I hold my breath and turn my full attention to what may or may not be beyond this door. Then I hear it. The thunk of something moving. A shuffle. A bottle falls over, rolls, stops. Someone is inside.
I step back from the door, waiting for it to open. But it doesn’t. Whoever is inside must be in a stupor. “Told you. Drugs and alcohol.” But as the sound grows louder and more distinct, I’m less sure of my assessment. My instincts decide I’m wrong long before my intellect. I step back away from the RV as the sound—like a hundred nails being whacked into the RV’s interior walls—grows thunderous.
“I think I woke something up,” I say.
“Somethings,” Hawkins says. Our eyes meet. “It’s already bred. The one we found might not have even been the one in the photo. We can’t win this fight.”
“How many could be in there?” I ask.
He shakes his head as we continue backing away. “One or two, we could handle. Four...maybe. More than that...”
He’s painted a clear enough picture. I get it. The noise coming from inside the now-shaking RV indicates a much larger number. “We need help.”
“We don’t have that long.”
Our conversation is cut short when the RV door flings open and slaps against the vehicle’s exterior wall. A cloud of black flies buzz out, concealing the view. When the insects dissipate into the air like smoke, a single, tailless BFS fills the doorway, very much alive, and if I’m not mistaken, pissed off. Its shaking limbs reveal barely contained rage. The inside of the RV behind the creature is slathered in blood and body parts, painted with the insides of people and various woodland creatures.
“Just keep walking,” Hawkins whispers. “Running now will just trigger their pursuit. Let’s get as far away as we can first. Wait for them to make the first move.”
Walking backwards, through the uneven stretch of crisscrossing branches and stumps without making any sudden moves is tough to do. But we keep moving, slow and steady...for all of five seconds. Then we’re frozen by what happens next. Living black flows from the top of the RV. Like sludgy water from a broken water main, the BFSs rise from below, congregating on the roof in a writhing pile of twitchy hairy limbs and wriggling tails.
My armor is gone, I think, and I fight to maintain my slow and steady pace. How many of them are there? Twenty? Thirty? More flow out of the doorway, their sharp talons piercing the RV’s metal hull. The massive vehicle is transformed into a living ball of BFSs, the way daddy longlegs pile together against the cold. But these things aren’t cold. They’re hunting.
Us.
But what are they waiting for?
I step back. The branch beneath my feet rolls and sends me toppling backwards. Hawkins is quick to catch me, but the damage is done. By the time I’m upright again, the BFSs have launched themselves toward us.
We don’t bother firing into the mass of shell-protected monsters. From this range we wouldn’t do much good, and neither of us want to get any closer. The only thing keeping us alive right now is distance, so we do our best to maintain it, bunny hopping through the field of fallen trees.
Our pace quickens when we enter the forest, which is mostly clear, thanks to the thick pine canopy blocking out the sun. But that also means the BFSs will move faster, too, and that’s a problem, because like most creatures with more than two legs, they can outpace a human being with little effort.
The sound of a hundred little daggers puncturing tree bark fills the forest. They’re gaining on us, taking the high ground, probably flanking us. They might not be intelligent, but most predators are born with instinctual strategies for hunting, and who knows what was programmed into the DNA of these things.
Through the chaos of the monsters pursuing us, the sound of my feet pounding the ground, my equipment rattling and my heavy breathing, I hear something new. Voices. Commanding and authoritative. Military, I think, but my half full glass is now totally empty. How did they get here so fast? We didn’t tell anyone. And—
I tackle Hawkins, and we fall into a field of tall ferns. Before he can complain, I put my hand over his lips and mouth the word, “Listen.”
The voices grow louder as the unknown group of men rounds a large Douglas-fir.
“I’ve got movement on the Flir,” a man says, referring to a thermal imaging device. “Up ahead. Half a click and closing fast. Looks like a lot of them.”