Rise of the Night Stalkers Read online

  She readjusted her gun back into position, allowing the strap to support most of its weight so she had one finger on the trigger and the other hand free, and then she grabbed the radio to hold it up to her mouth.

  “Sierra19 to Julius2, do you copy?”

  She scanned the area anxiously, glancing back at me as she waited for a response.

  It suddenly occurred to me that she was much smarter than I had given her credit for. Obviously she knew her best chance of surviving another such attack was to stick with me, but she was intentionally positioning herself so that I was protecting her most vulnerable side.

  John’s voice responded seconds later.

  “Copy. What’s your current location? Everything alright?”

  “I think we’re on Delaware, but we were just attacked by some kind of Night Stalker I’ve never seen before,” she said, sounding out of breath. “It wasn’t humanoid,” she added. “Over.”

  “Are you sure it was a Night Stalker? We’ve never seen a live one during the day. Over.”

  Savannah gripped the radio more tightly. “I don’t know what else it would be!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. It looked like some kind of giant isopod from when the dinosaurs roamed the planet! It would have gotten me for sure if Mason hadn’t saved me. Over.”

  “Iso-what? And who in the hell is Mason? Over.”

  Savannah paused for a long few seconds, her voice sounding embarrassed when she spoke again. “Oh. He’s the Night Stalker helping us. I decided he should have a–”

  Instantly, my tail shot around my body towards my right, knocking into the hard shoulder of a pitch-black humanoid monster that silently leapt from an opening in the concrete wall of a building we were just passing. The creature deflected the blow by shifting its upper body in midair, landing barely ten feet from Savannah as my blade continued onward.

  However, I rapidly retracted my tail and spun my hips sideways at the same time, forcing the end to curve slightly as it sliced through my enemy’s neck like a scythe sheering wheat. The decapitated head flew through the air just as Savannah let out a spurt of gunfire from her rifle, a sound that surprised me, since I had assumed it was semiautomatic, requiring an additional pull of the trigger for each bullet.

  The only explanation I could think of was that one of the men had filed down the disconnector pin to turn it into an automatic, which only raised more questions as to how I knew that was possible. Or how I knew that the process was a delicate one – that shaving even a little too much off the pin would cause an entire magazine of bullets to fire with a single trigger pull, which wasn’t ideal in a fight, considering the user would waste all their ammunition on a single target that way.

  Really, the idea itself was potentially idiotic, since most semiautomatic rifles held limited ammunition in the magazine, which meant there must be another purpose behind it, such as the hopes that the lost accuracy would actually improve hitting the target, considering my kind could move so quickly…

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get long to consider the implications, because the noise from her gun spurred more activity, another three humanoid monsters jumping from the same hole, with two of them charging on their hands and feet like wolves. Or werewolves. They all had warped faces and black hair on their heads.

  Shit! It was like we had stumbled upon a hornet’s nest!

  And hadn’t John just said they had never seen a living Night Stalker during the day?! Yet, we had seen five creatures now in the last minute!

  Must be that no one who saw a living Night Stalker survived to tell the tale.

  Dropping the old man and little girl, I bolted into action, trying to position myself in between them and Savannah, swiping at the nearest one’s eyes with my claws while my tail curled around to impale another through its oddly shaped skull. I then flung my tail back around, with the second fiend’s body still attached, using the momentum to slingshot myself toward the third monster, my claws intercepting its jaw, my own teeth sinking into its more slender neck.

  The monster went limp immediately thanks to my venom.

  The moment I freed myself from my final victim, I leapt backwards to scoop up my two unconscious charges in my arms, only for my tail to shoot out again as I impaled yet another monstrosity in midair just before it landed on Savannah.

  This time her second spurt of gunfire nicked my tail, leaving me surprised when the bullet didn’t penetrate my natural armor. However, likewise, I wasn’t sure it had done much to her assailant either.

  Did the humans know their guns were useless?

  Maybe they just carried them around as a precaution, having never really fought my kind face-to-face. Or maybe they even carried them around to protect themselves from other humans.

  Twisting back around, I charged at Savannah at full speed, trying to snag her around the waist with her sister in the same arm. Thankfully, she reflexively shot her hands up around my neck, dropping the radio in the process, with her gun only hanging on due to the strap, which allowed me to carry all three of them without dropping anyone.

  Unexpectedly, a sharp object clawed at my wing while something like a vice grip ensnared my tail, prompting me to violently spin in place, my bladed weapon whipping around to smash into four more Stalkers who had leapt out of the shadows. I then jumped backwards to evade another set of claws, seeing that even more of them were now pouring onto the street.

  Knowing we were about to be overwhelmed with sheer numbers, I did the only thing left I could.

  I dropped to my heels and jerked upwards again, leaping over ten feet into the air as my powerful wings thrust downwards.

  At the same time, another pitch-black monster jumped as well, prompting me to thrust my tail downwards to intercept the top of its head with the flat portion of the blade, knowing that stabbing my enemy might briefly anchor me to a dead weight.

