THUNK
My body jolts back and forth as the impact rattles the truck, and the brakes act with all their might. I'm death-gripping the steering wheel when I come to a stop, and the noise fades until there's nothing left but the soft growl of an idling engine.
I take a deep breath and exhale slowly, feeling the shock drain out of me as my hands relax. The biting cold of the sweat in my gloves brings me back down. Damn. Fuck! I hit a deer again... Inhale, exhale. Damn.
I grab my rifle from the passenger seat and push the door open, stepping into the biting cold. In the yellow glow, I can see the grill held up—only a few extra dents this time. The headlights carve the darkness into sharp glare and long black shadows that seem to stretch forever.
My car is fine. Nothing bad has happened. The front of the vehicle won't survive many more impacts like that, though—not that it'll be my problem. Maybe I should have gotten the heating fixed... The thought fogs in front of me like smoke.
If I were hungry, I could eat the remains of the deer. It's roadkill, but I know how to find the edible parts. Still, I'm not hungry, and really, I'm not in the mood to turn streetmeat into food when there's actual people-food waiting in the trunk.
Following the twin beams of the headlights, I find my victim. It's smaller than I expected, its limbs splayed out unnaturally across the dirty snow, still twitching faintly in the cold.
Normally, deer are quiet—but this one isn't. It's moaning softly, a low, broken sound that barely reaches the air. I think it even screamed when I hit it, which was strange. And tragic.
My mind splits into two, one side seeing the cervine head and fur, and the other screaming that the thing is a human with human proportions and limbs.
My boots hesitantly crunch through the ice as I get closer and see that the creature is indeed part man and part animal, with shoulders, hands, and clothes.
They... she... is wearing a heavy brown overcoat.
It's the most revolting beast I've ever seen in my life, a poor imitation of the human and deer forms inexpertly mashed together.
I turn my eyes away and take a few steps back.
I hold my rifle tightly.
None of the dozen attachments and modifications would make the difference, but if I've just run into a demon, the runes carved up and down the wooden frame might.
When I get back to the creature, the blood dripping from its mouth onto the grey snow has started to pool and freeze.
It's managed to get a hand into one of the pockets of its purse, the strap still laying across its body.
I grab what it retrieves and yank it free to find it's a flip-phone of some sort.
The creature speaks, gurgling words I can barely make out in a voice like a woman's, yet tinged with the bleating of a deer, beautiful in an unnaturally inhuman way.
Most of it is unintelligible through the pain-haze and the organ damage, but at least one word sounds like "Hospital".
It can talk.
I scream with primal terror and smash the butt of my rifle into its head over and over again with all my strength.
SMACK
it cries in pain.
Whatever it is, it isn't natural.
Or no—maybe it is, but it's not benevolent.
I've heard hundreds of tales of strange beasts that wander the local woods, and this matches at least a few of them.
Those stories tell of malevolent creatures that try and worm their way into your house to kill and consume you.
I had always suspected they were real in a metaphorical way, but clearly they were real—no asterisks, all truth.
The schizophrenics on the internet were right all along, fucking again.
I should stop making fun of them.
I consider showing this to them, but they'd probably call any pictures edited.
I have to tell someone about this, though, right?
My breath is ragged through my balaclava.
It might not be dead, but it's clearly not going to stay alive for much longer.
I don't want to eat a cryptid.
I don't think I could sell it, either.
The demon is unmoving now, faintly breathing, and I'm standing over it.
I push its limbs around with the butt of my rifle to confirm it really has human body parts.
Then I bend over and start going through its clothes myself.
The coat pockets hold a pair of gloves, far thinner than the ones it's already wearing.
The purse holds makeup, money, business cards, and notes, but when I shine my flashlight on it, it's all in an alphabet I've never seen before.
Bills and coins bear faces and buildings I've never imagined.
I put it back and unbutton her coat.
Underneath is a button-up shirt and a skirt, with layers of underclothes to keep her warm in spite of the airiness of the school uniform.
The smaller buttons strain my dexterity through my own gloves.
Underneath the shirt is bare fur, the patterns and colors not unexpected of a deer—yet normal deer do not have... breasts.
Again my mind is torn in two directions as I instinctively recognize the fluid softness as just like a human's, even though I've never felt a human's.
And yet I am revolted by the creature.
She grabs me weakly, desperation in her eyes.
She's beginning to cry, and her tears mix with the blood that covers her face after my assault.
I pull away quickly.
Trapped between the sickening mire of adrenaline and embarrassment, I give up trying to understand what I'm looking at.
I actively push away the guilt.
Monsters like to use that in their traps.
Or so I read.
She weighs little more than a human of her size would, and I haul her into the trunk, folding her in to fit.
She barely resists, and it's clear that some of those things were not supposed to bend in the ways they could.
Who do you go to with a new species?
