Michael Wolf

fter the project is conceived in mind at a secluded annex of ArisTech Laboratories, and after the life-form is crafted on the windows into silicon mind, the germanium-based life-form is genetically engineered to completion. But before the organism’s psychic abilities and lethal needs are realized and it is destroyed, a single, microscopic spore floats up and spirals away from the white fire, into the tangle of the night...

 * * *

 “Those aren’t bird guts,” Cindy Freeman said through a scowl only a fourth grade girl could muster. “Those are just stinky tree seeds. I want my dime back!”

Kenny Riggens looked up at Cindy and her big brother, confused over her lack of revulsion. He was 11 years old and dressed in handed down white-worn denim overalls, no shirt or socks. He glanced to his dog, Skipper, a small tan, short-haired mongrel, for support.

Skipper had found the baby birds just that morning in the Shelter Belt, a man-made tract of trees and underbrush about a block wide and a curved mile long. Kenny would never kill the nestlings himself but he knew a good money-making opportunity when he saw it. He set up his sidewalk sideshow from a broken card-table and for a dime a peek, with Skipper by his side, he would dramatically pull back a discolored blanket to reveal the glistening carnage to wayward school kids.

Kenny looked a little more carefully at Cindy’s brother. He was three years older and about twenty pounds heavier than Kenny, so in accordance to the school-yard pecking order, the matter was settled. He humbly returned Cindy’s dime and she gave the obligatory sticking-out-of-the-tongue sign. She stalked away, followed by her brother who turned with a cross-armed smirk.

Skipper had seemed to sense the tension of the moment and exchanged glances with Kenny. He was as intuitive as he was funny-looking. He was a light brown short-hair mongrel missing his tail and right rear leg.

Two years earlier, they had been hunting pigeons on the railline bridge when Skipper was clipped by a slow rolling train. It was an act of Providence that he survived at all, but he did and ended up looking like a wounded veteran of some foreign war of yesteryear. Eventually the tail mended and the missing rear leg healed smoothly into his flank. If you didn’t stop to count legs, a slight oddness to his gait was your only clue to his condition as he regained most of his speed and acrobatics. The sole indication the dog even remembered the incident was late at night when Skipper would sometimes jump up on the bed whining softly, and paw up close to Kenny when the night train wailed in the distance.

Kenny looked up the empty it couldn’t it street then into the late afternoon sky and figured there were no more kids coming home from school. In the arid summer heat, the three baby bird corpses had shrunk into dried-out husks. Pretty gross, but not rude enough for a kid to pay a dime to see.

Now it was time to count his earnings. He fished his hand into his jeans, pulled out a knot of coins, put them on a corner of the board and began counting. A randomly-toothed smile grew as he figured his display had earned almost a dollar-fifty. He called Skipper to lead the short scamper through the Shelter Belt to Mayfair Market, where a dozen little dreams awaited him.

***

 Like most of the kids in town, Lawton Bateman also was a regular in the domesticated woods of the Shelter Belt. Lawton was a chubby 14 years old, dressed in lime-green corduroy cutoffs and a Boy Scout shirt left by the last “helper” he had brought to Tina. Pasty faced and glassy-eyed, he swayed slightly from the vague nausea from the intense devotion for her.

She had seen into him.

By giving him everything, she had brought him up from the mud. Now he would give back.

He watched a small boy, about six years old with oversized lavender glasses, playing with toy trucks in the shade of a Russian Olive tree. Snapping back into his responsibility to Tina in recruiting “helpers,” he called to the boy, his voice came out in a loud, hoarse whisper, “Hey, kid!”

The boy looked up from his toy construction project.

“Come over here. There’s this really cool stuff!”

“What?” The little boy asked. “What stuff?”

“I don’t know. I think robbers left it.”

The red-haired first grader looked down at the ground and said, “Robbers! Wow!” Then he jumped up, ran toward Lawton and climbed up the little ledge on which the big boy was standing.

“Over here,” Lawton whispered while motioning into the trees. “They hid it real good.” He turned and walked into the woods with the youngster following him. As they reached a certain thicket of bushes, Lawton pointed into it. “Right here. Here it is.”

