Tin Can Creatures

Sunday

Hot breaths ignited the back of his neck. They were close, too close, far too close too damn close so he had to think. Concentrate. The next destination…

A snarl, thundering out of the depths of a carnivorous cavern. A cavern he would be descending into if he didn’t move faster. If he had only been quicker, if he had finished his work already, if he had never stopped for a break - if, if, if…

His vision blurred. Damn, he thought he had been too dehydrated for tears. Couldn’t afford distractions, not when they were stalking him, claws tearing at the heels of his shoes. Had to keep going, think about where he was heading. Finding her…

saving her…

Thoughts of her became fuel for his weary legs. He pushed forwards, feeling his muscles scream with every stride, hearing the rasping growls reverberate around his head as he slowed down. No weakness, for they showed no mercy. He had to keep going, focus on getting to her, holding her in his arms. His angel, his beacon, his light. His destination, too far away.

A split second decision made him bolt into the threadbare forest. Surely there were too many obstacles here, too much stopping them from following. He had grown up here, his feet knew where to tread and his head where to duck, but their husks would slam into the trunks. Slam through the trunks. Crashing, splintering, howling…

As he pushed on he realised the feral screams were beginning to fade. The breathing had vanished. And the ground beneath his feet crumbled away. Too far, thought too fast, and he was falling…

-----

Thursday

“Daddy!” a small voice howled, trembling with tears. “Daddy! He’s back!”

Immediately he was up. Slippers on, dressing gown tied, torch in hand.

Speed-slippering across the landing, wiping sleep from his eyes with his free hand, he called “I’m coming, it’s okay.”

“Daddy!”

“It’s okay, Maddie!”

He pushed the door open with his shoulder, shining the torch at the window almost on instinct. Gleaming red eyes flinched away, an accompanying rustle suggesting that it had fled the garden upon seeing the light.

Maddie sat huddled in bed, sobbing into her knees. She looked tiny for a seven year old, her eyes large and terrified. He sank onto the bed beside her, wrapping his arms around her skinny form and pulling her onto his lap.

“It’s okay, Mads,” he soothed, rocking his daughter gently. “He’s gone now.”

“He’ll come back, though,” she sniffled, rubbing her face into his dressing gown. “He comes back every night.”

“I’ll never let him get you,” he replied. “I promise.”

He kissed the top of her head, letting her cry into his shoulder until she fell back to sleep. When she was finally dozing he laid her down gently, tucking Teddy and Dog beside her and kissing her forehead again.

“I won’t let him get you,” he whispered. “I promise you. I’m working on it, Mads, daddy’s working on it.”

------

Friday

His laptop would not stop whirring, no matter how many tabs he closed. The noise was beginning to drive him over the edge. He couldn’t destroy another company machine, he knew that; this time he was meant to pay for it. He just had to breathe, be calm, push back from his desk and go for a short walk.

He strolled rigidly to the coffee machine. While he waited for another pot to brew he leaned his head against the cupboard full of other people’s mugs. Someone had put a post-it on the door, labelling it ‘Lost and Found’. It looked like his handwriting but he didn’t remember doing it.

He didn’t remember much, these days.

“You alright, mate?” Dan called. Oldest friend, most annoying co-worker: Dan.

“Yep,” he mumbled back. “Getting coffee.”

“Ah, you couldn’t make me a cup, could you?”

“Sure.”

“Cheers pal.”

He continued to stare downwards at the counter, counting crumbs, waiting until Dan filled the blissful silence with his useless rambling.

“So I read online, right, that there’s this creature living under the earth,” Dan began.

(Twenty seconds. That was a record for Dan.)

“It’s got like, metal skin and everything, and some people say there’s more but there’s photos of just one, and it’s got like, glowing red eyes or something, and serrated teeth, and it eats rabbits, apparently, and some people think it’s native to Australia because it’s weird as all hell and some people also think it eats kangaroos, not rabbits, and the first source on it is actually a mistranslation, and-”

“Jesus, Dan, do you ever breathe?” he snapped.

Dan blinked at him, lost for words. For once.

