A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 4
The roof bent when the monster landed on it. Zoe jerked back, hand around nothing, and braced herself. Rubber wailed as Omar slammed the brakes. The creature tumbled off the roof, sable-furred, gray-skinned, not mammal nor insect. It rolled along the asphalt losing tufts of fur and skin, gray-white blood streaking behind it. Without losing speed, it flung itself back up on all six legs and—
—vanished, joining the darkness as if already a shadow, itself.
“Go, go, go,” Zoe said. “Go, now. Go.”
Omar hit the gas. The car lurched forward, complaining, and the creature burst out of nowhere to crash into the side of the trunk again. The sedan spun, Zoe’s phone glowing against a tangled-up submachine gun. The screen went black again, the second call missed. Omar spun the wheel and pushed the accelerator down and the monster hit them again from the opposite side. The car whirled, tires balding, rubber burning…
“I can’t get speed,” Omar said.
He pulled some stunt Zoe didn’t have a name for—smoke billowed up from under them, the engine snarled barely-harnessed rage, and the vehicle pivoted around. It jolted forward whiplash-fast and surged into the night.
The creature landed on the hood. From where? Zoe couldn’t tell.
Zoe switched off the safety, got the stock in as good position as she could in her seat, and opened fire. The invocations affecting their hearing turned the chattering thunder into quieter chattering thunder. The windshield exploded. A series of meaty thnk sounds told Zoe that some percentage of the quickly-emptied magazine blew through the monster.
One of its six limbs blew through another piece of windscreen and clawed at Omar’s chest. The blow didn’t draw blood but peeled fabric from his vest. “I can’t see!” he shouted. “Zoe! Brace!”
He slammed on the brakes.
Zoe had lost herself in reloading, in some adrenal overwhelm. Her body jerked forward. She hit the passenger side dashboard gun-first. The airbag erupted, flinging her back. Omar shouted something she couldn’t understand anymore. Tires screamed. A monster ripped something important-sounding from the body of the car. It snarled. The airbag bloated. Zoe fumbled with the door handle, aware that the car was slowly-slowinnnggg…
“Zo’, tell me you’re up!”
“I’m up,” she managed, not quite telling the truth. She got the door unlocked. Something was buzzing somewhere but she couldn’t figure out why that was important.
“I need you out there now!”
“Wha—?”
Omar pushed through whatever wreck the driver’s side had become and tumbled into the street. “Hey, motherfucker!” he shouted, armed with a combat knife. “Hey, over here, that’s right!”
Zoe got the handle to move and kicked the door open. She fell face-first to the asphalt and spat bile. Luckily she wore the gun strap cross-body. Grabbing the submachine gun, she stumbled around the hood of the car, wavering her way back onto two legs. Behind her, the airbag hissed. The buzzing stopped.
The creature blurred past Omar and took most of the man’s kevlar vest with it. What remained twisted and warped, essentially useless. Omar spun and sliced air with his knife, missing. Trickles of viscous gray-white glistened where the thing had traveled.
“Zoe…”
She threw her submachine gun at him and he dropped his blade to catch it.
As the world stopped spinning, she noticed her sixth sense prickling along her skin. The monster, some summoned aberration from a world or even a cosmos bifurcated from humankind, vibrated with so much mystical energy it brought her supernatural sense to the fore, unignorable. She hoped Omar felt the same way.
She spun back toward the passenger side door and almost tripped getting back. Under the airbag, she grabbed the other submachine gun. She saw a phone buzzing out of the corner of her eye but didn’t stop to check the screen. A burst of shot blasted the air. The creature hissed, vanishing as Zoe came back around the hood of the vehicle.
Shallow but bloody scratches sliced along Omar’s left arm and chest. He spun in circles, searching.
Sharp alarm sliced her consciousness, her sixth sense screaming.
“Now!” she shouted.
Omar darted and banked, the creature erupting from the ether to miss him by inches.