Lawton smiled at the over-sized toddler as he peered between the scrub. With a look of awe, the lad saw a multicolored, three-foot high store carousal display of toys. Oddly, the display was moving, slowly rotating as if still in the children’s aisle. He stared in fascination as he saw hanging airplanes, action figures and hand-held video games. As it turned, Tommy said, “Wow! A Captain Krull Commando action figure!” He reached forward to grasp the prize.

As he leaned to touch the action figure, silent tentacles hidden in the brush snaked under the fallen leaves three feet around him.

As Tommy’s little hand touched what he thought to be a toy, a flurry of motion and a towering gray form gathered him up completely with only a pinched scream.

Then no sound. Just a pair of small, thick-framed lavender glasses lying in the stillness.

Lawton watched closely, but didn’t see any of this—he simply saw Tina, incredible Tina, his forever glory, gently moving the small boy behind her where he disappeared.

“Where’d he go?” Lawton asked.

“He’s going to help me,” she said to him. Her voice was a soothing, warm lotion. And as she reached out to him, she cooed, “As you have helped me.” He stared at her smoky blue eyes and the golden hair moved by an unfelt breeze—and he heard the promise in her voice.

As well as the little boy, he had found and led three other helpers to her that day, two other kids on their way to school and a Boy Scout. Now, he was again about to receive his reward.

She slipped out of her yellow sun dress into her naked perfection. “Come, Noniko.” Her words flowed like hot honey. “I want you.”

 

Before Tina, Lawton had already resigned himself to his life’s senseless drift, never expecting someone as wonderful as her could happen to him.

After his Dad was killed working as a Teamster, burned to death by a corrosive chemical spill while loading a truck, his mom had dedicated all her time to pickling her brain with alcohol while smoking cigarettes and watching her little black-and-white TV.

But on the fifth of the month, when the pension check came, she would go into town and get, what was for them, the necessary staples. A bonanza of junk-food to him, and an equal amount of vodka and whiskey for her. As reliably as she left, she also came back to their house, a four-room dump that stank of cigarettes, soiled laundry and forgotten dreams.

Most of his problems came at school from bullies. They had done everything to Lawton from repeatedly sticking him with sharpened pencils while standing in the lunch-line to pulling his pants down in front of Lisa Talmer. Lisa was the girl Lawton once burned so brightly for that if she did ever talk to him, he felt he would surely fall to dust. Lawton winced at the memory as it left him with all the dignity of a carrion maggot.

Once puberty began, he steadily developed a more intense desire for girls—girls he could never have. Though there were a lot at school, most would retch at the idea of him even breathing in their hair. He was a boy stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean with water from skyline to skyline, dying of thirst.

He settle for a poor second. He stole some dirty magazines from a local tree-fort and spent time with the stories and photos of the females in the slick, color pages. Though he would have much rather have been with Lisa Talmer, these women—actual women not just girls—were naked upon the turning of a page. So the compromise was made.

That morning he had first met Tina, his angel, through three demons who terrorized him at school. One of three hoods gathered on a corner had seen Lawton from across the street on his way to school and jabbed his two cohorts to look over. Instead of just their usual verbal abuse, this time they decided to give chase.

Lawton ran up the street, away from the sound of their rubber shoes twisting on the pavement in pursuit. He turned off the street into the Shelter Belt for the short-cut home. After a short distance into the woods his breath came in huge gasps and he felt like the dumpy fat kid they always accused him of being. He fell simpering onto a grassy mound with his arms over his face in protection from the expected rain of blows.

They never came. After a few seconds he raised the crook of his elbow above his eyes to see what was happening.

They had stopped about 15 yards up the path looking into the tall shrubbery. They were smiling and talking to someone hidden from Lawton’s view. Then they nodded to each other and stepped into the greenery.

A short, loud bustling sound and shaking of the nearby foliage was followed by complete silence. Then curiosity provoked Lawton to see what happened, and he ungracefully got to his feet and walked down the path to investigate. When he reached the spot where they had entered, he parted the bushes to see the woman who would change everything.

