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The string of profanity that John screamed will not be re-printed here. I saw the ground was rippling and twitching as if pelted by a heavy rain. Then I noticed I was covered to the knees in scurrying cockroaches.

I reacted in what I agree was the least-cool way possible, squealing and crazily slapping at my pant legs and trying to knock the things off me, dropping the CD player and my car keys in the process. John saw me flapping around and, liking bugs even less than I did, joined in. He slapped at the things with the satchel, cursed at them. Some rational part of me knew that seeing me freaked out was what freaked him out most of all, that I was losing control, that I was genuinely terrified.

But understand, if this was one of our patented hallucinations it was a five-senses hallucination extravaganza. Once, while half-asleep, I had a cockroach crawl across the back of my neck. It’s quite the unique feeling and hard to mistake. This was real, quite real, so very tinglingly and itchingly real, and my heart was pounding, my skin crawling and I mean literally crawling. In that instant I was sure the insects were not only on my skin but under it, burrowing through muscle tissue, spindly legs flicking over nerve bundles.

They had won. They had jacked into the core of the subconscious David Wong fear center and unleashed 50,000 volts of hard-charging phobic fucking body terror. My mind was gone.

You would think that under those conditions nothing would surprise me. You’d be wrong. I was quite surprised, for instance, when I looked down and saw that my fallen car keys were running away from me, floating as if carried downstream. Frantic thoughts flared and spiraled crazily through my brain like fireworks.

They’re taking my keys! The roaches are stealing my car keys!

Bugs were scaling my shoes just as fast as I could knock them off. I gave up and headed for the car, itching in a hundred places. I saw then that it wasn’t the autumn night that made the paint appear darker. It was the couple hundred thousand roaches swarming over the thing. I took off my jacket and used it to sweep the bastards away from the door and window. I yanked open the latch, greasily squishing a roach between my fingers and the handle as I did. I swung the door open-

There were a lot more roaches on the inside than out. They had puddled in the floorboards and when I opened the door they poured out like the jackpot from the devil’s slot machine, the bugs raining down onto the pavement with a sound like frying bacon.

I saw a lump on the driver’s seat, invisible under a rippling blanket of roaches. But then the lump grew and pulsed and I saw there was no lump under the roaches—the lump was roaches. The things scrambled over one another, twitching legs entangling and knotting, piling higher and higher.

You see people in horror movies standing there stupidly while some special effect takes shape before them, the dumbasses gawking at it instead of turning and running like the wind. And I wanted to run, to do the smart thing. A part of me wanted to slam the door, abandon the car, sprint out of this infested parking lot and not look back until some time next month. But I didn’t.

I’m a lot of things, most of them bad, but I’m not a coward. The adrenaline was pumping, the body was still in all-out Desperate Survival Panic Mode. But the tag team of Pride and Anger was wrestling my mind back into control and I didn’t run. I didn’t run, partly because I was ashamed of freaking out a few seconds ago, but mainly because I never ran, never in my life, and this was my car, dammit. My only car. I’d be damned if I was gonna walk to work every day.

So I stood and looked on as the roach pile in the seat grew and grew until it was a grotesque, lumpy column two feet high. Bugs were racing in from all over the lot now, pouring around my shoes like floodwater, flowing up the tires and across the fenders and into the driver’s seat. Their stampede made a soft sound like someone crunching cereal from across the room and I could smell the things, an odor like an old fryer full of dirty cooking oil. Two smaller columns now jutted from the base of the bug pile like tree roots, hanging off the front of the seat, building down toward the floorboard. The lump now had legs.

They were, I saw, forming themselves into a human figure.

Hey, why not?

Arms formed a few seconds later. Next, a head.

A full replica of a man sculpted entirely from cockroaches now sat comfortably in the driver’s seat. It extended an arm toward the dash. It had my keys. It started the car.

The compacted ball of roaches that was its head rotated toward me, as if it had turned to look me in the eye. We stood like that for a moment and I thought I was facing it down, showing I wasn’t afraid. But then its other arm reached out toward me and I flinched, yelped, jumped back three feet. The extended arm clasped the open door with fingers of knotted insects and pulled it shut.

