Chapter Thirty-Two

Circular Narratives

HIS SAVIOR HAD arrived, and he didn’t know what the hell she was thinking. Those bullets wouldn’t kill the monster. They’d only make her its next target. “Sam, stop!”

“Get out of here,” she told him. Her eyes were illuminated in the streetlights, and even from where he stood, he could see they were filled with rage. She wasn’t just here to save him; she was here to avenge Tyler’s murder.

No words he could say would stop her from doing her best to kill this thing, but he tried anyway. “The bullets won’t kill it!”

“Just go!” She buried another shot in the monster’s stomach.

The monster didn’t even flinch. It looked down at the thick red mud pouring from its wounds and let out a growl of frustration. It tossed the tall man to the ground and started across the street toward her, ready to pull her apart limb from limb.

“Please, just let her go,” Vincent pleaded, but if the monster heard him, then it made no indication.

He wasn’t going to desert her now, but he didn’t know what he could do to stop it. Bullets were useless, and he was too weak to get between them before the monster reached her. Dr. Cowart’s clue was lost on him—he had no idea how to defeat, or even delay, the creature. He felt like he was staring at his mother in her hospice bed, hoping beyond any reason that a cure would magically appear in his lap so he could save her, but knowing all he could do was watch her die.

Sam fired into the monster’s calf, and mud blasted onto the pavement behind it. The creature faltered, stumbling to keep itself upright, before it caught itself and continued forward. She kept pulling the trigger—another in its arm and one through its cheek—until she was out of bullets.

The monster didn’t slow down. Mud poured from every bullet hole, covering much of the creature in blood-red clay from the neck down. Globs of mud fell in puddles on the road in its wake. It’d lost so much that Vincent expected it to fall over, but that only seemed to make it more determined to kill her. It ran forward, closing the last few feet between them.

Sam threw her gun at its face, and as it raised its hands to block it, she charged forward. She pulled a stun gun from her pocket and jammed it into one of the holes in its stomach. The clicking of electricity filled his ears, and the smell of baked clay permeated the air. Black smoke poured from the spot. The monster stood there, shaking as the electricity shot through its body, creating cracked dry lines in the mud.

A glimmer of hope.

Is this the key to defeating it? Bake the mud until it can’t move?

“Die, you motherfucker!” She stuck the stun gun under its chin.

The monster’s head shook like it was seizing, and black cracks expanded across its face. But then it grabbed her arm and pulled it back with such force that she dropped the stun gun on the ground. It wrapped its other muddy hand around her throat and lifted her into the air.

It had her.

Sam turned to Vincent, her eyes wet with tears. “Run! You need to—”

The monster cut off her airway before she could finish. She punched and kicked the monster like she had trained in a ring for years, but it barely noticed her struggles. And as it started back over to where the tall man squirmed on the ground below the ledge, there was little doubt what it intended to do with her.

It’s going to kill Sam. Murder her like it did Tyler and Dr. Cowart unless someone does something.

But no one else was coming.

He was the only one left.

Run.

He heard the word in his mind, but he didn’t see Sam scream it. He saw James mouth it to him. Just below the bridge, he’d stood by and watched James die, and here he was again with Sam, incapable of saving one of the only people left in the world who he loved. He was the same helpless coward who’d entered that tunnel almost two months ago.

Only now, he had better excuses. Physical injuries. Ones masking the reality that, even if he were in perfect health, he wouldn’t interfere with what the monster did. He was too afraid.

“Run.”

The cry was so hoarse and quiet he would have been convinced he’d imagined it if Sam wasn’t looking at him. The monster neared the railing. Any second now, it would drop her, and she would die. And here he stood, too afraid to do more than watch it murder her.

Run.

He listened to her.

He listened to James.

Run.

He dropped the gun and ran. Not away from the monster, but toward it.

He was afraid—fucking terrified. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it’d break what was left of his ribs. His legs were shaking so much he expected to fall over at any moment. But this wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way. He’d been afraid when he’d tried to stop the monster from killing the kid. And when he’d stepped between it and Sam. What he feared more than the monster, however, was that this thing was going to kill someone who was as much of a victim as he and James had been in that tunnel. This wasn’t the same as watching his mother die. He could prevent this death.

Run.

His legs carried him forward. The pain was too terrible in his chest and arm to ignore it. So, he felt it. He felt the pain in his body. The pain of his mother’s death. The pain of James’s loss at the hands of terrible men. The pain of the deaths of all the innocent people who’d been murdered because he’d created this bloodthirsty monster to protect himself. He felt all of it. Used it as fuel.

He opened his arms wide to tackle it, and a moment before he collided with the monster, it turned to him. Shock and something else flooded its face at his betrayal. Fear. Yes, it was afraid of him.

