Torrent by Lindsay Buroker

more deaths in the city, with each cluster of attacks occurring farther east, until the last two had shown up in San Bernardino. After that, things had quieted down, until five days ago when there’d been two more groups of slayings near La Paz County Park. In all of the cases, nobody had managed to get a picture of the culprit, because it always attacked at night. The official reports had blamed bears, though some of the deaths had been as grisly as the decapitated man in that mine shaft. Our tunnel incident seemed to be the only killing that hadn’t happened at night, though a dark mine probably didn’t qualify as a daylight attack.
    “As for what we were doing up there hunting monsters… we weren’t. We were looking for some more valuable mining goodies. We heard a scream ahead of us, checked it out, and found the dead guy.” I wondered if I should confess to fleeing the mine, certain something was about to leap out of the dark and eat us. Nah, it was bad enough Simon had already witnessed me being treed by my imagination.
    “You heard screams and you
checked it out
?” Temi asked. “Isn’t that how all those pretty girls get killed in horror movies?”
    “I’m not that pretty, so I didn’t think that paradigm would apply to me.”
    Temi didn’t call me stupid—in fact, all she said was, “Hm”—but the notion seemed to hang in the air.
    “We thought it was some fellow explorer who’d managed to fall and hurt himself. Which I suppose technically happened. You do tend to fall after your head has been ripped off.”
    Temi frowned. “Is joking really appropriate here?”
    “Oh, I’m sure it’s not, but searching for sarcastic things to say is a great way to avoid thinking too much about the horror of what actually happened. That leads to weeping, hysterics, and group hugs. I find all of those activities counterproductive.” I’d never been good at sharing my emotions with others. I wasn’t sure if it came from having a pile of older brothers who’d teased and tormented me as a kid, or if it was some genetic quirk. The rest of the family went the other way—my older sister had a knack for sharing emotions with theatric intensity… and volume. Me? I’d always found sarcasm and jokes safer things to share. People have a hard time seeing through them and can’t pick on you effectively if you don’t have obvious buttons to push.
    “So it was luck that you stumbled across the monster,” Temi mused, “and luck that brought it to your camp last night.”
    “As far as I know.” Since Simon had ridiculed me for thinking we had something that might be drawing the creature, I didn’t bring up the theory again. It seemed even more unlikely now that I knew the whatever-it-was had come from out of state. Surely we didn’t have anything
that
intriguing in the back of the van.
    “Where do the Harley riders come in?”
    “They were at both spots too. And both times, they showed up after the creature had killed someone.” I felt silly saying creature over and over, but I didn’t know what else to call this mystery being. It wasn’t a bear, no matter what the newspapers said, and I wasn’t ready to add
jibtab
to my daily vocabulary yet. I’d filled Simon in on Eleriss and our strange conversation, but using such terms would draw confused looks from the general population.
    “What is the plan now?” Temi asked.
    “I’ve been instructed by the police to avoid monster hunting. It’s also been suggested by multiple parties that I might want to get out of town. Or out of state.” I thought of Eleriss’s proclamation that Alaska would be a suitable destination. I wish I remembered
more
of that conversation. He’d said something about finding “that which can destroy” the creature. Some super powerful tool or weapon? Located in Prescott? That seemed about as likely as a week passing without our van needing one repair or another, but it wouldn’t take much to convince me to run off into the