Shadow's Turning- Part 15

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay there.

I jolted back into wakefulness, feeling like I’d been slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer.  Birch was still above me, his mouth smeared with red and his eyes laser-focused on my face.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a truck,” I said hoarsely.  “And dragged down the road for a few miles.”

He searched my face, looking for something.  He nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“Maybe you could get off me now.”

After a second, he slowly slid off me, not looking away.  I sat up and leaned back, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath.

“Not that I’m not grateful, but what did you do to me, exactly?”

I didn’t look at him as I asked the question, preferring the distance that staring at the insides of my own eyelids gave me.

My lip was throbbing and I could still taste the coppery tinge of blood on my tongue.

Unsettling to say the least.

“I thought I might be able to break the connection.”

I waited, thinking he was going to continue, but he let the silence stretch.

“Why did you think…that…could break it?” I asked carefully.  I almost didn’t want to ask the question because I was afraid of the answer, possibilities chasing each other just under my consciousness while I refused to look at them.

“Just a hunch.”

I turned my head to look at him.  He stared back at me blandly, almost daring me to question his answer.

A hunch.

I turned away again, stifling the follow-up questions bubbling up inside me.  By not answering, he was almost confirming some of my darker suspicions.

I stayed completely still as fear flared through me.  I needed to get myself under control.  Having a panic attack in an enclosed space with no reasonable way out and away from the source of my fear was a recipe for disaster.

I needed to just agree with him and tiptoe around the elephant in the room.  If we both agreed it wasn’t there, we could ignore it.

I wasn’t having much luck with that rationale, but a heavy roar that was so deep I could feel it vibrating in my stomach echoed through the night outside, sufficiently distracting me.

And then something heavy hit the side of the car, a high pitched gibbering following as it bounced off.  The car skidded a little sideways.

“Sara!” the voice roared outside.

It did not sound happy.

Something else hit the car and I braced myself, against the seat in front of me as the car turned from the impact.

“How much time left?” I yelled as something else pounded into the car, this time in front.

“An hour.”

An hour.  An interminable amount of time.

Things kept pounding into the car, which rocked and slid under the impact, but didn’t roll over.  It was a fucking tank, and I was never so grateful for another person’s planning as I was right then.

Birch moved up between the front seats and sat down in front of the wheel.

“What are you doing?” I called, bracing myself against another impact.

“We have to move.”

“Move!  You can’t see anything!”

Smart observation Captain Obvious.

“I know.  But I don’t think we’ll make the hour if we just sit here.”  He turned the key and the powerful engine rumbled.  “Put your seatbelt on.”

I scrambled for it with my bound hands, clicking it into place as Birch stepped on the gas.

He didn’t inch forward like I would have.

There were a couple of soft thuds and then we were rolling over bumps on the road that I didn’t want to think about.

“Maybe you should slow-”

He yanked the wheel over and the vibrations sounding through the car decreased as we hit the smooth asphalt of the road.

I shut my eyes as he went even faster.

How did he know where the road was?

A few seconds later, the left side of the car scraped against something with a horrible screeching sound.

The railing at the median.

Birch jerked the steering wheel over and the sound stopped.

Guess he didn’t really know where it was.

This stretch of the highway was a straight line, which was difficult enough to navigate.  But there was a turn a few miles down.

Assuming we were even going in the direction I thought we were.

I shouldn’t have worried.  We didn’t make it to the turn.

Something hit us hard.  Hard enough to flip the car.

I didn’t know which way was up, everything seeming to go too fast and too slow at the same time as we tumbled.

With a bone jarring impact, we finally came to a stop upside down, my body hanging from the seatbelt.  The car was still pretty much intact, which was a little scary.

“Sara!  Are you alright?”

Was I alright?  I felt kind of numb, except for the deep pain where the seatbelt was digging into my torso.

I rocked a little as Birch got out of his seatbelt and dropped down.

I should probably unbuckle too.

My bound hands reached for the release, but Birch’s were already there.

I grunted as I dropped, landing against him as he caught me.  I leaned against him as I looked out the window.

“The blinds are gone,” I said slowly, knowing that should really bother me.  But my head felt like it was wrapped in cotton, muffling my thoughts and emotions.

Birch didn’t bother replying as he wrapped one arm around me and reached for something with the other.

