They Came With the Rain Read online

  “Amber, we need to go,” Derrick repeated, sternly now. “And you need to take a couple steps back.”

  As if to torment Derrick, Amber sauntered even closer to the sinkhole so that she was now only a step or two away from the rim, her head still to the sky, oblivious.

  “Amber!”

  Derrick moved in to grab Amber, slipping on the lunge, the rain having brought to the surface oils that had lain dormant for almost ten weeks now. But he regained his footing quickly and grabbed the girl at her wrist just as she was about to take another step back, one that, were it not for Derrick, may have been the last purposeful movement she ever made in her life.

  “Jesus Christ, Amber! What the hell are you doing?”

  “What?”

  “What? I just saved your fucking life!”

  Amber snatched her wrist from Derrick’s hand and then pushed him backwards, both palms in the middle of his chest. “The fuck off of me, Derrick. What the hell are you doing, huh?” She squinted and shook her head, disgusted. “Goddamn, man, you’re so...ugh. Just leave me alone. If you’re so freakin’ scared of the rain, get on out. I’ll be fine here by myself.”

  “You almost fell in!” He paused. “And I saw...” He hesitated again, trying to recall the images he’d seen earlier in the sinkhole. Only a couple of minutes had passed since then, not more than three or four, and already he was doubting whether he’d seen anything at all. Maybe it was some eruption of underground oil, he now considered. Or a tree that had been growing underground, one that, once the sinkhole was formed, slowly made its way to the surface, even accelerating now through some layer of dirt that the rain had softened. Perhaps the latent tree had even caused the sinkhole, Derrick pondered, which would have explained its occurrence despite the lack of rain.

  None of that made sense, of course; if it was oil or a tree, either would still be visible right now. Derrick was grasping.

  “I’m not even close! Look!”

  She was a yard away, if that. “I’m not going anywhere,” Derrick said, trying to bring the conversation down a peg, though, in the pouring rain, his words were drowned, and he had to project his voice, making all of what he said sound like yelling. “Just be careful. It’s wet now and it’s hard to see the edge of the hole.” He checked the sky again. “And in a minute or two, the moon’ll be covered and then it’s going to be pitch black.”

  “’K, dad,” Amber replied, sneering. “I’ll be extra careful.”

  Derrick shook his head, annoyed, but he kept his eyes on his girl. Amber was flexing her stubbornness muscle to its full capacity, but he was still responsible for her, and if anything happened to her at that sinkhole, the blame would fall fully on his shoulders, just as it should.

  Amber shook her hair out now and reached down to the hem of her shirt, crisscrossing her arms at her chest and then lifting the garment over her head.

  “What are you doing, Am?”

  “I’m getting naked. What’s it look like?”

  She reached both hands around to the clasp of her bra now, but as she was about to snap it loose, she stopped in the middle of the motion, standing frozen for just a moment before taking a step backwards.

  “Derrick?” she said, her voice trembling, teetering on a cry.

  “What is it?” Derrick’s voice was the masculine mirror of Amber’s, shaky and frightened, and the dark shapes from minutes ago snapped back to the front of his mind.

  “I saw something, Derrick. I...Just now. Just in the distance. I don’t know what, but—”

  “Where?”

  “I...I don’t know. Just...through the rain. It was blurry but...I don’t know what it was. I don’t even know...what it could have been.”

  Derrick grabbed Amber’s arm again, gently, and this time she let him guide her away from the hole, and they both walked slowly backwards for several paces before finally turning toward the truck which was still parked along the guardrail on the embankment.

  They picked up their pace now until they were almost running, following the beckoning glow of the headlights. They were close now, less than ten yards from the truck, when a long, thin shape passed in front of the dual beams, stretching a shadow over the pair before instantly disappearing into the dark.

  They both stopped instantly.

  “Did you see that?” It was Amber, nearly hysterical. “What the fuck was that?”

