Night of the Hollows
By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris
Andy Jumpfrey, AJ, got his idea for Halloween 2020 from a knock at the front door.
His parents, at work at the facility, had not mentioned any deliveries. AJ was in the TV room attending class on Zoom. It was senior year at home, thanks to the coronavirus — just like the second half of junior year — and his classmates looked as miserable as he felt. Those with their camera on, anyway. All half asleep, or clearly watching some other window on their monitor. AJ himself was texting Sugar Cortez, trying to flirt her up.
The knocking persisted, steady as a metronome. Someone out there with nothing else to do. He decided to answer it.
When he left his cam, the teacher did not protest. No one still cared like they did months ago, when the situation felt like it would only last a few weeks.
But, as he reached for the knob, the knocking changed. As if whoever was out there suddenly got fed up — and two fists began to pummel the door.
AJ froze. He did not want to open it anymore.
Halite was not the safest desert town. Everybody knew that. The meth heads. All the arson lately. But he did not, oddly, even want to look through the peephole. It made no sense — but it felt as if, through the door, there radiated from whoever stood out there a palpable wrongness.
So AJ only watched the door rattle.
When the pummeling had gone on a full minute, he thought Ah hell.
He got his aluminum baseball bat, and went out the back. The air tasted metallic today. He marched around the house resolutely — he wished he had his sunglasses, the sand was blinding — and tensed as he reached the corner that would bring him in view of the front. Raised the bat, as if to meet a fastball.
But the pounding abruptly stopped, and he rounded the corner to see the man limp away, into a swirl of white dust. A big man, but so bent over that the hem of his overcoat dragged as he crossed the street. The wide floppy brim of a brown hat obscured his head — and for a second, AJ had the impression that it was not a human being under those clothes. The figure tottered as if on limbs not purposed for solid ground, hunched crablike as if its eyes abhorred the sun; moved fast but careening, like a thing starving and desperate — and he couldn’t explain why, but he felt that not seeing its face was the luckiest break he had ever received.
Later, after dinner, he thought about the adrenaline the incident gave him, and felt inspired. Halloween was two weeks off. He hadn’t done anything last year — but maybe he wasn’t too old, after all.
Traditionally, for AJ the town triggered despair more than adrenaline. East to West he could walk Halite in twenty minutes. North to South took thirty, but there was more empty space along the way. Derelict houses, and concrete slabs where houses once stood. Some of the slabs were scorched black, their structures brought down in the past few years of endemic arson. Others had blanched in the sun since before he was born. Whole blocks returning to nothing but sand, gravel, stiff dry weeds.
“This might be my last Halloween here,” he ventured at dinner. “If, uh, I move away.”
“This town made me who I am,” his dad grimaced. “It made you who you are. You owe it.”
AJ couldn’t remember a summer where the heat didn’t feel like a furnace, where his retinas didn’t burn from sunlight on the dry white lakebed. He couldn’t remember a breeze that didn’t carry clouds of gypsum powder, or ash-fine salt, or borax, these dusts brought up from under the desert, drifting down the streets, through the windows, into the tufa hills, into his eyes. Whichever dust the facility was producing that day.
“They’ll start you at the facility right after graduation,” his mom said. “Hook you right up.”
He didn’t want to say no thanks, he knew they’d feel insulted. He’d be insulting everybody in town. But — the facility was a brine well operation. They drilled five hundred feet deep under the salt pan, they shot water down there, then sucked the water back up full of dissolved minerals. Evaporated the water, crystallized the minerals, recrystallized them to industrial perfection. Sold them for use in detergents, construction materials, food additives. The facility had been pumping up treasure for a century. AJ felt it could continue without him.
“People here are family,” his dad said.
“Does that include the meth heads?”
“AJ, the facility isn’t the only employer,” his mother said, which wasn’t true enough to count as true.
Maybe she meant in Ridgefront, the next town, forty desolate miles away. Ridgefront had a Taco Bell and a GameStop. But AJ felt with each increasingly tight breath he took in Halite that if life saw him only as far as Ridgefront, he’d die.
“You’re too good for the facility,” his mother said with a frown. “Aren’t you.”