The Roach Man shifted into reverse, backed out of the space and drove to the parking lot exit. It signaled a right turn, then drove off into the night. I looked down and saw the lot was now virtually clean of insect life.

John threw away his cigarette and said, “Shit. I knew that was gonna happen.”

“What now?”

“I think you need to report this to your insurance company.”

At that moment we heard an engine from behind us. We turned and saw a white Ford Focus roll into the parking lot. Out the side window popped the pretty head of Krissy, the girl from the couch at the crime scene. I stepped closer and saw that, yes, her body was attached.

“Hey, I’m glad I caught you guys. Did you see that newscast? Did you talk to him or-”

Instead of answering Krissy, I reached out, extended one finger and poked her in the forehead. Solid. She didn’t seem to like that. From that point on she looked around me and addressed only John.

“Something’s going on, isn’t it?”

John trotted up. “Yes. We need your car.”

“What? Why?”

John circled around to the passenger side door and said, “Car chase.”

She smiled. “Cool. Hop in.”

“Wait,” I said, digging out my roll of TestaMints. “Here. Eat one of these.”

“And who are you, again?” She asked.

“I’m the only man here who has his head on straight. This ain’t a situation for the dog catcher any more. There’s something else, something dark. We’re talking demons and witchcraft and gremlins and bigfoots and I don’t care if you believe or-“

“-All right, all right. Stop talking. I know what I saw tonight.” She reached into her sweatshirt and pulled out a gold cross dangling on a thin chain. “See? Could I wear this if I were some kind of a vampire or something? Now are you getting in or not?”

I studied her as best I could, judged her on the spot. I got in the car. The tires chirped as she pulled out of the parking lot, turning the same direction RoachMan went.

Traffic was dead at this hour and we hummed along with the speedometer hovering just over the 75 mark. Still no sign of the Hyundai.

So freaking dark. No moon and no stars and we’re all on our own down here-

“There!” said John. I looked and saw tail lights way up ahead. Small and close together. It was my boy, all right. It was at this moment I realized we had no plan for what to do once we caught up to it. The same thing apparently occurred to Krissy, who asked “What do we do now?”

“Get up alongside,” said John. “And then ram it off the road.”

“I’m not doin’ that! Who’s gonna pay for the-“

She cut off her words with a scream. We were close now, close enough for her to see the driver. “What is that thing?”

“You don’t wanna know,” John said. “But don’t be afraid. Get up close, I got a plan.”

She looked confused, but faced forward and pressed the Focus up to 80. We ran up alongside the blue compact. “Keep us even,” John said as he rolled down the window. RoachMan had his window down, too, one roachy elbow resting outside the window like a trucker. The occasional roach dripped off his arm like candle wax, flicking off into the wind.

John started to climb out of the window, wind whipping his hair around his face and I had the crazy idea that he was going to try to fling himself over to the other car like Bruce Willis. Instead he leaned his torso back against the car and braced his knees against the inside of the door. He unzipped his pants.

RoachMan turned his roach head toward us just in time to take a wind-blown spray of urine to the face. The creature flailed and convulsed, the Hyundai wobbled in its lane. The little tires lost traction and the car went soaring off the side of the road. It plowed through weeds and quickly tipped nose-down over an embankment, landing in a culvert with a white explosion of water.

Krissy pulled off to the shoulder a little ahead and we all jumped out. I screamed at John.

“What was that? Huh? What the hell was that?”

“Hey, we stopped him.”

“The goal was to get the car back. My car. Intact. And not splattered with urine.”

“Look! Oh, man-”

I did look, and saw a dark shape emerge from the wreckage of the Hyundai. It floated up like a plume of smoke and then slipped soundlessly off into the night. I heard a breathy sound from Krissy and saw she had slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

I said, “Don’t worry, it looks like it left. You saw it?”

She shook her head. “I felt it. It just ran through me, this sort of heavy feeling like—like there was nothing here. Like everything was nothing, everything everywhere. I mean, there’s like molecules and stuff but behind it, nothing. Just cold and dark...”

