Not everyone can be a protagonist or a hero. This is the story of one of Hometown‘s innocent bystanders.
*
Eleven-thirty.
That was all Kim Laramie could think as she speed-walked toward home along Wharf Street, the street in Rivertown that rode on the edge of Shady River.
Eleven frigging thirty.
“I got school tomorrow,” she growled. “They can’t do this. It can’t be legal. There has to be a law.” She kicked a rock. It bounced across the street and into the river with a plunk. It probably was illegal, and there probably was a law. But this was Belford. Even the night manager of a pissant business like Eduardo’s Pizza counted for more than a sixteen-year-old loser from Rivertown.
And they wonder why my grades aren’t so good, she fumed. Who can learn anything when they can’t stay awake?
Tomorrow, she would start looking for another job. She couldn’t just quit, not as badly as her family needed the money. But nothing said that she had to work at Eduardo’s. That was probably why they were doing this, anyway. They never fired anyone at Eduardo’s. They just piled you with shit-work and gave you nothing but the shifts you asked not to have and damn few of those until you quit. She’d seen it before, and now they were doing it to her.
She should have seen it coming. They’d been out to get her since the night she told Wilkins that no, she couldn’t come in, and it didn’t matter how busy it was. She needed to baby-sit her sisters.
Well, fuck ‘em. They weren’t worth the hassle.
Tonight was a Wednesday night, which was the second-deadest night of the week, after Tuesday. On top of that, it was the first day of school. The place had been friggin’ deserted. They could have let her go at 9:30 and closed up just fine without her. But guess who had been the manager on duty tonight.
So here she was, walking home at eleven-fucking-thirty. No one had even offered her a ride. Didn’t they know there was a killer on the loose?
That thought doused her fury for a moment and brought the fear back with a chill. She didn’t like this street. On one side was a sidewalk and run-down houses, now black-windowed and blind, their residents asleep. On the other was the river: waist-high railing and black water. There were far too many places to hide, and not enough to run. Every shadow-swamped back yard looked like the bogeyman’s home turf. A hook-handed psycho could lurch out of any one of them at any moment.
Tonight was even worse. The fog was rolling off the river so bad that she could hardly see more than a block in either direction, and it was cold.
She started walking faster.
Her senses on high alert, she noticed something weird happening on the river almost as soon as it started. She just didn’t know what the hell it was.
Lights on the river? Was it a boat? But how could it be? She heard neither oars nor motor.
Glancing both ways and listening carefully for cars—getting run over in this fog would kill her just as surely as any psycho on the loose—she crossed over to the river.
It had been a hot, dry summer, and the river was a full ten feet down from the lip of the concrete sleeve it flowed through. The fog poured so thickly from the river that she couldn’t see the other side, twenty feet away. She had to lean over the railing to see what was coming, and even then, all she could see were two gray-white lights.
Headlights? Weird color for ‘em. And how is it moving so quietly?
Then how it was moving so quietly stopped mattering as much as the fact that it suddenly started to move quickly. Whatever it was, it had spotted her, and it was coming. Fast.
Whatever? It? What are you thinking about, girl? It’s just a boat, and—
And the gray-white lights on the river were the way wrong color for headlights. But they were the right size. And they were coming fast. And they were coming under the water.
Something was in the river. Something big, something that was raising a mound of water the size of a car behind it as it moved, but still the only sound it made was the shushhh of water against the concrete sides of the river and some deep part of Kim was screaming Monsters! Monsters coming!
This was the kind of night where you listened to that voice. Kim spun on her heel and almost crashed headlong into a massive black car with a red stripe—flames?—down the side that had pulled in behind her, all but pinning her against the railing.
How? Her mind screamed in panic. Didn’t hear!
She took a step to the right and started to turn, intending to sprint off down the street. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something start to rise up out of the river–Oh, god! Monsters!—and she took off.
The car gunned its engine—she could hear it just fine now—and leaped out toward her, its headlights flaring into gray-white life. It could have run her down in seconds, if that was what it wanted. Her only choices were to run across the road—directly in front of it—or over the railing and into the river. She was about to choose the unknown in the river over the sure death of the car, but it suddenly surged past her and spun out, blocking her path.
She whirled again, and started to flee in the other direction, when she gasped and froze in place.
Something had come out of the river. Something dark and serpentine and impossibly huge, its neck rising out of the river’s channel and its head hanging ten feet over the pavement, its gray-headlight eyes glaring down at her. How could something that big possibly be in Shady River?
The head swayed from side to side like a snake about to strike. She stood in place, her feet set wide, watching it like a mongoose.
I have a chance. The car’s pointed toward the railing—if I can get to the other side of the street and into somebody’s back yard, the car can’t follow me, and neither can that.
She darted toward the other side of the street.
The thing in the river struck like a cobra, and then Kim Laramie had no chance at all.
*
To find out what the thing in the river is, and how the heroes of Belford fight it, head on over to Amazon and download a copy of Hometown at its new lower price (and of course, it’s 100% free on Kindle Unlimited)! And if you like it, check out the rest of the library!