Isolation inside isolation. The coronavirus had shuttered the school, the bowling alley, the greasy spoon. There wasn’t anything else, except the Hi-Lo-Deal, where people shopped for groceries giving each other a berth, as if accidental touch equaled death. And they all wore surgical masks or bandanas over mouth and nose, so no one had seen a public smile in months.
AJ knew Ridgefront neglected masks, kicked back in restaurants. But in Halite, everybody knew somebody who wasn’t sixty but relied on an oxygen tank, pills, fifteen hours of sleep. Everyone remembered March, when the dozen retirees who made a habit of the weekday lunch special at Pottbelly’s all caught the bug; by May, nine were dead, plus Janice Potter. Healthy and funny, and in the ground at twenty-five. Everyone knew what it meant to inhale the local dust for decades. What it spelled for their prospects, if this lung bug got in too. So just about all the adults went straight home when their shift ended, and most of AJ’s friends stayed isolated too.
The town’s resulting emptiness had made its meth heads brazen. They wandered by day, now, between abandoned houses, like they owned the place. All AJ had to do was walk around his block and he’d spot one, at least in the distance. A tweaker, a dealer. Maybe a relative who hadn’t given up, out looking. Ron Berwick quit school two years ago to build a lab in one of the vacant houses, and they’d looked for him for a while. Everyone knew someone. Miss Williway, the substitute, didn’t teach anymore, but lived in a van, losing teeth. Small town.
Well — the meth also lured outsiders. Everyone said the arsonists were outsiders. No local would burn Halite, they said.
AJ liked the fires though. Any night they lit up one of the town’s vacancies, as they did, he’d step outside to look toward the orange glow. You deserve it, he’d think, you hopeless wreck. You burn right down, you empty mess. All four walls.
His first choice for a Halloween partner was Sugar Cortez.
She said, “Sounds fun — if we were six. You want to talk to my little brother?”
He considered telling her about the man who knocked. And what was discovered when he followed the man. That might put her in the holiday spirit.
Or get him branded a liar. A creep.
So he tried Jenny Mih.
“It’ll be a full moon. How often is there a full moon on Halloween? We need to be out there.”
“Not after dark. The tweakers rule the town at night. My mom says don’t think of them as people anymore. They’ll kill us just to sell our hair for drug money.”
“We’ll shave our heads,” he said.
It occurred to him that the one who’d knocked was hiding his head. That — lately — all the tweakers hid their faces.
In the end, AJ turned to the failsafe, he turned to his best friend.
What did AJ discover, when he followed the man who knocked? He was not sure.
He didn’t follow until two days later. But he had watched the guy cross the street and enter the mobile home that sat at a tilt there. So, two days later, AJ investigated. He needed to know if the block had a squatter.
He took the baseball bat. Everybody said you did not want to surprise a tweaker. Or worse, a dealer.
The interior was stripped of everything worth anything. Even the carpeting had been ripped out, leaving a patchwork of particleboard and metal subfloor. The ceiling had a massive hole, blasting most of the interior with sunlight. With his every step, the whole structure creaked. But — he was alone.
He was exiting, relieved, when some detritus on the floor caught his eye.
In one tiny room where the window had been smashed out, a piece of particleboard had been wedged into its frame, newspaper wadded around the edges. Someone had made an effort to darken this room. He felt a sudden worry that the knocker was coming back. And what lay on the floor — he thought at first it was a snakeskin, shed by some fattening rattler. But — the skin extended well beyond the bit that initially caught his eye, to a piled and ruffled mass of yellowed, drying translucence.
He pushed the mass around with the bat. Then gripped the bat by its wide end, and hooked the pommel within the mass to lift it. It gave a faint crinkling sound, but was not so dried out as to crack. It remained pliable, and he examined it at the end of the bat, hanging in the air — thinking, as he did, that he had never heard of a snake seeking a dark place to shed — and when the skin came up to his height and he saw its shape, he dropped it and the bat and without breathing, he was so startled, he fled straight back to his own house, and bolted the door.