She fell into silence. We moved up to the edge of the standing water, the Hyundai now two-thirds submerged with its rear stuck into the air like the Titanic. A layer of cockroaches two inches thick floated out from around the car like an oil slick, clumps here and there still holding the shape of limbs. A half dozen old fast-food bags floated up from the interior and hung nearby like buoys.

Whenever I’m asked these days what’s the coldest my crotch has ever been, I don’t even have to consider the answer. It’s definitely the time I waded out toward my car in that weedy culvert of standing ice water. There were certain things we needed out of that car, like my cell phone, and since John had fished the box out of the dog guts earlier it was clearly my turn to do the nasty.

The water numbed everything south of my ribcage. I pushed aside the twitching algae of roaches and leaned my arms into the windows as far as I could. I managed to recover the package of dog bullets from between the front seats, even though we had not established a use for them. That was it; lost forever was my cell phone, our Songs Ghosts Hate mix CD and John’s lighter. His request that I go back for it was met with a display of my middle finger.

I was sloshing up out of the water when John asked, “So how do we get the car outta there?”

“The car is dead, John. You can’t submerge an engine in water. The water gets in the cylinders and the pistons break when they try to compress it. You can’t compress water.”

“Actually, I think you can, Dave. Are you sure you’re not thinking of ice? Because things wouldn’t float if you couldn’t compress water.”

“I’ve been to college, John, and I’m telling you-“

“-GUYS. Guys. Shut up.” This was Krissy, her teeth clenched like she had heard fingernails scrape across a blackboard. “What was that thing?”

I approached Krissy’s car, my sodden pants feeling like they weighed 50 pounds. I said, “It was a Shadow Man.”

“A what?”

“A man who looks like he’s made out of shadow. I just now made up that name for them. And you can’t see them, only certain people can.”

“Are they like, demons?”

“Well, they’re evil,” said John. “You just saw one of them steal a car. And your friend Wexler was in cahoots with those guys. As was our dog. What you got to say about that, Missy?”

I glanced at my watch. “Anybody want to go to Denny’s? Maybe this thing will sort itself out.”

My cell phone chirped. I felt the inside jacket pocket for the hard shape and pulled the thing out. The name “Danny Wexler” was lit up on the display. I pressed it to my ear.

“Go.”

“Why are you following me?” said Wexler, sounding shaken and exhausted. “Who are you?”

John was staring at me with the most screwed-up expression I’ve ever seen on his face, like I had just grown a second head.

“Is this really Wexler talking? Or is it one of those black fuckers that made my dog kill a guy and then wrecked my car?”

John moved toward me. He was gesturing. I shrugged my shoulders as if to say “can’t this wait?”

Wexler asked, “Is Krissy with you?”

“Yeah. You wanna talk to her?”

“Bring her to me. I’m going to the old mall. Bring her there.”

John was right in my face now. I looked at him and put a hand over the phone.

“What?”

“Dave, your cell phone went down with your car.”

I stared at him for a moment, confused. Then I felt a curious tickling sensation along the fingers of the hand I was using to cover the mouthpiece. I pulled the phone away from my head and I saw it had an extra antenna, black and serrated like a steak knife. Bent, curled around to touch my hand. No, not bent—jointed. Another one started growing out the opposite side.

Not an antenna. A leg, like a spider.

A third grew out the end. A fourth, a fifth. Twitching crazily, like any bug’s legs when it’s on its back. I closed my fist, crushing the thing with a sound like an egg cracked open on the lip of a bowl. A kind of gummy mustard-colored goo dripped through my fingers. I tossed the mush aside, gagging.

I asked Krissy, “Did you see that? The thing with the phone?”

“See what? You were sort of holding your hand up to your head and talking into it-“

“Nevermind.” I turned to John, “It looks like we’re going to the mall. Krissy, you’ve got a choice. We can drop you off at your house or you can come with us and finish this thing.”

* * * * *

Krissy drove, wordlessly turning into the weed-paved parking lot of the Undisclosed Shopping Mall of the Dead. The radio played, mandolin plucking the intro to an early 90’s song by REM called “Losing My Religion.” It only took a few seconds for me to realize this was not the song as Michael Stipe had written it.

“Oooohhh, knife

plus nigger

Equals you, and Jews are dead meat...”

“I know people around here,” John said, “who would like the song better that way.”