  Instead, the proverbial bitch-slap in the face helped propel me upwards, allowing me to peak over the rooftops despite the extra weight.

  As I slowly climbed higher, reaching another ten feet above the building roofs, with my wings pounding at the air, I noticed over twenty monsters converging on one location below, the distant sound of a familiar man’s voice speaking into the street urgently, a faint crackling accompanying the noise.

  In the end, it appeared that the distraction of the radio had been the extra edge we needed to escape, the desperate attempt of Savannah’s allies to make contact, after she cut off midsentence, becoming the decoy that prevented an otherwise unavoidable fight to the death – one in which the humans accompanying me probably wouldn’t have survived.

  From the sky, I could see that the hospital was several miles away, which meant we had walked probably almost an hour to get here. Crazy how the time flew. It didn’t seem that long at all, but at least I felt confident that putting the few miles between us and the horde of Night Stalkers below would be enough to keep everyone safe.

  After all, if they were just mindless creatures, then they should have no idea where to go to chase us, and the distance would be enough to ensure that sound wouldn’t provoke them.

  Flying in the direction of the hospital, it took a lot less time than walking to arrive. Knowing that humans were more fragile than my kind, I was careful about how fast I descended, landing back in the parking lot of the ER just in time to see three men loading up in a dark blue truck – the middle-aged guy from before, with blue eyes and blonde hair, and two younger guys not much older than Savannah.

  I saw a resemblance between all three of them, although the two younger ones had much darker skin than John, who I assumed must be their father based on his earlier comment about his ‘boys.’ Which of course meant the mother must be dark-skinned. Maybe from India?

  Hard to say.

  Apparently, my flying hadn’t been gentle enough though, because Savannah tumbled out of my arms the moment I landed and vomited all over the pavement.

  And once again, I had guns pointed at me w
hile she hurled a second time.

  Chapter 5: Party Member

  I backed up from Savannah to avoid the splatter, setting the younger girl down, but keeping the unconscious old man in my grasp to use as a hostage and shield in the event they fired. Savannah finally sucked in a deep breath, followed by some more gagging, before she looked up to see her allies taking aim.

  “Wait!” she exclaimed. “Don’t shoot! He just saved all our lives!”

  “Like hell he did!” one of the guys said, this one having brown eyes, light brown hair, and only slightly tanned skin.

  “He did, Chris! Like fifty Night Stalkers attacked us! And he protected me! He protected all of us!”

  “Probably just so he could make a meal out of the rest of us later!” Chris hissed, his aim steady.

  “That doesn’t even make sense!” she retorted. “He brought my brother back, he helped us find Harper, and he knows what two plus two is! He remembers being human!”

  “What in the hell does that prove?” Chris snapped.

  “Animals can’t do math!” she nearly screamed. “Not even simple math! Come on John,” she added, looking at the middle-aged man who was also taking aim. “You saw him earlier! He was just going to leave, but then I asked him to take us to my sister! And he did! And now we’re back safe!”

  John seemed exceptionally pensive, having been staring at me the whole time. “Savannah, he’s holding Randy like he’s about to tear him apart.”

  I completely disagreed, but whatever.

  I mean, I was totally holding him by the back of the neck, partially suspended in the air, but I mean, he could breathe, so there was that.

  Needless to say, it seemed like Savannah believed him for half a second, her head turning around to hesitantly look over her shoulder.

  “M-Mason,” she said cautiously. “Will you please put my grandpa down?”

  My eyes met hers and then looked up at the three men aiming at me, prompting her to snap her head around to glare at them.

  “Dammit, you three! All of you lower your guns right now! Or I swear I’ll shoot you myself! Even if you did shoot him, I guarantee he would kill you long before you killed him!”

  “He can try,” the other brother muttered.

  “Damn right,” Chris agreed.

  “Dammit, Tony! Chris! Put the guns down!”

  All three of them hesitated for a moment, before John lowered his weapon incrementally. Ironically, despite what the other guy had just said, Tony – who had brown eyes, dark brown hair, and tan skin – followed suit without question. It was only Chris who needed the extra prompt.

  “Do it,” John demanded, giving his oldest son a hard glare.

  “Shit,” he muttered, finally obliging.

  In response, I let go of the old fart and allowed him to crumple to the ground in a heap, his head smacking against the pavement on the way down…

  Huh, bad day for that dude, but he kind of brought it upon himself – he should have never aimed his gun at me with the intention to shoot. Bet he would be having a severe headache in the morning, assuming a concussion didn’t kill him before he woke up.

  Savannah cringed when her grandfather’s head hit the ground, but she didn’t comment on it.

  “See?” she said hesitantly, her tone lacking confidence.

  “Now what,” Tony whispered, his brown eyes shifting from Savannah to me, and then down to the little girl.

  For half a second, I assumed he was just examining the scene before him, but then movement in the corner of my eye prompted me to glance down too. Harper’s leg had twitched, but her eyes remained closed. It was only then I realized that in the skirmish her shirt had been torn, likely by a rogue claw, with the material barely hanging off her.

