The Jersey Devil (16 page)

It took them half an hour to find their way and reunite with Bill, Carol and April, but they'd finally made it. The darkness hadn't helped matters much. Now that they were here, Norm kind of wished they'd found a better place to meet.

“What the h-hell is a cemetery doing out in the m-middle of nowhere?”

It wasn't a sprawling graveyard, but it was much bigger than a simple, old-time family plot. Among the decrepit, crumbling tombstones were mausoleums and one crypt that had been built into the side of a small hill on the western edge of the cemetery.

A wooden church, its roof collapsed, windows broken long ago, sagged in disrepair beside it.

“This wasn't always the middle of nowhere,” the old man said. “People don't realize there were thriving factories all over the Barrens just over a hundred years ago. I'll bet if we could look around, you'll find overgrown areas of foundations and either a farm, factory, or mill if there's running water nearby. This place has been abandoned for a long time. The forest is good at taking care of the rest.”

Not for the first time that day, Norm questioned why he'd agreed to search for Daryl with the Willets. They were more than capable of handling this themselves. He wondered if he would only get in the way when things got bad . . . or worse.

He found the white pill case in his pocket, popping one of his anti-anxiety meds. With night upon them, he needed something to take the edge off.

Bill said to his son, “Help me find wood for the fire. We'll get what we need in the church.”

“This place freaking you out?” April asked Norm as she collected stones to build a fire ring.

“Everything's f-f-freaking me out,” he admitted. “Here, take this. It'll help you see better.” He handed her a mini camera, making sure to turn the night vision on.

“Thanks.”

“I want it on now, anyway. We can use it to keep an eye on the trees.”

He walked with her, holding the rocks in the tail of his shirt. She stopped at a pair of small grave markers.

“That's so sad. Look,” she said, handing him the camera.

There was only one word on each of the markers—BABY. No name, no date.

“They might have been stillborn or d-d-died not long after they were born. It happened a lot back then,” Norm said. “Guess they weren't around l-l-long enough to even earn a name.”

Some of the graves had dates from the late 1700s. The latest date they saw was 1923. It had been a long, long time since anyone had come here. The ground was uneven, as if the tenants below had been trying to rise up for the past century. In some places, weeds grew past his hip. Most of the headstones were cracked or simply a pile of broken stones. They made sure not to collect any of them for the fire ring.

“One good thing about the night,” he said.

“What's that?” April seemed awfully calm and collected. She must have been a bundle of nerves beneath that cool façade.

“No more damn sun trying to sweat us out. I think I lost a-a-about ten pounds today.”

“We'll have something to eat and drink to put a little back on.”

“I . . . I know this m-must sound crazy. But I've got a strong feeling we're going to find your brother. Wherever he is, he's a-all right.”

A wan smile touched her face. “I know he is. I'd feel it if he wasn't.”

They made a big fire and sat around it, heating up water to pour in foil pouches of camp food. Wood from the old church burned hot. No one spoke much.

“Everyone should take fifteen minutes to sleep. We'll do it in shifts of two, the other four keeping watch,” Bill said. “I know it's not much, but I think we need to keep moving. Right?” He looked to his son.

Ben closed his eyes, nodding, the shadows from the flames dancing across his face. “I think what we need to do before we start out again is take a warning shot at one of the things. When it takes off, we'll follow. We'll use Norm's camera to locate and track one.”

April leaned back on her elbows, her feet dangerously close to the fire. “I can see two right over there. Saw them streak across the moon before settling in at the tops of those pines.”

“You spot any more?” her grandfather asked.

“Just the two for now.”

“Hopefully, they stay right there and watch us rest a bit. All we need is one for Ben's plan to work.”

“Where exactly are they?” Norm asked, grabbing the camera. He needed to see if he could capture them on video.

April pointed to a tall pine tree to their left. He worked on the zoom, seeing nothing until a sharp movement caught his eye.

“I see it!” he said. “It's hunched on a couple of branches, kind of like a gargoyle. I swear it's looking right at us.” His elation at seeing one without being attacked was tinged with cold fear that ran like ice down his spine.

