Monster Apocalypse

By Paul R. Brown

When a worldwide monster invasion brings civilization to a crashing, blood-soaked halt and puts humanity on the Endangered Species list in the space of a single afternoon, 23-year-old misanthrope Fay Tucker must set out across the ruins of northeast Ohio in search of her little sister Daisy. To see her mission through, the embittered wannabe hermit is forced to associate with “those treacherous simians” (a.k.a. human beings) and soon becomes the nucleus of a small group of equally dysfunctional young women. As their quest takes them from the corpse-strewn streets of suburbia to the red-litten alleys of a city ablaze with unholy fire, from a harpy-besieged National Guard base to an amusement park turned ogre-run death camp, the women are forced to contend with both demons within and monsters without, and Fay finds herself forming bonds with her allies that may prove too strong for even her prickly soul to resist. If, that is, she—and they—can stay alive that long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul R. Brown
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9788829555321

Book preview

Funland

It was National Smile Power Day.

The only reason I know that is because I heard a DJ mention it on my car radio that morning, prompting a torrent of my tartest mockery. The risible Pollyanna holiday wasn’t something I normally deemed worth remembering, much less celebrating, and no doubt it soon would have faded from my mind altogether had not subsequent events left it too morbidly ironic to forget.

Despite the quasi-holiday I wasn’t smiling, the sides of my mouth rarely rising above the horizontal even under the most euphoric of circumstances, which the current ones unquestionably were not: I was spending yet another boresome day selling premium unleaded, Mega Millions lotto tickets, and mouth-rotting chaw at the BP station on Route 131 on the semirural southern outskirts of Keen Township, Ohio. And although business had slowed to a blessed trickle in the wake of the lunch-hour rush, leaving me only a single customer to contend with, that customer was Timmy Martin, a ten-year-old denizen of a nearby trailer park who bore an uncanny resemblance to that Opie kid from The Andy Griffith Show: carrot-topped; freckle-faced; eyes the same crisp bright blue as his Levis; the apparent epitome of the wholesome, all-American boy. He looked like he ought to have a fishing pole in his hand and a faithful puppy at his heel.

But looks, as I well knew, were not to be trusted, a fact amply evidenced by what that seemingly innocent, fresh-faced laddie was saying to me on that fine June day:

Just one pack of Marlboros. I won’t tell no one. C’mon, Miss Fay.

That was what he always called me. To my perpetual chagrin, my name was embroidered on the left breast of my dorky BP uniform shirt. If it hadn’t been there then trust me, Timmy Martin would not have known it. The divulgence of personal information was anathematical to every tightly woven fiber of my being. Even my mom had to crack out the thumbscrews and bastinadoes just to find out how my day was.

I gave the kid an icy stare, a look I had perfected over years of heavy use, and pointed at the sign on the wall that declared in stark black sans-serif letters that tobacco products were not to be sold to anyone under the age of 18. He didn’t even glance at it. He didn’t need to. We had been through this routine several dozen times since I started peddling octane there the previous October.

Aw, c’mon, he said. Rules were made to be broken.

So was your neck if you don’t stop pestering me.

Please? He cocked his head and flashed a winsome smile, a ploy that no doubt bore whole baskets of fruit from the many old biddies with whom he shared the trailer park but earned only thistles from me.

You can’t always get what you want. Live with it.

But—

I am not selling you cigarettes, I told him with firm finality, then fixed my gaze on the TV on the wall to show him how firm my finality was. The TV was one of the few perks of my moronic job. Mr. Bliss, the BP’s owner and an inveterate news junkie, had installed it so he could get his CNN fix while at the station, and he allowed the employees to watch it too—but only, he cautioned, during slow times. Like most of the other counter monkeys, I had developed an extremely broad definition of slow times.

On the set just then the President was solemnly bloviating about something-or-other on an outdoor stage in Washington, D.C. I hadn’t the slightest interest in the Prez or his blather; I just wanted Timmy Martin to take the hint and scram. As usual he didn’t.

C’mon, he implored. Do a guy a favor.

Show me photo ID proving you’re over eighteen and then we’ll talk, I droned, not even deigning to glance at him.

He tutted. Like you’re that much older than me. Are you even old enough to sell ‘em?

That got my attention.

I’m twenty-four, you malodorous little turd.

He scowled and planted his fists on his hips in a ridiculous and wholly undaunting display of preteen umbrage.

You can’t talk to me that way! I can get you fired for calling me names!

So what? It’s a job at a gas station. It’s not as if I won’t be able to find another one. It’s not as if there’s a dearth of gas-station cashier jobs.

His freckle-peppered face crumpled in confusion. "Durth? What’s that supposed to mean?"

"Dearth. It’s a word. It means scarcity. Try learning to read sometime."

Oh, yeah? Well, if you’re so smart how come you work in a gas station? How come you didn’t go to college?

I did go to college. I have a degree.

In what? Cash Registering?

In Cultural Anthropology.

What the hell’s that?

It’s the study of human culture.

He snorted. No wonder you work in a gas station.

I glowered at him, unsure what to say. I could have tried to blame my low-rent service-industry job on the lousy economy, or on my youthful stupidity for majoring in a field I was actually interested in rather than in one with decent career prospects (or, well, any career prospects, actually), but the truth was, I simply had no desire to do anything with my life. I was unaspiring and avoidant and more than a little misanthropic. My fondest dream was to drop out of the human race altogether and while away the rest of my days in quiet, contented hermitry, reading obscure books on comparative mythology and taking lots of naps. Unfortunately I had to find some way to buy those books, and my mom wasn’t going to let me live in her house forever, which meant some kind of a job was regrettable but necessary. This one, however, wasn’t it. I had already come to the conclusion that working at a gas station entailed far more human interaction than I was comfortable with, leading me to consider other, more reclusive career options. Fire-spotting, for instance. Or writing Kindle porn.

But self-acceptingly unambitious and antisocial though I was, I wasn’t about to share any of this with Timmy Martin (vide my above comments about divulging personal info). The little snot’s jibe couldn’t go unanswered though, so I started fishing about for some emasculating riposte that would make him run away sobbing for his mommy. And that was when it happened.

