One
Late on a warm and sunny afternoon, amidst the dreamy
buzzing of late summer locusts, Connie Danielson drew herself a hot bath
and told herself she needed a cold shower.
Age twenty-six was, after all, a bit old for throwing
temper tantrums. Brighton County Deputy Sheriff Rex Hogan, thirty years
of age, six lean, muscular feet in height, had gotten his before leaving
for his evening shift. All she had gotten, as usual, was loads of
self-imposed aggravation.
Connie stepped naked into the warm water, eased
herself down into its comforting embrace, and sighed, considering the
circumstances, contentedly.
Her intent had been to butter him up, lull him into a
sense of complacency, and then nag him about applying for the well-paying
position waiting for him on the Pittsburgh Police Department. Rex had
taken advantage of the buttering. He had smiled tolerantly at her
lecture. He had showered and dressed and with infuriating equanimity had
gone out the front door without saying a word, leaving in his wake her
well-rehearsed speech deteriorated to an frustrated tirade.
His smile did it, like an impenetrable wall of
marshmallows. It was the one thing about him that infuriated her to
absolute distraction.
Connie sighed and closed her eyes. Only very slowly
did the tub of warm water and hissing suds soothed her simmering anger.
She berated herself for letting it get the best of her. Rex's
condescending attitude irked her, but he'd dump her in a hot second if she
pressed too hard.
Abandonment was, after all, her greatest fear. He'd
leap into the willing arms of the sheriff's stepdaughter now that the
dreaded day of Caitlin’s coming-of-age was upon her at last. The
air-headed back-hills beauty had an eye for Rex, and Connie knew better
than to underestimate the effect the supple body of the eighteen-year-old
had on the men of Brighton Hollow.
She couldn't let that happen. Life without the
deputy sheriff would be hell on earth. Without his stabilizing influence,
she'd start sleeping around again, and she knew by long-standing
experience how much happiness and security that would bring her.
"Watch yourself, girl," she murmured to the
stillness.
Okay, so she'd make it up to him in the morning.
She'd withdraw her ultimatum and conduct a subtler guerrilla campaign to
steer Rex clear of his dead-end career in Brighton County. Caitlin could
turn an eye with her skimpy cotton dresses and her nubile young body, but
her own finely-honed skills at catering to the carnal hungers of the men
in her life had to count for something. Her fears of losing Rex were
groundless, or at least exaggerated.
She chuckled in the deathly quiet of the house.
Besides, Sheriff Leon Biggs would shoot anyone messing with his alluring
stepdaughter, Brighton County deputies included. Especially his trusted
deputies, and particularly the one he knew had the young wench's hormones
sizzling. Rex would never dare risk incurring wrath of that magnitude.
A smile lingered on her pursed lips. Having
convinced herself that she'd be ultimately victorious, she finally managed
to relax. A peaceful interlude should have followed. Instead, something
else entirely happened.
Outside, as if fate had waited for one crisis to run
its course before inflicting another, the buzz of the late summer locusts
ceased. Complete silence closed in upon her like an invisible fist.
Connie's eyes flew open to the eerie silence.
A crackling sound emerged from the silence, growing
swiftly in intensity.
"What the hell?"
A report like a gunshot fired on both sides of her
head sent pain stabbing through her ears. Faster than the human eye could
follow, an object shot through the ceiling and struck the rim of the tub.
Cast iron split wide. With a sound like the gong of a bell, her bathwater
emptied through the fissure opening beneath her.
The ceiling of the bathroom blew inward in the wake
of the object. A rain of wood slivers and plaster exploded downward and
stung her exposed body from head to foot. An attic floor joist followed
the rain of debris and slammed with stunning force across the fractured
tub just above her midsection.
Blinded by billowing clouds of dust, Connie
floundered. She painfully rattled elbows and knees against the broken
slabs of enameled iron. When her groping fingers encountered something
solid to hold to, she pulled herself frantically away from the
destruction.
An unexpected barrier of heat blocked her way. She
blinked away the dust in her eyes, then stared down in confusion at a
smoldering object lying at her feet. Its utter strangeness more than the
heat it radiated held her at bay.
Shards of coal-like material glowed red hot and
hissed in the bathwater soaking through plaster dust. An object looking
for all the world like an oversized oyster had been encased in the black
coating. The casing had shattered during its brutal entry into her home
as had the oyster itself.
Upon the halves of this
interior object, a thick white
frost formed and crackled with an intense cold that soaked the heat from skin
heated an instant before. Ice and incandescence sent a chill of
dread through her unprotected flesh. She recognized this object as a
thing from beyond the sky.
Between the shell halves, a gray and mortally wounded
organic mass writhed. The living substance bled green blood and screamed
in a high-pitched keening. A gray, snake-like appendage tipped with a
black talon rose quivering into the air.
Connie tried to sidestep the horror. The creature
sensed movement and struck out at her with a blur of motion. The talon
stabbed her on the inside thigh of her right leg. With a shriek of
terror, she lunged the rest of the way past the quivering mass, tripped
over the fallen joist from overhead, and fell face down through the door
frame to the carpeted bedroom floor.
Pain spread from the point at which the talon had
stung her flesh. A violent trembling shook her body. She pushed herself
to her hands and knees, looked down at herself, and saw that the talon had
broken free and embedded itself in her skin. She flicked the talon aside
in revulsion. Sensing that the sting had been venomous, she resolutely
focused her remaining strength on crawling to safety.
Her intent was to crawl on hands and knees until she
cleared the house entirely. She feared it may have caught fire. The
thought of being trapped naked inside a burning house terrified her beyond
words. Instead, she managed five or six feet before a strange lethargy
engulfed her and sent her toppling helplessly to one side. Unable to rise
again, she reached for the phone cord dangling off the night stand. An
index finger snagged the coiled wire. She tugged and the handset and the
base struck alongside her head and bounced in opposite directions.
Connie extended a shaking arm for the handset with
gritted teeth, engulfed in a fog of terror. The last of her strength
drained away before she reached it, and then consciousness itself. Her
sigh, too, faded away in the deathly silence.
Behind her, the injured organism so cruelly expelled
from the security of its shell pulled itself through its own oozing body
fluids. It reached and stretched with single-minded hunger toward the
warm body it sensed lying so close at hand.
