Page 10

Marshall stared at the monster slumped on the cabin floor.

The bullet had torn straight through its skull, a neat entry wound between its eyes and a gaping hole at the back of its head, spattering fur and bits of bone and brain out behind it.

The bullet had shattered one of the window panes in its wake, disappearing into the night, leaving a monstrous corpse behind without the thing that killed it.

Weak-kneed and wobbly as a newborn calf, Marshall took a step towards the thing.

It didn’t move.

Not a twitch, not a breath.

It was as lifeless as the one he’d killed outside earlier that night.

Carefully, Marshall raised one foot to dig the toe of his boot into the thing’s ribs.

It shifted under the pressure, but didn’t move on its own.

Marshall’s fear was rapidly retreating to make room for the gaping hollow of loss.

Hooking his boot under the monster, he turned it onto its side.

There was nothing underneath, no second body.

Just a pool of sticky dark blood, thick with the pulp of flesh and viscera, slowly soaking into the wood.

Everett had been fully subsumed by the beast before Marshall shot it.

He hooked a lasso around its neck and dragged it into the open air so the stench could dissipate.

By lamplight, he sliced the thing open from sternum to groin, praying he wasn’t too late.

Hope felt foreign and very far away.

The carcass stank like rot and offal, but instead of intestines spooling into the dirt, a bare arm fell out from between the ribs to land palm-up against the ground.

Marshall rocked back onto his heels, staring at it.

Afraid to see the rest.

The fingers twitched.

Cursing, Marshall hurried to toss aside his knife and grasp Everett’s arm above the wrist, shoving at the heavy ribs to lift that hank of meat and bone out of the way.

He pulled Everett out like a caesarean section, first with resistance, then all at once.

Everett slipped from the monster’s innards into the mud, where he lay like a maggot hatched inside a carcass that had never seen the light of day.

He trembled and twitched like a dog in a dream.

Marshall watched and waited, clinging tight to Everett’s hand, committing his friend’s face to memory in case whatever woke was something monstrous.

With his other hand, he drew his Colt and held it ready.

If his first shot hadn’t done what was needed, he couldn’t hesitate a second time.