The February Editor's Pick Story is by David Longshore
Please feel free to email David at: davidlongshore1@yahoo.com
JACOB’S LAST RISING
By David Longshore
The gray silhouette, a hue lighter than the surrounding night, materialized in front of Jake’s truck milliseconds before he ran into it.
He slammed on the brakes, sending the pedal to the floor. The truck’s engine stalled as the vehicle fishtailed down the isolated road before jolting to a stop in the opposite lane. The stuff on the seat beside him—his cell phone, his music player, his half-empty cup of coffee, the photograph of a young woman with amber hair—flew around the cab and into the windshield like frenzied projectiles. The CD he’d been listening to ended abruptly.
For several minutes, he swam through a confusing miasma of nausea, fear, and neck pain. Aside from the hiss of steam from the truck’s damaged radiator and the ticking of its engine as it cooled in the chilly October air, there was only silence.
Oh my god, he thought, did I hit someone?
The windshield’s maze of cracks resembled a jumbled roadmap, more or less converging in the center of the windshield, where it appeared something had struck it dead on. Jake touched his forehead then held his hand up to his eyes. His fingertips were free of blood.
Looking out the truck’s windows at the forested walls on either side of the road, Jake dreaded he would see in gory certainty what it was he ran into at a gruesome forty miles per hour. Swearing beneath his breath, he slid along the seat and reached down beneath the steering column, his fingers trailing through the accumulated grit on the floor mat. He found the gas and brake pedals, and the fugitive onion ring he’d dropped during his drive-through dinner at the start of his shift… and then what he was looking for: his cell phone.
The luminescent dial of the phone cast a wan gray light in the cab as he debated what to do next. He needed to call 911. Or maybe he should call his employers first, and have them call 911. Or perhaps he should call his father and ask what he should do.
He started to call his employer, then changed his mind and hung up. He didn’t want to leave any permanent, admissible message on his employer’s phone about what happened. Such a rash response might have legal consequences if he had hit a person…No! I hit an animal!
Jake put the phone down on the seat. He got out of the truck to look for what he struck before the feeble glow of the headlights faded forever. Considering the amount of damage the truck had sustained, whatever he hit was surely badly injured, maybe even dead. If it were still alive, he needed to summon medical assistance.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jake noticed something flitter in front of the headlights. It might have been a bug, magnified by the beams, or something larger, like a low-flying bird attracted by the light. He wished the truck had been equipped with at least a flashlight, and a first aid kit, too, one with a little red cross on it…just like those on the outside of the cab and rear doors.
He leaned over and pushed the button that locked and unlocked the truck’s doors. He opened the driver’s side door which let more light upon the scene. Amid the flickering light of the hazard lamps, he instantly witnessed something darker than the night slink beneath the truck.
A wave of fear crashed through him, and he jumped back inside the truck. His now-instinctive breathing response to stress was so deep and fast he sagged, dizzy and nauseated, against the back of the seat.
Then it occurred to him that what he’d really seen was the shadow caused by his opening the door. His nervous giggling, its tenor supercharged by his emotions, echoed surreally in the cab.
A loud scraping noise from the back of the truck killed his laughter. The vehicle quivered for an instant, and Jake had a sense that something had rubbed against his back bumper or perhaps even climbed up the back of the vehicle and onto its roof.
A fire of adrenaline flashed through his body as he looked in the side mirrors. He shuffled to the middle of the cab’s bench seat and peered out the cracked windshield, trying to catch a glimpse of what, if anything, was really out there.
The truck trembled again, and when Jake peered out the driver’s side window, he was sure he saw something: a dark shadow of some sort pass in front of the orange hazard lights. He slammed his fist down on the horn button and heard a dull groan, not loud enough to even spook a pigeon.
He unlocked the door and pushed it open. When the same shadow reappeared, Jake laughed in relief and climbed down onto the step. Obviously whatever was out there was alive. He hadn’t killed anything.
He held onto the open door and swung out with it, flashing his cell phone light toward the rear of the vehicle, and along the ground below. Withdrawing into the cab to grab the keys from the ignition, he climbed down out of the truck.
As his foot touched the ground, he had the sensation that something reached out from beneath the truck and grabbed his ankle, clamping onto it like an invisible vise or maybe a set of jaws.
Jake screamed and kicked his foot. The dark shadow slithered back underneath the truck. He jumped onto the sideboard, flattening his body against the door as he stared at the ground. Whatever was under the vehicle was causing it to shake slightly, as though about to levitate.
Suddenly, the truck lurched to one side, throwing him to the ground. The wind was knocked out of him and his cell phone flew into some roadside bushes. While he laid face down on the road gasping for air, Jake sensed he was being watched. Whatever it was he had struck was wedged beneath the chassis.
Lying on the ground, breathless with fear and pain, Jake wondered if he should look beneath the truck. He felt terror but he needed to know, so he peeked under the chassis.