Bang! It was as if someone had whacked the underside of the continental plate with a titanic sledgehammer. The BP trembled like a cheap cardboard diorama, forcing Timmy and me to lurch about, our arms outstretched for balance. Boxes of Pop-Tarts and jars of jam tumbled off the shelves that lined the center of the store. Bottles in the coolers wobbled and clinked, and a few fell over and burst. Packs of Merits and Camels dropped from the overhead rack and bonked off my scalp. The vending machine full of gumballs next to the front door toppled over, and the big glass sphere that held the candy shattered, sending gaily colored balls cascading across the floor.

The tumult trailed off, and an abyssal hush settled over the world.

Was that an earthquake? Timmy asked, looking around the trashed station with a mix of excitement and fear.

I don’t know.

Actually I doubted it. I had experienced a handful of minor-to-middling earthquakes before, and what just happened had been far briefer and more detonative than any of them. Instead I was wondering if a tanker truck had exploded on Route 131, or if terrorists had set off a nuke in nearby Arcadia, though why anyone would want to waste a nuke on a third-rate burg like that was beyond my comprehension.

I caught the words —seems to be some kind of earthquake— from the TV and looked at the screen to find that the Prez had paused in mid-speech and was looking up and to his right with a small, puzzled frown.

A huge, green shape blurred across the stage. In its wake the podium lay on its side, the President had vanished, and a small crimson drop had appeared on the far right edge of the camera lens. While shouts and gasps rose from the crowd, the cameraman swung the camera to the right in search of the blur. After a few jerky pans he found it, only it wasn’t a blur anymore. Now it stood out stark and clear against the blue sky above the capital. It was a giant flying lizard of a disconcertingly dragonish appearance, its head crowned with a pair of curving black horns, its body covered in green scales, its staggering bulk borne aloft by a pair of leathery wings big enough to drape a house. Unlike the traditional dragon, however, this creature possessed only a single pair of legs and sported a curved stinger at the tip of its tail.

Wyvern, I muttered.

"Why what?" Timmy asked distractedly. He was still staring in awe at the damage to the store, oblivious to what was happening on TV.

I didn’t respond, for I had just noticed a small, wriggling suit-clad figure between the wyvern’s jaws. The President. He was still alive.

That quickly changed. The wyvern gnashed its teeth, and the figure split in two at the waist, the top half disappearing down the monster’s gullet while the bottom half plummeted earthward, loops of intestines and streamers of blood trailing after it.

Screams erupted from the crowd, but the outcry wasn’t solely in response to their Commander-in-Chief’s sudden end. No, something else was happening now. Amid the shrieks and yells other sounds were audible: growls and snarls and roars more ferocious than any lion’s.

The camera swung toward the sounds. At first all I could see was the terror-stricken throng racing toward and then past the cameraman like a river breaking around a boulder. Then the crowd thinned enough to reveal scattershot glimpses of hulking four-legged shapes within the panicked mass, of tawny fur dotted with black rosettes, of swooping cat-like tails thick as baseball bats, of slashing claws the size of meat hooks. Pards. [1]

The pards lunged and snapped and tossed their heads, and bodies flew into the air, some of them missing limbs or heads, ruby drops raining in their wake. The crowd’s flight grew more frantic, their screams louder and more terrified, and amid the increasing pandemonium the pards disappeared from view. Then one of the beasts burst through a clutch of sobbing, stumbling old ladies, knocking them all to the dirt, and leaped straight at the camera. A roaring maw rimmed with fangs filled the screen, and then the picture went dead.

Cut to the newsroom, where a very rattled news anchor sat behind his desk. He looked at someone off-camera.

What—what just happened there? he asked.

There was a loud, sharp bang in the distance (in the real world, that is; not on TV), and an instant later the power went out. The TV went black. The low, steady hum of the coolers stopped. The overhead fluorescents went dark.

The loss of the overheads wasn’t a big deal since the store’s front wall was mostly plate glass. Although large swaths of the glass were plastered with posters hawking booze and pop and smokes, enough empty space remained to let in plentiful light from the bright, sunny day outside.

I looked out into that bright day, searching for some clue to what was happening. At first I saw only the same sights as always: the gas pumps; the BP’s big sign with its green-and-yellow Helios logo; Route 131’s two heavily patched and tar-lined lanes; the field overrun with common burdock across the road; the sun-bleached For Sale for Development sign that had been sitting in the field for as long as I could remember; the thick woods beyond the field. Then I spotted a column of thick, black smoke rising above the treetops about a mile due east, where the power substation was.

What’s going on? Timmy asked, his fear now far outweighing his excitement. He was looking at the smoke, too, still blissfully unaware of what had just transpired on TV. Is this, like, a terrorist attack?

I don’t know, I said. And I didn’t. As alarmingly genuine as the spectacle on TV had appeared, I was more than half convinced it was a hoax, or some horribly misguided promotional stunt for one of this year’s crop of vapid summer blockbusters. Wyverns weren’t real, after all. They existed only in legend and heraldry. I should know: My favorite subjects in Anthropology had been myths, legends, and folktales, particularly those of a teratological bent. But Washington, D.C., was over three hundred miles away. How could a hoax there, however crafty and grandiose, be connected with our power outage and the weird temblor earlier?

Timmy headed to the door, shuffling his feet so he wouldn’t slip on the gumballs. The candy rolled and clacked around his sneakers like miniature billiard balls. He grasped the door’s metal handle and looked back at me.

Maybe we should—

A high, droning cry rang out across the sunny summer landscape, a sound that made my blood go cold. Not only was the sound impossibly loud, far louder than any sound any extant animal could make, but its very nature was alien, possessing a pitch and timbre unlike anything I had ever heard before.

