Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (19 page)

fingers. I pulled open the heavy wooden doors and we plunged inside. I took two steps, then ran gut-first into a rusting

Ford sedan. Amy slammed into my back.

I spun around and realized, belatedly, that we were not, in fact, inside the elementary school. Rows of broken cars grew in

a field of yellow weeds al around us.

We had gone through the door at the school and come out at the junk yard south of town.

"FUCK!" screamed John, smacking the hood of a car with his hand. "He did that trick with the door!"

I turned and hoped to see the door to the school behind us, still open with a view of the street. No such luck. Just the junk

yard.

I looked for the shadow man, saw no one.

"Where'd he go!?"

I scanned the row of car asses and broken tail lights behind us. Then a shadow passed over the sun and when I looked

up, I saw a car flying toward us in the air.

We ran screaming in three directions as the thing landed with a thunder of rupturing metal and glass.

I stumbled and got a face ful of dried weeds. I scrambled to my feet and screamed for Amy, found her crouching behind a

hatchback.

John screamed, "There! There!" and we turned to see a shrunken, dried up old man who looked about 90. He was maybe

25 yards away, standing near a 20 foot-tal faded fiberglass statue of a smiling man holding a muffler.

The old man bent over, wrestled an old engine block out of the dirt, and threw it with one hand like it was a softball. The

400-pound hunk of metal turned in the air, little sprays of rainwater flying out of its cylinders. We dodged again, moments

before the engine crushed the roof of the hatchback in a cloud of glass bits.

John turned, raised the furgun and fired.

The old man recoiled, his hands flying to his face. When his hands came away I observed that he now had a thick, black

beard.

The man advanced. John fired again. The man's beard grew twice as long.

The old man was running now, terrifyingly fast, arms pumping. Running right at us. We ran away. John tried to turn and

fire the furgun. The shot went wild and suddenly the fiberglass muffler man had a huge beard.

The man closed on John with sickening ease, then tackled him like a quarterback. John fired wildly with the furgun, hitting

a nearby stack of camper shells. A family of rats spilled out from underneath, each of them with tiny black beards.

The furgun flew from John's hand and rolled away. I ran for it, then was sent sprawling with a blow to my back that

knocked the air out of my lungs. I hit the ground, gasping. I rolled over to see the old man ready to swing a car bumper at

me a second time.

Illustration b
y Nedroid

I reached over and grabbed the furgun and pointed it up at the old fart. I squeezed the trigger.

The gun went off with a booming sound that shook the Earth. The man flew up into the air with the impact. Way up. He

kept flying upward, in fact, until he became a speck in the sky and disappeared into a storm cloud.

"Well, shit," said John.

"Look!"

That was Amy. We both turned and saw the shadow man, a little slip of black standing next to a blue Chevy Beretta. It

floated our way, not really walking as it had no feet. Its "legs" fading to nothing a foot off the ground.

I pointed the furgun and fired. The Beretta started steaming, then melted into the weeds like it had been made of painted

butter. The shadow man was unaffected as far as we could tel . It moved closer. We started edging back.

"WAIT!" shouted Amy, digging into her pocket. "John! Get out your phone!"

He did, held it out like it was a can of mace. Amy dialed and music again poured forth...

"Does that make me craaaaaaazzzayy...."

The shadow man stopped, then turned. The two rear doors of a van popped open on their own and the shadow man

floated inside.

John moved toward the van and, staying well away from the doors, peered inside.

"Come on! It's a kitchen!"

"It's a what?"

John disappeared into the van. Amy and I went that way and, sure enough, through the open doors of the van was visible,

not a van's interior, but a large room with a row of stainless refrigerators and grease-tanned walls. Kitchen at a restaurant

or something.

We went through the doors and emerged in a kitchen that smelled like detergent and vaporized animal fat. There was a

walk-in freezer door to our right, to our left was a swinging door that probably led to the dining area of the restaurant.

Cautiously, John pushed through the doors, turning down a short hal and passing a small wooden door marked

"PRIVATE" that was probably a manager's office. We emerged into a room full of round tables. The building was silent,

the restaurant closed. We could hear a soft drumming on the roof. The rain had started.

Along one wall was a bar lined with bottles and two big-screen TV's that would be showing some kind of sporting event if

it weren't early morning. The opposite wall was covered with a mural depicting a smiling cartoon buffalo, eating a burger.

"Oh. Buffalo burger," John said, unnecessarily. We had al eaten here before. Yes, the burgers were made from buffalo

meat. We were maybe a mile away from the school.

I glanced at my watch. "All right, let's get back to the school. Somebody call a-
OOOMPH!!
"

I hit the floor. The chair that had bashed me in the back clattered to the tiles next to me.

I heard running footsteps. A chubby, balding guy in his 50's was racing across the room, heading for the bar. He had

emerged from the hall, from the little office I guess.

When he passed another chair he grabbed it with one hand and flung it our way, not even looking our direction when he

did it. John ducked and the chair smashed a window behind us.

The man jumped over the bar, landing on the floor behind it.

I had lost the furgun, then saw Amy pick it up and aim it toward the bar, cautiously. I stood, looked at the solid wooden

door at the front of the restaurant and wondered if we could get through it or if it could be unlocked without a key...

John said, "Hey! Buddy! Are you just a guy or are you under the influence of that shadow demon?"

We got no answer. Then, the guy popped up from behind the counter with a shotgun.

There was a
BOOM
and a shatter of glass behind us. We all hit the floor.

Amy squeezed her eyes shut and fired the furgun blindly in his direction. A small block of cheese landed softly on the bar.