He slammed into it. The monster stumbled backward and dropped Sam to the ground. She coughed as air reentered her lungs, and the monster fell over the railing. Its eyes locked on him. Anger extinguished any shock or fear. Reaching out a muddy hand, it grabbed the collar of Vincent’s shirt and pulled him down with it.

There was no time for screams or anything beyond scrambling to find a way to prevent the beast from dragging him into the darkness below. In the mere seconds before he plummeted to the ground, Vincent managed to hook his good arm around the railing at his elbow. Any relief was overpowered by the pain that flooded his senses when the weight of the monster pulled down on him.

“Ahhhh!” His arm shook. The collar of his shirt cut into the back of his neck, and he had to pull his head back in order to keep it upright. He couldn’t carry the weight of them both for long.

“What the hell are you doing?” it barked, and the rotten smell of death filled his nostrils.

Vincent tried to turn away, but he couldn’t with the monster pulling down on his neck. “I won’t let you kill anyone else!”

“You think this would stop me?” It laughed.

He knew it wouldn’t, but it’d give him and Sam enough time to get away from the creature. “Then let go.”

“You need me!”

Threads snapped as the collar of his old shirt ripped. The monster let go of the fabric, and just when he thought he was free of the beast, it wrapped its hands around his leg. The pain was so intense his arm slipped, and he grabbed hold of the top of the cold stone railing with his aching fingers.

“Fuck!” His grip was sliding. His fingers pulled away from the railing like snapped piano wires. He was going to fall and die in the very place where he and James were first attacked. Where he’d covered James in mud and told him he had to survive because Vincent couldn’t make it without him. Where he’d created this thing. And where it would kill him.

They’d come full circle.

Circular narratives.

It was just a big circle. He’d drawn it around his caricature of Dr. Cowart—he remembered that now. A narrative that returned to where it started. All the different tales about golems had that in common. To kill the monster, you had to reverse whatever you did to create it in the first place. It was so obvious, so clear what he had to do now that he couldn’t believe it’d taken him so long to realize it. And of course, he was too late.

He lost his grip, and he shut his eyes. He didn’t want to watch his own descent. But there was no wind rushing through his hair. No strange sensation in the pit of his stomach as he fell. Just someone’s sweating hands grabbing his arm and holding on to him for dear life.

He opened his eyes to find Sam’s red sweating face looking down on him.

“You have to kick that thing off!” she told him, her grip loosening as she coughed.

Before Vincent could do more than look down at it, the creature was climbing him. Pulling itself up his body like he was a ladder until it was holding on to his shoulders and staring at him face-to-face. “You need me! You’ll die without me!”

Vincent stared into the face of the beast. James’s face. He knew the monster believed what it said because he’d believed it. He might not have known he was creating a monster off the trail in the darkness below them, but he had slathered James with mud because he didn’t think he could survive without him.

“You’re right,” he said.

A smile spread across the monster’s face.

“You’re slipping. Get rid of it!” Sam urged.

“But you’re not James.” James had been dead for almost two months, and Vincent was still alive. He’d survived without him, and he’d continue to survive when this creature returned to the earth below them. He kissed its forehead in the same place as he’d kissed James’s when he unknowingly created the beast, and he spoke the words to reverse its creation. “I don’t need you.”

“No! Take it back! Take it back!” The monster shook him, but it was too late. Pieces of it were falling off, dropping to the ground below in globs of mud. The weight of it was lessening, but it was still clinging to him for dear life, its eyes burning through him with pure loathing. If it was going to die, then it was going to take him with it.

His arm was sliding through Sam’s grip. She couldn’t hold on for much longer.

Vincent reached into his pocket with his throbbing, damaged arm and pulled out the pocketknife he’d carried with him since the attack. He flipped it open and jammed the blade into the middle of James’s forehead where he had planted his kiss, and the monster released its grip, disappearing into the darkness below and letting out a garbled cry of fear before it hit the ground.

“You gotta help me!” Sam ordered.

Vincent grabbed hold of the railing with his other hand and pulled. Sam lifted him over the railing, and together, they collapsed to the ground, Sam coughing and Vincent trying to breathe through the pain.

“It’s gone,” she said, hugging him.

Vincent had to be certain. He forced himself to his knees and asked for Sam’s phone. Turning on the flashlight, he could make out a dark patch of red mud on the ground that was slowly sinking back into the earth. It was actually gone. They’d defeated it. “It’s over.”

Only in that momentary relief did Vincent realize there was still one person left, and over Sam’s laughs of relief, he heard him. The tall man. He’d somehow managed to break through his arm restraints. He was crawling on the ground, leaving a blood-smeared path on the road to where Vincent had dropped his gun.