Chapter Twenty-Six

“No, Heidi, no!” Chuck screamed. He reached for the nearest Melon Head, hoping to get hold of its collar, but it was too fast for him. The Melon Heads wrapped their arms around Heidi and drove her to the ground. She didn’t even have time to cry out.

Chuck saw that the one he’d slammed into the wall was trying to get up and join them. He kicked it under its chin and sent it to sleep.

A shadow leapt off the ladder, nearly landing on top of the pile. “Heidi!”

Mick had something in his hand. It looked like a pipe. He clubbed the backs of the Melon Heads mercilessly. He may as well have been hitting them with a broken flyswatter.

Chuck grabbed the lone clump of hair on one of the Melon Heads. He yanked its head up. The hair ripped free from its deformed skull with a sound like pulling two pieces of Velcro apart. The Melon Head howled with inhuman rage.

“Fuckers! Fuckers!” Mick bellowed, the pipe ringing every time it connected with bone. A light flashed from above as Vent came down to help with his lit lighter in one hand and a two-by-four in the other.

Heidi stared up at Chuck amidst the tangle of bodies and grasping limbs, her eyes bulging with unmitigated terror. The wounded Melon Head dove toward her face like a bird pecking at the ground. When it pulled away, Chuck’s heart stopped.

Heidi’s throat was gone. In its place was a gaping, bleeding hole. She desperately tried to draw a breath, the blood percolating wetly in her wound.

What happened next was a black blur for Chuck.

He was sure he shouted something, his voice alien and distant in his ears. His fingers wrapped around sweaty flesh. A heavy weight was there and then gone as he tossed a Melon Head behind him. His foot stomped on a leg, or an arm, or even a back. He couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw Vent swatting the Melon Head he’d cast off Heidi. Mick kept up with the pipe as if he were chopping wood.

You’ll hit Heidi! Chuck shrieked in his mind.

He managed to wrap his arm around a Melon Head’s neck, yanking it from Heidi’s quivering body in a chokehold.

“No! Oh my god, no!” Marnie wailed as she descended from the roof brandishing her own lighter.

Chuck locked gazes with Mick. Mick’s shoulders heaved, his eyes blazing with fury. The Melon Head struggled to break free, twisting its head from side to side and batting at Chuck’s arm. Chuck applied more pressure, hoping to crush its windpipe.

Then Mick did something that matched the Melon Heads in ferocity and brutality. He lunged at the captive Melon Head with his mouth open wide and bit a huge, quivering chunk off its cheek. The Melon Head unleashed a cry that could only have come from an animal. Its pain only fueled Chuck’s anger. He drove his knee into the small of its back. It was getting harder to hold on as its flailing and screeching went into overdrive. Chuck used its momentum to propel it into the nearest wall. He flung the creature as hard as he could. Its nose cracked as it thumped off the wall. When it turned around to snarl at them with a ragged hole for a cheek, Vent hit it in the mouth with the two-by-four, followed by a hammering blow by Mick in the same spot with the pipe. Chuck drove his fist into its ruined face and felt the satisfying crunch of bone and squelch of wet meat. The Melon Head’s eyes rolled up in its head and it collapsed onto the floor in a dead heap.

The formerly unconscious Melon Head’s eyes flew open and it jumped to its feet, kicking Vent in the back and sending him sprawling. The one feasting on Heidi leapt with almost feline grace from her body to the dead Melon Head, as did the third that had been grappling with Vent. It was as if the life going out in the one sent a signal to the others, who acted in unison to gather its body. The one with Heidi’s blood dripping off its chin hoisted the body over its shoulder and ran with the other two right behind it. Mick gave chase, shouting all of the things he was going to do to them when he got them. Vent followed after him.

Chuck’s gaze shifted back to Heidi. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, her body still as a stone. He didn’t need to check for a pulse to see if she was still clinging to life. It looked like every drop of blood in her body was on the floor. The Melon Head had devoured her throat until Chuck could see her spine. He fell to his knees beside her.

Marnie stood over them, the glow from her flashlight shaking in her trembling hand. Neither of them spoke, though they both wept, their tears absorbed by Heidi’s spilled blood. Chuck had never felt anything close to the compounding grief that he was sure was going to break something vital inside him.

“Why did you come back for me?” he muttered between bone-quaking sobs.

He felt responsible for her death, the realization making him wish the Melon Heads had killed him, too. Marnie kept saying Heidi’s name over and over. There was no mantra to get her back. She was gone. The Melon Heads had taken her from them with the cold cruelty of a pack of lizards.

How were they going to tell her parents?

Chuck heard the slap of feet on the bare floor and didn’t bother looking down the hall. If the Melon Heads were coming back, let them do what they wanted. But when he looked at Marnie on her knees, crying as if she’d saved every tear she hadn’t shed and had now set them free, he realized he couldn’t let the same thing happen to her. He got up and prepared for the worst, clenching and unclenching his fist.

Mick and Vent came stumbling toward them. They dropped their weapons and bent over with their hands on their knees, gasping for air.

“They…got…away,” Vent said.

Mick swallowed hard. “They were so…fucking fast.”

When Marie flicked her lighter on, both boys staggered backward, as if Heidi’s corpse were toxic. Vent immediately turned away and threw up. Mick stared at Heidi, burning the image of her ravaged body into his brain.

“I’m going to kill every last one of them,” he said, though Chuck had the feeling he was saying it to himself rather than issuing a rallying cry. He looked at Chuck, his expression going from shock, to anger, to a cold neutrality. His face was smeared with blood. “I was gonna push them off the roof. Had perfect spots for us to hide along the ledge. We could have easily sent them over.”

What he didn’t say was, If it wasn’t for you, Chuck.

Chuck couldn’t speak, nor could he turn away from Mick’s accusing gaze that was there one moment and gone the next.

After spitting over and over, well away from Heidi, Vent asked, “What are we gonna do? Maybe everyone will believe us now.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mick said. “How can you prove a Melon Head did this to her?”

“I mean, look at her throat.”

“Yeah, so? Look at that Melon Head’s cheek.”

Vent said, “And how do we prove that’s a Melon Head? It’s not like the cops have Melon Head DNA on file. We’ll get busted for murdering a handicapped person.”

“When do we kill them?” Marnie said, her voice so weak, Chuck almost hadn’t heard her over the sound of his own breathing.

“Tomorrow,” Mick said.

Chuck had no idea how they could accomplish such a thing, and he no longer cared.

Tomorrow it would be.