As the unearthly cry faded, a red Ford F-150 shot past the station, heading north along Route 131. A middle-aged man in a baseball cap was hunched over the wheel, his face warped with terror. Barely had the pickup sped from sight when a monster came loping after it: a bugbear, a fourteen-foot, black-furred anthropoid with round yellow eyes that took up half its face, a wide mouth full of sharp teeth, two tapering tufts of fur atop its head like the horns of an owl, and ape-like arms that hung so low its claws nearly scraped the pavement.

In three long, swift strides the bugbear crossed the front windows and passed from view beyond the station’s left edge. For another second or two I could still hear the dwindling roar of the truck’s engine as the driver desperately strove to outrun his bestial pursuer, and then it was swallowed by the distance.

I stared at the spot where the bugbear had vanished, my mouth agape. There was no longer any question in my mind that this was real. No prodigy of human imagination or feat of human technology could fashion something so grotesque yet so horribly real.

What was that? Timmy asked in a voice so high and tight it was almost a squeak. He looked at me with eyes as big as the bugbear’s. What’s happening?

I didn’t answer, for all my attention was suddenly fixed on the manducus that had just emerged from behind the forsythia at the lot’s northeast corner. It was a squat, hairless creature the size of a full-grown hog, with a markedly bell-shaped head, its jaw twice as wide as its cranium and packed with thick, almost tusk-like fangs. Above those cruel, slobbery chops were a little pug nose and a pair of beady black eyes, the latter evincing not the slightest glimmer of higher intelligence. The manducus’s pale-gray hide thickened to form dense, rhino-like plates on its back and neck and the top of its head (though I doubted there was much worth protecting in that tiny pate). The foremost edge of the head plate ended in a series of overlapping folds right above those beady eyes, lending the creature a perpetual frown that only added to its already overwhelming aura of dumb, blind brutishness. Beneath its stocky body was a quartet of stumpy little legs that would have been comical had they not been attached to something that looked like it could gnaw its way through a bank-vault door. The manducus began sniffing intently at the edge of the parking lot as if it found the scent of decade-old asphalt particularly compelling.

"What’s that?" Timmy asked, having noticed the manducus by now, too.

I don’t know, I whispered, afraid to speak too loudly. Or at all, actually; I didn’t see any ears on the manducus’s thickly armored head, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have any.

I kept telling myself we ought to move away from the window before the monster spotted us, but another, equally plausible part of my mind insisted that if we moved now our movements might attract its attention and that therefore the wisest course was to hold still until either its back was turned or it had passed out of sight.

While I was thusly waffling, the manducus, its pug nose pumping an inch above the pavement, sniffed its way across a couple of empty parking spaces until it came to the only car in the lot: my battered gray Chevy Nova, which at that point in its long, unhappy life was composed primarily of Bondo and duct tape. The monster’s nose pumped harder than ever as it sniffed the left front tire, the fender, the door, the loop of seatbelt protruding from the bottom of the door like a strangled black tongue—the seatbelt that never retracted properly and that I usually forgot to slide back into its housing when I got out of the car (especially when I was running late for work, as I had been that morning), the seatbelt that like a dutiful driver—or at least like one who always expected the worst from their fellow motorists—I always wore and that lay stretched across my torso for at least a good half hour every day and must therefore be saturated with my scent.

A feeling of dread stole over me as the manducus’s examination of my seatbelt dragged on and on and grew more and more nose-pumpingly fervid. The feeling soared to an Everest-like height when the manducus’s interest suddenly shifted to the pavement directly below the seatbelt, and the monster began to snuffle its way across the parking lot, tracing the exact path I had taken to the station’s front door when I arrived at work two hours earlier.

I grabbed Timmy Martin’s hand. I think we’d better—

The manducus looked up, its beady eyes trained on the BP’s door. On us, framed there in the window like today’s special on display.

Given its laughably stumpy legs I wouldn’t have thought the manducus capable of any pace beyond a waddle, but looks, like I said, were not to be trusted, and before I could even begin to react to our having been spotted, the manducus was halfway to the door, those squat, muscle-girded shanks strong enough to propel it across eight or ten feet with every mighty gallop.

Run! I yelled at Timmy.

We turned. We ran.

And then we fell on our asses.

I had forgotten about the gumballs. One step and vwoosh!—our feet shot out from under us and we slammed down onto a carpet of rolling, shifting varicolored bumps that felt like a million tiny fists pummeling me in the back. I screamed in pain and surprise. Beside me Timmy was wailing like a kid a fraction of his age.

The sunlight shining in through the door abruptly dimmed, and there was a loud bang. I tilted my head back and looked at the door upside-down. The door’s lowermost pane of glass was spider-webbed with cracks and spattered with spit, and the manducus stood on the sidewalk outside, shaking its head back and forth hard enough to make its lips wobble.

We needed to get moving while our would-be devourer was still disoriented. If the manducus renewed its assault—and I saw no reason to assume that something as dumbly rapacious as this thing seemed to be was going to shrug its beefy shoulders and toddle off in defeat after one little setback—it would breach the store in no time.

I kicked aside some gumballs to clear a space on the floor, sprang to my feet, and then almost got dragged back down by the dead weight of Timmy, whose hand I still held.

He wasn’t even trying to get up. The whole concept of standing, along with virtually everything else, had vanished from his terrified brain. Goggling at the hypermandibular monstrosity now separated from him by only three feet of empty air and a single pane of fragile and already partly compromised glass, he was paddling at the floor with his feet and free hand in a frantic effort to push himself away from the creature. But of course the gumballs were sliding like ball bearings beneath him, denying him the leverage he needed to move, and all he was doing was rocking in place atop the incessantly clacking layer of candy. His panic prevented him from grasping the precise mechanics of his dilemma, and realizing only that the monster wasn’t getting any farther away, he paddled harder, which of course had no effect, which only panicked him all the more, and so on and so on in an ever-rising spiral of hysteria.

Get up! I hollered, tugging his arm. Come on! He didn’t respond. He just kept paddling and whimpering, his eyes never leaving the manducus.

Seeing that the tug I gave him had sent him sliding a couple of inches toward me, I clutched his hand tighter and started plowing through the gumballs toward the door that led to the station’s back room. With the gumballs acting like rollers he coasted along almost weightlessly in my wake.