“Try to keep your eye on it,” Ben said. “It'll help to know where to shoot when the time comes.”

“Don't worry, I will.”

“Boompa, you and April should try to shut down for a bit,” Ben said. “Then Norm and Mom, and me and Dad.”

“I won't lie and say I'm not bushed,” Sam Willet said, stretching out on the cooling ground.

Norm barely heard what they said. He was riveted by what was on his view screen. It would be great if he could get a better look, but he wasn't about to head across the cemetery on his own. He'd kill himself just from falling.

“Do you see just the one?” Carol whispered, suddenly next to him.

“Mmm-hmm.”

The sound of stone grinding on stone put him on high alert.

“What was that?” Norm said.

Ben and Bill were on their feet, guns drawn.

“Could be one of those old headstones breaking some more. Hot day, chilly night, they get weak,” Carol said.

Norm looked back to the camera.

The Devil was gone!

“Damn, it moved,” he cursed.

He panned around the trees, but couldn't catch sight of it again. “I l-lost it.”

“Don't worry, April will find it,” Carol said. “She's been on them all day.”

“You see anything near us?” Bill asked. “That sounded close.”

“Let me check.”

Norm tilted the camera down, scanning the cemetery. It looked spooky as hell in night vision. He'd spent a lot of time alone in the woods, but never in a forgotten cemetery. If this had been an assignment from a network, he would have turned it down flat. In fact, he hadn't taken on any job that had even a hint of danger for longer than he cared to remember.

Well, this is sure making up for all that,
he thought.

“N-nothing walking about. Could have been a nocturnal critter rooting around.”

They waited in tense silence for the noise to happen again. When it didn't, coiled muscles began to relax. Norm was about to retrain the camera on the treetops when he thought he spied something in the open doorway of one of the mausoleums. The thick iron-barred door lay on the ground, a victim of neglect or vandalism or both.

His stomach clenched into a painful knot.

The big Jersey Devil was in the mausoleum, looking back at him, its eyes piercing white through the night-vision display.

“It's over there,” Norm said, afraid to speak above a tremulous whisper.

“What's over there?” Ben said.

“The big one.” He pointed, but in the dark, there was no way any of them could see. “Everyone needs to act normal and take turns looking in my camera.” Rummaging in his backpack, he found the small tripod he carried around. With one hand, he was able to extract the legs and affix the camera. The terrifying creature filled the frame. He could see its chest move in and out with each breath.

Ben casually came over and looked.

“Shit.”

“That p-probably means the others are all around us.”

“I wonder what they're waiting for.”

“Maybe for us to f-fall asleep.”

“Well, that's not gonna happen anytime soon,” April said.

Ben walked away, his eyes locked on the mausoleum. Carol gasped when she saw the Devil. “It flexed one of its wings. It's just sitting there, watching us.”

Each of the Willets looked through the camera, expletives and questions of what to do falling from their lips, all of them hoping to see Daryl somewhere close by.

“Looks like we have ourselves a standoff,” Bill said.

“You think they somehow herded us here?” April said. “You know, like popping up every now and then, knowing we'd follow?”

“I wouldn't put anything past them,” her grandfather said. Norm watched his fingers rub the stock of his rifle.

“They don't know we can see them,” Ben said. “For the first time, we have the element of surprise. I say we don't let the opportunity slip away. We should still take our warning shots and follow the flock or herd or whatever you call it.”

Bill took to a knee, making sure his rifle was fully loaded. “I think a warning shot will just get them to attack.”

“Which is why we need to take out the big one,” Norm said. All eyes turned to him
.
“It's the rule of Nature. That one in the m-mausoleum is very obviously the alpha creature. You bring it down, the others will scatter like birdshot.”

Maybe it was the pill taking effect, but a burgeoning confidence was beginning to take hold in him.

“Norm's right,” April said.

“I know I am. I s-spend most of my life watching animals. I'll bet the same rules apply here.”

“What do you all say?” Ben asked, looking to his family.

His father rolled his neck, tiny bones cracking. “You have the bigger gun, son. You do the honors, and we'll do our best to suppress the others if they try to be heroes.”

