Read Shadow Stations: Unseen Online
Authors: Ann Grant
Shadow Stations: Unseen (13 page)
We ran through the rows while the green light spiraled up and the dome pulsed. Thousands of shoes lay before us. It seemed impossible that we’d find Karin’s slippers in time. I couldn’t see anything that looked like ballet shoes. On the far side of the dome copies of feet and legs were growing into butts and bellies and headless torsos.
“
Got them,” Mike shouted half an acre away. He stuffed her slippers in his jacket, looked out across the floor in anguish, and then madly grabbed more shoes until he’d filled his pockets and overloaded his arms.
“
Get against the wall. Get down.” I shoved Nikki behind me, aimed the gun at the dome, fired… and missed. Too low. The eerie green light throbbed as if it knew what I was trying to do. I fired again and again until all the bullets were spent and I thought I’d wasted them.
A loud crack sounded. The huge dome shattered and rained down in sheets that smashed on the floor. Feet and shoes went flying as chunks of glass sprayed everywhere. For a few seconds I thought it was over and allowed myself to feel relieved. Half-formed body parts froze with muscles and bones exposed. The floor resembled a war zone with thousands of amputated limbs.
When the last sheet fell, the stars in the black sky shone though the ruined dome.
And there was Luna near the far wall, little ancient Luna, standing over her red collar in the middle of all the mangled human limbs. The Husky looked small and lost and stiff, her white and gray fur not quite right, staring at us with cloudy blue eyes. She looked as dead as the deer in the gun store.
My jaw dropped. “Luna! It’s Luna!”
Mike grabbed my arm. “No, it’s not Luna. It’s not her. Come on, we’re out of here.”
Like a demon that refused to die, John Savenue crawled to his feet. I tried to fire the gun even though it was out of bullets until Mike dragged me through the heavy double doors with his arms still full of shoes. By the time we reached the outer doors, the double doors burst open behind us. John Savenue was lurching after us with shadows still pouring from the hole in his neck.
The Jeep was closer than Mike’s truck. We made it across the gravel when John Savenue threw the outer doors open. Nikki snarled, but we somehow forced her into the Jeep, spun through the lot, and gunned into the darkness. Round white headlights flashed behind us as the van roared out of the parking lot.
He was coming after us.
I gripped the steering wheel. We were going so fast the Jeep’s wheels left the road. I kept telling myself we’d be okay once we made it to the Chambersburg Pike. Once the road widened and straightened out I’d give it everything I had.
Blinding headlights swelled up in the rearview mirror. The lights fell back when we careened past the site of Ben’s accident, but seconds later they flooded the Jeep again and everything went white.
“
Load my gun,” I screamed at Mike.
“
Where is it?” he screamed back.
“
Shit, he’s going to hit us.” I sped through a curve, grabbed the gun out of my coat, and threw it at Mike.
The van struck us hard. Glass smashed. The sickening thud went through my whole body and flung Mike back and forth like a crash dummy. The impact knocked us into the field where we bounced up and down with the shoes flying everywhere until our tires spun around in icy mud I didn’t even realize was there.
Headlights flooded the Jeep. The bastard hit us again, but he rolled the van and skidded a hundred feet away with the engine still running and a broken headlight glaring at us.
Mike leaped out. “When I push, you hit the gas,” he shouted. One long shove and the surefooted Jeep took the hill and made it to the road.
Nikki snarled. I looked up to see John Savenue’s six-fingered hands on my door.
Mike blitzed him. In seconds they had each other in a death grip. Shadows poured from the hole in John Savenue’s neck and surrounded him in a black cloud. The two men went down, wrestled up again, and fought each other to the edge of the pavement. Mike lowered his head, turned into the football player he’d been all his life, and slammed John Savenue down the road as if they were fighting on the one yard line.
The Grassland’s distant green light backlit the struggling men. I loaded the gun, left Nikki in the Jeep, and pounded to the crest of the hill, trying to catch up, but Mike had already shoved John Savenue a long way down the road. It dawned on me what Mike was doing. He was working John Savenue away from the Jeep.
“
Mike, get out of the way!”
His voice came up the hill. “Run, Amy.”
“
Get away. I have the gun.”
“
It won’t work,” he shouted. “You hear me? Run!”
Heart pounding, I aimed the gun, but I couldn’t fire it. They were too entangled for me to get a clear shot.
An ominous rumble came over the field from the Grasslands, an ominous ebbing and flowing of pressure. The thunderous sound built to a crescendo. Metal screeched and groaned as the walls bowed out and crashed open and a tsunami of body parts poured over the parking lot. A gruesome cascade of severed feet and legs swarmed the construction trucks and crane at the back of the lot and toppled them over onto the gravel. The wave surged under Mike’s black Toyota, lifted it up like a toy, and tossed it around, tires in the air and the cab upside down, before the truck sank, trampled under the mass of moving flesh.
The demonic tsunami kept pouring out of the Grasslands. My efforts to shoot out the dome had been useless.
Thousands of lower legs and bodies sliced off at the waist hurtled over each other. They surged against the chain link fence and ripped the posts from the ground. The mangled fence rode the top of the wave, sections twisting and bobbing, until everything fell under the stampede.
They were coming at us.
“
Mike,
look at them
!”
