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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 1136039" data-attributes="member: 12332">Cabin Fever Pt. 6The police would not come in time.  No one would come in time.  Something existed, something was OUT there, that should not be.  And it wanted them.  And it would get them. Wiley stood, still, stony.  Watching the door.  Listening.  For a creak, a crash.  He had the gun, a nine-mil.  Solid, heavy.  Heavier, really, than he would have expected.  Brickel hadn't asked for it back.  Honestly, he didn't blame him.  The gun felt reassuring, powerful, and amazingly useless.  A depressing feeling.  He had the gun, and he wasn't in charge.Scott had moved away from the phone, realizing how close he was to a window.  He kept his knife, crouched next to Frank.  His friend groaned and was shushed hurriedly.  The quiet grew, grew oppressive.  It moved, weighed, had presence.  The hum of the air conditioner gone, each breath seemed loud.  And then it happened.  A sound.  The sound.  A creak from the porch.  A step.  The quiet became fear, heavier.  Wiley grabbed the gun tighter.  Everyone held their breath, waiting for the door to explode, shouldered away by the thing outside.There was a knock.The four friends looked confused.  Shouting, roars, tearing flesh, muzzle flashes?  A polite knock?  Maybe it was ... playing with them?  Waiting for somebody to open the door, look outside, get his head ripped off.  Nobody moved.Nobody but the cabin owner.  He opened the door, on a woman standing in the dark.“Do any of you know Joshua Tehnoah?”“My name is Craig.”Brickel shouldered Craig aside and pulled the woman into the cabin.  “Introductions later, hiding from monster first.”“Monster?”  Jerri asked as she stumbled into the room.  She already had an idea, however.“Yea.  About nine feet tall, looks like She-Hulk got it on with that old crying Indian dude from Wayne's World.”  Pennick said.“Moves like the wind, claws and long teeth, eats human flesh?”  She asked.“Not sure if it eats flesh, but it does a pretty good number on it.  It tore our friend Frank up pretty bad.  We thought he was going to die, but he's been showing signs of coming around.”The woman ran her hands through her hair.  “My name is Jerri Thaves.  I'm a professor at a college near here.  I think that thing out there was accidentally summoned by one of my colleagues, Dr. Tehnoah ... That or it IS Joshua.”********************************************The crone slumps into a comfortable chair, bone-tired.  She remembers this kind of tired, working in the field with her mother and sister so many years before.  She'd always had her gift.  Others noticed it first when an uncle died, ten miles from their home, when she was five.  She saw him, sitting beneath a great-spreading pecan tree.  He had been eating an apple.  They may not have found him for a week, otherwise.  A gift from God, Jesus be praised, the visions.  She was a local phenomenon, an intricate part of her church.  It was the community and the church that protected her, her entire life.  Others wouldn't have understood, wouldn't have believed, or would have turned her into a tourist attraction like some West-Georgia crying-Virgin statue.  Only recently, in her declining years, had Susan come to the attention of official figures.  She had shown herself, had seen herself in a vision doing God's work in this way.  The visions had started coming more often ... things in the world were changing.</blockquote>

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