A petite figure turned from a backdrop of dense greenery toward him. Her hair was a rich gold streaked with gleams of silver, outlining shining pink lips and bottomless sapphire eyes. A combination of all the favorite subtleties of womanhood he had appreciated in the magazines, she was the most beautiful woman Lawton had ever seen. “And, who are you?” She asked. Her voice was lush and soothing.

Lawton stood gaping, he couldn’t speak. He felt as if there were a grapefruit-sized chunk of concrete lodged in his throat.

“The silent type.” She moved closer to him. “I like it.” She had a sleek grace in movement—a wild poetry in those three simple steps that invoked a crying yearn inside him.

“L-Lawton. Lawton’s my name,” he finally managed.

“Ooo... I like it. But I will call you... Mmm...” She looked down and turned her foot innocently, “Noniko. I like Noniko. Kinda sexy, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

“Sexy like you. Call me Tina.” She reached out and stroked his arm.

It was happening too fast. He felt a dizzying flush. Nobody had ever offered him the slightest complement like this before, let alone someone like her. And she touched him. He had to speak. “What happened to those guys?”

“Oh, I sent them away. They’ll be working for me. I saw them chasing you and they won’t be bothering you anymore. I was wondering if you might be able to bring me more people to help with a project,” she put her hand on his chest and added with a wink, “Stallion Man.”

Stallion Man!... he thought. He recognized that regal compliment from reading the racy magazines.

He reacted as only his immature nature could. “You like me?”

“Like you? Oh, Noniko, I can taste you in my dreams.” She leaned toward his face. “There’s one thing. No one can know that I’m here or what I’m building until I’m done, so don’t tell anyone,okay?” Wide eyed, Lawton nodded vigorously. Then she whispered gently, “You want to do something that never happened?”

Her offer was as amazing as it was sudden. He then saw the turn of her head as she moved toward his mouth. It was his first real kiss and her snaking tongue parted his child-like lips for a plush soul-kiss—the sacred overture to his first experience with a woman.

A chance passerby would have had the misfortune of seeing Lawton Bateman’s stark white, blemish-flecked buttocks moving on a quivering mass of leathery gray matter. An unlucky closer inspection would have shown four enormous, mucus coated crab-like prongs protruding up and around him, gently stroking his back.

***

 “Two seconds left in the game... Riggens kicks...” An empty paint bucket sailed into the air. “Its got the distance!... IT’S GOOD!” Kenny jumped up and down with his vocal imitation of stadium crowd noise, giving both arms straight up to mark the successful imaginary field-goal.

Skipper dutifully ran to retrieve the bucket from the other side of the make-shift goal posts. A leafless branch growing out behind a nearby telephone pole looked just like goal-posts and served the imagination well for a half-hour’s entertainment.

Finishing his wishful dream and satisfied that he would be in The Football Hall of Fame—his name immortalized in trading cards that would be swapped in school playgrounds until the universe imploded—they set off down a path through the trees to the grocery store.

Skipper led the way with a skittering run, slightly sideways and forward at the same time, like a car with a bent frame.

“Tripod Dog,” Kenny whispered to himself with a smile. But that, along with the dog’s other physical imperfections, was part of the reason he loved him. Years of honoring each other’s simple needs had alchemized their friendship to platinum.

The dog suddenly stopped stock-still as they came to the clearing. There was a big kid on a large green, natural-gas monitoring-box in their path. He was sitting on top of it, hunkered down with his head between his knees so Kenny decided to just walk by. He was alarmed from the way Skipper stopped, but figured he would just ignore the kid and slide by.

As they they neared, Kenny stepped on a branch. It broke, snapping loudly and he groaned at his bad luck. The big boy snapped his head up from between his knees as if startled from sleep and jumped down to block their way.

The boy was dressed in a shabby Boy Scout shirt and cut-offs but something was wrong—his shirt was far too small and buttoned offset and it looked like someone had thrown a bucket of horse vomit on him. The slippery odor of fire extinguishers and rotten squash reinforced the off-key impression.

The big boy stood in his path, glowering at him. After a long moment he spoke in a husky whisper through a sly smile of inside humor “I’ll pull the extension cords out from under your mattress.” Then he openly grinned, showing teeth so blackened it looked like he had been sucking on charcoal briquettes.