“
Run,” he screamed back and pinned the laughing John Savenue to the pavement.
“
You run
.
Let him go
!” I knew he could see what was coming. Tears streamed down my face as the wave of flesh swept up the hill. My friend for years, the man who’d tried to give me his grandmother’s necklace, the man who fell in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time, held his ground. Body parts rushed across the dark earth with truck parts and gravel and chain link, sweeping up everything in their path.
Horrified, I stared at the doomed men on the road as the wave of flesh bore down on them. I had to save Nikki and Ben. I started to run. The wave rushed up the road with the fury of a murderous army, but at the last second John Savenue mutated into green smoke and left Mike alone on the pavement. Mike held out his empty hands in shock just before the tide of crushing body parts enveloped him.
Screaming, I made it to the Jeep. I was screaming so hard I don’t know how I managed to get the door open, but somehow I did and then I was driving, tearing down the black road, beating the steering wheel with my fist, trying to see through my tears. “Damn you, Mike, why did you have to be so fucking good all the time? Why, damn you, why?”
The impossible wave of fleshy stumps and severed bodies thundered behind me. A flying foot bounced off the windshield. Legs and arms rained down on the hood. I couldn’t stop screaming. Every few seconds something horrible hit the roof, another grisly chunk that shot into the headlights and thumped when the Jeep struck it and knocked it into the night.
I reached the woods. Trees cracked and snapped in the darkness as the wave overran them. More chunks hit the back window.
Somehow I made it to the Chambersburg Pike and floored the Jeep.
My gruesome pursuers kept coming, but they fell away one by one until I was left with a single hellish pair of legs racing in lockstep. The lower half of a man’s body chased me over the highway, pale legs pumping down the yellow line for miles, until a tractor trailer truck ran over the thing and flattened it across two lanes.
* * *
I found Route 15 and was still screaming when I crossed the Maryland state line.
Shadow stations. They were turning people and animals into shadows and making copies of them and doing it in more than one location. They must have made a copy of Ben and burned it in the car, which was why the dental records were a perfect match. For six terrible weeks I’d been taking flowers to a copy buried under his headstone.
They’d tortured Ben because he wouldn’t give up a name.
“
One last time, who did you tell?” the calm tormentor asked.
The prisoner shook his head.
“
Not too smart.” The tormentor’s voice rose. “Give me the name.”
When the prisoner held his head high, the second tormentor squealed with laughter.
It was me. He’d called to tell me he’d seen something outside the Grasslands.
I turned off at tiny Thurmont, Maryland, took a wooded road to Catoctin Furnace, passed the historic furnace stack and the ruins of the iron master’s house, and headed into Cunningham Falls State Park. The deep woods towered over the dark road, but I knew exactly where I was going. My body was changing rapidly. The hot alien matter streaming through my veins guided me there.
In a lightless part of the woods I came to a small stone building that appeared to be a ranger station with restrooms at one end and a red CLOSED sign on the door, but I knew what it really was. I parked my beloved blue Jeep, got out, and took in the damage with my flashlight. Terrible dents, cracked taillights, horrible remains embedded in the tires.
“
You did good,” I told the Jeep and put my hand on the hood. “You got us out of there.”
Us, but not Mike. I forced down a flood of emotion. After Nikki jumped out and we walked to the ranger station, I pressed a stone beside the threshold. The door opened into a sleek black interior that bore no resemblance to a real ranger station: black walls, black tiled floor, and black controls that felt like cool skin when I ran my hands over them. Once we were inside, I led Nikki to another small black room and knelt down beside her.
“
We’re off to the Pacific tonight.” I stroked her fur. “I’m going to find Ben and the portal and go back in time and make everything the way it used to be. Just you and me and him, the way we always were. I’m going to stop him from going on the interview and save Mike’s life and fix everything, put it back the way it was.”
Nikki tilted her head. I wasn’t sure I believed it either.
“
You stay in here. I love you, Nikki. We’ve been together all these years, but I don’t know who or what I’ll be when I open this door again. If I’ve turned into a monster, then you run. You run far and fast and you find somebody else to love you and take care of you. You hear me?”
I left her there and closed the door. I knew what to do next. Open the roof, take the ship over the trees until we were flying above the cloud cover, and head due west under the stars to the open sea.
“
I’m coming, Ben.” I peeled my gloves off and placed my perfect six-fingered hands on the fleshy black controls. “I’m going to fix everything.”
# # #
To be continued…
Shadow Stations (Part Two): Black Friday
will be published in late 2012
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Rachel Cosgrove and April the German shepherd, who appear on the cover, and April’s owners, Ronnie and Tom Martin. My thanks also go to Kathleen Rockwood, Drew Stone, Barbara House, Ian Bontems, Dusty Smith, and Kim Kupperman. Huge thanks go to the madly talented Kealan Patrick Burke for the cover, book design, and editorial guidance. Finally, I’d like to thank you, the reader, for purchasing this book.
Ann Grant is a native of Washington, D.C. with a background in advertising and the arts. She now lives with her beloved collie in the Pennsylvania countryside, where she’s finishing the second book of the Shadow Stations series.
ALSO BY ANN GRANT
(Writing as Hollister Ann Grant)
Ghost Photos from the Gettysburg Battlefield