Threnody (016).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

Ryan made his way back and dropped down on the blankets, showing Maddy the batteries. She set them next to the dimming flashlight. The second woman seemed to be asleep; looking at her hurt: her face was clawed open, the bandages Maddy made soaked through already, and she had lost her left eye and a good deal of the scalp above it. She was missing two of her fingers, and had another wound that went all the way through her calf. It was random chance that they had found her in the house they had taken shelter in when the monsters were coming, and although they had saved her from one of them, Ryan did not think she was going to make it.

Why is it lasting so long? Maddy rubbed her arms. The others never stayed this long.

He shrugged; the twins had said the clouds of darkness that drifted across the land and the terrible creatures that lived inside were just one more piece of the rot that was eating this world alive – but she was right again, they had witnessed over a dozen, and been caught in a couple, and this one was not only incredibly large but was remaining stationary unusually long.

He went to the window, putting his eyes to a crevice in the wood barricade and risking a glance. He saw midnight out on the street, where abominations ran wild. The invading demons were a nightmare hodgepodge of animal and insect parts, merged together by some unknown force that had created them. He watched things with canine heads and serpentine bodies crawl in and out of expensive landscaping; he could just barely make out a harbor seal body with a child’s sweet face, its sides lines with segmented stick legs, scrambling up into the massive old maple in the front yard in pursuit of something edible with a swiftness that defied its bulk. Grasping for description after their first nightcloud survival, Ryan thought he had said it as best as he could when he had told Tim, It’s like somebody went to the zoo and took all the exhibits and shot ‘em full of radiation, and then made them all have babies with each other.

If this isn’t Hell, he whispered low enough so that Maddy could not hear, I don’t want to know what is.

She began cracking her knuckles; she knew it bugged him. You going to say anything?

What do you want me to say? He stepped back from the window, having made eye contact with something oozing with skin like plucked chicken that had chilled him to his core. He ran a shaking hand across his mouth. I don’t know anything. I’m not Tom.

Thudding steps on the roof crossed over their heads. There were two of them, whatever they were, and they could hear them communicating in a buzzing like bees. She pointed the flashlight at the ceiling; Ryan snatched it out of her hand and turned it off.