With an angry snarl, the manducus head-butted the glass again. The web of cracks spread, and the glass bowed inward in the middle. One tiny shard dropped from the center of the web and tinked onto the floor. Glaring at us through the fractured glass, the manducus backed up for another leap.

We reached the edge of the gumball spill, and Timmy slid onto the BP’s tile floor. I expected him to spring to his feet now, to take his survival into his own faintly nicotine-stained hands and start running for dear life along with me, but instead he kept kicking stupidly at the floor, still too panicked to think clearly. I tugged harder, but without the gumballs it was like lugging a very strangely shaped seventy-pound sack of suet. My upper-body strength being about what one would expect from a bookish, apathetic suburban girl (i.e. only marginally above that of your average nonagenarian), there was no way I could get Timmy out of there before the monster burst through the glass. I needed him on his feet. I was tempted to just let go of his wrist and sprint away and leave him to his fate, but much as I disliked the little twerp I simply couldn’t do it.

Get up, damn it! I screamed, trying to make myself sound scarier than the monster. All I managed to do was make my throat hurt. Timmy didn’t even seem to hear me. Clearly more drastic measures were required. Get up, you little turd!

Bingo. He stopped kicking and stared up at me, his silly sense of prepubescent dignity at war with his terror. It was enough to break the runaway circuit of his panic and make his cerebrum reboot. With a small whine, he sprang to his feet.

The manducus slammed into the door again. This time the entire pane sagged inward, its pieces only loosely cohering, and several more shards clattered to the floor. One more blow and the glass would give way like tissue paper. The manducus was already wiggling its rump in preparation for another lunge.

Run run run! I yelled, bolting for the back room, Timmy’s hand clasped in mine. His legs were a denim-blue blur as he strove to keep up.

We had nearly reached the door to the back room when there was a crash of breaking glass behind us, followed by a frighteningly loud and clear snarl. Timmy let out a despairing moan. Glancing back, I saw the manducus land inside the station in a rain of glass, its eyes gleaming darkly, ropes of saliva arcing from its ravenous maw.

And then it skidded on the gumballs. Its new and unexpected trajectory sent it straight toward the rows of shelves in the center of the store, and though the manducus struggled mightily to change direction, to end its rude detour and resume pursuit of its fast-escaping prey, however hard its little paws scrabbled for purchase, purchase wasn’t there, and it slammed into an endcap display of Hostess snack products. I had one last glimpse of the creature disappearing under an avalanche of Twinkies and Ding Dongs, and then Timmy and I barreled through the doorway and into the back room.

I considered pausing to hunt for a weapon but promptly dismissed the idea. It wouldn’t be long before the manducus, through either dumb luck or whatever meager shreds of wit it possessed, found its way off the gumballs and set out after us anew, and in any case the back room of a gas station was not exactly a great source of monster-killing hardware. We had a squeegee and a coffeemaker and unstocked cans of Coke galore, but nothing that offered much in the way of offensive capabilities except perhaps the box cutter we used for opening cases of merchandise. I wasn’t sure where the box cutter was, though, and didn’t think it wise to waste time hunting around for a short, slender blade of dubious utility when I could much more profitably employ that time putting as much distance as possible between us and the prognathous death-machine I could hear growling and thumping and swiftly attaining thermonuclear levels of fury in the front of the store.

Rather than burst blindly out the back door and perhaps unwittingly run right into the waiting arms/jaws/pincers/whatever of some new monster, I halted just short of the exit and flung open the door hard enough to brain anything that might be lurking on the other side. The door rebounded off the building’s outer wall, sending chips of brick ticking to the pavement, and then, wobbling from the impact, it swung a third of the way back toward us before drifting to a stop.

The view out the open doorway was comfortingly normal. The concrete pavement stretched from the BP’s rear wall to a metal guardrail twenty feet away, beyond which were the tree-lined slopes of Franklin Creek’s ravine. A few fat fleecy cumulus clouds moved languidly across the sky. A police siren was whining in the distance.

I poked my head through the doorway and looked left, ready to flinch back inside should I find some flesh-eating fiend skulking against the rear wall. Instead I saw only the station’s brown metal dumpster, a flattened plastic twelve-ounce Pepsi bottle on the dirty pavement next to it, the yellow heads of dandelions sprouting from cracks in the concrete, the faux mansard roof of Swanson’s Family Restaurant rising above the line of privets that separated our lot from theirs. There was a splintering crash, and the restaurant’s roof visibly trembled, dislodging a few shingles and sending them skittering down its steep pitch. From the restaurant’s lot rose a mewling cry that had a creepy stereophonic quality, as if the creature making it had two sets of vocal cords working simultaneously.

Pulling Timmy after me, I stepped outside and peeked around the door to make sure no monsters had crept up behind it in the short time between my flinging it open and now. Nothing was there. It was a straight shot to the station’s northwest corner.

Okay, I said, heading around the door. We’ll try to make it to my car and then—

Timmy’s hand was wrenched from mine hard enough to yank me off my feet and send me crashing to the ground. The back of my head smacked the concrete, briefly filling my vision with bruise-colored light.

As I lay there blinking dazedly at one of the ovine cumuli overhead, I heard a muffled crunch, which for one confused moment I thought was the sound of my skull fracturing when I had struck the ground a second earlier, my perception of the noise having been briefly delayed thanks to a quirk of massive head trauma.

Then I heard other sounds: fainter, more muffled crunches that reminded me of someone chewing pretzels; wet smacks and grunts; the patter of liquid dribbling onto the ground.

The sounds jolted me right out of my daze, apprising me with sickening clarity what had happened. I flipped over onto my hands and knees and looked up.

The monster, a tartalo, must have been behind the dumpster when I looked that way earlier, and emerged only after I turned to peek around the open door. The lanky, seven-foot-tall biped had mottled black-and-green skin that glistened slimily in the sunshine. The upper half of its face was dominated by a single large blood-red eye with a narrow catlike pupil. The bottom half was dominated by an even larger mouth full of small but lethally sharp teeth. It had four sinewy arms, the upper pair in the normal human spot, the lower pair, which were slightly smaller, about a foot lower down. Each arm ended in a tripod of clawed digits.

