...continued from page 3.

They had by now been through about a third of the village, and their numbers had risen again. The building closest to them now was a church, a somewhat modern triangular building plated in copper or bronze with a long single floor building attached. There were not enough of them quite yet to fully surround the entire building, so they split up. Some lurched towards the two main entrances of the actual church building, a few more went for other obvious entrances while the biggest portion disappeared into the shadows. Then the pounding on the doors began.
The two main doors were tall and sturdy, and even the immense strength of the attackers did not seem to be enough to break them down. But they kept going nevertheless.
They had better luck at the side entrances and were already flooding into the building.
Room doors were broken down left and right of the main hallway, but they mainly led into class rooms, the kitchen and eating rooms or closets that were all empty at this time of night.
Then there was movement in the back, and a door opened. The pastor, a middle-aged and strong man, walked out into the hallway with a flashlight in his hand.
He stopped when he saw the approaching mass and muttered something under his breath.
Then he stood up tall, took a cross from the nearest wall and held it out towards them.
"In the name of God, be gone from this holy place!", he demanded in a steady loud voice. When this did not seem to have any effect, he added: "Get the hell out of here!", but again to no avail, and the shapes kept coming closer, still opening doors on both sides of the hallway.
The pastor retreated into his bedroom, put on some shoes, took a coat from his wardrobe and opened a window. It was nearly perfectly dark outside, but not dark enough to hide nearby movement. Nothing - the night was still, except for the constant pounding on the big church doors and the sound of dragging foot steps out in the hallway behind him. Then there was a loud hollow noise when the big church doors finally gave in and smashed on the floor with a bang that seemed to reverberate for hours.
He shot one last look behind him, but they did not seem to have reached the door yet, so he easily climbed out of the window and into the juniper bushes outside.
Suddenly, the darkness moved, and he found himself surrounded by shapes from all directions except right in front of him, so he started running - and fell flat on his face as something grabbed his foot. He quickly brushed off his shoe and managed to free himself, turning on his back to face his opponent. It was a small shape, very small, that was still holding his shoe. The pastor directed his flashlight at the body at his feet. It was gray, like all the others, but it was not the body of a grown human being - it was less than two feet tall. Its head was disproportionately larger than the rest of the body, and so were its eyes.
Shaken by the horror of what he was seeing, he desperately tried to get to his feet, but the small shape was faster. In one jump it cleared the space between them and landed flat on his chest, knocking him down in the process. Then the ghastly face opened its toothless mouth, and the pastor had never heard anything as frightening in his life when it said what happened to be its first words ever: "Baaaaaaaiiiiiins!"

"Are you OK, Mitch?"
Dana's worried voice brought him back from a whirlwind of thoughts in his head in which he had been close to getting lost. He just nodded distractedly.
Close to tears, Dana nearly screamed: "Who were these people, Mitch? Why were they behaving so strangely?" With a nervous laugh, she added: "You know, it's just as if they were v..."
"Don't!", Mitch interrupted her. "Yes, I think they were, and no, don't say it out loud."
He was certain that their suspicions were right, no matter how impossible they seemed. But by saying it they would have to abandon any kind of illusion that maybe they were not right and that these people had been ... just people. Dammit, he had stabbed one of the bastards in the heart! Weren't their kind supposed to die from this? Or did it actually have to be wood?
Mitch's somber face worried Dana nearly more than the events of the last hour.
"What now?", she finally whispered?
"Damned if I know", Mitch answered. He felt like seriously getting drunk and trying to forget the whole thing, and the thought was very tempting. Maybe they could drink themselves to death. Heh, that would piss'em off when they came back, he thought.
Despite what the stiff guy had said, there was a third option - get the hell out of this house and as far away from here as possible. They surely wouldn't bother to follow them all the way out of town, would they?
But then, why had they taken hair? That didn't make any sense...
Of course he had watched horror movies as a kid - lots of them. What else was there to do in this town by yourself other than drinking and watching movies? But he had never heard of any type of monster taking hair... Was it witchcraft? Creating create a psychic connection? Or would they just be able to smell them out like hounds to the fox? Maybe they were just toying with them, and the hair had no significance at all... Damn! The uncertainty was killing him.
He finally spoke again.
"I don't think we'll be able to run away from them, and I sure as hell won't giv'em any reason to hurt you... I'm afraid we're stuck with them..."
He felt something like a rock in his throat, and swallowing could not quite get rid of it. He was sweating, and his eyes kept moving like little scared mice but not actually seeing anything. After a while, he continued.
"But ... but maybe that'll be a good thing, you know? Maybe it won't be so bad - I saw a movie once where a servant to a v... to one of those things was pretty much invincible as long as the master was alive... or undead... or ... whatever, you know?"
Dana was quiet. She was sitting on the couch again with her feet pulled up to her body and her arms around them, and she was shivering. It was more than Mitch could bear, and he sat down beside her and took her in his strong arms. He squeezed so hard that it must have nearly hurt her. But he also couldn't stand the thought of letting her go.
"We... " He swallowed dryly, before he was able to continue in a hoarse voice. "We have no choice."
And they huddled together in a bundle and sat in silence until the next morning.

