A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [69]
“A portal?” Mike repeated, glancing around the mausoleum.
“Might be a very small portal,” Vicki offered.
All four teenagers looked over at the circles chalked on the rear wall.
“It takes time!” Ren said defensively. She set the knife down forcefully enough that the metal rang against the stone, then moved around the crypt so that nothing stood between her and the wall.
Given that Vicki made no move to stop her, Mike figured the odds of the portal opening were small.
“Come on.” Ren beckoned to the others. “We need to be ready.”
“But Ren, they’re cops!” the scared boy protested, hanging back as the other two joined her.
“Their laws have no relevance here.”
Mike sighed. The last things he wanted to do was spend the night arguing with teenagers. “Okay, guys, I get that you’re bored and looking for some excitement, but at the very least this is trespassing, so let’s just pack things up, promise to take up hobbies that don’t involve graveyards, and we’ll see you get home.”
Ren ignored him. Spearing the scared boy with an imperious gaze, she snapped, “Cameron!”
Cameron ran to join the others. Just then, the center of the chalked circle flared white, then black, then cleared to show a dark sky filled with stars too orange to be familiar. Mike thought he saw the dark silhouettes of buildings and was certain he could smell rotting meat.
“We are so out of here,” Ren sneered as she stepped back through the circle, pulling Cameron with her. An instant later, Vicki stood holding the black and silver hoodie of the unnamed girl as the other two followed.
Almost immediately, someone began to scream.
Cameron.
The circle started to close. The first fifteen centimeters in from the white chalk line had already returned to grubby stone and flaking mortar.
Mike knew what Vicki was going to do before she did it. As he charged around the crypt—to stop her, to join her, he had no idea—she shot him a look that said half a dozen things he didn’t want to consider too closely, and dove through a hole no more than a meter across. Then half a meter. He couldn’t follow.
All four kids were screaming now.
Vicki was stronger, faster, and damned hard to kill, but in another world she might be no more of a threat than Cameron was.
Barely a handspan of portal remained. Mike snapped his extra clip off his belt, threw it and his weapon as hard as he could into the dark, then stood staring at a blank stone wall.
The silence was so complete he could hear the candles flickering on the crypt behind him.
Vicki had no idea what the hell she was facing. It looked a bit like the Swamp Thing, but was a phosphorescing gray with three large yellowing fangs about ten centimeters long—two on the top, one on the bottom, across a wobbling lip from a jagged stub. It was big—three, three and a half meters high although it was hard to tell for certain, given that it rested its weight on the knuckles of one clawed hand as it stuffed bits of Cameron into its mouth. The other three teenagers crouched among the rubble at the base of a crumbling wall and screamed.
Moonlight and starlight reflected off the pale stone of the ruins, denying them the merciful buffer of full darkness. It was light enough to see their friend die.
The scent of Cameron’s blood pulled the Hunger up and, although Vicki drew her lips back off her teeth and shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet, she held her position. She could do nothing for Cameron.
If the creature was willing to move on, she’d let it.
It wasn’t.
The kids realized that the same time she did.
On the bright side, as it lurched toward them, ramped up terror stopped the screaming.
It roared and swatted at her as she raced up the closest pile of rubble, too slow to connect. When the rubble ended, she launched herself onto its shoulders, wrapping both hands around its head.
Her fingers sank deep into rubbery flesh, but got a grip on the bone beneath as she twisted. Back home, bipedal meant a spine and a spinal column, but she wasn’t in Kansas