Ben had to get behind Norm's camera, lying on his stomach, to take the shot. The others talked around him in hushed tones. He zoned them out. He didn't want to miss, not that he could at this range. What was important was that he made it a kill shot. The last thing they needed was a wounded, enraged Jersey Devil. No telling what would happen then.

“Everyone in position?” he said.

His family and Norm were in a loose circle behind him, ready to take on any of the smaller Devils should they choose to attack. His father had thrown the remaining wood on the fire to increase the cone of light around them. The quicker they could pick the damned things out of the darkness, the better chance they had of shooting them.

“We're ready when you are,” Boompa said.

“Once I take my shot, I'm heading to the mausoleum,” Ben said. “If it took Daryl there, I need to search it right away. You all cover me as best you can.”

He knew he might be running headlong into the biggest shit storm of his life. It didn't concern him one bit. If there was a chance his brother was in there, he'd go now with just a knife and slash his way through the Jersey Devil.

The beast remained in the mausoleum, only its head poking out every now and then. Ben felt as if he were looking into a portal to hell. Nothing about the Devil's existence made sense, yet here it was, stalking them. A long tongue flopped from its maw, curling up so it could lick its nose.

There was no need for a countdown. His AR-15 would be loud enough for anyone within a mile radius to hear.

Breathing regularly, Ben squeezed the trigger.

He must have hit it because the Devil was no longer standing in the mausoleum's entrance. Ben scrabbled to his feet, flicking on the flashlight Boompa had given him. The absence of gunfire behind him told him the little fuckers had decided to remain hidden. Or maybe they simply took off. If that was the case, he hoped to hell someone saw which way they went.

His foot snagged on a tangle of exposed roots from a downed tree. Spinning and off balance, he straightened himself out by smashing his hip into a tombstone. He heard the crumble of rock as he sprinted to the mausoleum.

Now that he was closer, he was able to shine his flashlight into the aboveground tomb. The beam alighted on a raised sarcophagus. Leaves and weeds and pine-cones littered the floor.

He'd shot it. He knew he had. He'd had its heart dead in the center of his sight. At least where he thought its heart should be.

Ben took a cautious step inside, his boot scraping against the grit on the cement floor.

There was one small stained-glass window, miraculously intact, at the back of the mausoleum. The pungent odor inside was enough to trigger his gorge. He swallowed hard. If he hadn't seen it before, he'd sure as hell know now that it had been here. He'd never smelled anything like it, and he'd often come upon dead deer and other animals on the farm.

This was even worse than the Afghani family he'd found: a mother, a father, and three children, all under ten. They'd taken refuge in their basement during a bombing raid three days earlier. It had been over a hundred degrees every day and the entire house had been torn away as if a tornado had ripped through the neighborhood. The family of five had been exposed to the sun for three days, waiting to be found.

He'd thrown up so hard, he'd thought he'd cracked a rib or two.

“It's not here!” he shouted, his voice echoing painfully in the stone chamber.

His father shouted back, “How is that possible?”

“I don't know.”

“We're all clear out here. We can't even see any of the others.”

Again Ben wondered how this was possible. Because his mother was a cryptozoology enthusiast, they'd all listened to her talk about creatures other than the Jersey Devil for years. He recalled a theory she once spoke about how Bigfoot and other cryptids were able to come and go because they had figured out how to slip through portals of time and space. There were no dead Bigfoots or grand discoveries because they had an innate ability to go places we could not follow.

Jesus, had the Jersey Devil been able to do something like that? As alien as the concept was to him, its very existence allowed him to consider anything was possible.

“We're coming to you,” April said.

He heard them running across the cemetery.

“Don't come in until I give the all clear,” he said.

The sarcophagus was wider than your typical stone coffin. The person inside was either someone of immense size, or there were two bodies inside, laid to rest next to each other. Maybe they were a husband and wife who had died together.

Whatever the reason for its size, it did present ample space for the Devil to hide behind. Ben didn't see any drops of blood on the floor.

Holding the flashlight against the barrel of his rifle, Ben slowly stepped around the sarcophagus. When he got behind it, he sucked in a deep breath, having to turn away.