“What?” Kenny asked, baffled.

“She’s made everything perfect. She’s seen me. She knows.”

A vibration beneath Kenny’s feet made him look down while Skipper took a few steps sideways and, with a bark, looked down as well.

“That’s Tina.” The Boy Scout said. “She’s building something. She’s got her project spread out all under these woods.”

“Hey, I gotta go.” Kenny’s mind scrambled for an out. “My Dad’s waiting for me just over there.” He pointed in the direction he was walking, but Boy Scout just stepped closer to him. Realizing that tactic’s futility, he brought up his walking stick and poked it into the chest of the Boy Scout, stopping his steady advance and asked “If I give you some money, will you leave me alone?”

The dog emitted a low growl and bristled.

With a tilted head the big boy said, “Maybe.”

Kenny dropped the stick and fished in his money pocket. The Boy Scout’s eyebrows raised at the sound of the coins’ jingle and Kenny cupped a fraction of the pocket’s contents. “Here ya go!” he said as he flung glittering silver into a nearby shrub. As the Schizo Scout impulsively moved toward the bush, Kenny and Skipper broke for their path.

Kenny heard from behind him as he ran, “Hey! Look in the woods when you get to the stream! There’s something there!”

He heard him but ran without looking back. They crossed over a sewer-pipe culvert covering the stream. Kenny swam in this stream in heart of summer and the familiarity of the place gave him a kind of courage. After giving a few quick shoulder checks and saw nobody following, he slowed to an easy trot. He began talking to Skipper who was running along side. “He was One Twisted Monkey, don’tcha think, Skip?”

Skipper just looked up from his shadowing of Kenny’s escape and stuck his tongue out panting through what looked like a smile.

“Exactly.” Kenny said, and decelerated again from the trot to a walk. “Stunk too. Rat-nasty.”

Skipper gave a subdued yowl while walking.

He looked up across the surrounding trees that made up the Shelter Belt. They weren’t old enough to have covered the trail into a canopy, but they were thick enough to shield out a lot of the late-day sun. Still feeling a little anxious from his encounter with the Big Boy, and ashamed of yielding to two big kids in two hours, he began tough-talk to Skipper. “I woulda pulled out the knife if I had to...”

Skipper agreed with a slight chuffing sound.

He stopped. He had seen something in the woods—rectangular and white. It was a box of some kind and it looked too new to be trash. Skipper followed as he turned off the path to the box which was about ten yards into the trees. “Whoa,” Kenny said as he hovered over it.

It was an Official Dr. Cyclops Chemistry Set, in pristine condition with the plastic wrap still on—just lying there. Kenny had been admiring The Dr. Cyclops Chemistry Set in the department store. With its picture of a one-eyed mad scientist busily concocting brainsick experiments, it was the ultimate possession to him—The Holy Grail. He verbally invoked the inviolate rule of “Finders Keepers” and bent to pick up his prize amidst the weeds.

As he did, the dog growled. Skipper’s lips were quivering in a snarl showing his small but sharp canines as he bristled, staring intently at the white box. Kenny looked around to see if there was a snake or something. Nothing. So with a shrug he grabbed hold of both sides of the box.

Instantly, there was the sharp swirling sound like a giant clock spring suddenly breaking and unwinding. The surrounding leaves were thrown up and thin, serpentine tendrils leapt from the ground. Sentient gray cords moved with the speed of rattlesnakes, wrapping Kenny’s left wrist and right leg. He fell on his back and they dragged him. He screamed shrilly at the abrupt attack.

Skipper launched into a fury of barks and snarls that redoubled the needlestorm of confusion. A rumbling from under the ground led large chunks of earth being pushed up. About ten feet away something was emerging from beneath the ground. The wedges of surface soil fell away as the creature emerged to full showing.

A cylindrical organism six feet high and four wide, raised from the ground. It was gray and topped with a intertwining of tentacles sprouting in a lion’s mane around a sphincter-like opening that pushed open and closed with a deep exhalation.

Four crab-like legs also spread out in a clawing halo while the creature seemed to be only the beginning of a greater animal whose bulk lay underground while its head loomed above the surface.

