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* * * * *

John and Krissy and I walked, John clicking shells into the shotgun as we went. More of the wooden crates appeared here and there in the hall. More sounds echoed from the darkness. Growls, the tick of claws on floor tile.

Two gray blurs sprang out of the darkness. They turned out to be muscular coyotes with matted fur and red eyes. They both skidded to a stop at the sight of us, took in deep breaths, and breathed plumes of fire.

The three of us dove behind one of the crates. John leaned over with the shotgun, fired and tore a fist-sized chunk out of the first wolf’s head. I fired six shots at the second one, missed with every single one. John hit it with the shotgun and ended its short career as an object of terror. We rooted through the ruined carcasses to find another box of shotgun shells and a gold key with a “1” etched into it. John put the key in his pocket, seeming strangely familiar with the situation.

We advanced. We killed a wild boar that had badgers for feet. We killed a huge snake as long as a school bus and as wide as a man’s waist. We killed a few ducks, regular ducks that I think had just wandered in there.

We reached an end to the hall, facing one of those roll-down gates. It was locked. John pulled the “1” key from his pocket, tried it, found it wouldn’t work. Krissy noticed a number “2” etched above the lock. We then had to backtrack through the halls to try to find the number 2 key. We fought through a small herd of possums that shot these little poisonous thorns from their asses. One of them caught John in the shoulder and it flared red as venom spread under the skin. He was cured a few minutes later when we found a first aid kit inside the belly of a mutated dog/squid.

We wandered around for a while, never finding the other key. Eventually we got back to the gate, where John tried shooting the lock with his shotgun. Worked like a charm.

We rolled up the gate and found ourselves in a large octagon of a room that would have been the food court, I suppose. Boarded-up store fronts surrounded us, the floor littered with more of the wooden crates.

“DANNY!” That was Krissy. I turned and saw that Wexler stood in the middle of the room.

In one moment he was just Wexler to me, hair askew as it never was on television, but him just the same. Then I’d blink and Wexler would be replaced by the shadow man, a perfect black outline where Wexler had been, like he had been cut out of reality with a pair of scissors. Then back to regular Wexler again.

John raised the shotgun and shouted, “Speak your name, devil!”

Wexler turned to him but said nothing.

“Wexler!” I said. “Is Wexler in there somewhere? We wanna hear from Wexler!”

The Wexler thing raised an arm and in a blur the arm extended out, five feet, then ten, the fist at the end flashing toward me like a rocket. Before I could move, Wexler’s extendo-arm punched me in the groin.

I doubled over. John fired at the long arm with the shotgun. It splashed like wax, but no blood left the wound. Wexler reached up with his other arm and it also stretched, grasping the metal framework of the unfinished ceiling. He swung himself up, crouching on the steel bar like Spider-Man.

We shot at him. A lot. I fired until my pistol ran dry, leaving white scars in the glass of the skylight and bringing a rain of glass bits. My hands patted my pockets for another magazine and found none, heat radiating off the exposed barrel like a curling iron. I saw Krissy was sitting in the corner, fingering her necklace and muttering panicked prayers to herself like a woman on a 747 who just watched the second wing shear off outside her window. She clutched the tazer in her other hand, the weapon looking as useless as a toy.

The Wexler thing dropped from its perch and landed twenty feet in front of us, crouching and circling around us like a panther.

John fired, pumped, fired again, pumped, clicked on an empty chamber. Wexler took a step toward him. John flung the empty shotgun at his chest and the gun lodged there, as if he had been made of taffy. Tendrils of steam rose from the wound and we watched in dismay as the metal of the gun melted and dripped at Wexler’s feet like mercury.

I heard running footsteps behind me.

“Wait! Danny! It’s me!” Krissy again. She pushed past me and ran up to the Wexler thing. I probably should have grabbed her or something, but I admit at the time I didn’t really see any point to it.

John moved, though, running and shouldering Krissy aside, telling her to get back, to get out, to get to a safe distance while this thing ate us. The Wexler monster flicked out an arm and smacked John in the chest, flinging him through the air like a sock monkey. John landed on one of the crates, smashing it. There was something inside that looked like a foot stool, shaped like a mushroom and decorated with green polka dots.

