And that’s when the back end of the station wagon jumps several feet off the earth and flies backward.
Gunfire explodes.
Jordy realizes Bertrand just shot at the Volvo as it lurched toward him. But because he assumed it was being driven by someone, he didn’t calculate for the fact that the damn car was being dragged toward him by its back end by some invisible force, so his bullets went straight into its trunk and not through the back windshield as he’d hoped.
Jordy’s thinking of crazy defense contractor bullshit, of some kind of giant magnetic ray that can lift station wagons off the ground and send them flying through the air, because that’s the only damn thing that might explain whatever the hell he’s seeing.
He stumbles backward, far enough to see the Volvo slam into Bertrand’s chest—not his waist, his damn chest, because that’s how high off the ground the car is—then Bertrand goes down and suddenly the Volvo’s back tires crash back to the earth, and everything seems normal again. Until Bertrand’s dragged under the car.
Bang, bang, bang. Jordy’s not sure where these gunshots came from. Then he sees Frasier upslope. The little dude just fired three shots through the Volvo’s windshield. They’ve spiderwebbed the glass. But maybe Frasier can’t see what Jordy already saw—nobody’s behind the Volvo’s wheel.
Someone’s under the Volvo. Someone lifted it.
And now Bertrand’s under it.
And that someone’s under it with Bertrand.
His mind is trying to stretch to accommodate this impossibility, but everything else inside him is fighting it. Then something spits out from under the station wagon, sliding through the dirt toward his feet. He jumps backward, fires, then realizes he’s been frightened by a mouse. Not literally, but close. The thing’s hand-size, a misshapen mass of metal. At first, he thinks it’s a piece of the car; then he recognizes the barrel of Bertrand’s gun, bent at a ninety-degree angle.
The Volvo rises into the air again. Much higher this time. And higher. The nose drops to the ground suddenly, but the back end keeps rising.
Too late, Frasier starts firing like mad, bullets punching through the Volvo’s upturned roof. Then the entire station wagon flies forward roof-first six feet, ten feet, and smashes into the trees Frasier’s crouching behind.
Thrown, he thinks against his will. Something just threw that damn car at Frasier.
Jordy’s so stunned he almost misses the patch of darkness rushing toward him. It’s darkness in the shape of a woman.
He lets out a scream that fills him with shame, then he runs like hell.
Branches scratch and claw at him.
He hears more gunfire behind him. Frasier. He must have been able to skitter backward away from the flying Volvo in time. The gunfire’s closer to him than the station wagon. Frasier’s pursuing whatever this thing is—demon, demon, demon, his mind screams. The brave little fucker lets out a warlike yell, and that’s when Jordy realizes he’s got a gun just like Frasier does, but he’s running like some dickless little shit, and so he spins, gun raised, ready to face the demon behind him.
He spins in time to see Frasier rocket backward through the air, over the road, cracking and snapping the branches with his back, until he lands against one with a sickening thud. When the little dude suddenly goes limp ten feet off the ground, Jordy realizes he didn’t land against it; the branch went straight through him, and that’s why he’s screaming.
Jordy fires once, twice into the darkness, convinced it’ll be useless but just as convinced he’s got to do something on behalf of his friend. His screaming, dying friend.
There’s a riot of snapping branches in the darkness. It’s coming toward him. These aren’t twigs or leaves crunching under foot; these are thick limbs and maybe even the trunks of small trees, and whatever’s coming for him, it’s breaking them like kindling as it claws its way through the dark.
The shed’s his best hope; the shed and its fuel and weapons and God knows what else he might be able to use to defend himself against this demon. If he has to give his life for this, maybe this is the moment, the moment when he and this demon bitch go down together in a marriage of flame, all so Milo and the others can get away.
He throws himself against the shed’s door, grabs the handle, then he’s ripped backward. He makes the mistake of holding on to the handle as hard as he can. His shoulder pops out of its socket. It feels like his entire torso’s caught fire. He lands face-first in the dirt. After the terror of the chase and now the fresh agony of his broken shoulder, the single tap of a foot against his lower back feels almost comical. Then the foot braces itself against his right side and pushes him over onto his back like a spatula.
Not a foot, he reminds himself. A hoof, a cloven hoof.
Jordy blinks madly, prepares himself to behold some of the grotesqueries of Revelations, the face of a true demon. Instead, he finds himself looking up into the eyes of a vaguely familiar woman with a plain, baby fat–padded face and straw-colored hair and an expression on her face that comes from some feeling between rage and focus for which he doesn’t have a name.
“Where is he?” she asks quietly.
Jordy laughs deliriously. His girlfriend. Prescott’s fucking girlfriend.
“Is he in there?” she asks. “In the shed?”
Jordy wants to stop laughing, but for that he’d have to be breathing, and he can’t do that, either. Apparently, she takes the resulting struggle as an insult because she raises her right foot high, then brings it down into the earth several inches from his face. When she withdraws her foot from the crater it just made, the sole of her tennis shoe has a fissure running down its length, but wedged in the dirt is the misshapen mass that used to be his gun.