What he did not tell Sugar — or anyone — was that the skin resembled no snake at all, but very nearly instead seemed a suit of flesh human in shape — or approximately, anyway, its human form interrupted by odd lumps distributed around its back and sides, as if a man sprouted the protuberances of a stegosaur — and the legs were odd, as if dividing into many more legs, each thin, with no sign of knees — with flat hands shredded and dirt-caked, as if used for digging — and a mask — with two neat eye-holes, but in a face much wider than his own head — or so it seemed; perhaps the skin had stretched, become a poor representation of its inhabitant, warped — and so he hoped, as he could not shake the sight of its mouth-hole too wide by far. Much, much too wide.
Gerrold Dippold was his best friend. Since first grade. His one true friend. Others were friends of circumstance. Convenience. Proximity. Gerrold Dippold would have been his friend anywhere, any dimension in time and space, and if they lived to be ninety that would not change. He felt understood by Gerrold Dippold, and he felt what a relief it was to be understood.
AJ said, “Dippo. Let’s do Halloween.”
Dippo said yes immediately. “Like we used to? Costumes? The cemetery.”
AJ said, “The whole nine yards.”
And it would culminate in bringing Dippo to the skin. He could not wait to see Dippo freak out. AJ wanted to leave town feeling he had done some good things. As if he did owe it. And if he could give his friend the greatest Halloween of all time — he’d be proud of that.
AJ told his parents he’d watch horror movies till midnight in Dippo’s back yard. Dippo told his parents the same about AJ’s back yard.
AJ waited in the late afternoon in the bleachers beside the football field and wondered where he’d be a year from today. Someplace green? Not even the football field had grass. Grass wouldn’t grow in Halite. And alkali dust would turn fake turf to a crumbling, expensive memory in no time. AJ tried to imagine living someplace green. The air tasted chalky today.
Dippo showed up by skateboard.
“What’s that?” AJ asked, annoyed.
“What’s what?”
“Skating’s not spooky. That ruins it.”
The course of 2020 meant he hadn’t seen much of Dippo, and he was irked at this reminder that Dippo rarely stuck to a plan.
“AJ, it’s cool. I like your makeup.”
For once they were not wearing surgical masks. This plan he’d stuck to. It was fine. They were going to be outdoors, away from other people, they could stay six feet from each other — and they’d followed the rules for so long, they deserved one night off. Halloween was too important to compromise with masks.
AJ had painted his face white, black circles around the eyes, black grid for the all-tooth grin of a skull. Dippo had blacked out half his teeth and painted his chin red. As if gore poured from his mouth, his face slashed and battered by cruel torture, eyes crying blood. He’d splattered his white T-shirt red too.
From the bleachers they watched the trick-or-treaters who were out now, across the street. Knots of roving children, some under parental supervision, others free-range. Pointed black hats bobbed merrily, capes flapped happily — capes black for Batman, red for Thor — children transformed into their wildest dreams, princesses and soldiers, baseball players, the undead. Laughter and screams of delight and their desperate little spats traveled easily through the still air, making the town feel not quite so dead yet.
“That was us for so many years,” AJ said.
“I really miss being a kid today,” Dippo said.
It was different this year. Some houses put candy outside in buckets so as not to break isolation. Other people greeted kids from behind a folding table or rope positioned to enforce distance.
AJ put up the hood on his black hoodie, and became Death.
As they started across the street, Dippo, atop his slow-rolling board, said, “This will be a true eve for every hollow.”
Annoyed at the skateboard, AJ said, “A what?”
“That’s the official name of Halloween,” Dippo explained. “All Hollows Eve.”
“Oh yeah?” AJ decided to mess with his friend. “What’s that mean, Dippo?”
Dippo’s battered face tightened in consternation. Clearly he did not want to seem stupid by not knowing, so he was going to have to guess.
“Well. It’s the night, you know, spirits rule the earth. Spirits are ghosts, right? Meaning they’re hollow. So, tonight, it is the hollow ones who rule. All Hollows Eve.”
Dippo looked so proud of this explanation that AJ lost all desire to laugh in his face. As sincerely as he could, he said, “That’s really interesting.”
By the time they reached the cemetery on the edge of town, the sun was low, the sky yellowing. Back when they were twelve, thirteen, this was where they used to come after trick-or-treating. They’d wander among the crooked stones, reading dates, 1985, 1942, 1870, wonder who the important people were under the big obelisks. Soak up the Halloween of it all — one year, they saw a black cat — and then they’d sit and tell ghost stories.