Krissy was shaking visibly, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Danny... it’s me.”

Something changed on Wexler’s face, or maybe that was wishful thinking. He reached out for Krissy with a trembling hand, caressing her neck.

“DAVE!” screamed John, from the floor. “THE KEY! USE THE KEY!”

I frantically dug the “1” key from my pocket. I didn’t know how it would work, but I had a crazy idea that it would. I reared back and threw the key at Wexler as hard as I could.

Wexler flinched as the key bounced off his cheek, then clinked to the floor harmlessly. He looked at me in confusion, then dismissed me and turned toward Krissy again.

He reached out once more, Krissy trembling as he touched her delicate neck, running a finger along the thin gold chain. He followed it around, mesmerized, over her collarbone and down, slipping a finger under the neckband of her sweatshirt. The finger lifted the chain, pulling the crucifix free-

Something horrible happened. Wexler’s arms flew around his back, like they were yanked there by an invisible policeman to slap on handcuffs. Back and back they stretched, I could see knobs where his joints were popping out of his shoulders, could hear a sound like cracking knuckles. Then his legs did the same, sweeping out from under him while he hung in midair.

Wexler’s limbs pulled and twisted and twitched behind him, his body looking like that of a dead spider. His face contorted into a look of wide-eyed agony that I would never, ever forget. He opened his mouth and shrieked in a high-pitched sound like pressurized steam.

Black oozed out of every orifice in Wexler’s body, pooling into the air around him like drops of oil in water. Wexler fell to the floor with a painful crunch, leaving a suspended black blob hanging in the air like a cloud.

I backed up, reached out for Krissy to pull her back but saw she was way ahead of me, already twenty feet behind me and helping John to his feet.

I looked down at Wexler, he looked dead, limbs askew and eyes staring blankly at the cracked skylight above us. I raised the empty pistol, pointed it at the pulsing cloud of blackness in front of me and yelled, “Freeze!”

It didn’t. The black shape drifted toward me, slowly at first, like smoke on the wind. Then it snapped, flicked forward faster than I could see.

It vanished. I spun around, couldn’t see it, saw John and Krissy looking at me in terror.

“It’s okay! I’m okay! Where did it go?”

I was okay, now that I thought about it. Felt great, in fact. Suddenly a veil lifted over my thoughts. The clouds cleared, and for the first time in my life I saw true perspective, a supernova of reason.

There were six billion humans in the world. One American, I once heard, consumes enough calories to keep 40 African children alive. John and this girl were locusts, blazing through resources by the ton. Here was a man who would burn half a gallon of gasoline to get a pack of cigarettes, who would let a mile of rainforest be razed to make pasture for McDonald’s cows. Here was a girl who would buy special food for a dog while a Somali eight year-old starved, all while wearing the symbol of the Inquisition around her neck, the intersecting strips of gold the last thing millions saw before their limbs were ripped from their bodies in medieval torture machines.

The greatest possible high is clarity of purpose. And man, I was feeling some awesome clarity charging through me just then, my soul focused and electrified like a laser beam.

I had a job to do.

I took a step toward the two of them and kicked something metal. I thought it was one of my discarded pistol magazines, but no, this one was heavy. Full. I deftly picked it up and slammed it into the pistol. John and Krissy cast glances at each other, both of them looking as confused as the cattle they were.

I strode toward the girl and was pleased to see a look of crippling fear in her eyes, a look that broke those sculpted porcelain features like a hammer. Seeing that was fucking glorious. John was saying something to me, I tuned him out.

I had a second to look over Krissy from the neck down, those perfect thigh muscles, soft curves under her perfect skin that twitched with every movement, leading up perfectly into the curve of her perfect ass. The hint of perfect little breasts hiding under the sweatshirt. I suddenly had a great idea, the most spectacular fucking idea, the most fantastic and, well, perfect use for this girl the male mind could conceive of. Somebody would award my dick the Nobel Prize after this. But first-

I turned to see John running toward me. He took three steps before I raised the pistol and shot him in the head.

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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.