Supernatural: Night Terror (31 page)

—woke up in his bunk in the dim lighting of his solitary cell.

But he was not alone. Others stood in his cell, in a semicircle around him, their clothes stained with dried blood, smeared and clumped with the dirt of their shallow graves. All except for the young soccer mom standing in the middle of the seven. Her torn blouse was wet with fresh blood, the gaping hole in her chest dripping crimson droplets onto the floor of his cell.

“No,” he said. “You can’t be here. None of you. I took your power.”

En masse, they stepped forward, their eyes wide with fury, teeth bared, spittle and flecks of blood on their chins. As one, they raised their arms, each holding a butcher knife.

“No! This isn’t right,” he said. “It’s personal and sacred!”

The soccer mom stabbed his thigh, the butcher knife sinking deep enough to scrape bone.

He roared in pain and shoved her back. She smiled a wicked little smile and spat in his face.

As if that was their cue, the other six surged forward, knives rising and falling, plunging into his flesh, slicing his arms and legs, sinking into the meat behind his collarbone, puncturing a lung. Though he was physically strong, they overwhelmed him. Every push and shove, every punch and kick, was met with the bite of steel ripping into his flesh. They swarmed over him, knocking him from his bunk.

He curled into a fetal position, arms over his face and head, but they aimed lower, cutting through his abdomen with single-minded ferocity. Then, one by one, they reached their grave-cold hands inside his body, and their clawing fingers ripped out his organs and crushed them in their fists.

They saved his heart for last.

In the break room of Taco Terrace, located at the southern edge of town, Mike Keoghan leaned his chair back against the wall, put his feet up on the table, crossed at the ankles, and shoved earbuds into his ears with the iPod’s volume turned up loud enough to drown out the usual commotion at the front of the fast-food restaurant. He was determined to get maximum value out of his fifteen-minute break. The previous night he’d been up until nearly dawn, talking on the phone with his girlfriend, who’d had a big fight with her parents about breaking curfew.

After a long day, he was tired, his feet ached and his eyes burned. He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes, drifting into a nap while Johnny Cash sung about his “Ring of Fire.”

He dreamed of black smoke rising from a fire but when he looked for the flames, all he saw was the smoke, hanging overhead like poisoned clouds. Something was wrong about the black clouds, but the reason escaped him. Slowly, he became aware of someone tugging at his brown polyester Taco Terrace shirt.

“Couple more minutes,” he mumbled.

The tugging continued.

Irritably, he moved his arm to brush away the person’s hand but something wasn’t right. Instead of touching clothes or skin, he felt fur beneath his fingers. Rising to groggy consciousness, he experienced the tugging and pulling from both sides of his body. Something pushed at his chest and arms, even his legs. When he shoved against the weight on his left arm, he yelped, jerking his hand away. Something had bit him.

“What the hell—?”

Opening his eyes, he saw dozens of beady black eyes staring back at him. Rats—crawling all over his body. They waddled up his torso, pink noses twitching, sharp teeth flashing at him.

Yelling, he kicked convulsively, causing the tilted chair to slide down and drop him hard. The back of his head struck the linoleum floor and lights flashed in his skull.

In a moment, the rats swarmed over him.

Frantically, he looked to the left and right and saw hundreds of them flowing across the floor, a pulsing tide of grimy fur. He rolled onto hands and knees, crushing some rats beneath him, while dozens more bit his hands, neck and ears. As he lunged upright and staggered toward the door, they covered his body like a living fur coat, continually biting his exposed flesh. Three climbed up the back of his scalp while another ducked its head inside his mouth and, when he tried to scream, gnawed his tongue.

Furious, he bit its head off and spit it out like a bloody wad of chewing tobacco and slammed his body against the door. Several rats were dislodged from his clothing, but others scrambled up his sneakers and under the cuffs of his trousers, clawing his shins and biting the meaty back of his calves.

