Chapter 11: The House at the edge of Town (11)
Lena kept her foot on the accelerator.
The pedal was already flush with the floor, metal groaning beneath the pressure, but she shoved anyway, like maybe force of will could squeeze a little more violence out of a dying engine. The car screamed back at her, a ragged, uneven roar that vibrated through the frame and up her spine.
The front end slammed into the thing again.
The impact rang through the cabin like a bell struck with a hammer.
The hood buckled further, folding in on itself as the cocooned mass was driven backward, pinned, against what remained of the building’s wall. Stone crumbled. Rotten beams snapped. Black silk stretched, strands pulling thin and glossy before snapping back with wet, elastic violence.
Lena clenched her teeth and did not let up.
“Stay,” she hissed, eyes squeezed shut, forehead pressed to the cracked steering wheel.
“Stay. Stay. Stay.”
The entity thrashed.
Its many limbs, too many, all wrong, flapped and clawed against the car, scraping metal with sounds that went straight through Lena’s skull. Fingers, human fingers, burned and swollen and fused, dragged along the sides, leaving greasy streaks that smoked faintly where they touched hot steel. Larger limbs slammed down onto the hood, denting it further, trying to lever the car back.
The car skidded an inch.
Lena screamed and pushed harder.
The tires spun uselessly against blood-slick dirt and shattered stone, smoke pouring up around the wheel wells. The smell of burning rubber flooded the cabin, thick and choking. The engine coughed, stuttered, then caught again with a furious rattle.
She didn’t look.
She refused to look.
If she looked, she’d see it too clearly, the wrongness, the way the thing didn’t sit against the wall so much as overlap it, silk sinking into brick as if the building were only a suggestion. She’d see the limbs bracing, adapting, finding leverage. She’d see the moment it figured out how to make her stop.
So she kept her eyes closed.
She focused on sensations instead.
The steering wheel shaking violently under her grip.
The heat creeping up her arms.
The sharp, rhythmic pain in her ribs every time the car lurched.
‘Hold it,’ she told herself.
‘Just hold it. Seconds matter.’
Something struck the side mirror hard enough to tear it clean off. The glass burst inward, shards skittering across the dashboard and slicing into her cheek. She tasted blood and grit.
She laughed, a short, hysterical bark that surprised her with its own volume.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “You don’t like this either, do you?”
The entity answered by pushing.
The entire vehicle shuddered as if an invisible hand had pressed against it from the front. Lena felt her seatbelt bite hard into her shoulder as the car slid back another inch, tires screeching, engine screaming in protest.
“No,” she growled.
“No, no, no-”
She jammed the accelerator again, as if it weren’t already buried, heel lifting off the floor from the effort.
Her leg trembled with strain.
The engine whined, high and desperate, a sound that spoke of impending failure.
‘Come on,’ she thought.
‘You piece of junk. You can do one more thing.’
The car lurched forward again.
Metal met silk.
The building wall collapsed another foot inward under the combined pressure, bricks exploding outward in a cloud of dust.
The cocoon was forced tighter, compressed against the ruin, its surface rippling violently as it tried, and failed, to redistribute its bulk.
Limbs flailed faster now.
One slammed down onto the hood, fingers splaying wide, nails gouging deep grooves into the metal. Another limb punched through the already-crumpled hood from below, the impact making the whole car jump.
Lena’s breath hitched.
Still, she didn’t look.
She pressed her forehead harder into the wheel, eyes clenched so tight she saw stars.
‘This is fine,’ she told herself with grim absurdity.
‘This is exactly what training didn’t cover.’
The engine sputtered.
Once.
Twice.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
“No,” she whispered, suddenly pleading.
“No, no, no-”
The rumble beneath her feet began to fade, not stopping, not yet, but weakening. The furious vibration softened into an uneven shudder, like a dying animal losing the strength to thrash.
The entity sensed it instantly.
Its movements changed.
The frantic flailing became purposeful.
The pressure on the hood shifted, not pushing back now, but downward. The car creaked as weight redistributed, suspension groaning under stress it was never meant to bear.
Lena swallowed hard.
‘Don’t look,’ she told herself.
‘If you look, you’ll hesitate.’
Something tore.
A deep, wrenching sound, metal ripping away from metal, cut through the engine’s failing roar.
The car lurched violently to one side, frame twisting with a shriek that made Lena cry out despite herself.
The engine stuttered again.
And again.
She felt it then, through the floor, through the pedals, the sudden absence of something important.
A hollow sensation, like a tooth pulled without warning.
Her foot was still on the accelerator.
The car was no longer responding the way it should.
The rumble dropped to a low, sickly growl.
Heat flooded the cabin, then began to dissipate as airflow changed, wrong and uneven.
‘That’s bad,’ a distant, rational part of her mind observed.
The entity pulled.
The car rocked forward sharply, jerking Lena against the seatbelt.
Something heavy scraped across the underside, sparks spraying up past the shattered windshield in bright, violent streaks.
Her breath came fast and shallow now.
She opened her eyes.
The world snapped into focus through fractured glass and drifting dust.