The veterinarian? The university?
How about a mythological creature?
There ought to be a research lab that can handle that somewhere, but I don't think I've ever seen one—and I don't know where to look.
I stare down at the slowly writhing body.
If they are a normal creature, they ain't long for this world.
I guess I'll swing by the vet's on the way and give her to them.
By then she'll have expired, but she'll have frozen solid. How convenient for them.
I close the trunk and lean against the side of my car, thinking, waiting for my body to settle down enough that I'm comfortable driving again.
Besides the headlights and one of the interior lights, I can't see a damn thing—not the road, not the forest, nothing.
Yeah.
I need to take a second to relax.
I can't drive while this amped up.
A few seconds sounds nice.
The forest is illuminated by a new set of lights as a car drives by.
It slows to a stop and pulls over right behind mine.
I curse that it didn't arrive a few minutes later so I could avoid this conversation, but I'm glad it didn't arrive any sooner—so I'm not totally on edge.
Even better since I can make out emergency lights on the roof and the blue glow of a police dashboard computer.
The cop who steps out is almost as bundled up as I am, not an inch of skin showing anywhere.
I double-check and make sure I put my firearms away.
I did.
"Hey, son," the cop opens in the gruffest voice I've ever heard, putting his arms around himself to keep warm.
"You doing alright?"
I try to respond, but I haven't talked in weeks.
I can only rasp until I hack and cough to clear up my throat.
"Yeah, uh, I just hit... something," I tell him.
"I'm fine, but I'm a little... rattled. I'm waiting to calm down before I get going again, you know..."
"That's fine. Lots of animals around here, they love to jump in front of cars."
The cop leans from one side to the other.
"It's a shame, but it happens. I just wanted to make sure you weren't having vehicle trouble or nothing—it'd be a real problem if you were stuck out here."
He sneezes from the cold.
"Those things are real damn annoying," I say.
"I know, right? Tcha! The other day I got called to deal with a spider that was hiding in some guy's attic.
It had already eaten the family's hamster."
He bows his head in mock consternation.
"Must have been a big spider," I reply.
"I've seen bigger at the tarantula exhibit. Man, those are freaky. Tcha!"
"You got a cold, man?"
"Probably will before the night's out. Say, your catcher's beat to hell.
What have you been running into?"
I breathe in. "Uh, deer, mostly."
"Yeah, they love jaywalking. I don't get it. Tcha!"
"That's an understatement. I've hit, probably like a dozen of them in the last few years.
It's crazy."
The cop's stance changes. "No shit?"
"Yeah. It's kind of, uh, depressing to put them down every time I cross one in the woods and it doesn't explode or die on impact."
There's a pause.
"...No shit?" the cop asks hesitantly.
"Yeah, but it's all fine now. I'm fine. Thanks for the checkup."
I can't tell if he buys it.
I don't think I've done anything wrong, but I don't want to put that theory to the test while I'm cold and nervous and would have a hard time explaining myself.
Plus, the longer this conversation goes on, the more likely I am to be shaken down.
"Say, mind if I get your name? Just got to note that this happened.
Paperwork and all. Tcha!" he asks.
He has a clear view of my license plate.
I can't give him a fake name.
I stammer.
"Tops. Uh, Tohopka. Oskoriae Tohopka."
The policeman takes out a notepad and scribbles a few lines as he mutters to himself.
I catch my own name and little else in the mix.
He looks around one last time and catches some residue from the demon in the trunk.
He points to the streak of blood sliding down the back fender.
Expectedly, he suddenly becomes guarded.
"So, Tops, care to explain what that is?"
"Oh, that's, uh, the thing that I hit that had me so, you know, out of it. It's damn weird. Never seen anything like it, never."
I navigate to the back of the car and pop the trunk.
I half expect the demon-thing to have been a figment of my imagination that disappeared once I took my eyes off it, yet there it is—
the broken remains of a half-deer, half-schoolgirl being, lying there and bleeding on the lining.
She's probably dead by now.
"You ever seen anything like it?"
The policeman leans over and looks at it.
He tenses up, and his sidearm comes out.
I can barely make out the grey shape in our small island of visibility.
"Hands up. You're under arrest."
It suddenly hits me that there's a gun pointed right at me.
My heart skips a few beats, and the passage of time becomes theoretical.
I have no choice but to throw up my arms.
My mind runs in circles, trying to figure out what's happening.
The cop gets stern with me.
"Take off your mask, you rat bastard.
Let the dashcam get a good look at you."
I oblige.
The fabric is pulled over my face, and every nerve is lanced by the frigid air of a winter midnight.
My eyes feel like they'll freeze shut if I blink.
My body feels like I'll be shot if I move.
Fucking—he's not a cop. He's a fed. A man in black.
I should have guessed.
