The Influence(48)

The path ended at the edge of the outcropping, and he stood next to a pillar-like boulder, yelling into the space between it and the cliffside. “Hello!”

The other kids did not respond, although they both burst out laughing before continuing with their conversation. They were messing with him, Dylan thought, and the idea so annoyed him that he picked up a couple of pebbles from the ground and slid between the rocks as quietly as he could, intending to scare those brats within an inch of their lives. If he’d had the ability to do a deep voice, he would have pretended to be an adult, but since that option was out, he thought he’d throw the pebbles up at the cliff, above where they were, and fool them into thinking there was an avalanche.

It was a good plan, and he stopped, peeked out from between the boulders at a flat open space surrounded by tall rock, and saw—

—no one.

The kids were laughing. He could hear their voices coming from the small area directly in front of him, but there was no sign of anyone around. He stepped out, looked in each direction, thinking that his ears had been playing tricks on him, that maybe they’d detected his presence and were hiding between other boulders, waiting to jump out at him. But, no, despite the voices, he was the only one here.

Except…

Except at the other end of the flat space there were two mounds of mud, each about two feet high.

That was weird, he thought. How could there be mud here? It hadn’t rained recently, and there were no ponds or streams nearby.

The mound on the right shifted, a section of mud sliding off to reveal what appeared to be the decaying body of a bobcat beneath. The dead animal’s blackened mouth opened and closed, and Dylan saw that the movement matched the nonsensical words spoken by one of the voices.

Mud fell from the mound on the left, exposing a dead bird encased in the center of the wet dirt, and the bird’s rotted head jiggled up and down in time to the second voice’s responding laughter.

He’d been confused when he’d stepped out from between the rocks, but now he was confused and scared. Swiveling around, intending to retreat and run back the way he’d come, Dylan was confronted by a pack of small creatures hopping out from the passageway through which he’d arrived. They resembled tiny kangaroos more than anything else, tiny kangaroos with rat faces and lizard skin, and they screamed angrily at him in high-pitched voices far too loud for their size.

Behind him, the animal corpses in melting mud laughed uproariously.

Dylan started to cry. He still had the pebbles in his hand, and he threw them one-by-one at the small creatures hopping toward him, but he missed every time, and one of the little monsters jumped directly in front of him, screeching. Even through his tears, he could see the look of hatred on the tiny rat face, see the sharp thin fangs in the wide-open mouth. Sobbing in fear and frustration, he called out “Mom!” at the top of his lungs.

It was an instinctive reaction, a plea for help that had no hope of being answered. His mom was not here, and she would not be able to hear him from this far away. No one in town could hear him, and he suddenly realized that he could die up here and it would be weeks before anyone found his body.

Turning, he ran across the open area, between the laughing mounds of mud, and attempted to climb the boulders at the opposite end. The rocks were high with no footholds, and he scrambled in vain, trying to get up and out. There were no other paths save the one that had led him here, and his attempts to climb grew more frantic as he heard the approaching screams of those hopping creatures.

“Mom!” he cried again.

One of them leaped onto his back, claws digging into his skin and holding on. The pain was unbearable and overwhelming, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It felt as though he was being cut with razors, and he flailed about, hitting at his back, trying to get it off, lurching from side to side, screaming so loudly that his throat burned.

Someone somewhere was calling his name, but he couldn’t focus on that because more of those hopping monsters were jumping onto him, and he instinctively turned around, shoving his back against the boulder, trying to squish them, trying to kill them, trying to get them off, but they held on and dug in, slicing open his flesh, and he saw more of them coming, hopping happily across the open space toward him, fangs bared.

One of them either bit or clawed open his right ankle, and he collapsed on the ground, that leg no longer able to support him.

He knew he was going to die. He was still screaming from the pain, still crying from the fear, but inside himself, beneath it all, was a strange stillness that allowed him for his last few moments of life to see everything as though it was happening to someone else. He heard his name called again and knew this time that it came from the rotted bobcat encased in mud.