NFTF: Rancher IV

He'd caught it at a strange angle, and the box had broken open, much of its contents spilling over him. The word she'd shouted, one word so colored in his mind by that Halloween, that he had allowed himself to live a life devoid of it for the last fifty years.

"Salt," he says now. "Salt will kill 'em dead."

"Salt!" the wife shouts. "See? I fucking told you we should bring the rock salt!" Unleashing another arrow, she cores the largest creature's head and all those around it leap and devour before it's finished dying. Each creature that eats the largest one begins to grow larger than those around it. All of this in about three seconds, followed by more shots from both man and wife.

"As it happens," Talmadge begins, turning to head toward Beulah, but he never gets any farther in that sentence: a group of creatures is approaching the horses from behind a stand of trees to the East. He gives a shout and runs toward them and, as the woman and man behind him kill more of these things, he heads to his right and fires off a shot at the creatures closest to the horses. The first two creatures are down and the rest fall on them, devouring, giving the rancher enough time to reach Beulah.

In her saddlebags he keeps something special, in case he ever needs to run off an interloper or two. He grabs the sack and sprints back to the man and his wife, marveling for a moment at how the creaks and groans of his ramshackle old body could disappear in excitement. He decides to stick around these two as long as he can as he tosses the sack to the man. "See if this helps at all!" he shouts, then runs back to the horses, rounding them in time to see a creature launch itself at the fourth horse's left foreleg. The horse screams, trying to rear, snapping the dead branch it's tied to from the tree. The branch, wrapped in the horse's reins, swings wildly toward Talmadge just as he is ducking in toward the creature whose mouth is tearing flesh from the horse's leg. He sees it coming, raising the butt of his rifle to crush the skull of the little terror and hoping that his timing is just right.

The branch catches him in the side of the head, tearing into the left side of his face and his left eye. He feels the dry, jagged twigs jammed into his eye socket and pulling out with the force of the horse's panicked rearing. Clutching his left bicep up over his eye, he cries out as the last of the twigs tears through his eyelid and is trapped between his arm and the exposed, tender flesh. Lashing out in rage and pain, he swings the butt of his rifle toward where he last saw the creature, his grip on the rifle not so strong as it should be: it connects but doesn't kill the thing, and the rifle flies from his grasp, skidding across the earth to a spot about twenty feet behind the horses. As he lurches toward it, removing his left arm from its protective place over his bleeding eye socket, a creature lands on his back, digging its jagged claws into his right side and left chest as its teeth tear into the back of his neck. The pain is excruciating. He forgets about his eye, spins on the spot and falls heavily onto the little monster, thinking to crush it with his weight. Dimly, he hears the woman cry out and he is aware of a set of hooves galloping past his head too close for safety and just far enough away that he is still alive and can feel the creature struggling, still alive as well, beneath him. 

Just as he realizes what it's doing -- "Are you humping me, you little bastard?!" -- three more creatures launch themselves at him: one on his right leg, one aiming for his soft belly, the third with jaws thrown wide and black tongue lolling as it dives in to eat his face. For a moment, everything slows down and he sees:

Husband and wife, back to back, surrounded by an increasing number of creatures whose size has risen to about five and a half feet tall; the pair are turning, firing, the woman having switched from arrows to a pair of Glocks, from the look of things. The man is firing his shotgun with calm precision. These two move like they're dancing, seeming to know when the other needs to reload, reaching behind to give what's needed, turning to shoot what's attacking. He sees this and he is filled with loneliness: this is the kind of woman he should have married, instead of a bitter school marm librarian; he is also filled with pride: he knows he is going to die, and he has died fighting with two actual warriors. He knows a kind of love in that moment, and he wonders for the fist time in years if his children miss him at all.

He sees also that three of the horses are gone; branches broken from the tree tell him there's a chance they escaped. But there's Beulah, rearing up, coming down to crush a creature near the wife, then kicking three of them behind her. Good old Beulah.

The last thing he sees before the creature's jaws close on his face is a sturdy chunk of broken branch. It's just out of reach and he finds himself stretching toward it in this long billionth of a second, stretching his right hand out as he brings his left elbow up toward the throat of the creature attacking his face.

If he can only reach it in time ...