In its uppermost pair of claws the tartalo clutched Timmy Martin, holding him up before its chest the way a famished child holds a sandwich. Or at least it clutched what was left of Timmy Martin; the poor dumb kid’s head was missing from the cheekbones up, sheared off by the tartalo’s fangs. What remained of his face was covered with a shining mask of blood, which poured steadily from the bowl of gore that used to be his skull. His body thrashed and kicked in the monster’s grip, flinging off red rivulets that covered the pavement below with expressionistic splatters and whorls, and thanks to these violent movements I thought for a second he was somehow still alive. But no: It was just reflexes, ravaged nerves firing randomly, the last fading echoes of a life that was gone.

The tartalo lumbered forward, its two smaller claws reaching for me around Timmy Martin’s corpse, its mouth opening wide in an excited screech. It hadn’t swallowed yet, so its mouth was still full of blood and half-chewed brains and wads of flesh and shards of bone, and right there in the middle of that red slush, one of Timmy Martin’s eyeballs, still whole and unruptured and blue.

I lost it. Screaming, stupid with horror, I crab-walked backward on my hands and feet, a slow, clumsy mode of locomotion that under normal circumstances probably would have enabled the tartalo to catch me in no time, but Timmy’s convulsing body was impeding its movements, and the monster was either too greedy or too dumb or both to relinquish the body in favor of larger prey. This delay gave me the crucial moment I needed to shake off my thought-quashing panic. I scrambled to my feet and whirled toward the north side of the building, ready to race to my car.

My great escape was stillborn. Another manducus, this one slightly larger and a darker shade of gray than the one still presumably extricating itself from the pile of snack cakes in the BP’s front room, was rooting around in the rhododendrons along the lot’s north edge. Though its back was to me and it was growlingly engrossed with something deep within the bushes (I later recalled that a groundhog had a hole in there), there was no way I was going to risk running past that thing. I had seen how fast its ilk could move. One whiff of me and it would be gulping me down before I even had time to scream.

Without even really consciously deciding to do it, I bolted for the ravine, the only monster-free avenue left open to me. As I sprinted across the twenty feet of pavement, the soles of my black Reebok walking shoes thudding even faster than my heart, I kept expecting a roar to ring out right behind me and several hundred pounds of muscle and sinew and flesh-rending teeth to slam me to the ground and start tearing me apart. But before I knew it, I was vaulting over the guardrail and then half-running, half-skidding down the slope on the other side.

I tore through bushes. I bumped into tree trunks. Two-thirds of the way down I lost my footing completely and tobogganed the rest of the slope on my butt. By the time I came to a stop at the edge of Franklin Creek the seat of my pants was shiny and brown with dirt, my BP uniform shirt and the black tank top beneath it were bunched up under my armpits, and my back and arms were abraded and raw.

The instant I hit bottom, I snatched a fist-sized rock from the ground and spun around to face the slope, sure that one of the manduci was about to bound over the guardrail like a giant flea and hurtle toward me fangs first. A few rills of dirt were slithering down the slope in the wake of my graceless descent. Nothing else moved.

I didn’t plan to wait around to see if that would change. Rock clutched tight, I ran north along the edge of the creek, stumbling over stones and roots and skidding in the slick mud yet somehow always managing to keep my balance through some combination of luck, momentum, and sheer stubborn willpower.

Obsessively glancing behind me every other second, I was relieved to find that nothing was following me and even more relieved when the guardrail disappeared around a bend in the ravine. My relief, alas, was short-lived, for just then it rather tardily dawned on me that the sudden profusion of monsters might not be limited to the terrain topside; they could be in the ravine as well.

I stopped and looked around in alarm, scanning the high slopes overgrown with crown vetch and purple loosestrife, the ranks of sycamores and red maples and swamp white oaks, the dark vault of greenery rived here and there with fissures through which the bright sky shone, and at the bottom of it all, the softly burbling creek, the pebbles and chunks of shale that littered its bed crystal clear beneath the six inches of glassy, ever-wavering water. I seemed to be alone.

Somehow that didn’t make me feel any safer.

*  *  *

After hunkering down in a nearby stand of honeysuckles and making sure I was screened from view on every side by walls of dark-green leaves, I got out my cell phone, a simple flip phone, the cheapest and most rudimentary model I had been able to find. With my nonexistent social life, I had seen no sense in plunking down a wad of dough on something packed with apps and gewgaws when I knew I’d barely use it. It was mainly for emergencies. And I’d say suddenly finding yourself thrust into a real-life/real-death version of some ultraviolent, monster-filled first person shooter—only without any helpful health packs, power ups, or weapons (aside from one paltry rock)—constituted the very quintessence of an emergency.

My phone’s service indicator was devoid of bars, and the network icon had gone blank, very bad signs indeed; there were enough cellular towers in the area to ensure decent service even at the bottom of a well. I called a few numbers anyway.

I tried my mom first, dialing not only her cell and work phones but our house’s landline, too, since she regularly used (and arguably abused) her status as owner of Westwood Floral Boutique to leave her underlings to mind the store while she spent the greater part of the afternoon curled up on the living room sofa in front of her soaps. In all three cases I got nothing. No rings. No static. Not even an electronic voice telling me my call could not be completed as dialed. Just dead silence.

Next I tried my sister Daisy, who wouldn’t be of any direct help since (a) she was spending the summer working at Funland, an amusement park thirty miles to the northeast, and (b) she didn’t have a car and, being only fourteen, wasn’t old enough to drive one anyway. But she might have been able to relay my whereabouts to the proper authorities, or at least to someone with a car and the time and inclination to try to rescue me, and in any case simply hearing her voice and knowing she was all right would have been a godsend just then. But once again God sent nothing but silence.

Stupidly persisting in the face of all evidence and logic, I tried 911, the Westwood Police Department’s non-emergency number, and even Mr. Bliss, the BP’s manager. Silence, silence, and silence.