It was some time after midnight now and time to let them feed. Not on human meat, not just yet. Their numbers were still too low to waste humans on food. So the horde of moving shapes changed direction and moved down the road to a building with a German Black Forest type front and white painted bricks making up the back. It was a meat market, and a good one at that, using only locally grown animals.
There would probably be some minor losses once they started eating in there - they were not smart enough to always distinguish between food and companion... But it would pay off when the remaining ones would be all the stronger to continue their sweep of the village.
It did not take much coaxing - they sensed the closeness of food. Most automatically streamed towards the front entrance. It had to force about half of them away from the crowd and direct them towards the delivery entrance in back just so there would be less chance of them trampling each other.
The front door was not much of a challenge, and soon the counter was slowly being overrun. The delivery door was somewhat tougher, but not strong enough to resist for long. It worked well enough to slow this group down and to allow both groups to arrive on either side of the large cooler at about the same time.
And the slaughter began. It watched for a while, then averted Its "eyes" in lack of a better term. It had experienced the feeding process many times before, and It did not have to watch to know how even frozen solid pieces were ripped into small pieces, cracking or even breaking off gray and brittle finger nails and teeth in some cases.
It was a gory sight to say the least. As predicted, one of them was chewing the shoulder of one of its companions without being noticed. Another had stumbled under the pressure of bodies from behind and was now face (face?) down on the floor, trying to crawl towards anything that could be considered food, but stopped by a foot that had cleanly broken through its spine and was pinning it down.
The baby that used to be little Jimmy had somehow managed not to be trodden on and had worked its way up a hanging piece of beef where it ignorantly started gnawing through the area around the hook that held the chunk in place. And the one with the broken spine could not reach any food because there was not enough space between the bodies and the meat to flip the top half of the body back into its upright position. At some point, the chunk of meat with little Jimmy dropped and thumped onto the floor. Being the fastest of the lot, Jimmy still kept dodging incoming feet and now tried unsuccessfully to drag the huge piece into a corner to hide it from the others.
It was a mess.
But it helped in temporarily quieting a hunger that would never be fully gone.
It took about half an hour, but finally all meat was eaten except for some bits in a special disposal bin. These bits mostly consisted of inner organs, and among them brains. They would be a special treat now that the main course had been devoured, and It sent them over to the bin one by one - controlling them all at the same time would be impossible once they saw what was put on their plate for them. So one after the other was allowed one big bite of the delicacy before being forced to leave by a will stronger than theirs. It marched them out of and away from the building, far enough to no longer require concerns about any temptations of the flesh.
Once they all had received a piece of their prize, they moved on to the next house with some instructions before the mental link to them was severed.
It was tired. Controlling such a mass and preventing them from doing what tended to come naturally to them took quite a toll. It needed to rest for a while to recover. At this time, they should not need supervision for a while. Their direct hunger was taken care of, and the set of orders It had implanted into them should do its job.
So It completely cut the connection to Its minions and withdrew Its mental antennae from Black Earth.
And so they marched on.