Krissy asked, “So, what are you going to do in there?”

“Do we really strike you as the type to plan things out ahead of time?” I asked.

We saw Wexler’s “5 SPRTS” Buick, sitting alone in the middle of the weeds outside of the main entrance of the mall. Nobody in it. We parked a short distance away. Krissy turned off the car, killing the interior lights and the heat. We sat there, bathing in a chilled, inky darkness and waited for our hearts to stop punching our ribcages.

John put the satchel on his lap and started digging through it. He pulled out a long, metal flashlight, clicked on the beam to confirm that it still worked. Next he pulled out a wadded-up hand towel and handed it to me.

I unwrapped it. I found myself holding the stainless steel automatic pistol I had stolen from the pickup, back during the Las Vegas thing. I had planned to ditch it, to throw it into the river or something. Not only was the weapon stolen, but for all I knew it had been used to hold up four liquor stores and shoot two policemen before I got ahold of it. Cops have ways of tracing guns, you know. When I had told John the plan, he offered to take it because he “knew a guy” who could get rid of things like that.

“Why do you still have this? I thought you were gonna make it disappear.”

John shrugged. “Never got around to it.”

I popped the magazine out of the handle. Empty, as it had been the moment I fired the last shot at the Justin thing. I ran my finger over the“Smith and Wesson” etched on the side.

I had a thought, then reached under the floorboard and grabbed the three pistol magazines we recovered from Molly’s guts. I tore one out of the package, the first polished brass cartridge sitting in the open end of the magazine, ready. I slid the magazine into the Smith. It fit perfectly.

John said, “Well, that worked out.”

“Sure. Makes perfect sense.” I stuffed the other two magazines in my pockets.

Krissy asked, “You’re not going to shoot him, are you? If he’s possessed or whatever, you know that’s not his fault.”

“You belong to a church, right?” I said. “You know anything about performing exorcisms? That sort of thing?”

She shook her head.

“You know your Bible?” John asked. “You could show us the part that’s got the spells and incantations and stuff and read them right from there.”

She just stared at him. REM continued their bastardized song on the radio. Chorus now.

“That’s me in the porno

That’s me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Tryin’ to beat a tight-assed Jew...”

I turned to John and then Krissy. “Well, we’ll do what we can. Everybody ready?”

Krissy told me to wait, then opened up her purse. She pulled out a little black plastic thing that I thought was a flashlight but when she pressed the button a blue spark jumped across the end.

“It’s a tazer. A, uh, stun gun. I don’t think I’ve got anything else in here.” She sifted around in the purse. “Nail file...”

“No, let’s go.”

The three of us dismounted and walked toward the sprawling building, none of us making a sound other than the crunching of gravel under our shoes. Ahead was a tall, rusted metal framework that I supposed was going to be a fancy awning for the main entrance, maybe with a big sign arching over it. Beneath it was a row of huge windows and a bank of doors, all of which had been boarded over with plywood.

Among the graffiti, there was something that had been painted in bold letters two feet-high. On closer inspection we saw the letters were twitching, moving ever so slightly.

Slugs. A couple hundred of them had slimed their way up the boards to spell out a phrase that I have come to think pretty much sums up the demonic mindset in one grammatically incorrect nutshell:

YOUR DOOMED

One panel of plywood had been pulled partially off its frame, presumably by Mr. Wexler. John wanted me to go through first, because I had the gun. I made the counter-point that we couldn’t afford to lose the gun, so if the gunman went first and was killed then the rest of the group would be screwed. But if John went in first and something attacked, I could shoot it. John suggested Krissy go, and when she started to step through the hole I pulled her back and went through instead.

The place stank of rot and mildew and dead rodents. The empty storefronts had been boarded up, giving us a single, impossibly long corridor. The floor was littered with paper cups and candy wrappers and cigarette butts and other teenager droppings. I looked down and saw a used condom under my shoe.

The roof was glass, or some of it was, as the mall was originally designed to have a huge skylight running down its length. Parts of it had been boarded over, other sections were spiderwebbed with breaks and clouded with mounds of accumulated dead leaves. That was our only source of light, the faint hint of a moon shrouded behind clouds. When we walked under the boarded-over sections of the roof we found ourselves in pools of absolute blackness.