He fumbled with the doorknob while rats gnawed the back of his hand, tearing away his flesh, bit by bit. His own blood made the doorknob slippery but he finally managed to turn it and push his way through into the cooking area.

The customers lined up to order their meals saw him draped with hungry rats before his coworkers noticed. Uniformly, the customers screamed and ran for the exits. One teenaged girl held up her cell phone and recorded some video as she backed out of the restaurant. But when Mike had opened the door to the break room, all the rats that hadn’t climbed on him, rushed through the doorway into the restaurant’s seating area. The screams became shrieks and the people who hadn’t already left shoved each other aside and struggled through the doors. Some fell and were trampled by those behind them, then were attacked by the rats themselves.

Mike’s coworkers reacted seconds after the customers. Gail had just lifted a metal basket filled with fries out of the deep fryer. When she saw him, she screamed and hurled the basket at him. The hot grease dripping from the basket burned his face, but dislodged the two rats that had been chewing through his cheeks and another that had crossed over his ear to gnaw on his right eye.

“Help me!” Mike cried.

Jimmy, who ran on the high school track team, jumped over the counter, his legs swinging to the side and knocking over a condiment stand before landing on all fours in front of the soft drink refill station. Rats covered the floor like a living carpet and when Jimmy landed on them, they swarmed up his arms and legs.

Gail, who was naturally thin, backed away and tried to climb through the drive-through window. Snakelike, she wriggled her way through the narrow gap, but her hips got caught when she bumped the lever that worked the window. Hanging in space, half in and half out of the restaurant, she began to scream in terror.

Albert, the night manager, backed away from Mike, a look of incomprehensible horror on his face. He stumbled backward and reached out to catch himself, inadvertently pressing his palms on the hot grill. Yelping in pain, he lurched in the opposite direction. He grabbed the phone off the hook with his tender hands and dialed 911, all the while backing away from Mike and completely ignoring Gail’s helpless screams. His heel mushed a jumble of fries strewn on the floor and he slipped, cracking his forehead against the edge of the counter. By the time the 911 operator asked him to state the nature of his emergency, Albert was unconscious. As she repeated the question a second time, the rats swarming along the floor ignored the plentiful fries and chewed ravenously on Albert’s face.

Watching Albert accidentally burn his hands had given Mike an idea.

He slammed his fur-covered forearms on the grill and burned at least seven rats, enjoying their pitiful squeals as they sizzled against the hot metal. With his arms free, he stumbled past Albert and kicked running rats away from his feet. He squeezed one eyelid shut to ward off a rat nipping at the tender flesh there and managed to swat it away before it sank its fangs into his eyeball.

Gail was kicking her legs frantically while she screamed, even though the rats hadn’t worked their way up to the counter yet and none were attacking her. Catching her legs in his arms to still them, Mike twisted her hips and pushed her through the window. She fell awkwardly outside, with a yelp and a curse, but she had escaped. Since Gail never went anywhere without her cell phone, Mike prayed she would call for help—soon as she stopped freaking out.

He tried to call to her, but his voice came out as a gurgle. Two rats were ripping into his throat and blood had washed down the front of his uniform shirt. Too much blood. He felt lightheaded and his balance was iffy. Seeing the phone dangling from its cord, he staggered toward it and dropped to his knees. He cradled the receiver in his hands but his fingers were numb, useless. He leaned over and tried to call for help, but no words escaped his lips. Everything had become darker, as if the restaurant lights were dying, and the floor spun beneath him and then his cheek was pressed to the linoleum, sticky with warm blood.

Far away, too far to matter to him anymore, sirens wailed in the night.

Rat tails slithered along his neck. A cold nose poked into his bloody ear.

Darkness swept over him and he remembered the darkness in his dream of the poisoned clouds...