I thrust my useless phone back into my pocket. Thanks to my eremitic ways I couldn’t think of anyone else to call anyway.

*  *  *

Westwood, a small and excruciatingly twee city north of Keen Township, was where I lived with my mom and Daisy in a two-storey, three-bedroom modified bungalow built upon a slab of suburban blandness named Depeyster Road a few blocks west of downtown. Much as I regarded the house, the street, and the city with all the disdain and cynicism a disaffected young person could muster, it was still home, and it was there that I needed to go.

The problem was, there was three miles away, a measly six or eight minutes by car under non-apocalyptic conditions but now no doubt a journey of Odyssean proportions, especially since I’d be making the journey on foot. I didn’t even seriously contemplate trying to retrieve my junky Nova from the BP’s lot, for not only did that loping, moon-eyed bugbear’s pursuit of the F-150 testify to my own probable fate should I chance the roads, but in my mind’s eye I kept seeing Timmy Martin’s spasming corpse, the blood sheeting down his slack, dead face, his bright blue eye gazing at me from the gory cave of the tartalo’s mouth. There was no way I could go back to the BP after that.

Following the ravine seemed the only sensible option. I had yet to see any monsters there, and it offered a womby, sheltered tunnel I could follow due north almost straight to my front door, for the creek passed under Depeyster less than half a block east of my house.

Settling on a course of action was one thing. Implementing that course of action was another matter entirely. Though I knew what I had to do, I kept squatting there, unwilling to leave the debatable safety of the bushes. What finally got me moving was a crash from Swanson’s, which, judging by the nature and loudness of the sound, probably didn’t qualify as a building anymore. A second later came a replay of that ghastly stereophonic mewl.

I was on my feet in an instant. I couldn’t stay there. The known, or at least semi-known, horrors behind the bend were still too close for comfort and were infinitely more terrifying than whatever hypothetical horrors lay ahead. Besides, for all I knew the southern edge of Keen Township and a single road in Washington, D.C., were the sole loci of monster activity, and if I traveled half a mile north I’d be out of the danger zone entirely.

My pitiful rock still clutched tight in one white-knuckled hand, I waded out of the honeysuckles and scurried north along the creek.

*  *  *

Though the ravine itself was free of monsters (for now, at least), the same could not be said of anywhere else within hearing range. The landscape resounded with monstrous cries accompanied by a dissonant symphony of crashes, bangs, explosions, and kindred sounds of destruction. At first there were also a few hearteningly man-made noises—the grumble of a speeding motorcycle, the pop of faraway rifle fire, another police siren—but within a scarily short time these noises vanished, never to return.

Ten minutes of travel amid this nerve-wracking discord brought me within sight of the Kings Mill Road Bridge, two lanes of ill-kempt asphalt atop an archway of old, stained limestone blocks. On any normal day ten minutes after leaving the gas station my decrepit car would be ticking and cooling in Mom’s driveway, and I’d be shut up in my bedroom with my earbuds in and my face buried in a book (I was currently in the middle of Apollodorus’s Library of Greek Mythology). But now, on foot, traveling via ravine and paranoiacally wary, I wasn’t even out of eyeshot of the gas station: Had I scaled the eastern slope and walked two hundred feet to Route 131, I would have been able to look south and see the BP’s sign atop its pole in the distance.

Something was burning on Kings Mill Road just east of the bridge. The height of the slope and the lush greenery growing thereon blocked the fire itself from view but couldn’t hide the crackle of the flames or the column of sooty smoke rising above the treetops. A light breeze that came rustling down the slope brought the odors of gasoline, hot plastic, scorched meat.

The bridge formed an alarmingly large gap in the shady green tunnel that had sheltered me thus far, affording a clear view of the ravine’s bottom—and hence of me—to any monster that chanced to clump, crawl, or scuttle onto its open span. I kept under cover as much as I could as I approached it, scurrying from tree to tree and bush to bush like a rat or a chipmunk, afraid all the while that some inhuman form would suddenly appear above me, blotting out the sun and cloaking me in its chilling shadow.

I reached the bridge without mishap and darted into the dark archway beneath it. The gurgle of the creek echoing around me, I made my way to the middle of the tunnel, then slumped against the wall, whose clammy stones were covered with graffiti, the biggest and boldest proclaiming Birddog was here! in thick white letters a foot high. Cigarette butts and crushed beer cans littered the muddy ground. The sight of the orange butts led me to idly wonder if Timmy Martin were responsible for any of this petty criminality.

I took out my phone, and despite the continued absence of a network connection I tried the same round of numbers as before, receiving only the same sepulchral silence in response.

As I stuffed my phone back into my pocket, I looked left then right at the daylit semicircular vistas of ravine beyond the tunnel’s ends. I didn’t want to go back out there. Here in this gloomy arched cavern that stank of mud and moss, I felt the safest I had since I first saw the bugbear chasing the F-150. Part of me wanted to hole up here while hardier souls sorted out this mess. But I couldn’t. I had to make sure Mom and Daisy were okay.

With great reluctance I crept to the north end of the tunnel and peered out. Everything looked deceptively normal. Aside from the sound and smell of the fire, it seemed a pleasant summer afternoon like any other. I took a couple of cautious steps out from under the bridge, and in the process the fire came into view through chinks in the foliage atop the slope to my right: A burning car lay on its side on the road’s westbound berm.

Suddenly there was a low gnarr, and something moved in front of the fire, blocking the flame-wreathed vehicle from view. The foliage prevented a clear view of the creature, but judging by the number of chinks its silhouetted shape filled, the monster must have been at least the size of an elephant.

I shrank back, every nerve athrum with fright, sure that the creature had seen or smelled me and was moving in for the kill. I was about to dive back underneath the bridge when the shape moved past the fire, heading out onto the road. The gnarr sounded again, more muffled now. The monster had turned away from me. I hadn’t been spotted after all. Nevertheless the bridge now felt far less safe than it had a minute ago, and rather than tarry there a moment more, I resumed my quiet, crouching journey down the ravine.

