Free Bonfires Burning Bright by Jeremy Bishop, Kane Gilmour Page B

illumination, and everyone threw their hands and arms up in front of their faces to ward of the hideous glare. When Frost lowered her hand, the smoky air was white instead of dark.
    “Holy crap, I think that was just dawn,” Turkette said. The woman squinted and peered across the hazy field.
    “As abrupt as nightfall,” Dodge commented.
    “But that was just a couple of hours ago,” Frost looked at her watch. “Two and half hours, to be exact.”
    “The answers are this way,” Griffin said, gun in hand as he stalked across the field, taking the lead. Frost didn’t mind. She was still getting the hang of filling Becky’s shoes, but she definitely felt more comfortable organizing people than she did on the hunt. She had known all along that she would take a back seat to Griffin when it came time to confront whoever or whatever was behind the shifts.
    She raised her service pistol, and walked after him, Dodge and Turkette joining her, each armed with an M-16. It was cold, and despite the smoky haze, a light snow began to fall. At first Frost cringed at the thought of it, after the falling ash in one of the previous shift-worlds, but a flake landed in her outstretched hand and she was sure it was normal snow. The cloud of her breath was more assurance.
    Griffin stopped, and Frost caught up with him near the tunnel door. The rusted metal slab was ajar, the mouth to the tunnel yawning open in darkness. Spewed around the area in front of the door were several splotches of dark crimson blood—some of them where Cash had been sitting—but most were new additions to the landscape.
    Hideous chimera creatures, part bat, part human and who knows what else, littered the overgrown grass around the concrete structure. Human limbs were merged with three-foot-wide bat wings. The bodies in the center, where the wings came together, resembled feathered birds. Long gums, like raw red meat, pushed through the dark feathers. An odd assortment of oversized teeth—some sharp, others not—erupted from the gums. It was like a wide open mouth that attempted to swallow a giant bat, a raven and two full grown men.
    Each creature was different, but each, wounded and crumpled in on itself, occupied no more than a four foot radius. There were seven of them. All dead. One looked like it had been bashed against the inside of the metal door. The others all had small bleeding wounds. She thought of the savage version of Griffin, but the injuries didn’t look like the wide puncture wounds of a javelin. No. Except for the one against the door, the others all had gunshot wounds.
    Someone had killed seven of the creatures.
    “Charley couldn’t have done this, could he?” Dodge asked.
    “Truck is gone. Maybe he made it to safety,” Frost said.
    Griffin squatted down, and pulled a black knife from a sheath under his jacket. He flipped over the body of one of the dead creatures. It had two white human legs, about two feet long, like the legs of a short woman. Or maybe a child. Where there should have been genitals and hips, the legs were joined to a spherical mass of black feathers. On one side, a three-foot-long brown bat wing stretched out. The wing on the other side was missing. Like a Mohawk up the center of the thing’s body, was a single row of rotted fangs or claws. It didn’t seem to have any eyes or ears, or even a nose. As far as Frost could tell, it didn’t have a mouth either. Just the spikes.
    Griffin looked up at Frost. “When I painted these things, I never thought they could actually fly.”
    “Not funny,” she replied.
    “Wasn’t trying to be,” Griffin said. “These things are either all dead or if there were more, they bolted.”
    He stood up, and the radio on his belt crackled to life. Frost’s did the same, and hearing the stereo burst of static made everyone jump.
    “Griffin, come in.” Winslow’s voice, and he sounded panicked.
    Griffin holstered his gun, and quickly sheathed the knife, before snatching the radio