A large hole had been excavated into the floor. Cool air that reeked of decay wafted from the hole.

“Holy crap, that's bad,” he said, stepping back, eager to get outside.

It had to be down there. He would have seen it if it had tried to fly away.

“Everyone keep away!” Ben yelled. “Don't come in here!”

He grabbed one of the grenades he'd clipped to his belt. There was one surefire way to get the Devil now . . . unless it had built an entire underground warren with passages underneath the cemetery.

His thumb slipped under the pin.

“Fire in the—”

Before he could pull the pin, the Jersey Devil came screeching out of the hole, shattering through the roof of the mausoleum. Heavy stones rained down on Ben, knocking the grenade and rifle from his hands. A chunk of the ceiling caught him in the temple.

Falling backwards, the edges of his vision turning to black, he watched the shadow of the Jersey Devil streak past the stars into the night.

* * *

“Sweet Jesus!” Sam exclaimed when the mausoleum exploded.

They had been standing twenty feet from it, waiting for Ben to come running out when the Devil burst through, laying waste to the century-old structure as if it were made of Lego blocks.

The sky erupted with the piercing howls of the smaller Devils. Like a swarm of bats, they circled overhead. It was only a matter of time before they attacked.

“Bill, Carol, get Ben out of there,” he barked. His son and daughter-in-law ran to the remains of the mausoleum, Carol shouting Ben's name.

“Don't wait for them to come to you,” he said to April and Norm. “Let's give them a reason to reconsider their intentions.”

The three of them opened fire on the flitting mass that filled the sky. There were a lot more here than there had been last night. It would be self-defeating to try and consider how badly outnumbered they might be.

April let loose with a hair-raising scream as she fired wildly into the sky. Sam followed suit, the only difference being his trying to find one and pick it off like skeet. It was very hard in the dark, and with his old eyes not quite what they used to be. He thought he might have nicked one, but there was no time to pat himself on the back. He looked for another shape, followed it for a bit and pulled the trigger.

Reloading, he saw one of the Devils on a collision course with Carol.

In an instant, it was a cascading mass of blood, flesh and bone.

He looked over at Norm, who had nailed the bastard just ten feet before it would have gotten her.

“You're turning out to be handier than a pocket on a shirt,” Sam said.

Norm didn't show any sign of satisfaction. “I told you I used to hunt. Took down a lot of ducks and geese in my time.”

April let loose with a steady barrage of fire. “Die, you fuckers!”

Something slammed hard into Sam's back, knocking the rifle out of his hands. The flesh between his shoulder blades burned as if he'd fallen on hot coals. The cool air kissing his shredded skin only made it worse.

“You okay?” Norm asked, shooting randomly around them to discourage another attack.

“I'll be fine.” Sam crawled on his hands and knees to retrieve his rifle, joints popping when he got back to his feet.

Another Devil swooped between him and April. Sam waited for it to gain some distance, then shot it from behind. It went into a death spin. He heard its hefty body roll in the weeds, but it was too dark to see where it came to rest.

“They're coming closer,” Norm said.

Sam saw that Ben was safely away from the ruins of the mausoleum. He'd been knocked out, or at least he prayed to God that was why his grandson was being carried out by his father. Carol now joined in the fight, pulling off seven quick shots with her Beretta.

“I don't think they're getting the message that we shouldn't be fucked with,” April said.

“I can't disagree,” Sam answered. The Devils dove at them, one knocking the hat off Norm's head in a daring, almost playful gesture.

April dropped her rifle. She said, “Maybe this will make them think twice.”

For the first time, Sam noticed that she had a small pack over one shoulder. She dropped it to the ground, tearing the zipper open.

“Ugh!”

She fell to her side as a Devil caromed into her. Landing beside her, it hissed, trying to stomp on her hands with its cloven hooves.

Carol ran and kicked the Devil like it was a football. It tumbled end over end until it was out of sight.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Watch out!”

Norm took another one down in mid-flight. Blood sprayed all over the two women.

“Dammit, that tastes awful,” April groaned, retrieving the contents of the bag.

When Sam saw what it was, he silently thanked Daryl.

Improvised flamethrowers had been his specialty.