  “It was...I don’t know. A deer maybe. I saw it earlier...I—”

  “You saw a deer earlier? Or you saw something? Cuz whatever I saw back by the sinkhole wasn’t no deer. And that sure as shit wasn’t one either.” Amber was yelling now, crying, and Derrick raised his hands in front of his face, palms out in a pressing motion, signaling for her to calm down.

  “It’s probably Omar and Kenny fucking with us. That’s why they’re not hanging—"

  But before Derrick could finish his bolstering statement, the form reemerged in the headlights, this time stopping in front of the beams, looming in the glow, presenting itself as a towering silhouette at the front of the truck.

  It wasn’t Omar or Kenny; that much Derrick knew for sure.

  “Derrick?” Amber squeaked.

  Derrick squinted toward the shape, his eyes simultaneously filling with the driving rain and tears of panic. The shape appeared almost featureless in the shafts of light, at least a foot taller than Derrick, and it stood erect—almost perfectly—so straight and still that it appeared as much like a tree as a man.

  Yet despite its symmetry and body design—which was familiar, recognizable as something resembling a human, with shoulders that arched high above its long torso and arms that hung like frozen branches down past its waist to the middle of its upper legs—it was blurry, formless at times, the black outline bleeding constantly into the air, yet recollecting back to form just before lingering too far.

  Derrick tried desperately to make sense of the image, to place it within the context of all he knew to be scientifically possible. It was alive, there was little doubt about that; Derrick had seen it move, as did Amber. It had crawled from the pit like some misty crocodile, and Derrick quickly reminded himself that he had seen at least two more, though the things had been so close to each other it was difficult to tell where one creature had ended and another began.

  The rain began to ease slightly now, and Derrick could now make out the being’s head a bit more clearly, even noting the outlines of features, though nothing he could definitively call a face.

  “What...what do you want?” Derrick asked finally, yelling the words, instinctually taking a tone that was assertive, aggressive, though through the rain his voice sounded timid to his own ears, impotent.

  The creature stood motionless, giving no indication that it had heard Derrick at all. Its position directly in the front of the truck eliminated any chance of Derrick and Amber using the Ranger as a means of escape, so, for just a moment, Derrick considered grabbing Amber’s hand and running with her back down the road toward town. If the thing wasn’t going to allow them passage to the truck, then they could try to jog the seven miles home, walking when they became exhausted. It would be the trek of a lifetime, in the pouring rain at night with some skeletal black form lurking in the dark behind them, but at least it would give them a chance.

  And that led to another possibility: that perhaps this thing standing before them wanted Derrick and Amber to flee, that its purpose was to frighten them off, allowing it to carry out whatever secret reason it had for being there.

  But Derrick quickly reconsidered the flight notion, remembering again the other pit creatures he had seen and that were possibly lingering somewhere beyond the light. With that scenario, strolling along the dark mountain road on foot probably wasn’t the best play, at least not immediately. Besides, they had eyes on this creature, so, until he had no other choice, he would see out this showdown.

  The young couple stood their ground for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably closer to two, neither speaking as they
studied the form, both barely breathing, waiting for the black shadow to give even the slightest jerk or flutter.

  And then, as if triggered by some unseen signal, the creature’s head twitched just a hair, down and to the left, as if it were noticing some sound or motion coming from behind. The movement left a puff of residue lingering in its wake, floating in the air for just a moment before finding its source again.

  The movement seemed benign at first, but only seconds later the stalk-like figure bent forward at the waist and twisted its body in a long sweeping motion until its torso was turned entirely around so that the shape was facing the truck.

  The creature’s back was to the couple now, and the instinct to run again emerged in Derrick’s mind. But, as if reading Derrick’s mind, the thing took two long strides to its left and was suddenly out of sight again.

  “Shit, Derrick!” Amber cried. “Where is it? Shit!”