Kenny pulled out his pocket knife and slashed at the cord around his arm. Slicing partially through it, the living strap unwound and retracted as others slithered forward to take its place.

Simultaneously attacking the slimy limb wrapped around Kenny’s ankle, Skipper bit and growled, whipping his head furiously from side to side, biting through and cutting the tentacle. A stump pulled away leaving a shiny trail of gray ooze. The rest of the creature gave a sudden jolt and immediately retracted its appendages.

Skipper instinctively chased the severed tentacle until it brought him within the reach of the insectival legs. One of the legs folded over him and with the organized maneuver of the other three crustacean spindles, gathered him into the gaping mouth.

The last image the boy had of his dog was the confused face of Skipper as the jaws closed around his small canine frame. Kenny ran up to the beast but it withdrew under the ground before he could do anything.

He scurried clear before the creature could make a counter-attack and ran right into the fat kid walking into the clearing. It looked as though the Bonkers Boy Scout was crying.

“Get out! Get outta here!” Kenny yelled. “There’s a big thing, a big th-th w-well I don’t know what it is, BUT IT ATE SKIPPER!”

“She was only trying to get you to help her. Tina was hurt. I saw it.”

“What? We’re the ones who are gonna be hurt! Run!”

Then Kenny saw a change come over the fat boy’s face. It went from weepy to focused suspicion and the puke-covered boy came chest-to-chest, scowled and said “Your dog bit Tina.”

“You’re doinked!” Kenny screamed and pushed away into a terror-fueled run. He sprinted down the path with his face fixed into a mask of horror and grief. Arms wagging limp at his sides, swinging counter-rhythm to the wild gait of his flight. He ran with a deafening roar in his head and what felt like a highway flare burning behind his heart until he reached the edge of the woods and the road to his house.

There he slowed into a sluggish, weaving walk, silently crying, squeakily calling for his friend, “Skipper... Skip... Skippy?” He ran through all his nicknames trying to call him back.

The road was a rough, light gray and the fixed gravel was visible on its surface. An intrusive flash-memory pierced Kenny’s heart like a shard of broken window glass, of how Skipper’s claws used to make a tapping sound on it when he would walk next to him. Clickity click, click, clickity.

In a daze he headed for his tree fort, not fifty yards from his house. He climbed the ladder-boards nailed onto the tree, stopping halfway to hold his head in the crook of his elbow as he was overcome by a wave of sorrow. No words. Just the mental picture of Skipper, so confused, so helpless, right before the jaws closed on him. He clung motionless for a half minute before he finished his ascent to his tree-borne fortress.

Climbing through the entrance, he crawled across the plywood floor, then flopped onto his makeshift couch on his back with his arm across his eyes.

The tree-house was built from scraps his father had brought home from his job at the lumber retail store. There was even a secret removable slat with a few hot magazines stashed inside. Ultimately, it proved not to be so secret since somebody had slipped in and stolen the magazines a few weeks earlier.

He sat up with his head between his knees and his arms wrapped around his legs, when he felt something move on his ankle. Irritated, he went to brush off what he thought was a bug, when he felt something cold and wet. Dunking his head down further between his knees, he saw what looked like a small garter snake wrapped around his ankle. Except it wasn’t a snake. It was the end of the tentacle that Skipper had bitten in half and it was still clinging to him, and still moving slightly.

With a grunt of disgust he peeled it off and threw it on the floor. He got down on all fours and saw it was like a zombie nightcrawler, a kind of gray with an weird shine to it, like gasoline on a mud puddle. And it smelled mediciney—like his grandparents’ bathroom, only a lot worse.

When he looked closer, he could see tiny shapes that seemed to be moving. He knew what he needed to get a closer look: The scourge of the local ant population—Death From Above—his magnifying glass.

He began rummaging through the junkchest below the window. He found the large magnifying glass amidst the tangle of valuable trash and kitchen matches. Stick matches were an essential element to a 12-year-old boy’s commitment to pyrotechnics.

Holding the wide glass by the black handle he turned to examine the thing. He focused over it until he could see dark blotches, milling about like tiny swamp-water bugs.

