Free Voracious by ALICE HENDERSON

stumbled, fell, and sprawled across the floor, gasping for breath.
    She could hear the bubbling of blood as the thing attempted to breathe, a direct hit to the lung. It struggled to prop up on one hand, rose a couple feet, but its clawed, black hand slipped in blood, slamming its torso back to the floor.
    Its body contracted violently, folding in on itself, rolling into a ball. It twitched, its arms and legs alive with a hundred spasms. Then it fell still, struggling to breathe in long, ragged gasps. After several final labored breaths, it stopped breathing and lay immobile.
    Madeline turned and tore open the front door, flinging it back on its hinges and banging it against the wall. Then she was outside again, scanning the area for a safe place. Only trails met her sight, snaking off in three directions.
    Not wasting another second, she took off toward a kiosk that housed several maps and trail descriptions, hoping she could hide behind it for a few minutes in order to catch her breath and think. Sliding in the dirt near the wooden display, she flung herself down behind it. She panted, her throat dry. Peering up, she studied the map. At a glance, she noted that one trail led straight into Many Glacier, one of the biggest campgrounds in the park. There would be people there. Phones. Rangers who were alive.
    Instantly she rose and began running down the path, glancing behind her. She had probably killed the thing, but terror had seized her. Madeline ran until she simply couldn’t anymore. The ranger’s station was no longer in sight, and she had entered a steep, forested section. Gasping, she slowed to a walk, still looking nervously behind her.
    She wondered how far behind her the thing was—if it still lay in a pool of its own blood, dead, or if it was up somehow, resurrected, following her scent. How had it found her? Beaten her to her next stop? Had it anticipated her next move? Loped down the mountain in the silver of moonlight and found the backcountry ranger station, the lone ranger up there—and eaten him?
    None of it made sense.
    Madeline shuddered. She could feel the terror the ranger must have felt when he saw the thing slink in through the front door of the station. And then when it came at him, claws and fangs tearing him apart …
    She wondered if the ranger, not quite dead, had heard her come in. If he had been desperately trying to get her attention by banging on the wall of the station. “The generator’s been acting up.” The creature had stridden back there and savagely finished him off while she waited in the other room.
    It was incredibly intelligent. It had infiltrated the ranger’s station—it spoke. The fact that it could anticipate her moves, her thoughts, was terrifying. Even now it might know exactly where she was. If it was somehow still alive.
    If only she could somehow touch it, or touch something it had touched, she might know what it was and what it wanted. It hadn’t had contact with the backcountry book long enough for her to get any detail other than the blood.
    She needed to touch something it had been exposed to for a longer period of time.
    Or, she needed to touch the creature directly.
    She continued down the trail, pondering, gasping for breath with her mouth open, a stitch forming in her side. Already the temperature was climbing. She’d never known it to be this hot in the Rockies, and she needed water badly. She had to stop and drink. Up ahead she saw a cluster of rocks. Maybe she could hide in there and drink from Noah’s water bottle. She hoped he was still alive, but his screams played intensely and repeatedly in her head, like some gruesome song she couldn’t get rid of.
    When she reached the huge, granite boulders, she glanced back again. The trail was still empty. Quickly she darted off the path and ran around the side of one of the boulders. There she squatted on a bed of pine needles and flung the pack off her back. Inside she found another change of clothes,