JOEY: Andrea, we’ve got a fucking problem!
Andy turned toward the front seat to slap Joey in the head and froze halfway as she caught the landscape. Sleepy Lake had become a maelstrom. But the most remarkable thing was that that wasn’t even remarkable. The water mass had unleashed its own storm, but that was happening in the background, behind the line of creatures. At least three rows of them, walking side by side, all along the shoreline. Marching inland.
And they didn’t seem to have any trouble breathing at all.
“Move,” Andy cued, nudging Joey to the passenger seat. “Now.”
“Where the fuck did those things come from?”
“Hang on!”
She clutched, shifted, refused to even make a guess at how much oxygen would be left in the Chevy’s rigged carburetor and how many seconds the engine had to live on that before they reached useful air again, and gunned the car backward toward the waterline, wheels spraying mud into orbit, knocking off at least ten wheezers by the sound of their useless skulls cracking open on the station wagon rear while the others joined in a bloodcurdling cry and clung on to the bodywork, claws squealing on the glass, teeth snapping at the side mirror showing Andy’s frown as she changed to first and floored the gas, swerving south toward the road.
That offered her the first full view of the eastern shoreline, plagued with an overlimbed gray swarm of wheezers. Only that had already ceased being remarkable too.
The remarkable thing now was emerging from the vortex, a thing for which no one had words and Nate was only able to punctuate with “Holy Satan’s crotch.”
The wheezers, jumping into the Chevy’s path and being bashed away like bowling pins, were kind enough to block the sight of what would have likely rendered the witnesses completely mad. As Andy sharply steered the station wagon to the left and bounced onto a path through the woods, she could afford only the corner of her eye to see it in the mirror, and all she could say was that a mountain, a slithering mountain, had risen from the lake. Nate and Kerri peeped through the back window and still didn’t see it fully. They caught some tentacles, or at least one freight-train-long swirling limb, lined with feelers like a giant centipede; and bright red lava flowing through a highway of veins; and Nate even counted five giant trees like baobabs waving on its top, each the rough size of a blue whale, though red in color, and before the woods blocked it out he caught one of them blossoming into a five-jawed mouth, suggesting the notion that all the giant trees were heads. But they didn’t really see it, the same way one can be in New York and not see New York. Because you can only see New York in satellite pictures.
Then a wheezer jumped into frame, clinging to the back window like an incredibly grotesque parody of a suction-cup toy, and tried to smash the glass with its head.
The Vega was doing eighty through a meandering, rippling path about six feet wide, and wheezers were raining from the trees, banging on the car, shrieking through the windows. Andy saw one in the mirror running behind them and taking a leap, and felt it landing on the roof.
JOEY: What the fuck?!
KERRI: It’s the carbon dioxide; this is their medium!
ANDY: Bump ahead!
The Vega flew off a slope, letting a fir branch swipe off the wheezer on the roof, and landed as gracefully as a buffalo on a quadbike. Another wheezer had clung to the side in the few confused seconds before regaining terminal velocity, shrieking into Kerri’s window.
KERRI: Where are our guns?!
ANDY: We lost them!
JOEY: I carry one. (Draws a revolver, greeted with sudden silence.) I wasn’t sure if it was gonna help.
ANDY: Well, it can’t hurt!
A wheezer’s fist suddenly smashed in Joey’s window in a new demonstration of peak strength and perfect timing. Joey stopped the alien claw an inch from dissecting him alive, stuck the cannon out, and blasted the creature away.
KERRI: Keep going south! We need fresh air!
ANDY: I’ll take the shortcut!
JOEY: That’s no shortcut—it’s a mountain bike trail!
ANDY: Close enough!
Andy bypassed a turn and swerved south, and the car was flung off the road and into the woods, losing the rear license plate and two yodeling wheezers on the first bump. She kept the gas floored all the way downhill, Attilaing every single bush and bramble and sapling not tough-looking enough to be worth dodging, and landed the station wagon back on track at the other side of the meander, wheels peeling off three geological strata as she steered it back in the right direction and fishtailed on, watching three wheezers stampeding down the same slope after them, landing on the road.
She ran over the one ahead; Joey leaned out to gun down the one in the rear. The one in the middle stuck itself to the left side of the zigzagging car, punching through Nate’s window. Tim jumped over Nate to bite the slimy arm, making it lose its grip; the hand clung to the broken glass, the rest of the creature dragging along.
“I need a gun!” Nate shouted.
“I’m out of ammo!”
Tim growled as a fourth unforeseen creature almost jumped through Joey’s window, too close for Joey to try to push it out. Andy shouted to use the door; Joey opened it, the creature tried to sneak a second or third arm through the opening, and then Joey pulled it closed again, and once again, and again, and again, until a vicious, slushy crunch and a bump signaled that most of the wheezer had fallen under the wheels.
Nate grabbed the severed limb and used it to bat the wheezer on his side off the car. “Out!”
On the third strike it fell tumbling on the road, splashing black blood over the whitened tarmac. The road was improving.
JOEY: We’re clear! (Frantically seeking confirmation.) We’re clear! (To the others.) Jesus fuck, this is what you normally do?
KERRI: Tim, stop it! It’s over! Tim! Quiet!
TIM: (Keeps yapping and pinballing around the backseat.)
ANDY: We’re fine! We’re fine, let’s try to reach…
WHEEZER: (Leans in from the roof through the driver’s window, grabs Andy’s face, spreads its jaws attempting to swallow her whole skull.)
SOMETHING ELSE: (Crashes against the same side of the car, splicing the wheezer in half.)
—
The Chevrolet Vega spun out twice before coming to a full stop, twenty yards from the police cruiser. The creature caught in between lay scattered all along that distance.
Kerri was the first to exit the car and circle it to check on Andy. Blood ran down her head and neck, but she was conscious. Barely sane after the close-up into a wheezer’s mouth, but conscious.
“Are you okay?” Kerri inquired. “Andy. Andy, look in my eyes. Are you okay?”
Nate and Joey, the latter toting his revolver, were already limping for the police cruiser. No one had come out of it.
“Gonna need help here!” Nate called.