The Jersey Devil (20 page)

They hadn't seen another soul for the past fifteen minutes on the small, two-lane road. Speeding past the famed pygmy pines, full-grown pine trees that only stood four feet high or less, Sam leaned forward, gazing out the front window. The landscape unsettled him, the tiny trees looking like a forest recovering from an apocalyptic event. He spotted something ahead.

“Slow down, Ben,” he said.

His grandson saw the thing in the middle of the road at the same time. He eased the van to a stop several feet from it.

Sam hustled to get out of the van.

“Jesus Christopher Columbus.”

It had been a deer. A pretty big buck.

Now it was simply an exploded bag of meat and blood. The splatter marks stretched to both sides of the road.

“That's disgusting,” April said beside him. “It must have gotten hit by a semi.”

“It wasn't hit by any car or truck,” Sam said. “It was dropped here.”

“You gotta be shitting me,” April shot back.

“Either that or it strapped an explosive vest to its chest,” Ben said, his eyes unblinking as he stared at the grisly remains. Dropping down, he dipped his finger into a particularly vile puddle of blood and organs. “It's still warm. That's one fresh water balloon.”

Norm bent to get a closer look. “I think you're right. If it was hit, you'd see a blood pattern fanning out in the direction opposite from where it was h-h-hit. Looking at the c-circumference, I'd say it was l-let go from a tremendous height.”

Sam reached into his pocket just to feel the Colt pistol he'd put there when they got in the van. What he wouldn't give to have one of those Jersey Devils right here in front of him. He'd leave one hell of a mess for the roadkill crew to clean.

Bill said, “I guess we all know how it got here. If it's a fresh kill, we have to be really close.”

Ben said, “Let's get back in the van.”

He made a wide berth around the carcass.

As Ben drove, Sam spotted more animals on the sides of the road, one of them a dog, impaled on a pygmy pine. It looked as if the dog's throat had been ripped open before it was unceremoniously ditched.

No one said a word, but the tension in the van was thick enough to reinforce steel.

The police scanner came alive with strange reports everywhere. People were seeing things in the sky and on the ground. Someone called in what he thought was a squadron of silent helicopters flying over his house. It seemed that witnesses couldn't come to grips with what they were seeing, so they equated it with things that made more sense to them.

During one dispatch about a winged creature that was on someone's jungle gym in their yard, they heard the responding officer quip, “They have a Jersey Devil that wanted to go down their slide?”

The dispatcher chuckled. “Could be.”

They may be laughing now, but not for much longer
, Sam thought.

The Devils were riled up and mad as hell. April kept her head out the window, scanning the skies.

They were getting closer. The evidence of their recent passing was all too clear. He just hoped to God the beasts stuck to animals and left people alone.

“How much further to Leeds Point?” he asked Carol.

Carol looked at the map. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. I'm not entirely sure.”

April slipped her head back inside the van. “I think I see them!”

“Where, where?” Ben said, straining to see himself.

“Just over there,” she replied, pointing to the east.

Everyone moved up in the van, and huddled close to see out the window.

Sam saw the swirling black shapes hovering at least a hundred feet or more over the tree line. The Devils were snatching a flock of birds in midair, swallowing them whole, madly chasing any that made it through the gauntlet. In under a minute, they'd managed to track down and devour every single bird. “They're in a feeding frenzy. This isn't looking good at all.”

* * *

The Sand Pit Bar and Grill had seen better days, but it was the only bar around, so business was always good. The building was starting to list to the left, and the outdoor bar concept that had been abandoned a decade ago still had rotted stools lined up against a chipped bar top.

Lynyrd Skynyrd blared from a lone, blown-out speaker fastened over the front door.

Gary parked his Harley right up to the front porch, the heavy bike sinking a bit into the soft sand. It was morning, but the lot was already half full with trucks and a couple of beaters. He'd been up since four in the morning working on repairs to his back deck and now he was tired and thirsty. The only advantage to insomnia was being able to get shit done early.

Gliding through the dented, metal front door, he was greeted by Sonia, the bartender. She had her hair in pigtails and wore a baggy sweatshirt and black yoga pants. “Hey, Gary, I wasn't expecting you so early.”

A half dozen regulars were at the U-shaped bar, savoring the first beer of the day.

“Yeah, I couldn't sleep so I got an early start. The deck is done and I'm done.”

Sonia reached into the cooler behind the bar and opened a bottle of Tecate for him. He put a twenty on the bar.

“I'm starving, too. You got any hot dogs ready?”

She shook her head. “I'll put some on.”

“I'll have two with . . .”

“Chili and cheese. I know.”

