmy dog-panting sounds. Watching it, Minerva was reminded of Play-Doh. Little shreds of Play-Doh, red and blue and yellow and green, scattered on a table after arts and crafts class. She imagined rolling all those bits into a ball. Squashing everything into a solid mass while still being able to see the individual components: streaks of yellow, blots of red, veins of blue. But instead of Play-Doh, this thing was made of animals, all compressed and crushed together—
Micah fired. The bullet tore a chunk off. The thing squealed in a half dozen pitches with as many mouths. It continued toward them, faster now.
“Oh God,” said Otis. “Let’s go go oh no oh no let’s goooo—”
Minerva aimed and fired. Four shots, each one finding its mark. Gouts of blood—or whatever the thing was full of—spurted wildly. It did not stop. She could smell it now. The reek of spoiled meat and fricasseed hair.
The fire licked downward to spread around the belled shape of its body. It looked like the grass skirt of a hula dancer that had leapt up in flame.
Micah picked up the lantern and tossed it thirty feet ahead of them, directly in the thing’s path. “Shoot it,” he told Minerva. “The kerosene tank.”
Minerva steadied herself and fired. The bullet raised a burr of dirt six inches left of the lantern.
The thing neared the lantern. Eight yards, seven, six . . .
She fired again. The slug struck a half-buried rock and whined off target.
She fired again. A dry click. The gun was empty. She glanced at Micah, stricken.
He unloaded with the Tarpley, firing from the hip. The carbine boomed. The lantern flipped end over end, spraying kerosene onto the thing. It went up with a roar. Flames rose along the tortured slag heap of its body as flesh melted off in thick gobbets. It made noises that should be heard only in hell. Its many mouths screamed and bleated as its limbs swung spastically.
Charlie clambered out of the tent. He watched with numb horror as the thing toppled onto its side and lay there, squealing and hissing. Nobody could tell if the noises it made were the product of its mouths or the sound of its untold organs rupturing and popping from the heat. In time, it stopped moving.
Micah approached the creature. Minerva clenched her jaw and followed him. She couldn’t believe she had missed the lantern . . . twice. She had made shots like that a thousand times. She could pick tin cans off a fence post at forty yards. But it’s different when your back’s up against it. Your cool crumbles. You fuck-up.
The body still smoked. It was already softening into the earth. Its configuration was lunatic. It was made out of different animals, a mishmash of species. Fish, fowl, insects, beasts of the woods. All melted together. Every one of its faces—fox and deer and pheasant and coyote and otter—was wrenched into an expression of tortured despair. Everywhere Minerva looked, some awful horror greeted her. Here, a clutch of bats’ heads sprouting from the mouth of a gray wolf. There, a naked rib cage housing the flayed remains of a squirrel, its innards studded with a half dozen eyeballs that had burst in the flame. A blackened ball of ants compressed to the density of a baseball hanging on a strip of organ meat.
Minerva saw the melted remains of what looked to be a dog collar. Had this thing eaten one of Little Heaven’s dogs?
Micah lifted the flap of skin that shielded its means of locomotion. Minerva gagged. How could he stand to touch the thing? The stinking flap rose to reveal dozens of legs. This was how it moved, trundling about with its limbs hidden as though beneath a hoop skirt.
Micah let the flap fall. There came a rude farting noise as a bladder let go inside the thing. The shock was so profound that nobody could speak for some time.
“This is the devil’s work,” Otis finally said. His arms wouldn’t stop shaking.
Minerva checked her watch. It was coming up on five o’clock. The light of dawn was flirting through the trees.
“We have to go back to Little Heaven,” said Otis. “Warn the others.”
Micah and Minerva shared a look. Do we? But they did. She cared nothing for the Englishman, but Ellen and the others did not deserve to be abandoned.
She gazed down the path that led to their car. It looked wide and safe—a hop, skip, and a jump and they would be back at the main road.
But then something stirred. Her breath grated in her lungs.
She pointed. “Look.”
They were out there. Strung all through the woods. Shapes. Some big, others more compact. Some shaggy, others sleek. All unmoving as sentinels.
Micah said, “Grab what you can. Quickly.”