This year they were too old to trick-or-treat, so they were starting here. The stones cast long thin shadows in the sand. The sun set, magenta, wild. AJ felt lucky to see it, and wistful. It was the last Halloween sunset he’d ever see over Halite, and he felt he had engineered a memory he could hold forever.
The moon was already bright in the dusk.
“Story time,” Dippo said. “Ready?”
“I don’t think I am. My story . . . feels too true,” AJ said. Already he was building it up. “Can you go first?”
Dippo began, “This happened to my cousin’s friend when she rented a cabin outside Reno.”
It was not, as his stories never were, great, and it ended after twenty minutes with the friend dead and a sheriff turning to the cousin to say, “It’s strange, though. You say the killer lived next door? But that house burned down ten years ago.”
AJ had foreseen this ending for eighteen minutes, but even so he let out a cry of, “Oh, damn! That’s a winner,” and he laughed, and put up a hand for a high-five.
Dippo practically glowed to find his story a hit.
“Now tell yours.”
“In a minute. Mine is — I don’t know. It came to me in a nightmare. And I’m not over it yet.”
Dippo looked as intrigued as AJ had hoped. Neither spoke for a while.
The moonlit tombstones cast shadows as surely as they had by day. But the world had gone silent. There were no kids out this late. No squeals or arguments or laughs echoed across town. And eventually, in the stillness, AJ began.
“Do you remember Tuesday, when a thousand ravens out of nowhere suddenly filled the sky? It went dark as an eclipse. They were cawing like crazy.”
“No!” Dippo said, upset he had missed this.
AJ nodded severely, and did not let on that it was made up. “I went out to the front yard to watch, and I got the weirdest shock. Because they all swooped down out of the sky, like a tornado, and landed around me. All across the yard. On the roof, the fence, on the mailbox. A blanket of ravens. Suddenly totally silent. All looking at me. I froze. They just stared. I had the weird sense they wanted to tell me something.
“Then — just as suddenly, they all took off. And flew away, over the hills.”
“Did this really happen?”
“I swear. And that night, I had a terrible dream.”
In the dream, he said — and none of this was true either, not any of it — he’d been walking around town, following the caw of a raven he couldn’t find, when a man in an overcoat lurched out of nowhere, and hauled him across sand, into an evil church. Inside, all the crosses were upside-down, and there was a disturbing symbol drawn in blood on the wall, and — well, he couldn’t fully remember exactly what he saw, but — they were sacrificing people by peeling off their skins.
Dippo’s blood-spattered mouth hung open.
“As soon as I woke up, I drew the symbol. Before I could forget it.”
AJ unfolded a piece of paper and placed it on the ground between them. The symbol was made up too, a sort of pentagram-asterisk-eye.
Then AJ made himself look uncomfortable and said, “I guess that’s not much of a story.”
“Wait. That’s all?”
“Dippo. It felt real. They were going to peel off my skin, and—and—I was so glad to wake up. Sorry. It’s lame.”
“No. No, it’s cool.”
He did seem disappointed though, which was perfect. They sat a while longer.
Dippo said, “We should do this every year from now on. I mean . . . we can, right?”
AJ’s plan to leave town and never look back was one he had mentioned, casually, to Dippo, but — he had not stressed it, really.
He took a while to answer.
“What if,” he said, “one of us doesn’t still live here?”
“Right,” Dippo said quickly. “You just point me the way, and I’ll go! This town sucks.”
“I wonder where we’ll be,” AJ said.
“I wonder what jobs we’ll get.”
In the ensuing quiet, AJ suppressed more annoyance. Where will we work? Dippo didn’t get it. It doesn’t matter where we work, the first question is where will we be — in the whole world! Vegas, Hawaii, Aruba! The main question — when we’re there — is who will we be? Here I’m Death, AJ thought, and it seemed funny, though not in any way he could tell as a joke. Here I’m Death, sitting in a cemetery, nothing to do.
“Let’s walk back,” he said.
“Okay. Yeah.”
They walked down the middle of the street, Dippo carrying his skateboard over his shoulder, AJ secretly preparing for Phase 2 of Halloween. He would lead them past a particular vacant house — on the side of which, that morning, he had spray-painted the dream symbol seven feet tall. Dippo would freak the hell out.