He nodded at Will Simons and Keith Lundy, cousins in their late fifties with matching handlebar mustaches and worn, leather vests. They headed up a local motorcycle club comprised exclusively of retired vice cops. These guys made the Hell's Angels cross to the other side of the road. They'd always been cordial to Gary, even when he beat them at pool at the warped table in the bar.

Across from him was Garrett Grandy, a middle-aged accountant originally from Connecticut who spent his Saturdays at the bar. He had a wife, but rarely spoke about her. He liked to read his paper and magazines while he drank.

Three other guys he saw from time to time but hadn't really spoken to much, sober at least, huddled near the end of the bar with their bottles of Bud.

Gary leaned back on his stool, tipping the ice-cold Tecate back. He could tell already it was going to be a long day at the Sand Pit. That was fine by him. He had nowhere to go.

“It'll be about five more minutes on that chili dog,” Sonia said. She'd been two grades below him in high school and had been quite the cutie back in the day. Every now and then, she still captured some of that magic she used to weave on him and his friends. Most days, she was too tired and busy to give a shit.

Gary said to her, “You know, I'm still waiting for you to tell me when I can take you to dinner.”

“You already did,” she said, washing out a pilsner glass.

“Oh, yeah, when was that?”

“1989. You took me to the Sizzler. I still have dreams about the salad bar.”

Gary laughed. “Hey, I'm a man now. I can take you to the Olive Garden for an even better salad.”

“Hold your ground, honey,” Will said, waving his empty bottle. “You don't say yes until he promises you dinner and gambling and a show at one of them Indian casinos.”

Sonia rolled her eyes and went to the kitchen.

“Thanks for the cock block,” Gary said with a wry smile.

“Hey, you get her there, you stay the night and get lucky. I'm only trying to help.”

“With help like that—”

It sounded as if something very heavy had landed on the roof. The entire bar shook. A couple of glasses shattered on the floor. Sonia came bursting from the kitchen, the swinging door hitting into her behind. “What the hell was that?”

“A tree maybe?” one of the trio said.

“That's probably it,” Keith said, pushing away from the bar. “Get me another. I'll go check it out.”

“I'll go with you,” Will said. The cousins stormed out the door.

“If there's a tree sitting on the building, maybe we should leave and call the cops or fire department,” Sonia said.

“You're probably right,” Gary said. “This old place could be knocked to dust by an acorn. Before we go, can I get another Tecate?”

Garrett looked up from his paper. “Me, too.”

“Men and their beer,” she said, doling out another round and grabbing her cell phone.

The front door banged open, startling Gary. He spilled Tecate on his thighs.

Keith and Will ran into the bar. Will was covered in blood. Keith's left cheek flapped against his neck.

“What the fuck?” Gary shouted, catching Keith before he ran into the edge of the bar.

“It's . . . it's not a tree,” Will said. He wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, flicking it onto Garrett, who jumped backwards off his stool in a futile effort to avoid it.

“Who did this to you?” Gary said. Keith's eyes spun like pinwheels. His face was real bad. Gary could see the man's tongue and teeth through the ragged hole in his cheek.

Will strode to the pool table and grabbed a cue. Breaking it in half, he tossed the other to Garrett.

He looked out the open door. A shadow passed over the doorway.

“They're coming!”

For a brief moment, Daryl thought he smelled salt water. He wanted to stop, maybe find which direction it was coming from, but the woman wouldn't or couldn't understand him when he asked her to slow down.

The scent of the sea got him thinking about cool, running water, preferably from a tap into the biggest damn pitcher ever made. He was so thirsty, he could taste it.

“Hey, lady, you mind telling me where we're going?”

She cast a quick glance back at him, made a kind of grunting noise and plowed ahead.

He knew she wasn't going to answer him, but it felt good to pretend that he could have a conversation with another human.

There was no sense beating himself up about it. It wasn't as if he chose to black out. The lack of oxygen thanks to his constricted ribs was to blame.

“Why do I get the feeling we're not headed to civilization? Any chance you know where we can get a drink?”

The woods were getting more and more dense the farther they traveled . The only reassuring thing he'd heard all day was the passing of a passenger plane about an hour back. He couldn't see it through the thick cover of trees, but hearing it connected him to a more comfortable reality.

The woman stopped, going into a crouch. He pulled up a couple of feet behind her, peering into the woods.

“You see something?”

She didn't acknowledge him. After a few tense moments, she stood straight and turned to him. The milk was really flowing from her breasts now, carving through the filth in wavy lines.

Daryl shivered at the thought.

Now she dashed away from him, arms and legs pumping hard.

“Hey, wait up!”

He tried to keep pace with her, but it just wasn't possible. The first deep gulp of air he took brought a dynamite blast of pain.

The distance between them was growing by the second.

“Come on, slow the hell down! Don't leave me stranded out here!”