I said, "Give me that!" and twisted it from her hand. "I'll shoot, you guys run for the door!"

I raised up, aimed the furgun. John and Amy scrambled between tables. The man behind the bar never appeared.

"DAVE! OVER THERE!"

I turned to my right and saw the bald guy had crawled out of the waist-high door at the side of the bar, giving him a

straight path to the front door. He got there ahead of John and Amy, put his back to the door and aimed the shotgun.

I fired the furgun.

A huge, black blur the size of a minivan flew through the air, a furry shape that bel owed with a sort of grunting moo.

In the split second it was airborn I somehow registered what the object was. It was a buffalo. And I mean a real buffalo,

huge and furry and trailing a stink like wet dog.

The buffalo hurtled toward the man, its dangling feet flailing as it soared through the air. It smashed into the bald guy,

crushed him, blowing the door off its hinges. Man and door flew onto the sidewalk in a cloud of splinters and chunks of

door frame. It must have broken every bone in his body.

"YEAH!" screamed John, triumphantly. "That's what you get! THAT'S WHAT YOU GET!"

The buffalo turned on us. It snorted, belched, farted, sneezed. It charged, loping across the floor tiles, each hoof landing

with a sledgehammer impact that I could feel in my gut.

Amy screamed. The beast was tossing aside tables and chairs like they were dol furniture. I grabbed her arm and turned

to try to run. I tripped over a chair and fel . Both of us went down. John took the furgun, leveled it at the beast and fired.

The buffalo recoiled, stopping in its tracks. It suddenly had a thick beard, black with streaks of gray, as big as a man's

torso.

"RUN!"

I don't remember who said it, but none of us needed to be told. We dodged and juked around tables, went around the

buffalo. It was trying to get turned around, knocking over six tables in the process.

We flew through the door, stepped over the broken body of the bald man, emerging onto a sidewalk downtown. Rain

hammered the street and soaked our clothes immediately. Two seconds later the buffalo blew through the door, tearing

off another foot of door frame on every side.

We ran across the four lanes of street, looking for cover. The buffalo followed, then was hit by a semi.

The truck skidded to a stop, scraping a half ton of buffalo meat along the pavement and leaving a crimson skidmark that

stretched for a block and a half.

"YEAH!" screamed John, again. "That's what you get!"

BOOM!

The windshield of the car next to us shattered, bits of glass bouncing off my face.

The bald man was up again, walking on what looked like two broken legs. He worked the pump mechanism and aimed

again.

John fired the furgun. The man instantly grew a thick beard.

The man fired, and John went down. The furgun went flying. This time, both Amy and I screamed. John's shirt started to

turn red right at the bottom of his ribcage.

"SHIT! DAMMIT! SHIT!" I tried to drag John around behind a parked car. I heard a voice, a guy shouting, figured it was the truck driver. I heard a shotgun blast and the shouting stopped.

We got John sort of around the car, the side of the car was facing the guy and we got John leaning against the front

bumper, so his body was mostly shielded. I rounded the car and the guy shot at me, hit the ground right next to my foot.

Bits of hot pavement hit me al over and I think I caught a ricochet in the shin.

I grabbed the furgun with a shaky hand, fired it at the guy.

The gun honked.

Nothing happened.

The man had stopped in the street, as if to anticipate the result of the shot. He looked around. Nothing.

He pumped the shotgun, aimed it at me. My feet froze in place, a panic reaction. Rain ran into my eyes.

Then, from the upper limits of my vision, I saw a speck in the sky. A dark shape, tiny. It grew. Falling.

The bald man saw me look up, looked up himself.

A limp object fell directly on the bald man's head, bashing him to the pavement. All that registered of the object was that it

was a large bundle of clothes, but then I saw it was the body of a man. It was the old man from the junk yard.

I ran back around the car, saw John sitting up. He had his shirt up, was looking at a wound that spilled red down onto his

pants.

"Oh, son of a bitch it hurts like hel ." He took a deep breath and hissed with pain. "Oh, yeah. It broke a rib. I think it was just one of the pellets, maybe a couple."

"Can you stand?"

"Hold on."

John gingerly got to his feet, brushing wet hair out of his eyes. He nodded to me.

I looked toward the semi and saw the driver hiding behind the grill, standing on the carcass of the buffalo. I scanned

around us for the shadow man and once more saw it, standing near the busted door under the Buffalo Burger sign.

The door, laying flat on the sidewalk, suddenly tilted upward. The shadow man spilled itself into the ground under the

door.

We followed. No one suggested doing otherwise. Maybe it would have been smarter to steal a car and go to the

elementary school, but I think al three of us had the sense that the thing was on the run. That was fucking idiotic, of

course, but we were all pumped with adrenaline at the time and couldn't have known what was going to happen next.

I made it to the door, reached down for the brass handle and picked it up. Instead of sidewalk, I saw open landscape. Dirt

and stacks of boards and brick. It was dizzying, looking down and seeing the horizon at my feet.

I stepped through, felt a flutter in my guts as gravity changed, like a loop on a roller coaster. I stumbled forward, saw the

ground rush up at me and smack my hands. I looked up and saw I was on my hands and knees in mud, cold rain

pounding down my back.

I grunted as John stepped on the back of my leg. A moment later Amy had to grab my shirt to stabilize herself as she

came through.

I got to my feet, soaked from head to toe, mud caked on my knees and shoes. I squinted through the pouring rain.

Thunder rumbled overhead.

We were at the mal construction project. We were alone. John had taken off his flannel shirt and wrapped it around his