The silence in the motel room was a physical weight, thick and suffocating. It was broken by the sound of Jake vomiting into the shattered remains of the nightstand. The acrid smell mixed with the scent of pine from the broken window and something else, something coppery and wild that hadn't been there before. The smell of Mark.
Chloe didn't move. She stood frozen, one hand pressed over her mouth, her eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on the empty window frame where her friend had vanished. Her breath hitched in tiny, silent sobs.
Leo could feel the warmth of the bat seep into his palm. The single golden vein pulsed in time with his own frantic heartbeat. Thump-click. Thump-click. It was a part of him now. An extra, monstrous organ.
"We have to..." Chloe's voice was a raspy thread of sound. She swallowed, tried again. "We have to call the police. An ambulance. He's sick. He's... he's not in his right mind."
"What right mind?" Jake spat, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He gestured wildly at the splintered headboard. "You saw his eyes, Chloe! That wasn't the flu! That was... that was something else!" His gaze landed on the bat in Leo's hand, and his face drained of what little color it had left. "That came from that tree. That thing you made."
The accusation hung in the air, undeniable. Leo didn't have a defense. He just stared at the pulsing vein in the wood.
Sirens wailed in the distance, cutting through the night. They all froze. The sound grew louder, then faded slightly—headed toward the other side of town. A normal crisis. A world away.
"It doesn't matter," Leo said, his own voice sounding foreign and dead. "Calling anyone won't help him." He finally looked up, meeting their horrified stares. The truth of it was a cold stone in his gut. "They'll find him. They'll try to help him. And he'll... he'll hurt them. Or worse."
"Worse?" Jake whispered.
Leo didn't elaborate. The image of Mark's powerful, terrified hands was burned into his mind.
"So what do we do?" Chloe cried, her composure breaking. "We just leave him out there? Like an animal?"
"No." Leo's grip tightened on the bat. The warmth intensified, a comforting, vile reassurance. It knew what needed to be done. It was made for this. "I have to find him."
He walked to the broken window and looked out. The woods were a wall of impenetrable blackness. But he didn't need a trail. A new, terrible sense was awakening in him, a pull in his core, a compass needle pointing toward agony. He could feel Mark out there. Not as a location, but as a signal. A screaming, fever-bright beacon of will and pain, so much sharper and more complex than the dull, mindless throbbing of the shamblers he'd felt near the clinic. The bat hummed with a specific, targeted hunger. This was its preferred food.
"You're not going out there alone," Jake said, though his voice trembled.
"You have to stay here," Leo said, not turning around. "If... if I don't come back, you need to get in the car and drive. Don't stop. Don't look back."
"Leo, no—" Chloe started.
"It's my fault!" The words tore out of him, a raw scream that echoed in the shattered room. He turned on them, his face a mask of torment. "I did this! I carved it! I swung it! That thing in the woods isn't Mark anymore. And I am the only one who can give him peace. Don't you understand? This is the only thing it's good for." He hefted the bat, the golden vein glowing brighter, as if in agreement.
He didn't wait for their response. He climbed through the window, the glass teeth of the frame biting into his hands, and dropped into the cold, damp grass below. The pull was immediate, magnetic. North. Into the deepest dark.
The forest at night was a different world. The moon provided slivers of light, creating a monochrome nightmare of sharp shadows and grasping branches. Every sound was magnified. He followed the terrible pull, the sense of his friend's suffering drawing him like a fishhook in his soul.
The smell hit him first.
It was thick, metallic, and rich with the stench of offal. It overpowered the scent of damp earth and pine. Beneath it was that same cloying, sweet smell from the glade, now corrupted, gone rotten.
He pushed through a final wall of ferns and stopped dead.
The small camping site was a charnel house. A tent was shredded, its nylon skin hanging in ribbons from tree branches like grisly flags. A cooler had been smashed apart, its contents scattered. And in the center of it all...
Oh, god.
A man, or what was left of him, lay sprawled by the dead fire pit. His torso was... opened. Viscera, glistening black in the moonlight, were strewn around him. A few feet away, a woman's arm lay detached, fingers curled in a final, futile clutch. The ground was churned into a mud of blood and soil.
It wasn't murder. It was... consumption. Butchery.
And in the middle of the carnage, crouched over the man's remains, was Mark.
He was shuddering, his back muscles rippling. A low, wet, chewing sound filled the clearing. His head was down, but the faint, sickly yellow glow from his eyes illuminated the ruin he was feasting upon. His hands, now twisted into dark-taloned things, were buried wrist-deep in the carnage.
Leo gagged, doubling over, his stomach heaving. The sound made Mark's head snap up.
His face was a mask of blood and worse things. His jaw was distended, unhinged, and he was chewing on a string of something fleshy and raw. Those yellow eyes locked onto Leo. For a split second, something like memory flickered in their depths—a flicker of their friendship, of the person he was. It was a final, silent plea from the soul trapped inside the monster. Then it was swamped by a wave of pain and bottomless rage. The humanity was being burned away, leaving only a ravenous, endless hunger. The thing that looked out from behind those eyes was ancient and starving.
It saw Leo not as a friend, but as more meat.
It dropped the offal in its hands and rose. A guttural growl rumbled in its chest, a sound that belonged in a deep cave, not in a human throat. It took a step forward, its movements jerky but powerful, driven by a need to consume, to fill the horrible void the fever had carved inside it.
Leo stumbled back, terror freezing his limbs. This wasn't Mark. This was a plague wearing his skin. A vessel of pure corruption.
The bat hummed in his hand, not with warmth, but with a cold, purposeful certainty. It was not repulsed. It was ready. This was its reason for being. The strong will, the tortured self—it was the richest fuel.
The thing that had been Mark charged.
It wasn't a run; it was a loping, terrifyingly fast scramble on all fours, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat.
Leo didn't think. He acted.
He swung the bat.
It was not a swing of rage. It was not a swing of mercy. It was a swing of absolute, devastating necessity.
The crack of impact was swallowed by the wet, crushing thud of it connecting with Mark's skull. The force was immense, jarring Leo's arms to the shoulders.
The thing dropped mid-charge, collapsing into the bloody muck.
For a moment, nothing. Then, the golden light—the vile, infected energy that had claimed him—was pulled from Mark's body. It streamed out of his eyes, his mouth, his wounds, a vortex of sickly light being sucked into the bat's pulsing vein.
And Leo felt it.
A wave of soothing cold washed up his arm. It felt good. A profound, physical relief that eased the tension in his muscles and quieted the screaming in his head. It was obscene, a vile mockery of the grief and horror that were supposed to be there. He was being rewarded for murdering his best friend. The bat was sharing its feast, and his body was accepting the payment.
The bat grew hot in his hands, almost searing. And from deep within its core, he felt it: a definitive, satisfying CLICK. A lock turning. A counter ticking over from zero to one. The hunger was sated. For now.
The light faded. The body on the ground was just Mark again. His face, cleaned of the blood by the uncanny process, was pale and peaceful. The horrible hunger was gone. The transformation had been reversed, the corruption purged by the only thing that could.
Leo stood there, trembling, surrounded by the dismembered dead, his best friend slain at his feet. The bat felt heavier than the world. The soothing cold was gone, replaced by a shame so deep it felt like a physical cavity in his chest.
He had not committed murder. He had performed an exorcism. He had put down a rabid animal to save its soul and stop the spread of its sickness.
The first kill was the hardest. It would not be the last.
The bat had been fed. And it was very, very hungry for more.