Body Surfing

slip-ons. Her light wavered, and she had to stop to steady it. It took a moment to find what she’d seen before. Something winked back at her. Was it an animal’s eye? Maybe a raccoon in a tree? She took a few more steps in that direction. The trees clumped together here, and she felt exposed.
    “Good God, woman. Settle yourself down.”
    Suddenly she realized what it was: the window in the side of the old wellhouse. She’d forgotten all about it. John said it was full of bats—bats and batshit, which was a good enough reason not to go any closer. But still, that faint snap from a moment ago echoed in her ears. It sounded a lot like a door swollen with rainwater being pushed closed. Should she—?
    A bark sounded behind her, and she nearly dropped her flashlight.
    “Damn it, Gunther, where the hell are you?”
    She ignored the stairs, half walked, half slid her way down the hill. A black shape flashed through her beam.
    “Gunther?”
    The dog whined but didn’t come to her. She had to wave her flashlight around for a good minute before she was finally able to pick him out. His eyes flashed green, then dropped back to the ground.
    “Aw, hell, dog, what do you got there?”
    Cakes approached warily, just in case whatever it was wasn’t dead yet. But then her light caught a hand, a rubber boot.
    “John?” She ran forward. “Oh no, John! John, what happened?”
    The dog licked her face when she drew close and she clubbed him away. She grabbed John’s hand but it was cold. She held her fingers beneath his nose but couldn’t feel any breath.
    “Oh God, John! What did you do to yourself? What did you go and do to yourself?”
    With a trembling hand, she brought the light up to his face. His upper lip was split and covered with dried blood and dirt, and there were similarly stained gashes on his right cheekbone and forehead. His right eye was swollen into a dark mound like an unpeeled turnip.
    The other one opened.
    “John?”
    For a moment Cakes seemed to see lights dancing in the single eye, the stars of the Milky Way whirling around. The next moment a fist crashed into her face and snapped her jaw out of socket and she plopped onto the wet grass face-first. Her flashlight rolled a few feet away. Its beam snaked through the grass and illuminated the unmoving pair of bodies. Cakes’s face and knees tripodded her body; her hips jutted into the air in a sexual caricature. After a long moment, they fell to one side.
    It was another minute before the demon could move. He’d put everything into that punch—had to hit her with the broken arm because she was straddling the other. Now, scrabbling with his host’s good arm and leg, he pulled himself from beneath the fallen woman. He reached into her skirt, found the waistband of her panties, pulled them down to her knees. He clambered atop her, his closed, clawed hand on her throat propping him up. He crushed her windpipe to make sure she wouldn’t wake up. It was a petty and base act even by his standards. But this petty, base little family had brought it on themselves. The Van Arsdales. Father and son were a pair all right, one worse than the other. He was going to come back when this wasall over. He was going to burn down house and barn and obliterate every last trace of this family. But he was going to get Jasper first. He was going to rip limb after limb from whatever poor soul the fledgling was possessing. He was going to torture each nerve ending one at a time to make sure the pain lasted as long as possible. Acid. Knives. Needles. Fire. Who knows, maybe he’d videotape the experience and put it on YouTube. The Alphas would love that.
    There was a sound off to his right. The demon had to turn his whole face to see what it was, and even then could barely make out the dog because his command of his host’s senses was so poor. The dog too. He’d kill it. He’d kill everything that had anything to do with these fucking Van Arsdales.
    But first…
    Oh, first…
    With a rush he was out of John Van Arsdale’s battered body. The pain fell away, as did all sensation, replaced instantly by the world chorus he’d heard so many times before. He had planned to jump in Cakes but realized he must have squeezed too hard on her windpipe because she was already dead. He spun back out into the ether, was almost caught by a hundred souls scattered over the globe. He fought them all off. Who? he asked himself. Where? What? How would he take his revenge?
    Suddenly he