A pair of glowing blue eyes stared back at him. He tried to scream again, but his lungs merely wheezed. The eyes blinked once, then turned away. As they disappeared between the rear wheels, Jake thought he saw a bushy tail, much like that of a raccoon or a skunk.
Crawling on his hands and knees toward the edge of the road, he felt through the undergrowth for his cell phone. When he found it, he discovered that its screen was cracked and half of its battery life was gone. He needed to conserve its energy if he was going to call his father for help.
Believing it was a wild animal lurking beneath the truck, he staggered to his feet, brushing the dirt off his work uniform. His knees, skinned when he fell onto the asphalt, burned beneath his torn pants.
He wondered if the animal under his truck was unrelated to the accident. He turned his attention to the road and his search for what it was he had run down.
Adrenaline coursed through his body as he trundled into the darkness. He tried to calm his nerves by looking back at his disabled vehicle. The orange hazard blinkers cast it in a forlorn and lonely glare, like a lighthouse in the middle of an endless ocean.
Jake thought he saw more shadows hovering around its right side and back doors. Identification was impossible, and he believed he was only catching slivers of whatever it was—a pointy thing here, a pair of gleaming orange eyes there.
He walked another twenty yards before stopping at the spot where he believed the accident had occurred. His eyes had adjusted to the night, and he saw there was nothing on the road but darkness and uncertainty.
To his right, from a thick clump of bushes at the edge of the asphalt, came a rustling, followed by a rasping groan, then more rustling of dried leaves. His heart pumping like an oil well, he slowly advanced on the spot. By the time he reached it, the rustling had stopped and the groaning had faded away. I bet I hit a bear. It’s a bear returning to its habitat to either survive or die in familiar surroundings.
Then it happened again as something from the bushes closed around his right ankle and violently tugged him off his feet. He landed on his back with a thud, the air expelled from his lungs in a loud whoosh. The back of his head struck the pavement, and his ears started ringing. Unable to cry out, he thrashed his legs at the darkness, and tried to kick whatever it was that grabbed him.
He heard someone screaming, then realized it was coming from his own mouth.
After pulling him some three feet across the road, the invisible grip released him. Jake rolled over and vomited. The stomach acid burned his throat and lips and he tasted blood. The back of his head pulsed as he massaged his right ankle and foot, examining it for injuries.
He decided he needed to get out of there right now and call his father.
Jake’s eyes darted from side to side as he swayed to his feet. His skinned knees stung and the back of his head felt hollow. A sharp pain bolted up from his right ankle, and he hobbled a few yards toward the truck to find his phone.
Whatever it was that he’d run over was still alive, and alive enough to knock his stocky frame to the ground. It came and went with unseen swiftness. He no longer cared if the thing was hurt, only that he wanted out of this terrifying mess.
Besides, now he was convinced that whatever it was, it ran with a pack.
Just as he reached the haven cast by the headlights, he witnessed another pair of gray shadows moving around and beneath the truck. One swept along the right side of the vehicle, while another drifted below the chassis, but not before he got a glimpse of what it looked like.
Oh my god, did it have human hands? The hands seemed distorted, as though reflected in a house of mirrors…and then he told himself that perhaps he had a concussion from the fall.
He found his cell phone and frantically punched in his father’s number. His father answered on the third ring. Jake sobbed in relief.
“I’ll be right there,” his father told him.
He needed to get back inside the truck. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he kept checking the ground, then straight ahead, as he moved along the narrow gap between the vehicle and the embankment. Another shadowy trace disappeared around the truck’s rear.
He ran to the cab door and yanked. It was stuck. His mouth fell open and his bladder constricted as he recognized claw marks. They were deep and shredding, and had peeled away most of the red paint that decorated the doors.
And those scratches were made by something with five fingers of a hand…the something with five talons that lurked right behind him.
With a night-dicing scream, Jake ran to the driver’s side door, a trail of hot piss running down his leg and onto the ground.
Intoxicated by fear unlike any he’d ever known, he leaped onto the driver’s side step. Clutching the mirror, his body cramped with muscle spasms, he spent a split second watching a gray shadow fade in and out as it made its way toward him. He reached down and tried to open the door.
Locked. When had he locked it?
Jake desperately fumbled in his pants pocket for the key fob. The gray shadow drew closer, seemingly waiting for him to open the door. The key fob wasn’t in his right pocket, nor was it in his left. Jake whimpered, using one eye to watch the silhouette drift ever closer, its slivered presence only visible in the hazard signals. He had no idea what it was, but he knew it would harm him.
Locating the key fob in his shirt pocket, he pushed the button that unlocked the doors. There was a click, followed by a loud beep. He didn’t wait to see the ghastly blue hands vanish beneath the truck and the specter subside into the gloom before he gripped the handle, swung off the mirror, and yanked open the door.
Two muscular blue arms crept up from beneath the truck, making one last attempt to grab Jake as he scampered into the cab. The gray shadow reappeared, headed for the open door. Swinging around sharply enough to crack his spine, Jake used both hands to pull the door shut, but whatever it was on the outside had taken hold of the handle and the door opened and closed between them as though attached to an enormous rubber band.