*  *  *

Past the bridge the ravine’s far side formed a steep, shaly bluff sixty feet high along whose rim a chicken-wire fence extended as far as the eye could see. Beyond the fence rose the tops of a line of apple trees, the first, I knew, of hundreds that stretched away, row upon row, toward a cluster of whitewashed buildings on Strachan Road. This was Longo’s Orchards, a popular local institution for far longer than I had been alive.

I’ve heard it said that in extremis your life flashes before your eyes, and mine kind of did as I journeyed north along the ravine. But this weird recapitulation wasn’t due to some caprice of an afflicted consciousness; it was due to simple geography, a surprising number of personally significant locales being stationed along the creek’s winding course like beads on a rosary. Of course, having lived in the area my whole life, any route I took would have been a trip down memory lane. Few locales, though, would have packed the punch of Longo’s. Even in the midst of a full-blown code-red disaster with life and limb and sanity at stake, my soul blenched a little at the sight of that humble chicken-wire fence.

Don’t get me wrong: My abhorrence for the place had nothing to do with the quality of the apples, which, as I recall, were crisp and delicious, or with the Longo family themselves, though I did find them irritatingly chipper and wholesome, like Mormons or Mouseketeers. No, my antipathy stemmed from bad personal connotations, pure and simple, for Longo’s was inextricably linked in my mind with one Bartholomew Buchanan, once upon a time known as Dad, but damned if I was ever going to honor him with that particular appellation again.

He was a horticulturalist who did seasonal work for the orchard, and part of his payment was free bags of apples. Normally this was cause for joy, harbinger of weeks of my mom’s yummy homemade apple pie, and apple strudel, and apple butter, and pork chops draped with limp and wonderfully greasy fried apple slices, and so on and so on to a fruity infinitude of delicious foodstuffs. But then one fateful August day when I was ten he brought home extra apples, four bags too many, no doubt meant to be some kind of half-assed preemptive penance for the anguish he was about to inflict on us.

Whenever someone asks me to remember something from my childhood, the first thing I think of isn’t funfairs or birthday parties or family vacations. No, the memory that stands out above all others like a spire rising above a vast, flat plain is when he left that day. I remember him standing in the living room, five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, a valise in his fist, his back to the front door that within moments he would step out of forever. He was facing my visibly pregnant mother, who kept oscillating between bewildered despair and petulant fury, and me, who stood huddled half behind her, practically gagging on the apples’ thick, fruity stink, which seemed to permeate everything, as cloying as an old lady’s perfume.

Why? Mom demanded, her voice caught between a sob and a scream, her red cheeks gleaming with fresh tears. My breath stopped dead as I awaited his answer.

Bartholomew Buchanan looked at her in silence, and then his eyes flicked to me. My heart buoyed within me. Maybe he would stay now. Maybe by seeing me, he would realize he couldn’t leave after all.

His gaze returned to my mom and her swollen belly—that taut, round bud that in two months would blossom into Daisy.

I guess I just don’t love you enough, he said with terrible calmness.

My heart plunged into an abyss that had no bottom. In my mind, his you was a plural you, encompassing me as well as Mom. Tears spilled from my eyes, and I emitted a tiny, choked sob.

It wasn’t so tiny that Bartholomew Buchanan didn’t hear it, and he looked at me again, at my weepy eyes and my dimpling chin, and then he grimaced and gave a small shake of his head.

In retrospect I’m pretty sure he was shaking his head at himself for saying such a thing in front of his ten-year-old daughter. But at the time I felt sure he was shaking his head at me, because I was a pathetic, disgusting crybaby, a sniveling disappointment who was totally worth leaving.

I’d better go, he said, turning to the door.

Don’t you walk away from me! my mom shrieked. Don’t you walk away from me!

But he did.

*  *  *

A loud, cachinnating cry rang out from the orchard, a sound like a cross between a horse’s whinny and a madman’s cackle. The cry’s frightening volume suggested its maker was either very near or incredibly large, or both.

Heart whamming, I scanned the top of the bluff. I saw only the fence, the crowns of the apple trees, the fathomless blue sky beyond them. Nothing stirred. Nothing looked amiss.

Low, rhythmic booms grew audible to the north: the ponderous treads of something gigantic. And they were heading my way. Had something seen me? Smelled me?

Another mad whinny echoed through the orchard, this one louder, closer. Before the sound had faded there was a sharp crack followed by a quick, complex series of rustles and snaps that ended with the whump of something large and heavy striking the ground. A second later came another crack, more snaps and rustles, another earth-shaking impact. Whatever was approaching was big enough and strong enough to knock down forty-foot apple trees.

I ducked behind an old, lightning-scarred oak then timidly peeped around its furrowed bole at the top of the bluff.

Another cry rent the air, this one loud enough to make me clap my hands over my ears, and an instant later another tree crashed down. The monster was nearly upon me. Each footfall was like the blow of a pile-driver, a sound as much felt as heard.

And then there it was, tramping south along the edge of the bluff. It was a tikbalang, a humanoid monster a hundred feet tall whose head, in accordance with its cries, resembled that of a horse, though its muzzle was filled with very non-equine fangs, each of them nearly as big as I was. A mane of long, reddish-orange hair covered the top of its head and the back of its neck. Its eyeballs were black with blood-red irises. Its skin was brown and squamous except for the front of its torso, which was smooth and cream.

It towered against the sky, as big as a god, its thunderous steps flattening apple trees like flowers. The sight and sound of it filled me with a terror unlike any I had ever known, the tiny squeaking panic of a proto-mammal in the Age of Dinosaurs, the atavistic back-brain awareness that I was facing an organic engine of mass destruction I couldn’t possibly hope to fight or outrun, and that the only sane response was to vanish down some deep black bolt-hole till the threat had passed. Since there were no bolt-holes at hand I did the next best thing: I shrank behind the tree, compressing myself into the smallest possible target. If the tikbalang saw me and decided to kill me, it would; the cleft between the orchard and the bank where I cowered was no more than a step on a staircase to a creature its size.