Then, curiosity satisfied, his anger for the creature surfaced. There was still late-afternoon illumination shining through the window. He would focus it onto the thing to hear it sizzle.

With practiced precision, he maneuvered the glass until the sun’s rays were concentrated into a tiny, white dot on the surface severed flesh.

No sooner than a wisp of blue smoke had risen than a blinding white flash of hissing combustion kicked Kenny back against the wall. Through the smoke he could see the flickering of a small fire. He threw nearby rugs onto the center of it, smothering the flames.

He sat back against the wall with a dense, bluish smoke hanging in the air, making it difficult to breathe. “What the hell was that?” he said and coughed. The tree-house stank of putrid milk and battery acid.

His eyes opened wide with realization. “Is that IT? Is that all there IS?” He jumped around amidst the dense, blue smoke before succumbing to a round of coughing from the noxious fumes and falling to his knees. Getting his breath back in the clearer air, he rasped, “Is that all it takes?”

He cleared away the rugs and found no evidence of the thing’s existence. Aside from a scorch mark, it had burned completely away to the thick, bluish smoke. He knew this was the kind of creature scientists would crap down their leg to be able to study, but it had killed Skipper, so Kenny had to send it directly to Hell.

The plan came quickly, and a wicked smile slowly unfurled on Kenny’s tear-stained face as he said softly, “Kill my dog.” He turned back to the junk box and found the kiddy torches. They had not been touched from the packet of fireworks his uncle brought from the Indian reservation. The adored firecrackers were gone long ago leaving only two pencil-shaped torches. Weak Roman-candles that emitted a small conical flame for about 15 seconds and a few feeble sparks—perfect for his idea.

He whooped gleefully, “Well then, how ‘bout a little fire, scarecrow?” He crammed the fireworks in his left pocket and stuffed his right with kitchen matches.

“Spit in The Devil’s teeth,” Kenny muttered as he clambered out the door and down the ladder toward reckoning.

***

The sun lingered on the skyline like a small child refusing to go to bed. Kenny ran down the gravel-pavement road and into the woods. A cold gale of anger and resolution whirled up from deep within him until he felt there was blood dripping from his fingertips.

He reached the Shelter Belt and entered using the main trail. Knowing there was not much daylight left, he jogged down the shadowy path until he saw the “Boy Scout” standing in the path facing into the clearing where the creature was located. He looked drugged, arms hanging limp to his sides.

As Kenny reached him, he noticed a large dark stain on the Boy Scout’s crotch where he had pissed himself. He walked up next to the big boy—not getting too close as The Scout looked strong and he did not want to be delayed from killing the thing. “You gotta help,” Kenny said.

Boy Scout slowly turned a bloodless face toward him. “I’m her Noniko... That’s what she calls me... Noniko... Tina does.”

Kenny then knew that his guy was not on the same page as him—not even in the same library. With daylight dying, he did not have time to worry about it, and held up the firework. “I have a new toy for ‘Tina’,” he said as he pulled a stick match from his pocket and scratched it on his zipper, igniting it. “And she’ll be hurtin’ for certain.”

He put the match to the fuse and it began sputtering as the Boy Scout’s eyes widened into a look of worried surprise, but Kenny was already into the clearing.

Firework alight, he stepped into the dark opening in the trees. The creature wasn’t there—only raised wedges of earth shaping a small pyramid where it had emerged earlier. Kenny cursed under his breath for having missed the opportunity.

Then a yap sounded from the pile of earth triangles as Skipper’s head and body emerged. Kenny beamed brightly and trotted toward his best friend. Skipper had survived somehow, and Kenny was flushed in an instant of light-headed joy. The world was fair now. Everything wasokay.

Suddenly there was an explosion of movement and scattering leaves as he was yanked off of his feet. The firework flew back up through the air far behind.

The creature had set its bait, had been lying in wait for prey and now it had Kenny by the ankles, dragging him toward itself. Kenny watched as Skipper melted from a perfect image to a complex net of fiber, then to the recognizable tendrils of the creature.

In a desperate struggle, he was drawn toward the emerging monstrosity. Its spidery tines raked the air and the working mouth made deep, wet sucking noises.

