Fear (Gone 5)

The warrior who had gone out from the lake to save his people by slaying the evil one was now just a boy sitting in the dirt with his fingers in a mane o

f blond hair.

He stared at nothing. Expected nothing. Planned nothing.

Just sat.

Brianna picked up Brittney’s head. It was surprisingly heavy. She threw it as hard as she could down the tunnel.

Brittney’s body got up, swayed a little, and seemed as if it was ready to go after its head, so Brianna shot it in the leg at close range. The loss of one bloodless leg caused the whole body to topple over.

Penny was obviously in shock, staring at the terrible wound that was draining her life away, squirt, squirt, squirt.

Got to finish her off, Brianna told herself. But she hesitated. Penny was a human being. Not much of one, but an actual human being. Whereas the Drake/Brittney thing, well, whatever it was, it wasn’t human, because humans pretty much never stood up and tried to walk away after their heads were chopped off.

Brianna jacked a round into the chamber and aimed at Penny.

Then the gun blew apart in her hands. Exploded!

Brianna dropped it, but even as she let go she realized it was a trick. An illusion of Penny’s making.

The girl was spraying blood like a Super Soaker and still able to mess with Brianna’s head.

Brianna bent down to get the shotgun, determined to ignore any further interference, but Diana gave a huge cry of pain, and suddenly there was a head sticking almost all the way out of a place on Diana that Brianna had never wanted to see.

“Yaa-aahh-ah!” Brianna said. “Oh, this is wrong.”

But it just kept coming out as Diana grunted like an animal, and if Brianna didn’t get down there and do the right thing, the baby was going to land on the floor, on a rock.

Brianna snatched up her shotgun, snapped off a quick, poorly aimed, one-handed shot in the general direction of Penny—BLAM!—and cupped her hands beneath the emerging head.

“It’s got a snake around its neck!” Brianna cried.

Diana sat up—amazing that she could even think about sitting up—and yelled, “It’s the umbilical cord. It’s around the neck. It’ll choke!”

“Oh, man, I hate slimy stuff,” Brianna moaned. She pushed the baby’s head back a little, which wasn’t easy, because it was really ready to come out, and yelled, “Ewww!” a couple of times as she stretched and wrestled the umbilical cord over the baby’s head, freeing it.

And now in a rush the baby came out. It spilled out with liquid sounds and a hideous translucent sac attached and a pulsating snakelike thing leading to its belly button.

Diana shuddered.

“I am so never doing this,” Brianna said fervently. She shot a look to see if Penny was dead or alive and couldn’t see her at all.

The Brittney body was gone as well, no doubt crawling off to look for its head.

“You have to cut the cord,” Diana said.

“The what?”

“The cord.” Diana gasped. “The snake thing.”

“Ah. The snake thing.”

Brianna took her machete in hand, raised it up, and chopped through the umbilical cord. “It’s bleeding!”

“Tie it off!”

Brianna tore a strip from the waist of her T-shirt, twisted it to make it easier to handle, and tied it around the six-inch stump of the umbilical cord. “Oh, man, oh, it’s all slimy.”