Adrift 2: Sundown by K.R. Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page B

caught in his throat.
    He heard it.
    Above the rain.
    A sound that Barry abruptly realised had been ongoing for several seconds before he became conscious of it. A noise that twisted around the howl of the wind, as though trying to conceal itself.
    Screaming.
    At the house .
    Sara normally woke an hour after him, the kids around seven, depending on how hungry they were. But someone was awake early, and they were screaming; pouring everything they had into bellowing out a noise that made Barry’s soul wither.
    He ran for the house without thinking, sprinting blindly through the storm, careering across a nightmare that made his mind and muscles feel oddly sluggish. Another scream cleaved the dark morning air, worse even than the first.
    A different voice , Barry’s mind tried to think, scrabbling for clarity. A male voice. My boy...
    With each passing yard, his sense of dislocation from reality increased.
    Time stretching taut; threatening to snap.
    It took him mere seconds to return to the farmhouse; each one felt like a lifetime. When he burst through the front door, the screaming became a deafening symphony that drowned out the storm outside. The noise echoed off the walls, making the air itself vibrate. It sounded like the screaming was coming from everywhere all at once, but for Barry, there was no mistaking the source of the awful noise.
    Upstairs.
    The bedrooms.
    Acting on autopilot, he yanked open the cupboard next to the front door, and pulled out his shotgun: an old, double-barrelled affair that would persuade any intruders that they needed to rethink their life choices. He took the stairs three at a time, inserting shells as he went, his thoughts a shapeless roar. When he reached the top of the stairs, he had a direct line of sight to the bedroom his two youngest daughters shared.
    He stopped.
    Tried to process it.
    Couldn’t.
    Sara was in the bedroom with the twins. He recognised the shape of his wife immediately, even in the dark; the lines his eyes had traced lovingly for more than twenty years.
    And he recognised another shape: one that was spread across the floor in ruins. Barry’s teenage son. Josh had been ripped apart like wet paper; human form reduced to a slick pile of steaming meat.
    Sara didn’t seem to see Barry; she cowered back toward a wall, attempting to position her body as a shield in front of her young twin daughters. Trying to protect them from...
    ...from...
    Barry had no word for it.
    The creature in the room with his family was tall and impossible, a sneering, seething mass of teeth and claws. Something that Barry’s mind tried to assimilate and couldn’t. As he watched in stunned horror, paralysed by the sight of the thing, the creature drove its right arm forward, plunging it into Sara’s chest with a sickeningly moist snap .
    When it withdrew its hand from her ribcage, it clutched Sara’s heart.
    Popped the glistening muscle into its hideous mouth like a piece of candy.
    And Barry was screaming along with his daughters.
    Lifting the shotgun.
    Aiming it at the hateful demon that had crawled from the earth to take his family.
    Squeezing the trigger, and—
    It looked right at him.
    Right into him.
    Eyes like claws.
    Reaching into his thoughts, sinking into the surface of his mind like meathooks.
    Twisting and tearing.
    The shotgun blast that was supposed to tear the abomination in two never came, as if somehow the finger that cradled the trigger no longer belonged to Barry at all.
    Somewhere, buried deep in the basement of Barry’s mind, there existed a part of him that clung to sanity, but it finally began to collapse when his arms moved of their own volition, aiming the shotgun at his young daughters as they huddled together in abject terror.
    Screaming.
    Staring at him with fear and confusion that made his soul whimper.
    No—
    The creature allowed Barry to imbibe the last of his family’s fear for a dreadful, eternal moment, before the finger that was no longer his squeezed the