Free Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology by Howard Tayler Dan Wells Mary Robinette Kowal Brandon Sanderson

the handle; I expected the handle to come off, but was surprised to see the entire door come flying off, knocking my driver flat on his back as the sudden shift in weight unbalanced him. My gunner tried the lead engineer’s seatbelt, but it was jammed too tight to move. The little green man was dancing on the roof now, metal cracking and warping and rusting with each wrinkly footstep. I tried to open the other door and pull the engineers to safety (the door didn’t come off, just peeled away in long, corroded strips), but as scared as they were they refused to leave without their bags.
    “Just get out!” I said. Springs were bursting out of the seats like twisted daggers, sending puffs of upholstery wafting through the chaos like fat foam snowflakes.
    “We need MREs!”
    “What?” Somehow, despite the crazy green weirdo destroying the truck—or maybe because of it—this was the last thing I’d ever expected them to say.
    “We need the MREs,” they continued, scouring madly through their bags. “It’s the only way to stop it!”
    “To stop the . . . green guy?” He was chewing on the ceiling now, literally tearing into it with his teeth and ripping out chunks of metal, cackling like a madman.
    “Just help us!”
    “You can look for them outside,” I said, and hauled the engineers out by anything I could reach, shoulders and necks and arms, throwing the men in the dirt and tossing their heavy packs on the ground beside them. My belt came apart as I worked, the buckle bending nearly in half like someone was crushing it with invisible pliers, and the vehicle bucked wildly as the tires exploded in a string of deafening bursts. I went for my sidearm, drawing on the wrinkly green man at close range, but the rack slid off like it wasn’t even attached, and the bullets sprayed up out of the magazine like a bubbling metal fountain.
    “This one caught shrapnel in his neck during that last burst,” my driver shouted, looking at the second engineer, but the lead engineer drowned him out with cries of “MREs! Find the MREs, as many as you can!” He was already tearing open a plastic bag, dumping the interior pouches in the dirt and fumbling for one in particular. I turned to the wounded engineer and found a twisted chunk of truck frame lodged in his neck. He was already dead.
    “We need to get out of here!” I shouted.
    “I found one!” cried the lead engineer, and he tore open the smallest pouch from the MRE, the salt, and threw a pinch of the stuff at the wrinkly green thing still tearing the truck to pieces. When the salt hit him the green man screamed, leaped off the truck, and scampered behind a boulder.
    I stared in surprise, my eyes wide. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t need another demonstration to convince me. “We need more salt,” I said, and turned to the group with a shout. “Find more MREs!” Soon all of us were tearing open pouches of food, searching for the little packets of salt, and the engineer led us back to the flipped JERRV and directed us to dump the salt in a circle around it. We had barely enough to complete a thin, scattered border before the wrinkly green thing charged us in a rage, howling and brandishing a jagged tailpipe. When he came within a few feet of the salt circle his howl turned to a scream of fear, and he retreated again to the demolished truck, smashing it with wicked glee.
    My breath came in gasps. “What,” I asked, “in the bright blue hell, is that thing?”
    “It’s a BSE,” said the engineer, collapsing to the ground and leaning back against the JERRV. “Though it isn’t really bound anymore, so it’s just an SE. A supernatural entity: lambda-class demon, minor manifestation.”
    “Minor?”
    “It’s a gremlin,” he said. “They destroy technology. Made them a bitch to study in the lab.”
    I had no idea what to think, and my mouth seemed incapable of forming any words beyond the first aborted syllables of sentences: