The Girl in Red

It seemed to grow even as Red watched, the uncoiling muscles expanding.

Something like this could only be made in a lab, Red thought, and she almost laughed out loud but it would be a hysterical laughing because her brain was on the verge of breaking. She actually was inside one of the horror movies that she loved so much, and there was a flesh-eating monster and a government conspiracy to boot.

And Adam had been right all along—it had been a monster living inside people. A first in all the history of the world, she thought, and then tried not to choke on her tears and her fear because this was what had killed him.

The Thing That Should Not Be rose up, not unlike a snake from a basket. But Red was no snake charmer, and there were no eyes on the creature to charm.

“Sam,” Red said. “Go inside the house.”

Red felt rather than saw Sam shake her head no.

“Sam, you have to listen to me. You have to get away,” Red said.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Sam said in her tiniest voice. “What if it runs after me?”

“It can’t run. It doesn’t have any legs,” Red said, and snorted. That crazy laughter was brewing just under the surface. She had to get herself under control. There was a kid present and it wouldn’t do for Sam to see her sort-of-guardian completely lose her shit.

“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to back away slowly.”

The Thing That Should Not Be made a kind of hissing noise in their direction. Red realized it wasn’t vocalizing. It was just spinning its terrible teeth.

If I ever see Sirois again I am going to shake him until he tells me just what the hell these things are and why anyone thought it was a good idea to create them in the first place.

Red shifted her right foot backward. Sam had a death grip on that pant leg, so the little girl shuffled back too.

“Nice and easy,” Red said. “We’re just going to leave it here and make our way—”

It leapt with astonishing swiftness. Red saw all those teeth filling her field of vision. She swung the axe purely on instinct, using her leg to push Sam back and away from both the axe and the monster.

The axe caught the creature just behind the buzzing sawteeth. It didn’t slice clean, though, because Red hadn’t put enough effort into the swing. The axe blade was embedded halfway through but the thing was too

Stupid? Powerful? Magical?

to die just because it had a blade stuck inside it. Red drove her arm toward the ground and the creature bucked and fought, trying to coil its head around to bite her wrist. She slammed the creature onto the ground and pushed the axe all the way through and the end with the teeth popped off.

The other end of the creature lay still but the teeth kept moving, trying to bite. Bright purple fluid leaked out of both ends of the monster, looking like nothing so much as a Secret Lab Solution. Red scrambled away from the corpse and bumped into Sam.

“You killed it,” Sam said.

Red eyed the whirring teeth. “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, it can’t chase us,” Sam said, and she sounded cheerful for the first time since Red had killed the men who’d kidnapped her.

“Yeah, but when are its batteries going to run down?” Red asked.

She stood up, very slowly, and felt her hands shaking. Adrenaline had gotten her this far and now she was crashing. Pretty soon she would feel an overwhelming desire to sleep. They couldn’t sleep out here, though—not even in the brick house with its terrible orange color scheme. There were three bodies in the road and Red didn’t have the time or the energy to move them very far.

“Here’s the thing,” Red said. “These guys were on patrol. That means if they don’t return within a certain time frame, then someone from their group will come looking for them. Chances are they won’t bother walking, either—they’ll come out in a truck.”

“So we can’t be anywhere near these guys when they do that,” Sam said, catching on quickly.

“Exactly,” Red said. “Not to mention the fact that Riley and D.J. are waiting for us. I think the best thing to do is to roll their bodies into the ditch so they aren’t easy to find, and then we should try going across country diagonally to get back to D.J.’s. There’s no need for us to follow the road exactly, right?”

“You were only doing that so you could find out where their patrol was going,” Sam said. “And I screwed that up.”

“Action now, self-recrimination later,” Red said. “I’ll roll the bodies into the ditch. You go back and shut that front door. Make sure the house looks like it’s sealed up tight, but first double-check that I didn’t leave anything in the living room.”

“You’re sending me away because you think I’m too little for this,” Sam said.