“This is too weird,” AJ would say. Maybe even pretend to hyperventilate. “Oh my god, those ravens also landed on that mobile home across my street. Why? Was that a message? We need to go look in there!”
And voila, Phase 3: Dippo would meet the skin. Which of course was not a human skin — that had to be only, like, how it appeared. But if it had fooled AJ by light of day, it would get Dippo good tonight.
Just as the Phase 2 house came into sight, though, AJ realized they were being followed.
The awareness had built gradually, like shivers. He did not want to turn and look. He felt the same instinct not to see that had kicked in when he’d heard that knocking. He did listen for footsteps, though — in the hope maybe it would turn out there was no one back there.
“If—“ Dippo began, too loudly.
AJ’s reaction was instant: “Shh!”
Dippo understood — as if that was all he needed to sense it too. He tensed. But, less sensitive to the eerie feeling, he turned to look.
“Yeah,” he said, and by how low his voice was, AJ knew he had seen something.
AJ looked.
It was the same silhouette that had retreated from his door. The overcoat, the hat. Exactly the kind of misshapen hat a tweaker would find blowing around in a wind, or steal from a car trunk. But no face was visible under it. The shadow under the brim was total. The night all around the shadow was bright and crisp, but mercifully under that brim was a swirl of moonless night. Approximately man-shaped. Coming on fast. No sign of limp, now. Fast and smooth, as if—
For an instant AJ thought he saw not feet under the overcoat, but the flow and curl of a dozen snakes.
He had the insane idea that it was a tangle of snakes wearing the coat.
“Keep moving.”
“I hear that.”
The figure slowed as they sped up, as if to consider, change plans. It tilted, as if looking back over the shoulder of the coat — and AJ saw another one. This one wore a blanket. An old quilt thrown over a lump, it seemed, a block further behind.
AJ must have imagined the exchange that ensued. Wild, sibilant utterances that rose and fell and slid over the hard consonants, hssstss-chsss-sskssk-tsshh — from some primitive, even prehuman language, a tongue with few words, words for nothing beyond the basics — hunger, surround, kill.
“Let’s get out of the open.”
AJ turned up a driveway into a barren lot, Dippo one step behind. They both hopped a low cinderblock wall, into the next lot, which held the skeletal remains of a car.
Dippo, huffing, out of breath given his nerves, tripped on the wall, fell. His skateboard clattered back on the other side of it.
“Ung!”
He got up, bleeding from his palms.
“I’m okay. Let’s go.”
But AJ stopped. There was one in front of them. By the car.
This one carried a stick. A broomstick or shovel handle, its end for some reason wrapped in a wad of cloth that dripped fluid. On its head was a baseball cap and AJ wished for a wider bill, a full brim, to cast a shadow as completely as that floppy hat did, because he could see the rough gray lizardine flesh of a loose chinless neck and that was too much.
A scent emanated from it and AJ said, “Run,” and started to, not looking back to see if Dippo did — but he heard Dippo’s feet smacking the ground behind him.
Dippo wheezing.
“Wait, wait.”
AJ slowed up. He needed to think, anyway, needed a plan — a place to run to.
“You okay?”
Now the three figures approached together from the east with that odd smoothness, as if rolling over the ground. To the south a fourth one moved parallel, coming through empty yards a block down.
Dippo shoved his inhaler into this mouth. A lot of kids in Halite were asthmatics.
AJ in his panic could not place it — what had he smelled back there?
Dippo’s breath sounded like air pushed through a straw that narrowed to needle width, air trying to force itself past a valve that kept sealing. Each inhale a pained whine.
Still the pursuers closed.
Dippo dropped to his knees.
“Come on, Dip, get okay. Get okay now.”
The one in the ball cap had an enormous mouth and this mouth had no teeth, a mouth hanging open like the neckhole of a stretched-out old shirt, with nothing but open throat behind it.
The one in the wide-brimmed hat picked up speed, as if feeling sure of — of the kill.
“Let’s go!” AJ cried.