He knew the thing was trying to get into the cab, and if that happened, he felt it would kill him. With one final effort, he tried to slam the door closed. This time the door was pulled back so forcefully that Jake was nearly yanked off the seat. About to lose his tug-of-war with the unknown, he reached into his shirt pocket and pushed the key fob.
The locks snapped, the truck squawked, and the door swung freely. Jake slammed it shut and locked it. Misty traces of the gray vision lingered outside the window for several seconds, during which time Jake, smelling of urine and sweat, tried to catch his breath. He clutched the phone in his lap and whimpered in the blackness.
It was then, beyond the windshield’s tangled web, he saw something moving on the road.
As the gnawing terror set in, Jake felt a loneliness flush through him, the same kind of smothering melancholy an innocent prisoner might have in a cell. It wasn’t the same thing that had just tried to hop into the truck with him, he was sure of that much.
He watched as the crawling thing on the road moved a few feet closer to the truck before collapsing face-down. Please let it be dead! He leaned forward to get a better look through the windshield in time to see a crouching black silhouette flitter across the front of the truck.
He was convinced that the immovable truck was now surrounded by moving things that wanted to get in. He huddled in the middle of the cab, anxiously looking back and forth between the two side windows, wishing he was at this moment safely locked in a concrete box that had no apertures of any kind—except for an invisible door, a way out known only to him.
Where’s my father?
Nearly two hours had elapsed since he had run something over, and Jake’s self-awareness was faltering. He stared at the creature lying still and motionless on the road. The truck’s translucent headlights revealed the presence of two insipid arms, and blue hands with long fingers, outstretched as though reaching for him.
The truck again shook as though something was sliding across its roof. A chill enveloped his spine, and he rubbed his upper arms to regain warmth. He stared in dread at the driver’s side mirror. It was filled with more peculiar shadows; gloomy, shifting shapes that didn’t seem reflected so much as projected. There were extended fingers with sharp nails, and floating limbs turned blue by long immersion in death’s shallows.
Then he saw them: human faces, similarly indigo in color, with protruding eyes and yellow wolves’ teeth; a human parade, a music-less march of people he had known.
Once the ghostly procession was over, Jake turned his attention to the road. The thing he’d innocently mowed down was again creeping toward him, face down, its stomach dragging across the asphalt.
Please God, please God…get me out of this and I promise to be a better man!
Watching it struggle in the darkness just a few feet from the front of the truck, Jake relived the most dreaded moments of his alarm-filled life. It seemed each accusatory step the thing took toward him traced Jake’s own progression toward meltdown.
Slowly, one hand after the other, the thing fully emerged into the headlights. Jake sank back into the seat as far as he could go. His wired mind, already overloaded by the currents of fear surging through it, was unable to comprehend what he was seeing through the windshield prism.
Did it look like a woman? Or was he now insane from the impossible becoming reality?
Propping herself up on her elbows, the woman with the obscured face prepared to stand. Jake’s mind whirred with indecision.
Do I wait for my father or run? Can I run and find a house down the road where I can be safe? Or can these things run faster than me?
He checked the driver’s side window as a heavy ground fog settled in, flowing like a rising tide around the truck. Within seconds, it had entirely covered the road, its wispy feelers drifting through the orange headlights, submerging the battered blue woman beneath its undulating shroud.
Frantically, Jake snatched the key fob from his pocket and was about to use it when he saw something rising from the earth-bound cloud; a long blue finger, the glimpse of a shoulder, the shock of amber hair above gray eyes.
Jake screamed until his vocal cords snapped.
In that instant, his father’s face—blue, with bulging reptilian eyes and the thin teeth of a piranha—appeared outside the driver’s side window. He hissed at his son, his four sharp teeth bared in a snarl, his fingers drumming on the door.
Recoiling in abject terror, Jake scrambled across the seat only to come face-to-face with his mother at the other window, her blue face covered in garish makeup, peering at him through the passenger side.
She opened her muscular jaws wide and hissed through the glass, her red-stained teeth as deadly as rusty razor blades. She then closed her mouth, cocked her head and smiled sweetly at her son, just as she had always done when he was a boy.
Tapping repeatedly on the glass, his mother’s wretched smile dissolving into a look of ghoulish determination, she pointed to the doors and motioned it was time to let them in.
Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and raised in New Hampshire, David Longshore holds a B.A. in history and English from Amherst College, and an M.A. in Homeland Defense and Security from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
A veteran of the U.S. Navy, David was a member of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management when the city suffered its worst catastrophe on September 11, 2001.
He began writing horror stories as a way of expressing an inkling of the terror experienced that day. In addition to his works of horror, mystery, and suspense, David is the author of the Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones (Checkmark Books), as well as various non-fiction essays on terrorism, naval affairs, and sea disasters.
