“That’s me.”
“Could you hear me?”
He stopped packing and raised his head to look at me. His eyes danced in the lamplight.
“When you were calling me in your head?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, I could hear you. I heard you loud and clear.”
I smiled softly, glad that I reached him somehow. “What happened to you?”
He shook his head. “I wish I knew. One minute I had ground beneath my feet, the next minute I didn’t. I woke up buried under some rocks. I don’t know how long I was out for but your voice got me up. It just took a while. There was one slab across my leg that took forever to get free of.”
I dropped the bottle and went around the bed to his side, eyeing his leg with concern.
“Are you OK? Is it broken?”
“Kiddo, if it was broken I wouldn’t be here. It hurt a lot at first but now I feel fine. I don’t know. Maybe this whole crazy dimension thing made me heal faster or something. I’d believe anything at this point.”
“Maybe.”
“You know I thought about calling Pippa,” he admitted. “I thought maybe she’d appear. Maybe, like, the gateway would materialize or something. But I was afraid to go back in there. I thought maybe I wouldn’t come back out. And if I did, what if I brought something else back with me. If that’s where we changed, Perry, we can’t assume that the changes will always be good.”
I had thought that too. I placed my hand on his arm and gave it a squeeze.
“Thank you for trying to find me,” I whispered, feeling strangely small and awkward.
He raised his brows, his ring glinting in the low light. “Thank you for-”
He was interrupted by the cabin shaking, a deep rattling noise emanating from the living area.
I gasped in a panic and we quickly made our way out of the bedroom.
We froze.
The front door was shaking on its hinges, the couch being rattled back and forth like a bucking bronco.
I swallowed hard, unable to take my eyes away from the scene, from the scraping, scratching sounds on the wood, the way the handle tried to turn. It didn’t help that the cabin had very little light in it, casting everything in limitless shadows.
“Maybe it’s Rigby,” I whispered.
A low, guttural moan crept in through the cracks in the door.
“No,” Dex said slowly. “It’s not.”
I felt like I was getting tunnel vision, blackness closing in on all sides of me, but Dex grabbed my hand, hard, and brought me back to life.
“Do you remember if there were any guns left behind?” he asked, turning me so I’d look at him. “I can’t remember if Mitch packed them all.”
I shook my head, my brain too slow to latch onto any memory. Dex was acting as calm as he could but I could tell from the cracks in his voice, he was close to panicking as well.
He narrowed his eyes at the door, then looked around the cabin.
“It’s injured, so I don’t think it can get through there. That lock should hold it back, and if that fails, the couch should do the job.”
With shaking limbs, I silently thanked him for barricading the cabin so well.
“We have to do something about the windows though and we need to defend ourselves. Perry, stay with me here.”
I nodded, swallowing thickly. He pulled me toward the kitchen and we walked as quietly as we could. There was no doubt the creature knew we were inside, but the kitchen had a window, a window that offered no protection.
Dex quickly opened a drawer and brought a bunch of knives. I winced as they clattered against each other and only started breathing again when I heard the door continue to rattle. As long it was there, it wasn’t here.
He handed me a long sharp hunting knife and kept another one for himself.
“Are you ready to do some hand-to-beast combat?” he asked, almost smiling.
“No!” I whispered harshly, the knife feeling foreign in my hands. Oh, how I wished I had that shotgun back.
His smile washed away. “Good. Neither am I. Let’s get these windows covered. Help me with the armchair.”
I doubted he needed my help, but it kept me busy and not focused on the blood-thirsty monster outside the door. Oh who the fuck am I kidding, of course I was focused on the God damn monster outside of the door. I had blown half his shoulder away and he was pissed off as hell.
We got the armchair up on the kitchen counter. I didn’t see how the beast couldn’t just topple it over, but Dex got a broom and managed to wedge it between the corner of the wall and the chair. It looked like a feeble barricade but it might be enough if the creature wasn’t at his full strength.
Next, we scampered over to the other window, unnervingly close to the door. The creature wasn’t giving up and the thumps were getting louder, heavier and more spaced apart. It was throwing itself against the door now, perhaps getting desperate. The lock snapped off and clattered to the ground.
“Oh shit,” I swore, eyes glued to the broken lock, unable to move.
“Perry, hey.” Dex tried to get my attention while he picked up the kitchen table.
I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t move.
“A little help, please,” he repeated. I finally tore my eyes away to him at the sound of the utter pleading in his voice. He was trying to turn it on its end so it would stand up high enough to block the window.
With legs made of cement, I joined him at the window, moving the heavy table back so it was covering most of the pane.