  Derrick said nothing in response, his stare still frozen on the void left by the creature. But the thing hadn’t left for good—Derrick could still hear it in the night—and then, suddenly, the headlights of the Ranger flashed wildly toward the sky, and the flash was immediately followed by the sound of the truck rocking back to the ground before settling.

  There was a lull of silence, five seconds perhaps, and then the headlights scattered again as the truck was turned upside down, flipped to its roof in one smooth motion. Derrick stared in wonder as his vehicle balanced for just a moment atop the guardrail and then toppled down to the ground on the opposite side of the barrier.

  “Oh, god!” Amber whimpered, a verbal acknowledgement of the strength required to push four thousand pounds of metal and rubber up over a guardrail.

  Derrick watched helplessly as the vehicle rolled back to its tires on the other side of the rail, completing a revolution; but the force of the thrust was enough to send the Ranger another quarter turn so that it rolled again until the driver’s side door was flat on the ground. This time, however, the body of the truck caught the slope and the pull of gravity below, and in a wink, the pickup plunged from the landscape into a freefalling plummet down the side of the mountain.

  “No!” Derrick yelped, a desperate response that included a combination of the loss of his truck, the inhuman strength of whatever monster was before them, and the helpless situation in which he and Amber now found themselves.

  Amber screamed, bending at the knees as she did, putting her full energy into the shriek. And then, without another thought, she turned toward the road and ran, taking the choice about what to do next into her own hands.

  Derrick watched her go, as if witnessing her in a dream, desiring to call her name but incapable of producing the sound lodged deeply in his throat. He turned back to the monster now—unconsciously settling on the word for the moment, as he was aware of no other one that could truly describe it—hearing the final sounds of his destroyed truck settling at the bottom of the ravine resonate up the mountain.

  Derrick searched the night for the monster now, trying to locate the spot where it had been only seconds earlier, but it was gone. Without the illumination of the headlights, it was possible that it was standing right in front of him, blending in with the rain and darkness.

  Derrick spun frantically, rotating a full three-sixty, searching desperately for the black vision that had twisted his innocent evening with Amber into a nightmare. But he couldn’t find it, and, spurred by instinct and despair, he ran forward toward the ground where the beast had stood only seconds ago. He stopped when he reached the edge of the drop-off, looking first down into the ravine and then along the ridge in both directions.

  Nothing.

  Then, in the darkness of the night, perhaps a hundred or so yards from where he stood, Derrick heard a scream. It was high-pitched, feminine, a sound that was a mixture of both fear and agony.

  Amber.

  He turned toward the road again, his eyes wide with terror and helplessness as he listened to Amber’s cries quickly choke to silence.

  Derrick closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly now as if trying to force himself to wake from a terrible dream. He stood that way for five seconds or so, during which time his mind quickly switched back to survival mode, trying to find a way out of the horror of his situation. Derrick finally opened his eyes again, and when he did, instead of seeing the sheer cliff face that ran the length of Route 91, his vision met the black torso of the monster from the sinkhole.

  It was only a foot or two from Derrick, and before he could unleash a scream to match the one Amber had released seconds earlier, the creature’s arms whipped forward with a speed that was unlike any animal that existed on the planet, though its murky shape seemed to dull the quickness just slightly.

  Derrick felt only the slightest prick of cold on his face, but as the mysterious creature held his face in its hands—claws that were like cages at the end of some nightmarish scarecrow—his mind suddenly slipped from that moment of unimaginable terror and began to flood with visions and experiences from his twenty-two years on earth. Millions of memories and ideas invaded his brain all at once, most of which he’d thought were long erased from his hippocampus, never to be resurrected again.

  Derrick was no stranger to psychedelics, having eaten more than his share of mushrooms in his short lifetime, most during the summer after senior year; and though those encounters were met with quite a bit of success—good trips being his definition of the word—nothing came close to the voyage his mind was on at that moment. It was a deconstruction of his being.

  An unraveling.