He grabbed Dippo’s shirt and pulled. Pulled him up, along, running, dragging him upright. He had the feeling that Dippo’s adrenaline had to kick in any second, kick Dippo right in the lungs. That no human body would fail in the one minute it was truly needed. That if Dippo wanted to live, he would power through. Dippo only had to want it.
Dippo fell to his knees crossing the street. The piece of his shirt that AJ held tore off. AJ stopped.
Two more of them emerged from the shell of a house immediately in front of them. Gliding down its cement walk, as if coming to check the mail. AJ tried to haul Dippo to his feet. These two also carried the dripping sticks. Dripping with what, blood?
The one that had been moving parallel to the south — there were two more with him, now. Those three turning to converge on this spot.
“They all see us,” AJ said, angry at the wheezing, as if the sound was giving them away. “Let’s go go go.”
Dippo issued a strangulated cry and tilted, eyes wide in terror. He could not breathe at all.
AJ crouched, threw Dippo over his shoulder.
Somehow he found his feet, and he ran.
There was one direction where the things did not seem to be. North.
A block north, the road ended. The town ended.
Half a mile past that, the hills ascended.
If I can get to the hills, AJ thought.
He knew his pursuers were not simple meth heads without strength to pursue him. They had once been. But now they were something else. Something new. Or very, very old — but he hoped they retained the mental disarray of the addict. He hoped they would give up, as soon as the chase got difficult. In the hills.
And he had adrenaline on his side. Like crazy. He was not fast with Dippo over his shoulder, a deadweight. But he was steady, moving, did not feel pressed down, did not feel flight was impossible. He would make it. Out of town.
The eight — eight! — after him, they would not follow, not all the way.
If I can get into the hills, he thought.
Pavement gave way to crunching gravel and then to the shushing of loose sand as he ran, and here Dippo did get heavy. Here AJ’s knees began to wobble with each stride. Here he knew one turned ankle and it was all over.
But he kept going—
Then he was crossing hard parched earth, riddled with deep cracks. That pancake-flat expanse, spur of the ancient lakebed, so pale, so bright it hurt his eyes even at night, and he was bowing as he ran, slowly collapsing, unable to raise his head, watching only his feet as he lumbered. Sweat poured into his eyes. His chest burned.
He meant to stop but half fell. Meant to put Dippo down gently but half dropped him.
Dippo had maybe passed out.
AJ looked to see how far he’d come across the expanse. It was the length of three football fields since town. Well — carrying deadweight, it was a distance to be proud of.
He smacked his oldest and best friend across the cheeks, gently but insistently, on and on—
Dippo sat up, abruptly, emitted a squeak, plugged his inhaler into this mouth, and sprayed. His eyes were grateful. But he held up three fingers as if to say, “Three minutes, I need three minutes.”
AJ looked to see if they had one minute.
There were a lot more than eight, now. Lined up along the edge of the town, just off the street, on the sand, two dozen of them. Some of them oddly shaped. And more weaving through the yards, creeping between the houses, coming to join the line. Only two — three — had ventured onto the lakebed, and they progressed slowly, as if unwilling to walk across it for some reason.
AJ grinned. His plan, for whatever reason, was working.
“Dippo, stand up. If we get to the hills, up high, we can see if anyone comes across. We can stay there all night. Can you walk?”
They started to walk. They were not being pursued — but in the long line, those with the sticks were raising them, lowering them. It looked almost coordinated. It reminded AJ of the drum majorettes with their batons on game day. Marking a tempo, or ritualistic.
“You’re a good friend,” Dippo said. His voice was hoarse. Like an old man’s. “Thanks. Thank you.” He was breathing. “I can jog. Let’s try.”
It occurred to AJ that the stick-wielders stood at regular intervals. It was coordinated. Across the cold desert snaked the hiss of a rhythmic chant.
“Sssul-ssrah! Sshul-shhh’r! Hsss-tss-rnss-rah! Sssul-shhh’r! Shhul-ssrah! Hsss-tss-nyarla!”
AJ turned to Dippo to say, “Jogging, yes,” and that was when the ground beside them erupted.
The violence of it threw them down. Hefty clods of dirt launched straight up as if mere pebbles, blew out in all directions. Came tumbling down amid a spray of sand. AJ covered his head. The desert floor seemed to be breaking open along its cracks — for an instant he thought a meteor had crashed next to them.