  Not that it really mattered, since it was obvious that her wetsuit-like skin covered up everything except her face and the patch on her stomach. Just like me, she would be covered even without normal human clothing, because the black encasing on our bodies was truly like wearing permanent armor.

  Suddenly curious about the wound on her back, I abruptly bent down to yank off what was left of the shirt before rolling her onto her stomach.

  “What are you doing to her?!” John exclaimed, taking a step forward.

  “Please don’t hurt her,” Savannah abruptly added.

  I ignored them both as I rested my fingertips on her back, tracing down the tiny ridges that marked her spine underneath the black shell.

  No wound – not on her neck or back. Not even any dried blood.

  But damn, this kid really was in trouble.

  Her skin wasn’t hard like mine – it was malleable, being not much harder than thick leather, which meant it wasn’t going to offer much protection in the hellish night world. Shoot, a cow’s hide was probably thicker!

  How did I even know that? An assumption?

  Unexpectedly, white letters appeared in my vision.

  Sub-handler 001 update.

  Physical Condition: Regeneration complete.

  Checking available resources.

  Distributable Resources Available: 1

  Ailment Detected: Fatigue

  Allocating 1 resource to reduce fatigue by an estimated 50%...

  Assignment complete.

  Initiating Antigen production…

  Initiating Adrenal production…

  Flooding system…

  Complete.

  Ailment ‘Fatigue’ dismissed.

  Condition ‘Unconscious’ dismissed.

  Instantly, the girl’s eyes flew open, her slitted pupils narrowing as they adjusted to the daylight, before she shifted her head to look up at me. However, unlike before, she didn’t lunge for my throat, instead just staring me down with a blank expression, one of her eyes partially covered by her white hair.

  I barely noticed everyone flinch in surprise, instead my focus returning to the floating words between me and the girl.

  Establishing synaptic link with Sub-handler 001…

  Synchronization in process…

  Stabilizing telemetry nodes…

  Complete.

  Sub-handler 001 linked.

  Uninodal connection established.

  No commands assigned.

  Hierarchical Status: Independent Utility

  Evaluating allegiance…

  Calculated Allegiance: 79%

  Condition Status: Acceptable

  Evaluating yield…

  Calculated Yield: 86%

  Condition Status: Acceptable

  My gaze shifted back towards the girl as she finally averted her crimson eyes, slowly sitting up in front of me between my knees, as she placed her large midnight hand on her forehead.

  “Ugh, my head hurts,” she complained.

  Savannah gasped.

  Chris cursed under his breath, and John spoke up. “Well, I’ll be damned. I can’t believe this is happening. It’s really still her.”

  Savannah scrambled to her hands and knees, half-crawling, half-stumbling over to us in a rush, landing hard on her shins next to her younger sister.

  “Oh Harper!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around the girl, unaware of the sudden tension in the new Night Stalker’s body. “I was so worr–”

  Instantly, my hand flashed out like lightning, snatching the back of Savannah’s neck and yanking her backwards just as a pair of sharp teeth snapped right where her flesh had momentarily been.

  Then, just as fast, I thrust my other hand in front of Savannah’s chest to intercept a pair of claws, shoving my arm outward and colliding with the young girl’s armored chest, causing her to tumble backwards, flipping head-over-heels several times.

  It all occurred so fast, that none of the humans had managed to even comprehend what was happening. Granted, I was sure it wasn’t that they couldn’t ‘see’ what was occurring – our movements weren’t that quick – but registering that this little girl was attempting to attack her older sister was a different story. I wasn’t even sure if they were prepa
red to ‘put her down’ at this point, especially after hearing her speak.

  The moment the gremlin caught her balance, the little monster bolted to her feet and began charging again, her crazed red eyes focused on her prey.

  I held up my hand in front of Savannah a second time, my palm facing outwards in the universal stop gesture – only sideways.

  ‘Stop!’ I demanded nonverbally.

  Harper came to a halt so abruptly that she stumbled forward, catching herself with her hands as she froze in place, her body trembling with restraint. Sure enough, her elongated arms made her look like a four-legged humanoid, appearing to be capable of comfortably running on all fours at high speeds, which was probably why her speed stat was one of the highest. Granted, I wasn’t too surprised by the sight, since I had already just seen several Night Stalkers with a similar build.

  Still, part of me couldn’t believe that she listened to me – that she responded to an unspoken command.

  “I don’t want to listen!” Harper exclaimed, seemingly in response to my thoughts. “I want to bite her for touching me!”

  “Sis,” Savannah whispered in disbelief, carefully squirming free of my fingers loosely on her neck to lean forward a little. Her hand was curled up at her chest now, her entire body trembling, her legs bent beneath her. “W-What’s wrong? W-Why are you mad that I touched you?”

  “Strangers aren’t allowed to touch me,” she hissed in response.

  I took a deep breath as it all finally clicked. For some unknown reason, this girl had turned out just like me after all. She likely knew she had once been human, and recalled the values and lessons she had been taught, but couldn’t remember the specifics of who she had been.