The Reincarnation

Grey was pissed. Johnny Rotten kept falling asleep on him, and there was nothing Grey could do to wake him. He had tied him to a tree along the road, and finally arrived at the next house.

This one was occupied, and Grey was actually pleasant to the old couple living there, despite the curious way they watched him. He used their phone to call the Lab, got a woman named Patty, and told her to have a car sent out to pick him up.

She told him the Lab didn’t have any cars that far north, and that she would send a rental car. Then he would have to drive himself to the Lab. And no, not a word from his Army. Deserters, Grey thought. He hung up with her, thanked the couple, and went out to get Johnny.

There wasn’t a town anywhere around this place, Grey thought. Jesus, how do people live like this?

Janet Lear was amazed how quiet little Shanda was today. She guessed the terrible twos were finally over. She thought she better check on her anyway; she had been looking pale lately.

Janet thought to turn down the stove, letting the pork chops that were sizzling in their own fat cool down a bit, but figured she would only be gone a second. Hell, she thought, if this lunch – the one time they had meat a month – wasn’t ready by the time her husband T.J. got home, he wasn’t going to take it well.

She stood in the doorway to her daughter’s room, and at first, she couldn’t tell what had happened. But she screamed nonetheless. Getting closer to the grisly sight laid out before her, Janet began to piece it together.

Little Shanda wasn’t happy in her crib, hadn’t been for a few months now. But she had never escaped before. Her first time was her last. She had impaled herself on the spire of the play model of the Medical Church of America Headquarters building Janet had picked up the last time they had gone to the amusement park.

Where did she think she was going? passed through Janet’s mind right before she broke down into hysterics.

Her husband T.J. returned home too late – much too late – to salvage anything from the charred remains of his home, least of all his wife and child.

Frank F. Feldman had seen better days. Today ranked up there with the worst. His left hand stemming the tide of blood flowing out of the back of his head, his right groped for the phone that lay nearby it. The truck was a total loss. It had flipped over at least twice when he lost control of it, and lay battered and worthless a short distance away.

The travel cage he had been hauling had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, which Frank quickly realized might not be a plus, the Beast it had housed remained relatively unscathed throughout the ordeal – only one head was injured. On the minus side, the cage was woefully inadequate for holding a creature of its size and strength.

Frank’s second thought after he landed from his ungraceful flight through the truck’s windshield – his first was silently thanking the Church for using that new kind of windshield glass – had been protecting himself from the creature. But he needn’t have worried. Once the animal was free of its cage, it oriented itself quickly and walked away. After a short while, it ran.

Frank, still dazed, finally got hold of the phone. Amazing, he explained. Even with seven heads, that thing was running in a perfectly straight line, like it had a destination in mind, an appointment to keep.