Page 68 of The Godhead Complex
The noise grew louder, as if a dozen Frypans had gone from cleaning pans to banging them together. “Whatisthat?” Trish asked quietly.
Sadina’s heart thumped hard enough to feel it in her ears, and she pulled the gun from Minho out of her back pocket.
The crack and warp of metal grinding on metal stopped, oddly replaced by a gurgling noise. Garbling. Mumbling.
“Something’s there,” Dominic said, pointing his knife somewhere straight ahead, but a lot of good that was going to do.
“Minho?” Sadina asked, wanting him to take control like her mom would have, to tell everyone it would be okay, but he remained silent. The wind blew through the bog trees beside them, creepy pine trees that looked like they weren’t willing to leave the ground no matter what came after it, be it an ax, storm, or avalanche. They were full on the bottom but skinny all the way to the top, like the sky had grabbed hold and stretched them as far as they would go. Trees that looked like tall weapons themselves. Spears.
Minho shushed them again. He and Orange stood still, listening intently. The rest of the group did the same. Roxy obviously wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She just held her long gun tightly in both hands.
“Guys . . .” Dominic broke the silence when the source of the metal clanking came into view.
Cranks.
Six . . . no,eightCranks chained together in a row came through the white-barked trees up ahead. Like the kind of weird Crank-contraption they had seen on the Berg with those Grief Bearers. They stumbled over roots and smacked their heads into low-hanging branches, but stayed upright, walking closer to Sadina and her friends. They were normal humans, all sexes and ages, but with eyes full of deep emptiness. Soulless.
“Oh shit.” Without hesitating, Minho pulled up his gun and started shooting them, one by one. Trish grabbed Sadina’s arm as the Cranks fell alone but also together because of the chains fastened around their wrists and ankles, binding them into one fighting force. Before the last Crank in the group of eight fell from Minho’s death shots, another fence row of Cranks came trampling through the woods. And then another one. And another one.
“What in the Iblis is going on!” Roxy straightened out her gun and started firing like an Orphan veteran, obviously taught well by her adopted son, but Sadina remained frozen. Gun or no gun, she could only hold Trish and walk backwards from the wall of Cranks coming at them, pushing them deeper into the creepy pine trees. Dominic and Miyoko walked backwards, too. The islanders weren’t meant for war and they weren’t meant for whatever this Crank-stuff was.
“I told you!” Orange shouted over to Minho as she put down one after another in a line. Two, three, four bodies fell. Sadina watched as Orange, Minho, and Roxy all fired away, the cracks and smoke of gunfire filling the already misty air. Despite the relative ease of picking them off, more and more waves of them were coming, weaving through the trees, stumbling but then dragged upright again by the chains.
The war had come to them, after all.Dammit.
“I told you!” Orange said again. Her gun fired three times in succession, each shot hitting a target. More came.
“What?” Minho asked, clearly annoyed as he reloaded his own weapon.
“How many Cranks need to be tied together and marching toward us before you’ll admit there’s an underground Crank Army in the Remnant Nation?” She huffed as she shot yet another Crank in the head and skipped a rock into the temple of another one.
Minho refused to take the bait or even look at her, keeping his eyes on the heads of the Cranks he was blasting. “Not much of an army without weapons!”
Orange allowed herself one moment to glare at Minho. “Theyarethe weapons, idiot.”
Roxy shot at them with relentless consistency, like it was a hidden talent no one knew about. “She’s quicker than both of them . . . ,” Dominic said.
He was right, but he was also wrong. Miyoko pointed out the obvious. “No. It’s because there’s only four or five Cranks on some of her group’s chains.” Miyoko freaked a little. “Where’s the rest of them?” It was as if she’d spoken it into existence, the fact that there were now Cranks on the loose. They appeared out of the nearby bog, crawling on arms that ended in bloody, raggedy stumps, their hands sawed or chewed off at some point. They came anyway, dragging themselves between the pine trees.
“Minho!” Sadina shouted. There were two freed Cranks coming at the islanders but Minho, Orange, and Roxy still had their hands full.
“I’m out of ammo!” Roxy pronounced and moved to the next chain-link fence of Cranks with her knife. Sadina stared in awe at such bravery.
“Minho!” Sadina cried again, squeezing Trish tighter and moving away from the trees.
“Dominic, get it!” Miyoko screamed, pointing at the Crank closest to them. Sadina couldn’t process what she was looking at, all this insanity and terror. For the first time since getting separated, she was glad that Old Man Frypan wasn’t there with them to suffer such pain and anguish. “Dominic!” Miyoko yelled.
“Stab it in the neck. You can do it.” Minho quickly showed Dominic where exactly to stab and slash his blade.
Dom stomped in place like he was going to pee his pants. He gripped his knife then looked directly at Miyoko, then Trish and Sadina and said, “I voted to go home!” And then he charged the Crank crawling at them from the pine trees. He stabbed it in the neck with a war cry like Sadina had never heard. He’d been so loud that it made Minho and Orange stop shooting for a second and turn around. “I got him!” Dom raised his knife in the air.
“Good job,” Minho said and went back to holding the line of chained Cranks coming out of the woods. Dom had a renewed strength and went after the next Crank crawling from the pine trees. This time it took two stabbing thrusts to kill it. Sadina let Trish’s hand go with a sigh of relief.
Dominic wasn’t quite smiling, but a sense of pride had glistened his eyes with tears. In that moment of terror and violence, Sadina realized two things at once: First, Dom didn’t have something he was particularly good at like the other islanders, he didn’t have a trade to learn and train for on the island and grow into, and even though he wanted to go back home, he really had the least to go back to.
Second, Sadina realized there’d been three Cranks missing from Roxy’s chain and Dominic had only stabbed two of them.
And like a tall, creepy, pine tree in the bog, a Crank rose up from the ground and stood behind a proud Dominic. Hovering with horror.