They both followed its path through the air. When it landed, they opened fire simultaneously. Series of three- and four-round bursts, only breath separating one trigger-pull from the next. Gouts of gray-white gore erupted from the monster’s sable fur, its scaly skin. It stumbled and tripped, its opalescent essence drooling from its mouth. It shuddered forward and vanished. Zoe still had rounds in the mag. Between four and six of them, at least.
Besides, she’d already used her spare.
The creature reappeared, lurching from darkness. Slops of viscous gray-white poured out of it. It slumped, coiled, and reared up on four legs. Staggering, it swung one of its forelimbs at Omar. The strike came slow and wide and Omar easily backpedaled from it. Landing on all six of its wobbling appendages, it turned toward Zoe and—
Zoe emptied her last few rounds into its arachno-lupine face.
It shivered and managed one more stride forward before collapsing. It started unraveling immediately, mystic anima melting and evaporating. Soon, all that would remain of the monster was whatever mass of animal sacrifice the conjurer had used to stabilize the magic.
Zoe rushed for the passenger seat, submachine gun going over her shoulder by its strap, body banging on her back. She snatched the phone from under the dashboard. Bringing the screen to life, she saw she had six missed calls.
In the not-so-distant distance, sirens hackled up their warcries.
“This place is full of shells,” Omar said.
Zoe stared at the phone, somehow frozen. She had to call back. She had to run. She had to call back. She had to run.
“Fuck it, mundanity will fix it.” Omar grabbed Zoe’s arm and jerked her back into motion. “We gotta go.”
“You’re bleeding,” she noticed.
“We gotta go,” he stressed, already pulling her across the street.
The sirens sped closer.
Zoe shoved the phone back into her kit and zipped it closed. They hit a copse of trees—not real wilderness but blueprinted foliage, suburban green—and kept running. Zoe ignored the buzzing in her kit as they ran. The submachine gun kept banging against her spine, the strap too loose. Her legs ached, naked from the mid-thigh because the attack had happened so suddenly. She shook.
They headed toward Salem Woods, a large enough expanse of forestry to lose themselves in. And if they cut through it the right way, it let them out close to Jill’s house…
They ran through a strip mall. A lifetime of smoking burned in Zoe’s lungs. The phone buzzed. Somewhere, CCTV cameras captured blurry silhouettes, their identities smeared and smudged by a weave of spells into bare vagaries. They kept up the pace until they hit the tree line of the woods. Even with their daily nightsight invocations, the difference between suburban light pollution and under-canopy dark slowed them down.
They jog-walked through the woods toward the northeast. Bugs buzzed and hummed. Zoe opened the kit and took out the phone. “It’s been long enough.”
Omar squinted back behind them, sirens inaudible after the two mile run. “Do it.”
Before she could call, Zoe started coughing. The fit went on for less than a minute, a series of deepening hacks that brought up more and more phlegm. She swallowed and spat and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Goddammit.”
“I told you those things would kill you.”
“Not the time.”
Omar pursed his lips, his agreement and apology both living in his eyes.
Zoe put the phone to her ear. Jill answered almost immediately. “J—”
“He’s dead,” Jill cried. “He’s dead, oh my god…”
“Who? What happened?”
Another woman wailed in the background. Karen Woeser?
“Karen’s s—her—our—Altan. Our son. He—he—he—oh my god…”
“The ambulance is on its way!” Darnell shouted in the chaos background. “There has to be a spell—”
“I tried the fucking spell! No, no, no…” Karen’s shouts descended to low moans.
“I found him,” Jill muttered. “I…”
“What happened?” Zoe repeated, quieter. But something in Karen Woeser’s strained shriek scoring the background already gave her the answer. Something about Jill’s senselessness, her sudden inability to make a sentence through the panic and grief and shock worming through her words…
“Not again,” Jill whispered, half-dissociated. “Not again, not again, please, please…oh my god…”
Zoe slouched against a tree and fell. She dropped the phone.
“What happened?” Omar asked.
“Karen Woeser’s son just killed himself.”
Turn Back
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