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Trying to keep her safety in numbers.
“What are we doing?” Harry asked wearily as they dragged him along by the armpits. His legs trailed along behind him like boneless chickens and he felt dazed.
“Ru
“The supermarket must be nearby,” said Jerry, struggling with Harry’s weight. “At least I hope so.”
“It is,” said Kath. “We’re here.”
Harry looked up to see the dim shape of a building present itself through the snow, only twenty yards away.
We’re going to make it…
Harry craned his neck to look back behind him, but his joints would not allow sufficient movement to see anything clearly. “Where is that…thing?”
Lucas and Jerry continued to drag him, their speed increasing as the sight of the supermarket spurned them on. Kath overtook them all and started searching her pockets frantically, no doubt for the building’s keys.
Harry repeated himself. “I said, where is it?”
They reached the supermarket’s locked fire door and dumped Harry down. Lucas stared down at him and offered his hand. “I don’t bloody know where it is. We lost it on our way here and I was in too much a hurry to keep looking back, so get up and get ready in case it comes back.”
Kath pulled her keys from her pocket and started sifting through them. “I can’t see a thing out here.”
Harry managed to stand, his legs solidifying from jelly to gradually-setting cement, not yet firm but getting there. He looked back in the direction they’d come from, and found his heart stopping in his chest. “You best hurry up and get us inside, Kath. I mean right NOW!”
Harry waited anxiously while the others turned and saw for themselves. Coming through the snow, with a steady and methodical purpose, was the hooded figure again; only this time, on either side of him, were others. Dozens, in fact. Their ghostly visages seemed to melt into the background of the thick, whirling blizzard that could have hidden an endless legion of them for all Harry knew.
Kath frantically tried keys on the lock. Lucas fell to his knees, muttering. Harry thought he heard the Irishman say something about ‘an army of Christ’, but there was no time to ask about it; the hooded figures were approaching. Urgently, Harry turned to Kath at the door. “How’s it going?” he asked her.
The chinking of keys. Kath fumbled with the lock. “I’m trying,” she said, sounding close to tears. “I’m sodding trying.”
As if things could get any worse, Harry heard a sound that chilled his blood several degrees beyond the ice that already flowed through it.
Growling.
The sound was so guttural that it could have emanated from a pack of rabid wolves. Or a dozen beasts from hell, thought Harry. Alongside the hooded figures appeared several other beast-like shapes, moving faster and more erratically than their two legged companions. They seemed like over-sized dogs, just as Jerry had described them. Harry wished he’d paid more attention
“It’s the hounds of hell,” said Jerry. “The ones I saw earlier with Jess. Believe me now?”
Harry clutched the chef’s knife tightly in his hand, but had a horrible feeling that it would prove to be as useful as a handful of wet spaghetti. “Jerry,” he said. “If we live through this then I will be the first in line to apologise for not believing you, but now’s not the time for humble pie.”
Jerry seemed buoyed by the vindication and actually began to smile. He moved over to Kath and picked up the baseball bat that she had propped against the supermarket’s door.
Lucas was still on his knees, but had stopped his incoherent rambling. He fixed his gaze on Jerry. “What the b’jaysus are you doing, lad?”
Jerry narrowed his eyes at the man. ”I’m getting even.”
With that, Jerry trudged through the snow at a speed that was as close to ru
“Jerry, get back here!” Harry shouted, but his words were wasted and almost faded into the blizzard.
Moments before Jerry was set to collide with one of the hounds, he stopped in his tracks. Harry watched the boy stick out an arm and make a beckoning motion with his hand. “Let’s go, Cujo!”
Jerry swung the baseball bat from over his head in a downwards arc. It co
Harry watched the surreal image of the spotty, teenaged boy taking on a pack of hell beasts with a decrepit baseball bat and wondered whether he was stoned. Had his drinking progressed to drug-abuse and he was now just lying somewhere, hallucinating the whole thing? It was a thought he would’ve liked to have held on to very much, but he knew it wasn’t true. They were all in very serious danger and none of this was imaginary. It wasn’t a movie.
“Jerry! Get your arse back here, now!”
Harry’s warning was too late. He and the others watched in horror as a wave of dog-beasts swarmed over Jerry’s scrawny frame. Harry was unable to take his eyes away as flesh and fat were shorn from teenager’s bones like meat from a turkey, razor sharp fangs piercing every inch of Jerry’s skin. Harry thought his ears would explode under the force of the boy’s agonised screams and was grateful that they only lasted a few seconds as the exertion eventually ripped free Jerry’s vocal cords.
Harry sobbed.
“Thank God!” Kath said finally, unlocking the door and pushing it open so hard that she fell to her knees on the other side. Harry himself did not move, too transfixed by the pack of wretched beasts that feasted on Jerry’s still-twitching body as though it were a packet of raw meat. Despite everything that had happened that night, Harry was only now realising the situation they were in. “They’re going to kill us all, aren’t they?”
“Maybe,” said Lucas, pulling him backwards and through the door. “But there’s no reason for us to make it easy for them, is there?”
Finding a defiance inside of himself that he did not know existed, Harry closed the supermarket’s door behind them. “No,” he said, “That’s the last thing we’re going to do.”
Kath locked the supermarket’s door while, outside, a dozen hooded demons surrounded them.
Chapter Thirty
“Damien…
“Damien, wake up.”
Damien opened his eyes, expecting light to stream in and burn his retinas; but there was only darkness. Gradually, he remembered the evening’s events. The unending snow, the power cut, and everybody freezing. He could remember no more than that at first, but when he found himself tied to a chair he began to panic. It all came flooding back to him.
“Steph!”
“I’m here, Damien. I’m going to untie you, but you’ve got to stay calm. We need your help.”
“That son of a bitch knocked me out. Harry, I’m going to kill you.”
“Damien, I can only untie you if you calm down. The only reason Harry hit you was because he thought-”
“I was going rape you.”
“Yes,” said Steph. “We got it all wrong. It wasn’t you, it was-”
“Nigel!” Damien could remember; remembered finding the sick pervert about to stick it in an unconscious woman. Not just any women either; it was Steph. Damien was a lot of things, but a rapist he was not. Sex offenders and nonces were a whole other level of scumbag; subhuman slugs. He pulled at his wrist restraints, furious when they would not come off. “Where the hell is that piece of shit?”