Dana and Mitch had spent most of the day with doing chores around the house. Both were in a state of mental paralyzation, unable to feel or think anything beyond the next step to take or the next item to pick up. They worked like empty machines and did not speak a single word between them.
At lunch time they ate a few bites before they both started feeling sick to their stomachs, and the rest of their meal landed in the garbage.
Evening came, and still they kept working in a stupor.
Then finally - sundown.
Simultaneously, they put their cleaning supplies into the closet, washed their hands and sat down on the couch, huddled together again and waiting.
And they waited a long time. But nothing happened.
Now it was at least an hour after sunset, and still no visitors. They waited.
With every passing hour they became even more uncomfortable.
When they heard some church bells strike midnight, they both jolted, but still they were alone.
Finally, Mitch frowned, looked at his watch as if to verify that the church clock was correct. His gaze moved back and forth between the watch on his wrist and Dana a few times until she softly broke the silence that had lasted for over 24 hours now.
"M... maybe they aren't coming...?"
There was the hint of a question mark at the end, and her voice sounded slightly sick after not being used for that long.
Mitch sighed and replied in a similarly strained voice: "Or maybe they are testing us. Maybe they are already here, and we just don't know it yet..."
After another minute of silence, Dana suggested: "Should we ... check? Look for them?"
Mitch's tongue nervously tried to moisten his lips, but they had not had anything to drink since lunch, and there was no spit left. Slowly and nearly imperceptibly he nodded.
He got up and held out his hand for Dana who took it. Together, they walked towards the basement door.
Mitch's hand automatically reached for the handle, but hesitated, only inches away. Then, after a sigh that was meant to give Mitch comfort but failed, his hand slowly continued its path and finally touched and turned the handle very slowly and quietly. The creak of the door seemed unnaturally loud in the silence of the night.
His hand went for the light switch and flicked it.There was a click, and there was light in the stairway.
Mitch tried to swallow. His throat hurt, and his mind was racing, coming up with a thousand reasons why they should go downstairs and another thousand why they should not. But he squeezed Dana's hand encouragingly and slowly took the first step down, carefully watching his feet to avoid tripping even though they both had taken these stairs dozens of times before.
It seemed to take hours until they finally arrived at the bottom and felt the hard and smooth concrete floor under their feet. With yet another sigh Mitch put all the will he had left into lifting his gaze off the floor. Nothing. He turned his head one way and the other. The basement was empty, except for the few small things that were stored there - mostly winter clothes, gardening and carpentry tools and some food preserves.
He walked around the water heater and looked behind it. Still nothing.
His mind was telling him that this was a good thing and that this meant that they were not here. But his fear told a different story, and his doubt yet another.
"Where are they?", asked Dana.
Her voice shook him out of his brooding thoughts.
"Damned if I know - not here", he answered shortly.
So that was it - there was no other place where anything bigger than a cat would have been able to hide from them. So they really weren't here...
He turned around and led Dana back upstairs. They went through the entire house and found everything exactly the way they had left it. There were no signs of anyone or anything having entered.
Dana whispered with a glimmer of hope in her voice: "Do you think they might have changed their mind?"
"Damned if I know", he said again.
Then he opened the closet door and took out a big flashlight and tested it. He walked to the front door, and with a newly found sense of determination opened it.
Nothing, not even in the cone of bright light he created. He took a step outside and quickly looked around himself. They were alone.
He stepped out further and walked towards the road until something caught his eye. The area where the realtor sign had been when they had bought the house still had a big hole and some earth around it, but now there was also something new - a foot print. Or to be precise: A paw print, similar to that of a wolf, and it was huge.
And it pointed straight at their house.
In one quick movement he turned around and frantically started searching the rest of the garden with his flashlight.
But again, there was no one there.
He turned again to have a look at the paw print. Not only was it huge, but the claws were longer than you would normally expect from a dog - they were sharp and pointed, more like those of a cat, but the paw itself was definitely dog-like. "And against that stupid pack of daw...", he muttered to himself. He crouched to have a closer look - it nearly looked as if these paws had created something like a hand print where the surface should have been smooth if it had really been a dog or a wolf. "Hmmm..." Slowly, the corners of his mouth twisted into a terrible grin.
He got up and casually started walking back towards the door. He very nearly swaggered.
Dana looked at him, still scared, but now also confused. "What is it, Mitch?"
"I could be wrong, but I think we'll be alright", he answered with a contented smile, and he led her back into the house and closed the door. This time he locked it.

...continued on page 5.