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in a big chunk.
    “Jesussss Chrrrrist!” he yelled. “Get ooooout!”
    He raised the flashlight again to whack at it. This time the
creature lunged in at Jim with its horrible mouth open wide and clamped to his
gut. Jim whacked at the head and thick, strong neck with the flashlight. Bailey
pressed herself into the far corner of the tent and watched as the creature
shook and tore at Jim’s midsection.
    “Staaaap!” he said through clenched teeth and swung the light down
as hard as he could time and time again. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
    Bailey had never seen so much blood. When the head shook, the
blood splattered the inside of the tent. She watched in shock as the creature
bit and tore and Jim hit it with the flashlight. She watched until Jim was
dead. She heard odd sounds outside the tent. They sounded something like words
but made no sense to her like the big words on her father’s radio did when she
was a child, just word noises.
    When the creature was done it raised its bloody face and looked at
Bailey. She was in shock, and not entirely in possession of her faculties, but
she could have sworn that the head smiled an evil little smile at her. She
heard the distant sound of an odd fog horn and thought how strange it was to
hear it just then. She wondered dimly how it came to be that someone installed
a nice fog horn right here in this peaceful canyon.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Phil jumped out of bed and pulled on his pants. This was no jet
engine he was hearing and it was right over the cabin whatever it was. He
pulled on his boots, grabbed his shirt and put it on fast. He snatched up his
large five-cell Maglite off the dresser and headed out of the bedroom. Just as
he was getting to the bedroom door, he dashed back, opened the top dresser
drawer, stuffed the stainless steel, forty-caliber Smith and Wesson auto into
his back pocket and raced out.
    Better
safe than sorry, he
thought.
    He crashed out the front door and vaulted over the porch rail. He
had the light on and pointed skyward before he hit the ground. The sound coming
from above was deafening.
    Set for a narrow beam, his light drew a bright pencil-thin line on
it, illuminating just a small spot. Phil quickly twisted the head of the light
to get a broad flood light on the thing’s underside.
    Phil blinked and shook his head. When what your senses tell you in
the now runs contrary to what they have so carefully gathered in the past,
history usually wins. “That thing’s impossible,” he said under his breath.
    He was looking at the shining underside of the creature’s carapace
and could make out the huge flat, overlapping plates that armored it. Phil was
no biologist, but he knew enough about natural science to know that he was
looking at something very close to an arthropod. It was more insect-like than
crab-like. It had no visible appendages, as if it were an immature or larval
form rather than a fully developed adult. Its color was dark brown, like a
beetle. Phil gauged its size at about forty feet in length and fifteen wide.
The entire rear section was encased in a framework of dull metal-like
machinery. Near the anterior where the machinery was the heaviest, the creature
had grown into and around it like a tree will grow around offending barbed
wire. The craft was stationary, and Phil panned the light toward the head. The
head lacked detail except for the eyes that looked precisely like the compound
eyes of any bug he had ever seen. The light found an open orifice some three
feet wide in the thorax. As he watched, a brown plate slid over the hole and
the deafening sound stopped. The auditory void seemed to leave his head wrapped
in cotton.
    Phil’s hair suddenly stood up as if influenced by static. The
craft banked and moved off without a sound down the westerly side of the hill
just above treetop level as if it were sliding down on ice. The motion had an
element of smooth grace to it. He tracked after it with the light until it was
lost in the darkness