For the past two days, Bryn Gunning had felt a tickle in her throat, a sure sign she was coming down with a head cold or some kind of virus she had probably picked up from one of her fifth-grade students. During the school year, somebody was always sick and the viruses survived by tag team propagation, as she called it. Sometimes it seemed as if schools were just incubators for the evolution of the super flu that would one day create an extinction event for the human race. Or, maybe she was feeling sorry for herself at the thought of yet another illness wracking her body for the next three to six weeks.

She’d been getting plenty of rest and taking echinacea, zinc and mega-doses of vitamin C since the first sign of the cold, hoping to nip it in its viral bud, but that strategy always amounted to little more than hopeless optimism. At least, she reasoned, she’d go down swinging.

Thunderstorms jarred her from sleep and the uncomfortable dream she’d been having about difficulty swallowing. Tangled up in her bed sheets, she wrestled her way out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom in her fuzzy bunny slippers. Without warning, she began coughing and couldn’t stop. It was a dry cough and soon she was wheezing, unable to catch her breath. Flicking on the bathroom light, she grabbed a cup and tried to fill it with tap water while her body was wracked with spasms.

She managed to get a mouthful into the cup and half of that into her mouth, then sprayed it across the mirror as another round of coughing doubled her over. Hacking, she had the sensation that something was caught in her throat— and it was trying to get out!

With trembling fingers she reached into her mouth and grabbed something hard and pulled. The size of a large button, it had thin, twitching legs. Disgusted, she flung it into the sink and it crawled around the basin—a cockroach. Backing away from the sink, she bumped against the door and wiped her saliva-sticky hands against her oversized nightshirt, panting. Then the panting degraded into more coughing.

She spat three more wiggling cockroaches out of her mouth.

Weeping and shaking in revulsion, she gagged as she imagined them swarming in her stomach and crawling up her throat. On hands and knees, she crossed to the toilet, flung up the lid and gripped the edge of the bowl a moment before the torrent of vomit surged up her esophagus. Clear fluid, streaked with blood and riddled with squirming cockroaches, centipedes and spiders spilled out of her and flowed down the side of the toilet bowl. Desperately, she reached for the handle to flush the chitinous mass down the drain, but many of the bugs scrambled up the porcelain and dropped to her tile flooring. They wriggled and twitched and scuttled toward her legs.

Screaming between coughing fits, she scrambled out of the bathroom in a frantic crabwalk, rolled over and ran toward her bedside telephone. She lifted the receiver and punched in 911. Her stomach rumbled alarmingly. The operator answered but when Bryn tried to explain what was happening, she could only cough and hack, and she spit up more bugs. Several landed moistly on her forearm and skittered toward the hand holding the phone, while others scrambled up her arm, under the loose sleeve of her nightshirt. Dropping the phone in disgust, she swatted at the bugs nestling in her armpit or crossing over the swell of her breasts.

At some point, she’d lost her fuzzy slippers and, as she backed away from the phone, bugs on the floor squished between her toes. She gasped for air and coughed again, hacking out a wiggling centipede before she ran from her bedroom in a blind panic and stumbled down the stairs, catching herself on the railing a moment before she would have plunged headfirst to the landing. In sparing herself from a nasty fall, she’d twisted her right wrist hard enough that she thought something had broken.

Cradling her throbbing wrist against her rumbling stomach, she flung open her front door and ran into the street, grateful that the stormy night had brought cleansing rain to wash away the live bugs crawling on her body and the bits of dead bugs tangled in her hair or clinging to her face, arms and legs.

She lived behind the school where she worked, in the eastern suburbs of Clayton Falls and had always loved that when the weather was pleasant she could walk to work. Now she ran toward the sprawling elementary school building as if it were a sanctuary for her.

By the time she realized she should have stayed close to home after placing the incoherent emergency call, her stomach was protruding painfully beneath her nightshirt. She pressed her hands to her abdomen and felt her flesh rippling under her fingers. With each painful step, she coughed up more blood with the bugs. No matter how many of them she expelled, more remained inside her and they were impatient to get out. From the sharp pains telegraphing from her abdomen, she knew they were eating their way out of her body.