In Laymon's Terms

The room was a shell. The door looked fine on the outside, but inside it hadn’t even been sanded down. There were beams supporting the outside wall and the one to the hall, but no other walls, no furniture, no light switch, only bare wood and wires hanging haphazardly from the ceiling.

Where there should have been a wall to the next room, Dirk walked straight through. It encompassed all four rooms on this side of the motel, one long Hollywood behind-the-scenes facade. Outside, everything looked fine. Inside, Dirk left a second set of footsteps in the sawdust.

Five steps in the room, he wished he’d taken his guns.

“Fluffy?”

He jumped, the girl’s voice startled him so badly. Not good to get jumpy like that, even in the middle of the Twilight Zone. No wonder the motel had filled up so quickly; it was only half a motel. Or less.

The footprints Dirk had been following ended abruptly, with neither a turn to one side nor a reversal of direction. Someone, not too long ago, had stopped here. Every muscle in Dirk’s body tensed. A small pool of blood, thick and congealed, had spread to about half a foot in diameter just a few steps beyond where he stood now. A splattering of fresh stains surrounded it.

Slowly, Dirk raised his head to see, in the highest rafters, a man’s naked, ravaged body The arms and legs were pinned, crookedly, between the beams and the ceiling. Bones must have been cracked to force the arms in those directions. The chest cavity had been savagely opened, the organs removed without delicacy, leaving a gaping hole with the sharp edges of ribs protruding randomly.

From the door, he hadn’t seen the body; he hoped the girl with the lost dog didn’t, either.

He didn’t want to stay long to look at it, but a few peculiarities struck him. The eyes had been popped out. He hadn’t been stripped, but his clothes had been shredded to nearly nothing.

Dirk never had time to consider what might have done this before the girl and her mother let out a pair of high-pitched screams. There were words underneath, totally lost beneath terror, but Dirk didn’t need to discern the words to understand the meaning.

He crouched, turned, and stepped aside in a single motion. The creature, stooped even lower, snarled. It separated Dirk from the open door, from which the women had fled.

Its snout was wolf-like, its fur silvery gray, but its eyes were human. Angry, maybe, but human. Its front legs were actually arms hanging, knuckles scraping, to the floor. Saliva dripped from its jaw. Canines glistened, catching every ounce of available light from the hallway.

To Dirk’s left, another creature growled. There was probably another behind him; like a pack of wolves, they’d surrounded and trapped him.

He knew what had killed the man in the ceiling.

Fluffy emerged from wherever she hid, teeth bared, barking, tail tucked tight behind her. She was not white at all but sandy, medium-sized, half the weight of the creature blocking the door. She’d come from behind it.

When the creature turned, Dirk knew he’d never get another chance. He dashed for the door, passing too close to the thing. He heard the other behind him.

The girl appeared at the doorway with Dirk. He ran straight into her, and they toppled to the ground. Behind him, the dog yelped and then was silent. Dirk scrambled to pull the door shut, untangling himself from the screaming girl whose Fluffy had led him into this room in the first place.

In that brief moment, he saw that two of the creatures had ripped the dog in half. One scooped internal organs out of its torso; the other crouched on its legs, staring at Dirk.

Dirk managed to pull the door shut before two other creatures, bounding toward him from opposite corners of the room, slammed into it. The whole motel shuddered with their momentum.

The girl was incoherent, calling for Fluffy and reaching for the door. “No,” Dirk said, dragging her bodily away.

“Jessie, no!” the mother cried, rushing toward them.

The creatures opened the door behind him. They didn’t tear it from the hinges, and hadn’t pounded through it with brute strength. Rather, one had reached for the knob, turned it, and almost silently pulled it open.

Dirk, half on his feet and half carrying Jessie, threw an arm around the mother as he crossed the hall and shoved her into his room. He slammed the door and locked it behind him.

Again, there was no pounding.

“What...what...?” Mother couldn’t finish the question, but Dirk didn’t have any answer. Still carrying Jessie with one arm, he went to his bed. He shrugged the girl off and reached into his bag.

The room became very quiet, with only the wind howling against the windows.

“What are you doing?” the mother finally asked. When Dirk turned to face her, he had a semi-automatic in each hand.

“Get to the center of the room,” he said.