now it screamed with a power so tremendous it was as if the Bellow were not the screamer itself but the mouthpiece of some beast that blasted through its bones from within the earth. “THE CAAAAAAR!”
Michael’s crosshairs wavered as he shot and a chunk of earth on the bank beyond the Bellow ripped away.
Idiot idiot.
The Bellows droned on.
Michael cocked the bolt again, chambering the next round. Three shots left. If he remembered right.
Breathe out before you shoot, Michael told himself. Like Modern Warfare.
Michael breathed out hard to steady his crosshairs, and his breath fogged the lens.
“Stupid stupid—”
“Sssstuuuuu—”
Patrick turned the ignition, and Michael heard the engine whine. Frakking cripes, the alternator!
The engine kicked over. Relief flooded him.
And Patrick screamed.
From twenty feet away, Michael watched a Bellow moving toward the station wagon. Blonde hair crawled over her scalp. A silver necklace glittered on her skinless clavicle. She fell on the hood, clawed toward the windshield.
“Lay down, Bub!”
Patrick’s silhouette gave two thumbs-up and vanished.
The woman reared an arm back. With the power common to all Bellows, she struck at the windshield. Cracks popped across it. Patrick laughed as glass dusted down. “She’s good!” he shouted.
Too good.
Michael exhaled a slow stream like a digitized sniper and he pulled the trigger. He’d been aiming for the forehead; the side of the Bellow’s skull flipped away instead. The creature stopped screaming and slid from the hood and spun to the dirt with a thud. And a wild satisfaction swelled Michael’s chest.
Two shots now.
“Lay—Paaaaatriiiiiiick—Paaaatriiiiick down!”
The Bellows were moving up the hill. Sixty, seventy-five. The forest echoed, in hideous stereo, alive.
So burn it alive, Michael saw. He saw it, even though it had not happened yet: the satisfaction and the yes-yes simply loaded the image, fully formed, inside his mind.
Burn. It. Alive.
He ran to the car. Pulled out from the trunk a five-gallon nickel tank. Patrick looked through the window, said, “That’s our gas.” Michael sloshed rainbows in a semicircle behind the car, then went to the front, trailing liquid. Patrick said, “Michael, it’s our gas.”
“Yeah.”
“But that’s our gas, though.”
“Patrick!”
“Why’re you using it for?”
Just shut up, Patrick, shut your face. If you say one more word, tonight they are going to win.
He said, “Remember the Game Master talked about tricks?”
Michael nodded, glugged more on the downslope road, then hurled the canister.
It stopped on a rock several steps ahead of the approaching Bellows, glinting.
Michael cocked the bolt and lifted the rifle. He steadied the crosshairs. He checked the safety—off—and—
—wait wait wait!—
—and then took the rifle down and adjusted the outer aperture a quarter turn to the left, and the trigger came back with an easy tug.
He’d been right; the scope sight had been slightly off.
His shot now was flawless: the tank sang and bled some of its insides.
But didn’t explode.
No.
The night went casket black. The sleeping-bag fire behind them had died, the flare, too.
Flare!
Michael rushed to the trunk and grabbed another flare. He slammed it bright on the seat of the bike, waved it once in an arc over his head to drive back the Bellows now only paces behind the car, then flung it at the tank.
Where it landed too far, the sparks hissing the wrong way.
He settled on the lead Bellow ahead. Maybe it would fall, make the others stumble, giving the car time to escape.
He breathed, “Please.”
Feel your blood.
And without thinking, at the final instant, swung the bead back at the tank.
A cry of light and a flat crack. The slug punctured the tank and slung a tongue of gas forward: a liquid fuse, an airborne fuse.
The flare lit it and it detonated.
Knew it! Michael’s chest shouted. Knew it knew it knew!
A blazing arm roared high from the gas tank, exploding the canopy above in a catastrophe of flame. Fire glimmered and traced the gas trail up the hill, raising a primal barrier between the car and the Bellows of the forest. Over the chaos, beyond the inferno, Michael could hear the Bellows’ agony. His eardrums shook with it.
Patrick laughed and clapped and kicked the driver’s seat in delight, and Michael jumped into the car and rammed the pedal to the floor.
An airborne moment when the car bucked off a tree root, then they were off, tearing snow and earth toward the core of the explosion. When the fire leapt onto the hood he yelled out, “Duck, Bubbo, close your eyes!” and fell down on the