Free Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters by Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, China Miéville, Joe R. Lansdale, Cherie Priest, Christopher Golden, Al Sarrantonio, David Schow, John Langan, Paul Tremblay

screaming started.
    Weston ran past the others, up to the front of the Jeep, and squeezed off a couple of rounds without a chance in Hell of hitting the thing. It blended too well with the desert and the dark.
    “What the hell?” Brooksy roared from behind the wheel of the Jeep.
    “Weston. Do you read? Are you under fire?” Ortiz barked in the comm in his ear.
    “Under attack!” Weston snapped back. “Not under fire. That was me shooting.”
    Ortiz asked half a dozen questions in as many seconds, but Weston wasn’t listening anymore. He pulled the comm from his ear and tossed it to the sand. They were three or four hundred yards from the lights and vehicles and weapons of the DEA and Border Patrol. Not far at all.
    Not far , he told himself.
    But those Mexicans hadn’t made it very far, back at the border. They’d been picked off one by one, the stragglers, killed quickly. The thing only slowed down to start its banquet when they were all dead and the screaming was over.
    Weston swung the barrel of his M-16, searching the darkness all around, knowing the thing could come from anywhere. The Mexicans not inside the Jeep huddled nearby him. Afraid as they were, no way were they making a break for the border now.
    “Damn it, Weston, what was that?” Brooksy asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said, without sparing the other grunt a glance.
    “Fuck this.”
    Brooksy gunned it. The Jeep’s engine roared and the tires spit sand as the vehicle leaped forward.
    “God damn it, no!” Weston yelled.
    Two of the Mexican men started running after the Jeep, shouting. The others hesitated only a second before following. Weston yelled for them to stop, but they were beyond listening. Exhaustion, starvation, and despair had plagued them earlier—people who’d been taken advantage of by nearly everyone they’d encountered—but now fear drove them to madness.
    Weston pursued them. The night loomed up on either side of him. He could feel the vulnerability of his unprotected back, but knew that they were all vulnerable. The darkness shifted. Every shadow, every depression in the desert floor, seemed about to coalesce and take shape and rush at him with its claws out.
    The illegals were stretched out in a line, scattered in their pursuit of the Jeep. The thing came out of the night and killed the woman, punching a hole in her chest. Weston brought up his weapon and fired at it. Two bullets hit the woman as her corpse fell. The thing flinched and he thought he’d winged it, but it rushed off into the dark again, merging with the night.
    The taillights of the Jeep grew smaller.
    Weston swore, catching up with the four survivors. The teenaged girl fell to her knees beside the dead woman, and Weston heard her saying “Tia” over and over, and knew she had been the girl’s aunt.
    They all clustered around the sobbing girl. Weston heard the Humvees revving. One of them pulled away from Paradise, headlights turning their way.
    “We’ll be all right,” he said. “They’re coming.”
    But his fingers felt frozen on his weapon. Ortiz would be coming to get them, maybe with inter-agency backup, but seconds counted. He swung the M-16 around, jerking at every sound—real or imagined—from the desert. The survivors stayed low, out of his way. Maybe they hoped the thing would come for him next.
    One of the men had begun to cry with the girl.
    When Weston saw it, at first he didn’t even know what he was looking at. The thing stood forty feet away, entirely motionless. On instinct he raised the M-16 and squeezed the trigger. The thing darted aside, slipping through the darkness, too fast to hit. It stopped, studied him again, cocked its head and gazed with a terrible intelligence. It thrust out that long, thin, snaking tongue and tasted the air with it.
    “El Chupacabra,” one of the men whispered.
    Engines roared and headlights splashed across them. A pair of Humvees arrived, one on either side of the group, bathing the Chupacabra in