Now only a yard away, the arachidonic legs painfully clamped together on his chest. Together with the confining grasp of the tentacles, it lifted him into the air over its eager jaw.

He snapped a look back for help, but only saw the Boy Scout picking up the lit firework and running toward them screaming.

Then he looked down and saw what awaited. The appendages held him ten feet off the ground situating him for ingestion, over the mouth eagerly gaping below. It was a cavernous orifice of a ringed tubular cavity, crowned by bloated cushions of pink tissue that could only have been gums because inwardly curving, dirty-ivory daggers lined the craggy death hole.

Though enveloped by pinning limbs, he twisted until he sensed an opening. He slipped through and fell free for a moment. But as he fell his descent was abruptly stopped by a pig-iron grip around his ankle, the thing had halted his fall with his face only inches from the ground. He emitted the guttural whines of a trapped animal as the other slimy tentacles and arachnid legs again lifted and centered him over the working maw.

Kenny barely saw the Boy Scout pick up the burning firework and run up toward him, the torch spraying sparks from his hand. He pointed the flare at Kenny and shouted. “Don’t hurt Tina! I’ll burn you!” He jabbed the torch at him. “I’ll burn you!” Like dried tumbleweeds the surrounding tendrils caught fire and burned with a frantic intensity that spread to the monster in an almost instant speed. The uniformed fat-boy gaped in astonishment then screamed. “Your dress! It’s burning! I didn’t even come close!”

A darting illumination flared to the other appendages and the creature froze for a split second. Kenny felt a brief moment of pain as the fire spread to the tentacles holding him, then he heard a roar as the monster spread all of its extremities straight out in a starburst of alien flesh.

Kenny was slung free and hurtled through the air into the upper branches of a nearby tree. Snapping limbs raced by his face as he bounced down through many layers before catching on a stout branch and pulled himself up onto his chin and elbows. After positioning himself, he witnessed the scene below.

Movement caught his eye to the left—below he saw the beast had thrown the Boy Scout twenty feet back to the opening of the clearing. He jumped up from the ground and ran toward the creature. With his arms outspread, he was bawling the name, “Tina” in one long howl.

A bright glow from the right took Kenny’s attention. Fifteen feet of the creature was extending from the ground, all its extremities splayed straight out from the top its of worm-like body. Streaking fire-tracks spiraled around its arched frame, as it shrieked in a earsplitting wail of misery in a last calling to whatever mad gods had created it. The lacing flame increased in intensity as a swelling inner radiance showed in its exposed belly.

The Boy Scout seemed to share an equally intense anguish as he ran toward it open-armed. Calling the girl’s name, he impacted with a withering shriek and an explosion of sparks as he and the creature became enveloped in a phosphorus corona.

The tree Kenny was perched in began to tremble with the repercussions of fireball explosions just beyond the nearby treeline. Inside of him he sensed an imminence in the surroundings, and slipped to a two-handed grip, dropped to the ground, and sprinted out of the clearing.

He ran across the path, and reached the culvert spewing his swimming stream as a rising glow illuminated the woods behind him to a daylight brightness. He knew the stream was shallow so he dove in a stretched belly-flop. The submersion shielded him from the outside concussion he felt in a single deep movement of the entire underwater element and the complete aquatic floor momentarily lit up in an instant photoflash to show every mossy detail, then back to the black stillness of night water.

Kenny broke the surface to see a sheet of white fire over the night sky of the Shelter Belt. With his head just above the waterline he could eventually hear the sirens through the crackling inferno as the flames changed to a more natural yellow and orange. He knew they would probably blame the fire on the gas mains and he knew they would find nothing except maybe the skeleton of the Boy Scout welded into a final embrace. But he didn’t know why Skipper died. Feeling only hollow, Kenny looked silently to the skies and asked for an answer.

***

That night the Shelter Belt completely burned. Within a month the city cleared the remaining gaunt, charred stalks to begin construction of an array of medical offices.

Years later, Kenny learned to play guitar and started a rock-n-roll band. He named the group Tripod Dog and they proceeded to make even the most conservative listeners gleefully dance far into the night. One of the people’s favorite songs was a moving ballad he had written in a minor key about an unnamed friend who was forever gone and deeply missed.