Feral (17 page)

“Charity, stop!”

Shannon?

She followed its shrill echo through the darkness and saw Shannon running through the dark toward her.
 
With Shannon were two men.
 
Not her brother Jared, he was dead, but a big black-skinned stranger and someone she knew.

“Who is he?” she asked Jenny dreamily.
 
“Why do I know him?”

He's not important
.
 
He let the Bogey Man take you away
.
 
Forget him
.

“She's my friend,” Charity said, pointing toward Shannon.
 
“She saved me.”

We're your friends
.
 
She can't help you
.
  
Join us
.

Charity turned back to the playground as the adults neared it.
 
“If I get away, will he kill her?”

Does it matter
?
 
She's just another Bogey—if he doesn't eat you, she will
.

“We hate Bogeys,” the tall boy said through clenched teeth.
 
“They come in here, we do
this
to 'em,” he shifted the broom handle spear forward and jabbed it into the ground.

“Kill the Bogeys,” came a shout from the playground.
 
“Stick 'em through their guts!”

“Kill the Bogeys, kill the Bogeys, stick 'em through the guts.
 
Kill the Bogeys, kill the Bogeys, stick 'em through the guts,” a chorus from the playground.
 
Then every child rose from their spots brandishing crudely fashioned spears, knives, hammers and clubs.
 
They scaled the bared wall and poured over the side into the high grass.
 
They surrounded Shannon and the man she was
with in
a quick, deadly circle and steadied their weapons to strike.

Charity saw the look of terror in Shannon's eyes, and saw herself in it.
 
She went cold, her heart quickened.
 
Then she saw the man's face and her heart nearly stopped.

Daddy
?

“
Daddy
!” she screamed, and broke from the triangle.

Come back
, Jenny called to her.

“Stop,” she screamed.
 
“Please!”

They wouldn't; they stood in their circle around Shannon and Gordon, weapons raised.
 
Waiting.

Kill the Bogeys
!

The night exploded around them, the deafening whip crack sound of gunshots from above.
 
Crack, crack, crack
, and Charles rushed the circle of homicidal kids.
 
“
Back away or I'll blow your heads off
!”

They scattered through the grass, into the shadows, back into the park, as if they were never there.
 
The playground was empty and silence stole the night.

Shannon stayed back as Gordon rushed to his daughter, swept her from the ground in a strong and tearful hug.

A moment later Charles stood next to her, smiling, bewildered.
 
“I'll be damned,” he said.
 
“A happy ending.”

“Indeed.”
 
A disembodied voice, the voice of the night itself, filled Feral Park.
 
It came from everywhere, from nowhere.
 
“Charity, my precious little girl.
 
You've been bad.”
 
He appeared in the close distance, coming from the direction of the highway and moved toward them with purpose.
 
“I'm your daddy now, Charity.
 
You have forgotten.”

Charity buried her face in Gordon's chest and screamed.

Shannon stumbled backward toward them and joined Charity's chorus.

Gordon held his daughter tight, gaping at the monster that approached.

“Get her out of here!” Charles shouted.
 
He pulled his revolver, only three rounds left, and aimed it at the walking nightmare.
 
“
Stop there or I'll shoot
!”

The dark man-shadow didn't slow, and Charles fired.
 
He was a crack shot, he knew, from years of practice and a handful of altercations in his line of work, but the approaching man didn't slow.
 
Charles fired again, and the slug passed through him as if through a fog.
 
He kept walking.

Charles turned to see the three of them still there.
 
“Move your asses!” he screamed.
 
“Get her out of here now!”
 
When he turned back, the Bogey Man was upon him.
 
He fired again, point blank, but the monster only laughed.

Charles screamed as the thing reached through him, like smoke through a screen, then it grabbed him from the inside and began to twist.
 
It pulled him close, his dark, sweating face touching its darker face, a black shape with burning eyes and grinding teeth.
 
Charles could feel the hands inside him, burrowing, reaching, gripping deep within.
 
Then it tore him in two, and his last scream echoed as he fell halved into the grass.

“She's mine!” the monster bellowed.
 
“Give her back!”

G
ordon ran blind through the stunted trees on the wild side of the park, Charity a dead weight in his arms, and Shannon fighting to keep up.
 
Charity had fainted.
 
Finally back in her daddy's arms, she allowed herself the luxury of weakness and just let go.

The growth thinned quickly as their path sloped toward the river.
 
Soon the trail would be gone and only the treacherously rocky shoreline would remain.

“The road,” Shannon yelled.

Gordon ignored her, continued to run, and she knew he would run them blindly into the river if she let him continue.

“The path is up there,” she said, pushing hard not to fall behind.

“What?”

“The trail's ending,” she said.
 
“If we keep going this way the rocks will slow us down.
 
If we get to the road we can go back for my car.”

He held to his straight path for a few moments then veered toward the highway.
 
“Can we make it?”