John lit the flashlight and we followed the beam into the darkness, me with the gun ready, Krissy with her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt.

A sound, from ahead. Running feet, shoe soles scraping on floor tile. I raised the gun, blood pumping in my ears. We reached a bend in the mall, where the hall took a 90-degree turn to the right. I saw the shadowy shape of a man, dashing around the corner and just out of sight.

“Danny!” That was Krissy, her voice echoing in the empty space. We jogged ahead, rounded the corner.

John screamed a profanity. I started shooting. Krissy started shrieking.

Something was running at us in the dark, something on all fours and moving fast. Yellow flashes from the pistol gave us brief glimpses of brown fur and antlers. A deer?

The thing that came bounding out of the shadows had grown several new sets of eyes and each of its antlers ended in a snapping set of lobster-ish claws. It looked like it had a novelty chandelier from a seafood restaurant on its head. It was, I would have to say, the stupidest looking thing I have ever seen.

It stumbled as it got close and my wild shots actually started landing, blossoms of red opening up on the beast’s chest and neck, the sound hammering my eardrums and echoing through the halls. It tried to turn away, showing me its ribcage and taking several broadside shots from me as a result. The mutated deer collapsed, thrashing on the dirty floor tiles and leaving red smears like a child’s finger painting.

John walked slowly up to the deer carcass, after it had twitched for the last time. I glanced down at the pistol, my hand shaking. The thing looked broken, the top half of it pushed three inches from the rest of the mechanism. After fiddling with it for a few minutes I realized this is what the gun naturally did when it was empty. I pushed in the button to release the empty magazine. I dropped it on the floor and replaced it with one of the two from my pocket. Great job conserving ammo so far.

John knelt down over the thing that I guess had been a deer. From behind me, Krissy asked, “What were you shooting at?”

I walked up to the fallen was-a-deer, kicking brass casings as I went. I pushed at its furry hide with my foot. As solid as a dead deer. I turned to Krissy, asked, “You don’t see anything on the floor here?”

“No. I mean, there’s a Twinkie wrapper and an old sock.”

“Come over here. Put your hand on the floor there.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain in a moment. Try it.”

She walked over, knelt down next to John and put her hand through the deer’s abdomen as if it were no more solid than a hologram. I stood and grabbed Krissy by the elbow, acting like I was helping her up but was actually testing again to see if her elbow was solid to my touch. It was.

John grunted out a “well that’s interesting” sound and got back to his feet.

“This make any sense to you?“ I asked him.

“Don’t know. I don’t think that you and me and her are all operating on the same frequency. Oh, look! Look at its ass!”

The deer’s ass was melting, puddling on the floor like candle wax. In less than a minute the entire hindquarters were a brown pool on the floor and the ribs were quickly caving in like a punctured balloon at a Thanksgiving Day parade. The front legs flattened, then the head and antlers. Meanwhile, the liquid from the hindquarters was dissolving before our eyes and leaving dry floor behind.

There was one part that didn’t melt, a section in the middle of the animal that protruded from the pink and brown slime. Square. A box about six inches to a side.

I kicked it free of the deer residue. Heavy. When the goo dissolved from it, I saw that it was a green and yellow box marked...

“Shotgun Shells,” I told John. I held them out to him. “We’ve got a box of shotgun shells.”

“Too bad we don’t have a shotgun.” He took them from me, then held the box out to Krissy. “You see this?”

“Of course.”

Of course.

John turned the box over and over in his hands, then opened it and pulled out one green plastic shell, an inch of brass at its base. I was about to ask if there was another use for shotgun shells, but I noticed John was wandering around the hall, deep in thought.

There was a lone wooden crate sitting next to the wall to our right, presumably full of floor tile or coils of electrical wiring and other mall fixin’s. But John, suddenly full of some conviction that it held something useful, started prying around the top, trying to get it open. Finally he resorted to delivering a series of hard kicks to the side, cracking and splintering the boards until he could work them free. He plunged his hands into the hole he had made, fished around inside and pulled out a dark length of plastic and metal that I had already guessed was a shotgun.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.