Then he saw the crater had not been blasted from above, but had exploded from below.
A form sprung from the crust, a creature exiting its burrow, a beast as monstrously vast as it was ill-defined in shape. It was a creature of horrid, disparate masses, lined by swaying waves of centipedinous legs, unfurling serpentine appendages, eyes blinking by the score in deep sockets all over and searching outward on ropy stalks. Masses rough and solid as tortoise shell, masses sinewed and drooping scrotumular, pale new flesh in patches and dead flesh flaking off in pieces as big as bedsheets. And as this concatenation reared up, as it became the tallest thing within a mile, dwarfing everything in Halite except the very chimneys of the facility, it roared, the sound a cataclysm that was screech within bellow within some ratcheting of air through its unfathomable inner glots and sacs and AJ knew, knew, this roar was no terrible word or triumphal shout but was simply this being taking a breath of the night before it ate.
Both boys ran. They ran together, for the hills, they sprinted with fists pumping and tears in their eyes from the fear and their feet flew as if carried along on a wind as if some angel had been able to see through the monster that blotted everything else from view and had exhaled a sweet breath to carry them along.
But when AJ glanced left to make sure Dippo was not falling too far behind, he found that Dippo was fine — Dippo was strong — Dippo’s huffing had the faintest trace of wheeze but this time his adrenaline had kicked in, this time he was going to make it to the hills right alongside AJ. Maybe even beat him there.
Yes, Dippo was pulling ahead.
Some awful tiny part of AJ, then, burst in his heart, as the awful entity behind them readied, he sensed, to reach, to grab for one of them; some tiny blister in him, a black seed, burst and sent its color through his rushing bloodstream and he thought, It isn’t fair. I carried him.
So as Dippo pulled ahead, AJ kicked out as far as he could, and his kick caught Dippo’s rear foot.
Dippo smashed down hard, face first. In a second AJ was so far past him each boy existed alone in his own world. For a second AJ’s world was pristine, soundless, beautiful.
Then he heard the beast crash down on Dippo.
He kept at his sprint. The hills so close. He felt so glad that Dippo was buying him time. Just enough time.
Just enough.
The hills were rough tufa, and he clambered up hand over hand, cutting himself, bleeding.
He didn’t look back to see if the thing really was still feeding. The sound of it echoed on, the squelch and gobble — but the feast had to be long over, didn’t it? By now the sound had to be only in his head.
Only in his head.
When he was as high as he could get, he surveyed the jut of lakebed that stood between him and town. He saw the dark hole where the awful thing had burst out. The furrow where it dove upon Dippo. No trace of Dippo.
He felt reflective, then, and it even felt inevitable that of course Halite had come to this, this year. How could it not, at the confluence of — of three factors. First, the dusts brought up from deep below the primordial lake, which poisoned the air; then, the synthetic crystal that altered the nervous system of so many who lived in the dust; and lastly — what made now truly different — the sheer loneliness of the year. Isolation will change humanity, won’t it, he thought, and so, the most vulnerable in town became exactly what they had long been considered. Not human. The year even changed me, he supposed, didn’t it.
And now from a hilltop he saw what those dripping sticks were. Realized that what he had smelled was kerosene. The sticks were torches, now lit. All across town the torches roved, pin-dots of light, and many more without torches, black spots everywhere at once like ants going to war — seemingly in chaos, but in truth methodical — he watched long enough, and saw: quite methodical. He watched the torchbearers set every home ablaze. He watched families run out of their burning homes, and those creatures without torches set upon them in the yellow glow. Screams rose to him. He wondered if each man-sized creature would continue to grow, mutate. He supposed the vast beast had dwelt for eons in some recently disturbed pocket below town. He wondered if those who had once been human now worshiped the thing, and if they would grow into similar things, and mate, and spawn. He watched all night as the whole town burned to its slabs, even his own home, and all its people were devoured, probably his own parents. Someday the horror of that would hit him, he knew, but seeing the town’s ruination, he felt a little better about himself. He felt better about tripping Dippo. Dippo was never going to make it, he thought, but I have a chance. What else could I have done? I’m alive. Finally.