Like Modern Warfare. Michael breathed out hard to steady his crosshairs, and his breath fogged the lens. Frakking cripes, the alternator! The engine kicked over.
Relief flooded him. And Patrick screamed. From twenty feet away, Michael watched a Bellow moving toward the station wagon.
Blonde hair crawled over her scalp. A silver necklace glittered on her skinless clavicle. She fell on the hood, clawed toward the windshield.
The woman reared an arm back. With the power common to all Bellows, she struck at the windshield. Cracks popped across it. Patrick laughed as glass dusted down. Too good. Michael exhaled a slow stream like a digitized sniper and he pulled the trigger. The creature stopped screaming and slid from the hood and spun to the dirt with a thud. Two shots now. Sixty, seventy-five. The forest echoed, in hideous stereo, alive.
So burn it alive, Michael saw. He saw it, even though it had not happened yet: the satisfaction and the yes-yes simply loaded the image, fully formed, inside his mind. He ran to the car. Pulled out from the trunk a five-gallon nickel tank. If you say one more word, tonight they are going to win. It stopped on a rock several steps ahead of the approaching Bellows, glinting. Michael cocked the bolt and lifted the rifle. He steadied the crosshairs. He checked the safety—off—and— —wait wait wait!
His shot now was flawless: the tank sang and bled some of its insides. The night went casket black. The sleeping-bag fire behind them had died, the flare, too. Michael rushed to the trunk and grabbed another flare. He slammed it bright on the seat of the bike, waved it once in an arc over his head to drive back the Bellows now only paces behind the car, then flung it at the tank. Where it landed too far, the sparks hissing the wrong way.
He settled on the lead Bellow ahead. Maybe it would fall, make the others stumble, giving the car time to escape. And without thinking, at the final instant, swung the bead back at the tank. A cry of light and a flat crack. The slug punctured the tank and slung a tongue of gas forward: a liquid fuse, an airborne fuse.
The flare lit it and it detonated. Knew it! Knew it knew it knew! A blazing arm roared high from the gas tank, exploding the canopy above in a catastrophe of flame. Fire glimmered and traced the gas trail up the hill, raising a primal barrier between the car and the Bellows of the forest.
His eardrums shook with it. An airborne moment when the car bucked off a tree root, then they were off, tearing snow and earth toward the core of the explosion. He heard and felt the fire, a hot cloak unfurling above, then it was gone and he was moving like a pinball between the standing Bellows, feeling sick and smiling, both, as he watched them burn.
Michael cocked the wheel at the bottom of the hill, fishtailed, barreled down the length of the dogleg road parallel with the creek. He shot them onto the bridge and across it and only then slowed to under sixty. This eeeeve? It felt gorgeous. Michael grinned and held up his crossed fingers. Tomorrow, maybe.
Michael Martin's debut novel is a transcendent thriller filled with electrifying action, searing emotional insight, and unexpected romance.
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