Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Dead Air

Sure enough. “Second best?” She turned on me, her eyes narrowing. “What was your title?”

I thought of telling her the truth. I honestly did but… where is the fun in that.

“Best Around” I lied.

“Best around?” she scoffed. “You’d be dead without me… best around my ass. You better not let this go to your head or I will show you how much better I am at kicking your ass” there was a wicked glint in her eyes that told me she would do it.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Thank goodness her feisty spirit was the same or I’m not sure how I would have responded to this messed up situation.

My own screen was still hovering there, an unwelcome passenger in my field of view. It shifted when I moved my head, always staying in my peripheral vision unless I looked right at it.

How the hell do I get rid of this thing? I tried to treat it like a faulty heads-up display.

Off, I thought. Nothing. Exit. Still there. Go away. Shoo. Close.

The moment the thought Close formed in my mind, the blue box winked out of existence.

“Whoa,” I said, the surprise sharp in my voice.

“What?” Kira glanced over, her focus momentarily breaking from her own screen.

“I just thought about closing it, and it vanished,” I said. She stared intently at the space in front of her, her brow furrowed in concentration.

“Cool,” she said a second later. She racked the shotgun, the shuck-shuck of the action a deeply reassuring sound in the sudden quiet. “What do you think that was?”.

“No idea,” I admitted, my eyes drifting back to the lizard she’d killed. I approached it cautiously, weapon ready. “That ‘player’ thing it mentioned is… unsettling.”.

“The blue screen said it was dead,” Kira pointed out, moving to flank me, her own shotgun at the ready.

“I’m not inclined to trust pop-up windows that appear out of thin air after a monster attacks,” I said dryly. “Besides, for all we know, we’re both hallucinating from something we ate at that diner of yours.”.

She bristled. “Hey! I guarantee that food would’ve been amazing if we’d had the chance to actually eat it.”.

I knelt beside the carcass. The hole from the shotgun was big enough to stick my fist in. I could see pulped organs, though I had no reference for what a normal lizard’s insides were supposed to look like. I slung my rifle and pulled the knife from my vest. I ran the tip down its back; it made a high-pitched skreee of steel on something harder than stone.

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“Scales on the back and head are like armor plate,” I noted. “But the underbelly looks softer.” I tried to pierce the flesh on its stomach, but the knife point just skated across a lattice of smaller, more pliable plates, like a kevlar vest made of reptile hide. It wouldn’t go through. “My rifle didn’t do much to the other one, either.”. I looked at the shotgun wound again. Close-range buckshot. The only thing that had worked so far.

“Thanks again, Kira. You really saved my ass,” I said, meeting her eyes.

A fierce smile touched her lips, though a slight blush tinted her cheeks. “I’ve got your back.”.

A new thought, cold and sharp, cut through the moment. Communications. “We need to call this in.” I grabbed the mic on my shoulder. “Dispatch, A06, how copy?”.

Static.

I tried again, hitting the tone alert first. “Dispatch, this is A06, urgent traffic, come back.”

Nothing but the hiss of an empty channel.

“Not hearing you through mine either,” Kira said, already heading for the cruiser. “Let me try the car radio.”. I watched her get in and talk into the vehicle’s mic, but my own radio remained silent. She got out a minute later, a worried frown creasing her brow.

“Nothing. On any channel,” she said. “The entire radio is dead air.”.

“Shit.” I pulled out my cell phone. The screen was a monument to our isolation. No Signal.

The unnatural silence of the farm suddenly felt a lot more menacing. No birds, no insects, no dispatch, no cell service. The world had gone quiet. We were on our own.

“Okay,” I said, forcing a calm I didn't feel. “New plan. We take pictures of everything. Then we drive to the detachment and figure out what the hell is going on.”.

I opened my camera app and started documenting the scene: the two lizard corpses, the ruined coop, the eviscerated bull. As I focused the lens on the gaping hole in the second lizard, Michael's terror-filled scream echoed in my memory. “MONSTERS!”.

Yeah. That about summed it up.