Page 15 of Stalked By Shadows
Micah lurched forward after shining his light down a path, and I chased after him as we both found the guard, Fred, lying beside a grave, very still. I leaned over him and checked for a pulse. Thankfully, I found one.
“Just unconscious,” I said to Micah and turned the big man over. It looked like he hit his head. “I already sent Lukas a text, so help should be on the way.” What was that smell? Slightly metallic. I looked over Fred again and he didn’t appear to be bleeding.
“Do you smell blood?” I asked, looking around the small area we were in. I knew a half dozen yards away the tomb that had been open to add a new body stood, but didn’t think they’d have left it that fresh. I would have smelled it earlier in the day, and it seemed odd they’d let people in the cemetery if that were a normal occurrence.
“I think it’s from over there.” Micah got up and tiptoed that way.
“Micah…” I called after him, leaving Fred’s side to follow.
We kept moving forward, passing chalk markers written on some of the tombs that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. The shadows grew thicker the further we walked, and so did the marking. That awful white noise filled my head, deafening me. I stopped twice to try to clear the noise, only to have it grow louder.
Micah stopped and glanced around a large sarcophagus.
“What?” I asked. Though the stink of death turned my gut, I’d smelled that a time or twelve in my life. Most vividly as I lay injured in the desert sand with my troop torn to pieces around me.
“Summoning ceremony.” He motioned to a heap of dead animals that littered the ground. Their deaths had obviously been the result of torture since they were contorted in horrible ways. I swallowed back bile at the sight, trying to keep from spewing right there. It took a lot of willpower not to examine them and commit the horrors to vivid memory. Dead humans were one thing, innocent animals was a whole other that only added to the unsettled tension growing in my gut.
“What the fuck?” Nothing about this was normal. “Like one of those pretend voodoo fuckers killing animals for shits and giggles?”
“Maybe,” Micah whispered. He tiptoed his way through the mess. “Wonder what they called.”
Called? “Um…”
We passed another row of little houses for the dead, navigating around creepy baby statues that almost seemed to move in the dark. In this row all the crosses had been broken off the tops of the crypts. The discarded pieces of stone were flipped upside-down, making my head swim with the possibilities and terror.
The recently used tomb was open, red curtain ripped away, gaping hole of darkness where the marble plate was supposed to close it off. I couldn’t see a body through the dark, but it looked like something black stained the edges of the tomb. Almost as though something had slithered its way out of it.
Micah stopped suddenly, forcing me to run into his back. I stumbled, trying to find my footing and felt something squelch under my boots. Looking down, I fumbled to organize my thoughts like I’d been put on a slow-motion roller coaster. The black liquid soaking my shoes made me gasp as memories hit me like an atomic bomb. The metallic sting hit my nose at the same time I caught the moving dark shadow from the side of my vision.
Unlike the other shadows I’d seen until now, this one wasn’t human. The shape too large, shifting and undulating more like a worm than a person ever possibly could. My first instinct was to run, but I couldn’t pull my feet from the bloody mess left by something more than an abused animal, or my thoughts from the chaos of disaster that swirled in my head.
The dark mass went through the stone walls, head a slew of writhing shadows, moving so fast I didn’t know if I even had time to breathe. Horrors I’d seen once before in my life filled my head with memories. I saw it reach for Micah and I instantly reacted by shoving him away and taking the brunt of its touch.
The mass hit me like a slap of water, walloping me with an icy grip of pure freezing pain. I felt as though I’d been crushed by a glacier wall. I slammed into the ground hard and tried to suck in a breath, but got nothing. Everything around me frozen, my hands stung like they’d been gripping a bag of ice for too long, and my lungs burned for air. The night turned into a reddish-black haze as consciousness was stripped from me.
Chapter 6
Iwas dropped down into the memory of that day. Waking up under a hail of gunfire. The sound of the wind howled around like some sort of banshee of old storybooks. I crawled from my tent only to find the sky black with soot and the fierce pounding of another sand storm on top of us, the particles of sand like tiny shards of glass ripping at my clothes and skin.
Another man left the tent beside mine, took several steps toward the swirling mass of sand, and was suddenly yanked upward by the wind like an invisible giant fist wrenched him off the ground. Only a few seconds passed but he rained down over me in parts instead of a living person, blood and bone, clothes and hair, like an internal explosion, ripped to shreds. A storm couldn’t do that. It wasn’t possible. Bombs maybe, but nothing like that fierce whipping of the wind.
I struggled to breathe, feeling the weight of his blood drenching my skin and the scent filling my nostrils with the copper stink. The guy I shared the tent with came up beside me and I latched on to him, dragging him to the ground with me, holding tight as he fought to try to get away.
The howling continued, like a siren’s call. Instead of giving me the urge to run, I felt like I should be heading into the darkness, reaching for that swirl of death. After watching the third member of my team explode, I buried my face in my struggling bunkmate’s hair and held on, waiting for it all to end. Death or the sandstorm. I wasn’t sure which, or that it mattered so long as there was an end.
He fought me, trying to answer the siren call coming from that whipping darkness. But I held on, using my weight to keep us locked down while I expected death to rip him from my arms any second and tear us to shreds.
He stopped struggling. I felt his hands on my face, which was odd as I didn’t think he’d been at all cooperative that day. But soft fingers stroked my cheeks, brushing away tears I hadn’t realized were falling. Then soft lips pressed against mine, and I breathed in the smell of spice and gumbo.
“Alex?” he whispered.
I opened my eyes, not realizing they had been closed and found Micah in my arms. We were both kneeling, covered in blood, but wrapped together, Micah sprawled around me like a shield. My arms were locked so tightly around him they ached with the effort, but he didn’t protest.
There was a lot of shouting and bright lights directed on us so intensely I couldn’t see beyond Micah’s face. His hands cupped my cheeks, and he rested his forehead against mine.
“Alex? Look at me okay? Focus on me.”
“Yeah,” I said, throat hurting like I’d been screaming. I studied his face, the pale eyes and tiny freckles almost lost in the illuminating washout of color around us.