She may have been poor company, and slightly dangerous, but she was all he had at the moment. Somehow, she had learned to live out here, and the closer he stayed to her, the better his own chance for survival.

It seemed like she was trying to lose him with the way she zigzagged around every tree she passed.

“I'm . . . I'm warning you. I won't be . . . be your friend if you keep this up.”

Something fluttered overhead. Daryl looked up, grabbing his knife, expecting the worst.

He didn't see the huge pit. For just a second, his legs kept running over empty space, just like Scooby-Doo and Shaggy when they fled the monster of the week. Gravity reclaimed its hold on him and he landed hard on his knees. The knife spilled from his grasp. He heard it
plink-plink
as it disappeared into the darkness.

Winded and now with banged-up knees, he cried out, “Hey, you gotta help me! Hey! I'm down here!”

Tears blurred his vision. The fall hurt like a son of a bitch. If things kept up this way, he was just going to lie down and wait for death. It had to be more peaceful than this.

Despite the pain, he wondered,
why did my knife make that weird sound?
It was as if it had skittered across something hard. But this was just a loamy pit, a sinkhole in the middle of nowhere.

Wiping away his tears, he saw how dead wrong he was.

The pit was far from empty.

Bones, hundreds, maybe even a thousand, were stacked everywhere. Somehow, he had just missed being impaled on a yellowed rib cage.

“Aw shit.”

He'd grown up on a farm. He knew what animal bones looked like.

That was not an animal's rib cage.

The woman's head popped over the hole. She wore a maniacal grin.

Daryl mustered a pained smile back at her. “You think this is funny? We'll see how funny it is.” He looked for his knife amid the random scattering of bones.

When he found it, he wasn't going to be held responsible for what he did with it.

* * *

The abominations that flooded through the open door of the Sand Pit defied description. And there were so goddamn many of them!

Sonia ducked behind the bar while Gary ran to the pool table and grabbed his own cue. He, Will and Garrett swung like it was batting practice, clipping a few of the flying beasts, but doing very little damage.

The trio that had been at the end of the bar ran outside just as the creatures came swarming in. He could still hear their screams, though they were growing fainter.

Sonia shrieked. Gary turned to see two of the winged beasts nipping at her head, their wings flapping madly as they hovered over her.

“Hold on, Sonia!”

He jumped onto the bar, leveling a swing at one creature's midsection. It spun to the back of the bar, knocking a wood panel from the wall. The other got an uppercut and let Sonia go. The skin of his knuckles was shredded by its sharp chin.

“Just stay down. I'll do what I can to keep them away.”

He was hit from behind and almost fell on top of her. Sonia was on her hands and knees, scrabbling away from him.

Will and Garrett were in serious danger of being overwhelmed. Just the sound of all the fluttering wings and unearthly screeches was enough to make Gary want to curl up in a ball and wish it all away.

Sonia suddenly popped up, now holding a shotgun. She took a deafening shot at a pair of creatures headed for Gary, shearing the head off one. Its body skidded across the bar like a frosty mug of beer, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

She fired off another shot, but it went wild. Before she could reload, one of the flying demons clobbered her in the temple with its hooves. Sonia dropped like a bag of rocks.

“We have to get the hell out of here!” Will shouted.

“How?” Gary said, grabbing a creature by its long neck before it could bury its teeth in his face. It was one ugly bastard. He shoved the thick end of the pool cue in its open maw, pushing downward until he felt something inside its throat give way. It went limp instantly. He dropped it just in time to duck as another one went for his head. After seeing what they'd done to Keith, he was terrified of them lashing out at his face.

The blood that soaked Will through and through must have been Keith's, because the man was fighting like a champ.

Garrett yelped. Gary turned just in time to see him buckle under as a bunch of the creatures dog piled on the man, driving him to the ground.

How is any of this happening?
He jerked his leg back when he felt something pinch the flesh by his ankle. A smaller monster tried to chew through his Achilles tendon. He drove his leg into the beast's mouth, and it gagged and let go, scampering away. Another one, flying in a drunken arc, plowed into his shoulder, spinning him around. The pool cue fell from his hand.

Getting into a fighter's stance, he raised his fist. He had no idea what these things were or how they'd swarmed into the Sand Pit, but he sure as hell knew he was going down swinging.

The heavy rumble of an overworked engine caught his attention. The bar shook once again as a van nudged against the front door, blocking any hope of an exit. The side door slid open. The next thing he knew, incredibly loud booms and the sharp
rat-tat-tat
of gunfire erupted. The creatures shifted their attention, now concentrating on the people taking shots at them.

Sonia moaned. Gary got down next to her.

“Cover your ears and stay down, unless you want to catch a stray bullet.”