I stared at the window, watching as something darker than the surrounding night slithered across the glass, leaving a humid streak.

The sound of tearing metal screeched through the interior as we rocked a bit.  Footsteps on the undercarriage above us followed, along with the gentle clacking of claws or nails.

Birch slapped something in my hand.

I looked down to see a small handgun, the handle already warming in my palm.  He quickly freed my hands.

“Here’s the safety.  Just point and shoot.  It won’t kill them, but it will slow them down.  We’ve got about a half hour left.  I’m guessing it’ll take them about half that time to peel us out.  That leaves fifteen minutes.”  His hand gripped my jaw and turned it so that I was looking into his red tinged eyes instead of the gun.  “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I whispered, the shock starting to wear off.

He gave me a hard look and nodded, letting go of my face.

“Back to back.”

I turned so my back was resting against his, trying not to look outside, but focus on where the sounds were coming from.  They seemed to be mostly working above us.

We passed the fifteen minute mark.

I stared at my watch, urging the hands to move faster.

At eighteen, a clawed hand punched through.

“Shoot it.”

I aimed and squeezed the trigger, the target so close, even I was able to hit it.

I watched it jerk back, a spray of dark fluid spraying.  I couldn’t hear anything through the ringing in my ears.

Multiple fingers took a hold of the small hole and began peeling back, widening it.

Something the size of a large dog dropped through and quickly sprouted a bolt through its neck.

It fell over, writhing.

After that, we were overrun.

I shot blindly, only knowing where Birch was because his back was solid against me.  I saw his bolts hit where it count time after time, but it wasn’t enough.

The dark wave finally reached us.

I shot something with gleaming teeth that snapped against my face.

And then clicked on empty.

Unnaturally long fingers wrapped around my wrist, yanking me so hard I thought it would pull my shoulder out of its joint.  I tried to pull the fingers off, short, tough fur meeting my hands.  It didn’t even seem to notice as it jumped up through the hole, trying to take me with it.

A hard hand clamped onto my ankle, preventing me from being pulled out.

I looked down as my body was stretched painfully between two opposing forces.

Birch handed his crossbow up to me as something jumped onto his back, something with a long, sinuous tail and slanted, red eyes.

Take it, he mouthed, his free hand grabbing the thing’s muzzle.

He let go to fight in earnest, and I was pulled through the rest of the way, the jagged edges of the peeled metal gouging my side.

“Sara.”

That voice.  It felt like it was digging into my brain, delicate nails scraping across it.

If I’d seen him walking on the street in the middle of the day, I may not have given him a second glance.  At least, not with sunglasses on.

Tall, but not too tall.  A pale, gleaming bald head.  Jeans and a dark t-shirt over a rangy build.  My eyes didn’t want to go to his face, but I forced them to.

Even features that managed not to be handsome or unattractive, but almost wax-like.  Unmoving.

His eyes gave him away.

Dark pits with the flicker of embers in the depths, they took up more of his face than they should have.  Or maybe it just seemed that way because they were so…eye-catching.

His head tilted to the side in a quick, stilted motion, a slight smile coming to those waxy looking colorless lips as he regarded me.

From the corners of my eyes, I could see a writhing black mass around the car, stretching in every direction, the edges blending into the night so I couldn’t get a handle on where it ended.

Assuming it did.

My hand tightened on the bow in my hand.  The bow I had no idea how to shoot, let alone reload.

I blinked and he was suddenly only two feet away.

“Not to worry.  You just need another dose,” he said, his lips barely moving, those eyes looking even bigger this close.  I stared at them, morbid fascination overcoming revulsion as I realized they were literally pits, lidless holes in his face.

His lip curled up to show a mess of fangs, jagged and sharp.

I wasn’t going to get a better shot than this.

I swung my arm up, my fingers having found what felt like a trigger.  I shot quickly, only a little space between the bow and him.

It went into his side, an end sticking out of his front and back.

I didn’t exactly plan what I would do if I did hit him.  Maybe I was hoping he would just go poof.

He snarled and shoved me away.

I stumbled back, trying to keep my balance as I teetered on the edge, conscious of the teeming mass I would fall into.

I felt my body lose the fight.

I dropped the bow, my eyes wide, mouth open on a gasp as the lightening sky tilted above me.