His double suffered a scare befitting an I Love Lucy gag. The half-formed thing collapsed in the dirt rasped laughter that sounded as if it’d come from a synthesizer. Claws with the span of semi truck hubcaps churned the earth in his attempt to rise and swipe the imposter’s one standing leg, to drag him near to satisfy the fevered want for flesh induced by the metabolic demands of a shift. He missed. James2 turned into a gazelle on crank, bounding away.
With the last of his human consciousness, he understood that Cricket was trying to help, and what it cost her to do so. Her voice had worked on him before. With the Mantle, it pinched in the way of a minor migraine. But he was tired, travel weary, hungry and unfamiliar with the new balance of power he now possessed. Heartsore for a moment, empathy gave way to untethered rage.
She dared.
Both women were skinny little things, more toothpick than a meal worth the effort, but the craven thing camping in the back of his mind since his early teens demanded the insult of Cricket’s attempted compulsion and Birdie’s worthless trinkets be answered appropriately.
Eat the hearts. They’ll watch.
A complete shift had never taken more than five seconds, but time seemed sundered by this incidence, or the new symptoms of the Mantle. He knew only that in charging the inadequate patch of lamplight they occupied, raising onto his realigning hind legs was still too painful. Antlers spilt the left of a skull more akin to a half-decayed bear’s than a man’s. Now the size of a small garbage truck, the creature shrieked pain and bolted, advancing in a blur like a gorilla on cracked appendages, its limbs assaulting the earth. Muck and hay flew, kicked up in a dusty spray. A clawed foot cracked the quartz. It hissed, dodging the skidding flashlight.
A tiny streak of turquoise bolted beneath its nose.
Lunchable.
The Wendigo’s solidifying limbs pinwheeled to redirect his trajectory after his hand-bag sized nemesis. Hatred was a greater motivator than food, for the moment. But a brain in flux was stupid brain, and Lunchable had leapt through the narrow window of opportunity. The seafoam fox creature sprinted through flaps covering the well-lit entrance of the Pool of Tears, and the beast followed. The ensuing cacophony of crashing and not yet human howling drew two brownies to poke their heads out from behind the shooting gallery, their eyes round. The tent shuddered as a whole. An antler sliced a hole in the candy cane striped roof. Eerie screams suited to an animal dying in a snare cleaved the comparable quiet of the Midway. The clamor tapered after a quarter minute.