And I should have fucking guessed that Pops and the internet schizophrenics were right about this too. Fuck!
The cop looks intently at me.
His pistol starts to shake as his breathing becomes quick and shallow.
"What... uh, is..." he mumbles.
I keep a sawed-off over-under shotgun inside of my giant military surplus trench coat. It's absurdly hefty for a sidearm, especially to a teenager, and it can't be carried subtly at any time except the dead of winter.
I carry it for bears, and it handles 600-pound killing machines just fine. I'm lucky there's no such thing as overkill.
The fed was too distracted. His first shot goes wide by at least a few feet, but before he can readjust for a second try, a baseball-sized hole has appeared in his shoulder, staining the entire street with vibrant red blood.
He falls to the ground, grabbing his limp arm, hanging on by a strand of flesh, and screaming in pain, but I have two shots. I put the other one into his chest, causing gore to erupt like a fountain and splatter the road.
Looking down at the shuddering corpse, I realize that the mask he wears isn't shaped for a human head. I kneel down and pull it off to reveal the head of a furry pig with a wide, square snout and small tusks.
I do not know what to make of it. I carefully reload my sawed-off, burning smoke making a hole in the frigid air.
The dashboard camera in the cop's car is still aiming at me. If I'm lucky, the signal here is bad enough that it's not also broadcasting, or that it was never turned on since I was going to be liquidated soon anyways.
The door is unlocked and I point my shotgun inside, realizing my mistake as I'm pulling the trigger. The small rectangular camera explodes into shrapnel, but I barely hear my own gunshot over the ringing in my ears, and I no longer have feeling in my wrist.
I force myself to fire the other round into the dash computer. I shut the trunk to my car, unload the spent twelve gauge shells into the glove box to dispose of them later, and reload with some fresh ones.
My thoughts are a soup of feelings and worries and plans, I speed off into the night, hoping to find something useful.
I drove for a long time, maybe minutes and maybe hours, constantly wondering if I would throw up. The adrenaline rush had left me shaking and sweating ever since I left the scene of my crime, and once the energy faded, I was saddled with exhaustion and bottomless nausea. And a sore wrist.
I didn't have anywhere in particular I was going at first. I just wanted to get away and figure it out later. And I did.
Where do you go when you've just blasted a cop in the face? For me, there's only one answer: The same place you go to get a secondhand Stevens 555 over/under shotgun turned into a conceal-carry weapon. I might be hours away from my house, but I'm not far from my uncle's place.
The trip there is harrowing. Nothing of note happens, but I see the signs, the buildings. It isn't just one stretch of road.
For tens of miles, I see places that look similar to their earthly counterparts, but different. Text is in the alien language, the designs are ever-so-slightly different to match the wishes of their creators, and everything is just a little fake. If I were in a better headspace, I might feel like I'm in a poor reproduction of my precious Tennessee.
Instead, I feel like I'm going insane. It strikes me that my uncle's house might not be my uncle's house anymore, and when I get near, I don't get into the driveway, I pull over to the side of the road and continue on foot.
Dead branches snap as I fearfully clutch my rifle. A hundred yards into the woods, I reach the clearing where the log cabin sits.
There it is — and yet it too is slightly different from what I remember. I turn on the night-vision mode of my rifle's scope and crouch down.
It's scratchy and low-quality because I cheaped out. I can see, though, that the inside of the building is radically different from how it was when I was there.
The lights turn on inside and I get lower to the ground. Something comes out the front door.
It's a wolf-man. A wolf? Maybe, maybe not, but it's something carnivorous for sure.
He sniffs at the air hesitantly, then turns in my general direction and barks at me. I don't think he can see me, so I slowly back up.
If I'm lucky, he'll think he was just imagining things.
The trees close in around me again, their dark silhouettes twisting together until the sky itself feels strangled.
I hear him going back inside, the door creaking shut, the faint echo carried by the cold air.
I stand up and go back to my car.
I'm alone.
I have part of a tank of gas, and the only things I know for sure are the things I have in my car.
The metal hums faintly in the silence, the smell of oil and cold plastic seeping into my nose as I grip the steering wheel.
I haven't slept in seventy-two hours, which cannot be helping me figure out what to do.
My reflection in the rearview mirror looks like someone else — hollow-eyed, pale, half unreal.
If everywhere in this new world is a simulacra of somewhere from the old, though...
then what about uninhabited places?
During a car trip with my dad, we once passed a big hill and he told me about how, if you only went a few hundred feet into the woods, you'd see the remains of a once-bustling theme park that was nearly invisible to the town around it. I wondered if it was just as abandoned now.
It was. It was also a lot bigger than I expected, taking up the entire miniature mountain.
I found a place to stash my Wagoneer so that it was at least a little hidden, then grabbed some of my hunting gear, found an appropriate shack. And passed out.