The Sky Beneath Us (on hold)

TWENTY ONE

Avery stumbled out of the bar, cursing as he tried to light a cigarette. He’d quit one day, he kept telling himself that. Willing himself to believe it. But hey, what was the rush?

He dropped his keys as he fiddled with them in his battered car door. As he bent down to get them with a drunken heave, he cracked his head on the mirror.

“God dammit!”

He punched the red door hard, leaving a new dent in the paintwork. The pain from the impact was distant, his mind was too busy focusing on his balance to notice. Trying again with the keys, he gained access and fell inside into the torn crème leather seats.

Turning the key in the engine, he began to drive through the cold winter countryside. His head was swaying, his vision blurred. Beer goggles, he thought to himself and giggled.

There was a car ahead of him, its headlights danced across the dashboard until they hit Avery’s drooping eyes. Blinded, he hit the horn, spun the wheel wildly in anger.

CRASH.

Avery was thrown forward in his seat, ears filled with the sound of screaming and wrenching metal. He veered into a ditch, and cracked his head off the wheel. The air bag blew up, too late, and Avery clambered out of the vehicle dazedly. The other car was flipped, its occupant some feet away from the wreckage. The young girl was no older than eighteen. She lay on the wet grass, wet from blood and dew in the early hours. Her legs were bent at unnatural angles, she screamed horrifically into the night.

And Avery fell to his knees in tears beside the grotesque accident he brought into her once peaceful world.

***

Day 28. 08:06.

____________

Avery had been captured. Now they had him.

“Tie 'em up, make 'em suffer" a husky feminine voice croaked.

"Yeah, yeah, and cut 'em!" another voice rasped.

Avery watched Becca, hunched in the corner and crying. He wanted her to know that everything was going to be okay, that it would be over soon, that the end wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Perhaps even peaceful. The raspy psychopath, a lipless middle-aged man, placed a thick blade to Avery’s throat. The blade felt cold, and its sharpness began to pull across his sweaty neck.

“Time to-“ the psycho stopped mid-sentence, his face dropped. There was panicked shouts, he tried to run. And with an animalistic roar, something monstrous mauled him to death. The beast was like a wolf and a small bear hybrid, pitch black like a shadow, but ragged. It tore into the writhing psychopath, turning his screams into gurgles. Avery attempted to move away as more of the monsters showed up, slaughtering psychos left, right and centre.

Rolling into the far corner, he felt the sting of the deep gash in the small of his back. Avery pulled desperately at the ropes binding him. It was hastily done, and was therefore easy to get free from. One hand came loose, then the second. Avery rolled again onto his backside and tore away his ankle binds. Becca was doing the same in her corner, yet having less success.

Gunfire and frantic shouting mixed with the screeches of the shadow monsters, who over-ran the psychos with ease and suffocated the opposition. Avery spotted his revolver on the ground, retrieved it through the chaos and wildly-flying bullets. He ran over to Becca, grabbed her and pushed her under a broken desk. He slid under with her, pulled a chair over the entrance, hid.

The beasts crawled around the room, finishing off their prey, heads cocking around the air unnaturally and insect-like. There was four, each in turn more horrific as the next.

Becca whimpered, and Avery held his hand over her mouth firmly. With his other hand, he closed his fingers around his red revolver. He waited with baited breath, ready to fight or die. Or both. One beast seemed to sniff the air, its shadowy fur tipped with a blood-red hue, its jewelled eyes like glimmering rubies.

With one last screech, the four creatures headed towards the nearest broken window and slipped out.

Like lizards, Avery thought to himself.

A few minutes passed with Avery and Becca in silence, just in case the beasts came back. Eventually, they crawled out from their hiding place.

“What the hell were those things?” Becca asked as she jabbed her finger to the bodies littered around them.

“I really don’t know, they’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Shit, my heart is beating like a drum. Shit…”

“We need to get back to The Settlement, and fast” Becca whispered hoarsely, “you need medical attention”.

“The others are still out there, Eve, Brady, Mark. I need to find them first. We all came out here together, and I’m not going back without them”.

“And what about Chad?”

Avery gulped, a lump in his throat. His stomach dropped as he replied.

“Chad is…he…he’s gone, Becca”.

“I’m sorry”, she whispered, hugging him tightly, “was it the Jackal?”

“Yeah. Look, I’d rather not speak about it, but the Jackal is dead now”.

Becca looked down at her feet.

“Good”, she muttered.

Avery retrieved a soaked submachine gun from a corpse, and an old pistol from the hand of another. He cleaned off the submachine gun on some nearby cloth and turned to Becca’s startled face.

“Know how to use one of these?” he asked, handing Becca the pistol.

“Kinda” she replied.

“Good enough. Stay behind me, let’s get out of here”.