“You’re always going on and on and on about these stupid conspiracies that have zero fact behind them, and you never once ask anyone how their life is actually going, or whether they even want to hear the damn things in the first place,” he ranted. The coffee had finished, but he didn’t dare pick up a mug. He thought he might throw it.

“Sorry, mate,” Dan said. “You a bit stressed, yeah?”

“People have much bigger lives than just being sad and alone and sitting on their second-hand sofa reading stupid Reddit threads and jerking themselves off,” he snapped, wheeling around to point a teaspoon accusingly at Dan. “I have a daughter. A whole daughter to look after. Another human being, reliant on me, who actually likes me! Not some online e-girl animated nonsense! I have responsibilities, Dan! I don’t care about your bloody Transformers fanfiction! Just… for the love of God, be quiet once in a while, will you?”

Silence rang around the tiny office. He wasn’t sure how he was feeling, what he was feeling, how Dan was feeling. He didn’t care. The catharsis and the rage was ruling him.

Thirty seconds passed.

“So can I have that coffee?”

-----

Saturday

Maddie had been asleep until about four A.M Saturday morning. This time, when she awoke, she screamed, non-stop, almost masking the sound of glass breaking. Some primal part of him knew there was no time for slippers or dressing gown but out of habit he grabbed the torch, almost dropping it in his haste to get out of his room.

The screaming remained mostly constant, a panicked siren that begged for help. He could just about distinguish a “Daddy!” when she paused for breath, the vowels elongated in a wail of misery and fear.

He shoved her door open violently, whirling the torch around to scare off the beasts of the night. A stinging sensation in his foot made him jump briefly, made him aware that there was glass littering the floor. A drop of liquid on his head forced him to look up and confront what had smashed its way into his daughter’s room.

From his angle, all he could see was teeth. Jagged, wonky teeth and a gleaming throat, plated in silver. All of it headed over by a glittering, ruby eye, looming out of the darkness from a head well over six feet in the air. A serpentine neck curved above and around him, ensnaring him in a tomb of terror. A rabbit caught in a trap.

Maddie had fallen silent. He glanced towards her bed, saw her white-faced and petrified. A damp patch on the duvet was visible in the weak beam of the torch. Strange, how the battery had gone down so much in just one night.

“Daddy,” Maddie whispered hoarsely. “Daddy. Daddy, he’s here.”

“I know, sweetheart,” he replied. “But it’s okay. Uncle Dan said he only eats rabbits, or maybe kangaroos.”

Maddie’s stunned expression didn’t shift. Her mouth was slightly ajar, her eyes swollen with tears. The damp patch below her tucked up knees continued to grow.

“But Daddy, he hurt me,” she said. She nudged the duvet with one shaking hand, indicating the growing patch of darkness that he had thought was just urine.

“He bit me, Daddy.”

“It’s okay, Mads, we’ll get you sorted, no problem,” he said, as calmly as he could manage when saliva dripped down the neck of his pyjamas. By this point he had his own damp patch growing, barely visible due to the failing torchlight. The bulb flickered, once, twice, then gave up.

He could only hear breathing and his heartbeat. Not his breathing - he wasn’t sure he even was - but the breathing of the thing. Wheezy, mechanical. Alive. Close.

“Daddy…” the voice came out of the darkness. “Daddy, I’m scared.”

“It’s okay, Mads,” he answered. “It’s okay.”

As soon as the words left his mouth he felt the creature shift. Its head seemed to lower, its breathing getting more excited. It emitted a low rumble in between the increasing breaths, an unnatural sound that mimicked laughter. Its hysteria grew until grating shrieks filled the room, barked out of the mouth of the titanic carnivore, a cacophony of horror that overwhelmed him. Without realising he was doing it he curled into a ball, rocking on his toes with his arms wrapped around his head protectively. Every atom in him wanted the noise to stop.

He wasn’t sure when it did finally cease. All he knew was that when it did, Maddie wasn’t there.