“I don't know,” she said, wishing for the flashlight she had stupidly left back in Crazy Ernie's cellar.
 
“If he followed us through the woods we might, but it's the only way to outrun him.”

They broke through the last of the foliage, straddled the guardrail and found the pavement.

Shannon saw the small flashlight still hanging from Charity's wrist (she must have dropped the other back at the park) and slipped it off.
 
She tested it; the beam sliced a path before them.
 
“This way,” she said leading them down the shoulder of the highway.

“
Give her back
!”
 
The voice came not from behind, but from the side, somewhere in the trees.
 
She turned the beam toward the sound of his voice as she ran, and was rewarded with a pained scream.
 
She saw him briefly—one of a hundred shadows, as the light cut him.
 
Then he was gone.

“
Give her back, she's mine
!”

“No,” Gordon screamed, and pushed himself harder.

Shannon struggled to stay beside him.

Then he was standing before them on the shoulder.
 
“Give me back my Charity or I'll gut you while she watches!”

Shannon skidded to a stop, slipped in the gravel, and fell against the guardrail.
 
Gordon stopped and did nothing as the Bogey Man's gaze fell upon him.

Then the light came, and behind it the diesel roar of an eighteen-wheeler.
 
It turned the corner, came straight at them, air horn blatting.
 
For a moment he was a perfect silhouette, then he was gone.
 
The truck hugged the far shoulder as it passed them, its horn giving one last angry blast as it disappeared into the night.

Shaking off the unnatural chill that had frozen him, Gordon turned and found Shannon unconscious on the shoulder, blood flowing from a cut near her temple.
 
He bent to see if she still breathed and saw a small crouched figure behind the guardrail out of the corner of his eyes.
 
It stood, a crude 2x4 club raised to the sky, and after a shock of pain he fell into the deepest, blackest sleep he had ever known.

C
harity awoke lying in the dirt.
 
The blond boy stood over her.

“Wake up, pretty girl,” he said.
 
“I can't carry you all the way.”

Charity rose, searching, and said, “Where are they?”

The boy's face tightened into a look of disgust.
 
“They dropped you here and ran away,” he said.
 
“They don't care what happens to you.
 
They're not even Bogeys, they're chickens.”

Charity closed her eyes, put her face in her hands and wept silently.
 
When the boy grabbed her hand and led her back to Feral Park she didn't resist.

“Hurry,” he said.
 
“The Bogey Man's coming back for you.
 
He'll get us both if we don't hurry!”

“I know,” she whispered, and ran with him.
 
In her sadness, fear became secondary.
 
They had left her, Shannon and her daddy had left her.

As the trees thickened, her heart hardened.
 
Shannon said she would protect her, but she had left her behind to save herself.
 
The man with her probably wasn't even her daddy.
 
Her daddy wouldn't have left her.

Jenny was right—the wild ones were all she had now.
 
Feral Park was her home.

“I hate you,” she said to them, and though she knew it wasn't true, the words gave her strength.
 
“
I hate you I hate you I hate you
!”
 
Her new mantra, and she knew if she said it enough she could mean it.
 
They were her feral words, and now she knew what feral really was.
 
It was telling the world to fuck off.

Her feet pounded dirt and she broke through the last veil of hanging willow branches, her new home at Feral Park dead ahead.

“
I hate you
!”

“Someday you will love me,” he said, and she saw him coming, a formless thing in the night, moving through the sky toward them, his heat warping the reality around him.
 
“
Until then I will teach you to mind me
!”

“Go!” the blond boy yelled.
 
“
Hurry
!”

Charity made it to the playground.
 
Alone.

She turned and saw them, the Bogey Man holding the blond boy by his throat, lifting him off the ground toward his waiting mouth.

The boy kicked at him, pounded at his arms with tiny fists, then went limp as the Bogey Man stole his gaze.

The Bogey Man opened his mouth, teeth parting in an impossibly wide grin.
 
His jaw stretched, his face tipped up to the sky, and with a final scream the boy went in, struggling, feet kicking air until he was gone.

Darkness folded around her like a blanket—warm, safe darkness.
 
Not sleep, but something else.
 
It swallowed her like the Bogey Man had the boy, and she was gone.

H
e couldn't see her, couldn't smell her, couldn't sense her anywhere.

Charity was gone.

The Bogey Man howled with rage at his lost prize, and all over Riverside children cried out as the thing crouching in their closets, hiding under their beds, pounced them from their sleep.

T
he boy lay in bed, eyes wide open and staring across the room at his closed closet door.
 
He had closed it himself before climbing into bed, latched it firmly and piled toys around its base so it couldn't swing open in the night.

A little before midnight, when he was the only one in the house still awake, it opened, just as he knew it would; as it had every night for the past few weeks.

The face inside, disembodied but undeniably real, grinned at him.
 
A shark's grin.
 
When it spoke, its voice seemed to come from everywhere around him.