Free Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig Page B

and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is everything: noise and fury and stink, and the massive man’s head snaps back and his body topples backward like a redwood felled with dynamite. The floor shakes as he hits.
    Fuck , Cason thinks. He can’t hear anything. Only the pulsating shriek in his ear. He staggers forward into the house, shoved by Frank.
    Cason didn’t ask for this. Didn’t ask to be in on a murder . Bad enough what happened to his boss—but he thought today would give him context, not just another dead body to deal with.
    He snaps. Yanks Frank into the house by his gun-hand. Slams him into a wall lined with ugly mural wallpaper meant to look like a pine forest—a framed painting, of a couple of deer sipping lake water in the shadow of mountains, tumbles off the wall and shatters. Frank yelps—the gun goes off again, this time the bullet whining against an old iron heating grate—Cason pulls his arm taut and kicks hard up into Frank’s solar plexus.
    The freak ooomphs as Cason twists the gun out.
    Then brings the flat of the gun hard against the bastard’s head.
    The Cicatrix goes down—a still, unmoving, scar-flesh lump. The bag under his arm now a crumpled-up package smashed beneath his hip.
    “Jesus,” Cason says, panting. In his ear: the deafening whine.
    He thinks: just leave, just go—run—you were never here .
    But the guy could be okay. Well—not okay . Nobody’s okay after getting shot in the head. But some people survive it, right? The head’s made of harder stuff than people realize. Bullet maybe rides the skull to the back. Or shoots a part-the-seas path through the two halves of the brain and goes clear out the back without blowing out any vital circuitry.
    Cason kneels over the giant.
    Oh, shit .
    Multiple problems strike Cason as notable.
    First, the bullet. It’s half-flattened against the wrinkled flesh of the man’s brow—a squashed mushroom of lead.
    Second, the man’s eyes are open. And blinking. And looking at Cason.
    Third, and most troubling: the man is not a man.
    He’s changed.
    His piggish snout is now an actual pig snout. His mouth is a thresher bar of crooked needle tusks sticking out over the top and bottom lip, criss-crossing like briar barbs. His face is a pelt of hair to match the snarl upon his head.
    Yellow eyes.
    Leathery flesh.
    Breath that’d make a vulture choke on its own puke.
    A low rumble rises in the beast-man’s chest. Cason can’t hear it but he can feel it. The creature says something—the words lost to the roar in Cason’s ears—just before the monster lifts Cason up like he’s the father and Cason’s a newborn baby.
    Of course, this father doesn’t mind throwing his infant into the ceiling.
    Cason slams into popcorn ceiling—then the floor rushes up to greet him and punch the air clean out of his lungs. The monster man is already up, standing over Cason.
    Again he’s trying to say something—foul mouth moving, teeth gnashing together, but Cason can’t hear it.
    And again the monster tosses Cason like he’s a ragdoll. Into one wall. Then the other. Then the door. Then back to the floor.
    The giant beast-man—fur now bristling through his greasy gray shirt and around the margins of his baggy shorts—squats over Cason like an animal squatting over his kill. He roars words, this time words that Cason can hear as they barrel through his temporary deafness:
    “—he should have never created man. Man ruins everything. Have you seen? Have you looked outside? You spread your filth everywhere you go. All that you touch is poison and sickness. Kishelemùkonk moved mountains to prove you should exist, but he was wrong. The Great Spirit was wrong!”
    The monster forms a wrecking ball with both his hands and raises them high above Cason’s head—
    But then pauses.
    Draws a long, deep, snorting sniff .
    The beast-man’s yellow eyes narrow.
    “But you are not all-man, are you? You are a child of the Beast, too.”
    Cason tries to say