Glasses and mirrors erupted. Shards of wood exploded as rounds hit the bar and walls. Gary covered Sonia the best he could. He doubted the wood of the bar was thick enough to stop a bullet. Especially the rounds these people were expending.

One of the creatures flipped over the bar, landing in front of them. Its chest heaved several times, then stopped. Gary saw that half its goat head was missing. Hot gore poured out onto the floor.

He dared to look up and see what was going on.

“I don't believe this.”

“What's happening?” Sonia wailed.

Gary dropped back down. “It looks like a family of lunatics with more weapons than fucking Rambo. There's even a guy old as dust over there shooting away like he's at target practice.”

“What are those things?” she said, pushing away from the creature's corpse.

“I don't have a fucking clue.”

He heard someone shout, “Don't let them out!”

That was followed by a chest-thudding roar of gunfire. It was like being close to a string of a hundred M-80s going off at once.

He got up again just to see Will deposited on the bar. His stomach was peeled open, a long neck tilted downward, the face of the beast buried in the man's organs.

“Get down!” a woman yelled.

He shrunk back as a bullet came exploding out of the thing's neck. It flopped about before crashing to the floor.

Gary looked back at the shooter, a very attractive, modern-day Annie Oakley who lithely spun to take out the next creature heading her way.

Dipping down to protect Sonia, he pulled back sharply. One of the beasts had slithered to the back of the bar. It had Sonia's head in its mouth. Her body convulsed as if it were being electrified. He nearly threw up when he heard the pop of her skull and the hiss of air and liquid escaping.

A stray bullet clipped his shoulder and he fell to his side, awash in blood, watching in horror as Sonia's head made its way down the monstrosity's long throat.

* * *

It had been Ben's idea to use the van as a barrier. Watching all the Devils as they soared inside the dive bar, he figured this was their chance to take as many out as possible—at least until they ran out of ammo. He had run over a man to get the van in place, but from the looks of him, his flesh ripped off in chunks, eyeballs ripped from their sockets, it was safe to assume he was already dead.

His mother and Norm stayed in the van, taking down any Devil that tried to enter. They were also on the lookout for the big Jersey Devil. If they spotted it heading their way, they would honk the horn to alert them.

He, his father, April and Boompa opened fire on the flying Devils at will. It was fish in a barrel time, there were so many.

There were a few people trapped in the bar who did their best to fight back, but a pool cue wasn't enough to beat down this horde.

“Keep behind me,” he ordered his family. Ben pulled the trigger in quick, controlled bursts, using the points of the compass as a targeting guide for maximum effect. He clipped one flying against the low ceiling, caught one in the chest to his right, buried a bullet in the head of another straggling across the floor and finally blew through the wing of one fast approaching Boompa on his left. He heard and felt everyone's fire behind him, not worrying if they'd hit him by accident. Boompa had trained them well over the years. They may not have been planning for something as insane as this, but they knew how to handle themselves.

He missed one as it tried to fly out the blocked door. A hoof, hard as petrified wood, grazed the top of his head, unbalancing him. A hand pushed into his back, keeping him on his feet. He turned to see April smile.

“In a bar two minutes and you're already drunk,” she shouted above the din. “Lightweight.”

“April, look out!” Boompa barked.

Still dazed, Ben watched helplessly as two of the Devils swooped over her, knocking the rifle from her hands and dropping her to the floor. He couldn't shoot them without hitting his sister in the process.

That moment of indecision was enough for another creature to land on his shoulder, taking a bite from his neck.

“Motherfucker!” Ben spun in a circle, trying to dislodge the Devil.

There was a loud smack, and suddenly he was free. Boompa had brained it with the butt of his rifle. His hand went to his neck. Blood trickled between his fingers.

“April!” he shouted.

Her legs were writhing underneath the attacking Devils, but he couldn't see the rest of her.

A rumbling cry caught his attention. He spun to see his father drop his weapon, running to April. The man he'd always thought of as bigger than life in more ways than one jumped on the demons like a wrestler taking a leap from the top turnbuckle.

“Get the hell off my daughter!” he roared.

His massive hands grabbed each Devil by the back of their long, muscled necks. Snatching them away from April, he clapped their heads together with a snap that sounded like a two-by-four breaking.

When Ben went to help his bloody sister up, another Devil hit him from behind. He collapsed next to April. Somehow, he'd also lost his gun.

Now on his back, he watched as part of the roof collapsed. Instead of the trapped Devils using it as a means to escape, more came diving in.

“Come on, you sons of bitches!” Boompa wailed.

“Stay down!” his father said, covering Ben and April with his body.

“No, let us get up to help,” April wailed.

Ben tried to slip out from under his father, but the man's massive body had him pinned.

He looked at them, and for the first time in his life, he saw fear in his father's eyes. That and a sadness that knew no bounds.