-------

Sunday

He had been walking for over twenty four hours. Dan had refused to let him borrow his car, saying that he wanted an apology first. No attempt to explain, to lament and plead that Dan had been right about the creatures existing, was heard. His calls were rejected.

All he had was that torch and his dying phone. His contact lenses had dried out hours ago and he could barely see straight. Instead, the blurred puddles of blood and the pieces of shredded Hello Kitty pyjamas were his guides.

He would lose the trail, every so often. The creature left few footprints on the surface of the road, seemingly travelling with ease as it stole his daughter away. He knew, though; he knew where Maddie would be. She had grabbed Teddy before leaving and there was a tracker sewn into its head. He had only put it there when the night terrors began, but he was so glad he had. The beeping on his phone screen reassured him that she was alive.

Staggering onwards, he realised that the beeping had sped up. He hadn’t read the manual, wasn’t sure what it meant, was she dead?

His screen showed a stagnant blip on a map of the area. She had stopped moving. And she wasn’t far.

Blinded with grief and relief he hurried on, ignoring the way his entire body screamed at him for rest. Any time he closed his eyes he saw her blank face, framed by a leering, tin-can head. He had to get her from them.

Some superhuman strength kept him going. Perhaps all of his adrenaline went into motoring onwards rather than being aware of his surroundings because it was too late when he spotted the other creatures. Two more beasts, equally as imposing, equally shining in the light of the mid-morning sun, glistening violet and lilac. Their scarlet eyes glittered with bloodlust and apathy. If he had considered their position in relation to where his daughter was, he would have realised they were on sentry duty; bodyguards, ferocious and unmerciful.

Two conflicting trains of thought forced him to stop in his tracks. Did he fight for his Maddie? Did he turn tail and run? Could he find another way in?

He glanced down at his phone, checking that Maddie was in the same place. Content that she was still not going anywhere, he started walking with unusual calmness to a direction somewhere beyond the bodyguards. His logic was that they would assume he was bypassing them and let him skitter by. He wasn’t encroaching on their territory, he was simply a pedestrian! Right?

The aluminium heads swivelled with unusual fluidity to watch his progress. When he stumbled from exhaustion, stepping too close to the invisible territory line, one of them lunged, drawing back when his frantic retreat made it clear he understood. His scrambling was met with more of that grumbling laughter.

“You wanna do it like that, then?” he murmured, fury boiling up within him. “Take my daughter and make a mockery of me? Stupid tin can creatures. What do you want her for, anyway?”

The one that had laughed cocked its head curiously, staring him down with one crimson eye. There were no eyelids, no eyelashes, and he thought there was no pupil. What there was in the eye was a circle that bounced erratically from one corner to the other. How did something so bizarrely constructed, made out of recycling and scraps, instil such fear in him?

“What do you want my daughter for?” he repeated, raising his voice and glaring back at the creature. “What are you going to do to her?”

The rumbling began again. Sneering, ridiculing, a sound that undermined all of his responsibilities as a father. A static-y noise that made the rage boil over.

In a moment of stupid bravado, he hurled the torch at the creature. It made a satisfying, rattling clunk as it bounced off its armoured head and hit the ground. It was enough to stop the creatures from laughing, at least.

“Let me get my daughter!” he hollered, mistaking their silence as stunned.

One swivelled its head 180 degrees and screamed back into its territory. War-cry completed, it waited until it heard almost silent footfalls that signalled the approach of even more beasts before turning back to watch him. The other stabilised its pupils, its eyes narrowing to murderous slits as he was identified as their target.

“Shit,” he muttered, anger replaced with terror. The burning of emotion had cooled, causing jelly-legs that left him trembling on the spot, painfully aware that his pyjamas were still soaked with his own urine. He was in no state to fight these alien monstrosities. He could run, though…. If he were fast enough and clever enough and aimed for the thicket of trees, he could outmanoeuvre the hulking beasts and burst into their den, reclaim Maddie, then sprint for freedom. Or for a hospital, that might be smarter. If Maddie were still alive…

Their army had gathered. They were just waiting, watching. He was their cue to begin the hunt, so he did what any good prey animal would do.

He ran for his life.