But it didn’t come after me. I doubt it even knew I was there. It was merely heading south through the orchard, though for a being of such size even that simple act wreaked havoc on an immense scale. Its booming treads sent shale sloughing off the cliff-face to form new islets in the stream. Apple trees crashed down onto the chicken-wire fence, their upper branches flopping over the cliff’s edge and shaking loose green apples the size of acorns that bounced down the steep slope and plopped into the water below. Its demoniacal whinnies filled the air as if the gears of heaven itself were seizing up. The sound made me want to scream.

I doubt it took more than fifteen seconds for the tikbalang to pass by, but it felt ten times that long, each moment packed with enough terror to fill the average lifetime. It was like living through a tornado or a tsunami or some other natural disaster, something merciless and unstoppable that transformed the world from order to chaos with heedless ease.

Even after the tikbalang’s reddish-orange mane had sunk from sight below the top of the bluff to the south I remained where I was for another twenty or thirty seconds, listening to the steadily receding din. Only when the cracks and booms and whinnies had been swallowed by the gurgle of the creek did I dare to step out from behind the oak and slink on my way.

*  *  *

The trail of destruction followed the edge of the bluff for nearly a quarter of a mile, then curved away northwest. The orchard itself ended a few hundred feet after that, the fence veering west, and dense woods once again topped the cliff and hid the expanse of blue sky the airier orchard had exposed. I was entering one of the most remote areas of Keen Township, a stretch of old-growth woods far from any major roads, buildings, or houses. And far from the monsters, too, it seemed; as the woods thickened around me the circumambient clamor slowly faded.

The next few minutes slid by as smoothly and unremarkably as the water beside me. Birds twittered in the trees. Gentle breezes riffled the greenery. An occasional water strider dimpled the creek’s surface. It was like a normal nature walk on a normal summer day, or so I assumed, having long made a point to avoid such pastimes, averse as I was to mud, bugs, mold, guano, poison ivy, and all the other earthly muck mankind had wisely spent millennia dragging itself out of.

This placid interlude formed such a striking contrast with the monstrous cacophony earlier that I couldn’t help wondering if the crisis had been resolved, or if I had passed beyond the danger zone and would soon be whisked to safety by some helpful soldiers armed to the teeth with monster-busting ordnance or by a bunch of brainy scientists in hazmat suits who were rapidly equationing their way to victory.

A deafening squawk snuffed these fantasies and froze me in my tracks. An instant later the glints of sky visible through the canopy of leaves went black as something enormous sailed over the ravine. The flap of its wings made the treetops heave like storm-churned waves and filled the ravine with a gusty wind that stank of rotten eggs.

By the time I overthrew my paralysis and dove behind some glossy buckthorns, the creature had already passed. I continued cowering there nonetheless, listening to its receding wing flaps, afraid that it had spotted me and would wheel back around to snap me from my feeble shelter. But the flaps kept fading, and when another squawk rang out it was faint and distant, already half a mile or more away.

I rose and warily headed on, a few leaves detached by the monster’s tempestuous passage spiraling down around me, the stink of sulfur still fouling the air. I hadn’t traveled more than fifteen paces when from the northeast came a cannonade of overlapping explosions like the finale of a Fourth of July fireworks show, the blasts powerful enough to stipple the creek’s surface with clashing patterns of ripples.

I peered northeast—the direction Arcadia was in, I noted with foreboding—in search of a fireball or a pillar of smoke, but the woods were too thick to show aught but leagues of murky green. I listened for further detonations or some additional elucidatory sounds. None came.

What had just happened? Were my hypothetical soldiers on the attack after all? Had some otherworldly colossus just been blown apart by a fleet of tanks or an airstrike? Or did the blasts have a less cheery origin, as seemed more probable given all I’d witnessed so far? Had some blundering monster unwittingly detonated something? If so, what? I tried to think of what could account for such a tight cluster of explosions. Boxcars full of flammable material, perhaps? A string of ruptured natural gas lines? Gasoline storage tanks, like those beneath the BP? The more I thought about it, the more I realized the number of possibilities was dismayingly large.

A tremendous roar boomed across the landscape, apparently some giant monster’s irate reaction to the noisy blasts. In a way the roar proved the most disheartening thing of all, not only because of its volume and the likely size of its utterer, but because of where it came from: north, the direction I was heading. It meant I wouldn’t be exiting the danger zone any time soon, if at all. But I couldn’t let that bleak realization sway me from getting home and finding my mom. If anything, it made doing so more imperative than ever.

*  *  *

Before long a large open space bordered by a rusty chain-link fence interrupted the wall of woods atop the eastern slope. This was the Heartland Autorama, a once-popular drive-in that had shut down nearly two decades earlier and sat neglected and increasingly weedy ever since. I never had a chance to visit it while it was still open, but my mom’s wistful tales of seeing movies there in her wayward youth, sometimes for free if she stowed away in a friend’s trunk (often accompanied in that dark, stuffy space by cases of beer, bags of weed, and/or that week’s boyfriend), almost made me wish it had stuck around. (Almost. As reclusive as I was, I doubt I would have gone even if I’d been handed a free ticket.)

One of the drive-in’s two screens backed on the slope, the massive, weather-stained white rectangle supported from behind by a rotting wooden framework and a pair of repurposed phone poles. It was the first major man-made structure I had seen since the Kings Mill Road Bridge, but the sight of it did nothing to boost my spirits. Just the opposite, actually, for the Autorama had one final attendee who seemed to have been lifted straight from one of the kitschy sci-fi flicks shown there during the theater’s heyday.

The screen was being overrun by thick black vines covered with foot-long cordate leaves. Sprouting at intervals amid these leaves were trumpet-shaped flowers the size of funerary urns, their petals dark purple verging on black, the tips of nubbly orange stamens protruding from their mouths.

Dozens of vines were wrapping around the screen from the other side, apparently where their hub was situated, and were slowly converging on the back side’s center, their tapered ends languidly wriggling like plump black worms as they inched across the plywood panels. Other vines were twined around the phone poles and the wooden framework like shoots of cyclopean ivy. Still others had overrun sections of