For a split second, all she saw was black silk and writhing limbs, pressed unnaturally close, filling her vision.
Then she saw below that.
The engine, what was left of it, was no longer where it belonged.
A massive, human-shaped arm, skin blackened and stretched to translucence, was inside the car’s front end.
Fingers had curled around the engine block with grotesque intimacy, tendons standing out like cables as it wrenched.
Bolts sheared free with sharp cracks.
Metal screamed.
The engine was being torn out.
Lena stared, frozen, as the arm pulled back inch by inch, dragging the heart of the car free of its housing.
Her foot was still on the accelerator.
The pedal did nothing.
And she realized, with sudden, cold clarity.
The car had bought time.
But it was out of seconds.
***
The hood buckled upward with a scream of tearing metal.
That was enough.
Lena didn’t think, thinking would have been too slow.
She wrenched the door handle and threw herself sideways, shoulder-first, out of the car. Glass shredded her jacket as she rolled, heat licking at her back as the engine tore free with a final, furious wrench.
She hit the ground hard.
Pain flared bright and immediate, knee, hip, ribs, all of it announcing itself at once. She skidded through dirt and broken stone, came to rest on her side with her breath punched clean out of her lungs. For a heartbeat, she could only gasp, the world reduced to a ringing pressure behind her eyes and the taste of blood on her tongue.
Behind her, the car flipped.
Metal shrieked as the thing heaved the wreck aside like it weighed nothing.
The chassis cartwheeled once, twice, then crashed upside-down in a cloud of dust and steam, wheels still spinning uselessly in the air.
Lena dragged herself onto her elbows.
The cocoon reared up, silk tearing and reforming, massive limbs bracing as it prepared to surge again, toward her this time.
The air thickened, pressing down on her chest, squeezing breath into shallow, useless pulls.
The roar hit.
It wasn’t sound.
It was force.
A wave of pressure slammed into her from behind, flattening her against the ground as if the sky itself had dropped a shoulder into her spine.
The air vibrated violently, teeth-rattling, bone-deep. Her vision blurred at the edges, black spots blooming as something inside her skull screamed in protest.
She clapped her hands over her ears instinctively, but it didn’t help. The roar wasn’t entering her, it was passing through her, shaking her organs, rattling her thoughts loose.
The ground shuddered.
Cracks raced outward beneath her palms, splitting dirt and stone alike. Dust leapt into the air and hung there, unmoving, caught in a moment that refused to progress.
Lena tried to move.
Her body did not respond.
Muscles locked. Breath froze halfway between inhale and exhale. The pressure pinned her in place, not crushing but holding, like a giant hand pressed flat against her back.
Her heart hammered wildly, each beat echoing too loud in her ears.
The cocoon reacted.
Its silk rippled violently, limbs flailing not in rage now but in sudden, frantic confusion. The pressure around it warped sharply, its bulk pulling inward as if something larger had just entered its awareness.
Then a shadow fell across everything.
Cold washed over Lena’s skin, not chill, but absence. Like warmth had been erased rather than replaced.
She felt it before she saw it: a presence so vast it bent the moment around itself. The pressure intensified, not painful but absolute, as if the world had decided that movement was no longer optional.
The roar faded into a low, resonant hum that vibrated through the earth.
Something moved behind her.
She could feel it, each shift of mass displacing air, bending space in subtle, terrifying ways. The hairs along her arms stood on end. Her skin prickled, nerves firing useless warnings at something too big to meaningfully categorize.
The cocoon tried to flee.
It didn’t get the chance.
A hand reached past Lena’s field of vision.
It was enormous.
Bigger than the car had been. Bigger than the cocoon’s massive arms. The shape was almost familiar, five fingers, a palm, but stripped down to something primal and wrong. Bone jutted through leathery, scaled flesh in jagged ridges, ivory-white against dark, reptilian hide. Joints bent at sharp, predatory angles, claws curving inward like hooks meant to anchor into prey that fought back.
The hand closed around the cocoon.
Silk screamed.
The black mass convulsed, limbs thrashing wildly as it was lifted clear off the ground, its pressure collapsing inward as if gravity itself had been reassigned. Embedded human limbs snapped and tore free, dropping uselessly to the dirt below.
Lena couldn’t look away.
Her body was still locked, frozen in place, but her eyes tracked every impossible detail, the way the cocoon compressed in the grip, the way reality seemed to crease around the fingers holding it, like fabric pinched too tightly.
The hand tightened.
The cocoon let out a sound that wasn’t sound, a violent distortion that made Lena’s vision white out at the edges.
The pressure increased again, sharper now, driving her chest into the ground, breath stolen completely. She tasted dirt and blood and ozone, the air heavy with something ancient and wrong.
She tried to scream.
Nothing came out.
Behind her, something shifted its weight.
The ground groaned in response.
And the hand, still holding the writhing, furious anomaly, pulled back, dragging it away from her and deeper into the shadow cast by whatever stood just out of sight behind her.
The roar subsided into silence.
Lena lay pinned, gasping shallowly, ears ringing, heart racing out of control.
She couldn’t see what held the hand.
Only feel it.
And that was worse.