  But as quickly as this deluge of recollection arrived it was gone—his lifetime in a few seconds—and Derrick was now back in the moment, standing at the edge of a pit in Garmella, staring at the face of something long, black and terrible. Not ugly or hideous, the way one might describe a monster from a nightmare, but blank, absent, as vacant from life as anything he could imagine.

  Suddenly its empty face formed slight contours near its chin and forehead, something resembling the features of a face, and then the lined wrinkle at the bottom opened slightly, as if to speak. But the words Derrick heard came not into his ears, but to his mind.

  “Tell me your evil.”

  Derrick felt his breathing accelerate, his face flush as beads of sweat built at the top of his forehead. He knew instinctively what the thing was asking of him, knew it as clearly as he knew the date of his birth. How he was so sure he couldn’t have said, but the torrent of his lifespan seconds earlier had everything to do with it.

  But he couldn’t dredge up the memory—never—so he clarified, instinctively stalling. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me your evil.”

  Derrick shook his head, the pain of the memory fighting to get to the forefront of his mind, fighting to come out for its master’s survival. But Derrick was vigilant, keeping himself distracted. “No,” he whimpered. He was crying now, shaking his head, pleading. “No.”

  The cold pressure of the creature’s hand turned warm, and then, as if the monster were a lightning rod in a thunderstorm, its hands sent a bolt of pain that encompassed the entire mass of Derrick Zamora’s skin and bone and tissue, devolving his body from a thing of cellular life into a statue of black carbon death.

  Seconds later, the creature moved its hand from Derrick’s face to his neck and then dragged his corpse to the edge of the Route 91 sinkhole that had appeared as if magically only a day earlier.

  And there it waited patiently, for just a minute or two, until the second of the three black forms appeared through the rain, hauling with it the carcass of its own kill, that of Amber Godwin.

  Each dropped its lifeless prize into the pit, minding it no longer than the two or three seconds each body took to flop from the precipice into the endless cavity.

  There was no time to savor, no time to appreciate. They were there to collect.

  And collect they would.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The rumble first came to Josh Car
ter in a dream, deep-toned and gloomy, a sound that was obviously generated by the lumbering stomp of a distant T-Rex marching through the dry ground of a fern forest. Josh didn’t have visual of the creature, but he could picture the slow, searching swivel of the beast’s head, its huge mouth brushing against lush, overhanging branches, jaws locked in a sinister, smiling overbite as it hunted, seemingly with glee.

  And then something deeper in the boy’s mind roused, sending an alert to Josh’s cortex, signaling that the rich, bass sound from the forest had, in fact, come from somewhere else in the endless stretch of time and place and was caused by a thing larger and vaster than the sum of all the prehistoric reptiles that had ever lived.

  Josh opened his eyes and was now facing the door-side wall of his bedroom. His breathing was frantic, his tee shirt damp with sweat. In a moment, his eyes adjusted to the dark and he could now see the perfect completion of Mike Trout’s swing, the poster of Josh’s idol having been tacked to his wall two years earlier, eye-level at his request. The slugger’s powerful follow-through brought a sudden feeling of comfort to the eleven-year-old resident of Garmella, Arizona.

  Josh’s vision dipped to the foreground now, to his nightstand, where a digital clock read 12:12. The symmetry of the time felt somehow peaceful, and it helped further to bring him down from the terror of being hunted by an eight-ton killing machine.

  He rolled a quarter-turn to his right so that he was now on his back, and he lay staring at the ceiling. He took several deep breaths, closing his eyes as he did, and with each exhalation he relaxed a little more.

  Brrmmmmmmm.

  The rumble again, this time sustained for several seconds, and Josh’s eyes flashed wide, his heart regaining the tempo from seconds earlier. He sat up straight in his bed and lifted his chin high, his mouth slightly open as he tilted his right ear toward the window of his bedroom trying to locate the sound, praying it had been caused by the thing upon which his mind had already settled.