Then a silence cloaked us, settling around the whole cabin. I could hear my breath, ragged and wheezing as it came out of my lungs.
My eyes flew to the main door. The rattling had stopped. The door was still. The place was quiet. Too quiet.
We exchanged a worried look over the expanse of wood and with a final thrust, pushed the table back. There was only a foot of space on my side that was uncovered and I had my head close to the darkness, contemplating if we needed to cover it up more when a head appeared beside me.
The beast was at the window, inches away, only a thin pane of glass between his swarming, liquid black eyes and bared fangs, and me.
I screamed.
And I screamed again when the window shattered. I leaped back from the rain of glass just as its muscled arm and snipping claws came flying in, making a grab for me.
I couldn’t stop screaming, so Dex whisked me back into his arms until the beast’s arm retreated back into the night, leaving a narrow hole of broken glass that let the whistling wind inside.
“The bedrooms!” Dex yelled.
We booked it to ours just as the glass shattered there, spewing fragments all over the bed. The monster had both arms inside, including the arm whose shoulder I shattered, it’s bloody wound dripping down the wall as it tried to pull itself up.
Dex made a run for the bed, his sleek body low as he got ready to flip it up against the window. He had flipped the bed in the motel room the other night, so there was no reason why he couldn’t do this.
Except when Dex got down, his arms straining underneath the edge of the bed, he could only lift it up a few feet. He struggled, face sweating and growing redder as the monster was almost in the room with us, only it’s lower half was dangling outside. In the crazy glow of the kerosene lamp, I saw the creature closer than I ever had before. If it was a missing link, it was a bizarre, twisted one, a savage, animal face that couldn’t possibly be related to us. Yet when I thought about the faces of evil I’d seen in my life, from Mitch’s lustful, demented gaze earlier, to the depraved, haunting face of Abby, I knew that the link from man to monster wasn’t too far off.
“Perry,” Dex cried pitifully. “Help.”
My heart sank. He couldn’t do it. His strength was fading by the second and we didn’t have seconds. We would have nothing if the monster finally made it into the room with us.
And it wasn’t a question of if, but when.
I joined him at his side, getting into a low crouch and trying to push the bed up like I was in a weightlifting competition. The bed moved a bit and together we were able to move it up a foot.
But it was too late.
As we lifted, side-by-side, our arms underneath the bed, our chins on top of the mattress, we saw the rest of the glass shatter away. The monster was perched on the window ledge, perched like a snake with arms, like a raptor, ready to strike. There wasn’t any time to think or act, except that I saw in its tar-filled, alien eyes that it had us. It had us right where it wanted us.
And it wanted revenge.
There was a flash of movement, its fur-covered muscles tensing to pounce, claws extended, when a huge blast shook our ears and the room.
We blinked hard at it, confused when it didn’t move. The creature looked down at its leg and that’s when we saw a stream of blood erupt from it.
Then it fell backward, falling out of the window and into the winter outside.
I was stunned. In my confusion I let go of the bed and it slammed hard into the floor. It didn’t matter. What the fuck had just happened?
Dex and I walked cautiously over to the window and peered out of it, the night breeze whipping back my hair. There was nothing below us except a patch of blood and a corresponding trail that led off into the woods.
And Rigby.
He was running toward us with a rifle in hand, his flashlight bobbing up and down.
“Are you all right!?” he yelled up at the window. “Stay there, I wanna see if I can kill this thing for good.”
And then he was gone into the trees, following the bloody trail.
Dex and I looked at each other. I was dizzy from holding my breath and leaned against the wall for support. He took me by the shoulders and pulled me into his chest, embracing me. He held me like that until I felt I could breathe again, until my heart stopped thudding in my ears. Until we heard two more gunshots ricocheting into the night.
I pulled away and looked up. He was gazing down at me with an expression I couldn’t read, made all the more mysterious by the glow of the lamp.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
He cupped my face in his hands and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me. I wanted him to kiss me. I needed it.
But he only lowered his eyes till they were at my level and said, “We’re going to try and flip this bed up again. And then we’re going to go out there and get those knifes. Then we’re going to wait.”
We didn’t have to wait long. We managed to get the bed up. It took as much effort as before, but as least the window was blocked. Then we picked up the knives from where we left them and were about to test the couch for solidity when there was a knock at the door.
I jumped, nearly dropping the knife.
“Dex, Perry, it’s me,” Rigby yelled from the other side of the door.
“Oh thank God,” Dex exclaimed and began to move the couch out of the way. We stood back as Rigby pushed the door in, gripping the rifle like an angry farmer with a rabbit problem.