Shadowboxing

I checked my watch. It had been exactly three minutes and forty-four seconds since we'd heard anything besides the thunder, the rain, and the distant yips of hungry coyotes.

My heart rate was going nuts.

Jack caught my eye as he scratched his rugged blond beard, his lips pressed firmly together. His rotting red Adirondack chair creaked as he leaned forward, cradling his shotgun. I recognized the look on his face. Something ain't right, it said. He inhaled sharply, leaned back, then stared daggers at the things outside the window in front of him.

Jack was just as nervous as I was, if not more. His beige linen shirt was soaked with sweat—the October night was unusually hot, but not that hot. His grey eyes, normally sullen and disinterested, were on high alert. They darted between the cabin windows like flies trapped in a jar, zipping in vain from wall to wall in search of a way out.

The Lich were blocking our views of the forest at each of the four windows, which were all thinly veiled by dainty cream lace curtains. Their frozen moonlit forms, eldritch obelisks, were densely packed together. Their gangly arms hung limp at malformed sides. Their heads, aimed downward, were featureless save for a dark perforated line on their scalps. They stood in total and foreboding silence.

It hadn't taken long to learn their mannerisms. Each night, at 12 a.m. sharp, the Lich limped from their underground nests and meandered in search of food. They were swift at the sight of prey, tackling rabbits and squirrels and wolves with meters-long lunges, tearing them apart with the strength of a hundred Olympians. The perforations, we soon learned, were mouths. At 3 a.m., they all stopped wherever they were and sat cross-legged—cross-tendrilled, more like—and emitted sounds I can only describe as muffled, low-pitched, drawn-out screams. They alternated, seemingly in conversation. That's all they did until the first sliver of sunlight came, at which point they quieted, rose, and shuffled back into hiding until midnight came again.

The Lich were disturbingly vocal at all times. On their prowls, they cried intermittently between sighs and groans, as though tormented by some perpetual woe. But the worst was the shrieking. We'd heard about it early on, how it was a response to human screams—how otherwise they paid us no mind. But our group had heard it twice. It took us those two times to learn it was a response to any human speech at all.

The first time around, it was close to dawn; the assault lasted minutes before they left us alone. We lost two people. The second time was worse. Nine of us scrambled to leave the cabin and make it to the van. Only four of us drove off into the night, aimless, navigating long empty roads until dawn came.

So now it was just me, Jack, and the teen twins Mia and Blake, who were sound asleep on the dirty pinewood floor behind us.

I checked my watch again. 3:07 a.m. There was no question now—for the first time I'd ever seen, the Lich were deviating from their normal behaviour. I could sense something else. I think Jack could, too. The air felt different. It was thick with something dark and rancid and heavy, like an invisible black mold tethering itself to empty space.

The assurance of the coming dawn was no longer comforting. Something was seriously wrong.

I began thumbing the safety on my assault rifle. On. Off. On. Off. Jack looked at me with ugly knotted brows, clearly annoyed. I stopped and kept the safety off.

I set the gun atop my lap and snatched my waterproof notebook. Jack was using Mia's. Our erasable ink had run out months ago, so now all but three of my pages were marked up with permanent ink. I wrote as small as I could, in letters just big enough for Jack to see from across the cabin.

WTF IS GOING ON?

Jack was the longest-standing member of our group and he'd seen much more than the three of us had. If he was clueless, we were in trouble.

With aggressive strokes, he scrawled:

IDK. B CALM

I nodded. He set his notebook down with shaking hands and looked away, back at the creatures.

I glanced behind me at the sleeping 18-year-olds. The Lich started appearing seven months ago, right when spring began, so the kids never finished high school—not like that mattered now. But they were shockingly robust, both physically and emotionally. In the summer, when we fled to the Island, Mia and I got to talking. She told me their mom was a "psycho ex-military doomsday prepper who taught us survival skills as kids," and their dad was "a retired firefighter with a penchant for horror films and cryptids and scary shit like that". She said they both would have had a field day with this whole thing. Blake wasn't so lighthearted when he talked about them, which was almost never.

I didn't ask questions. I didn't know what happened to their parents, if it was before or after everything, if the kids saw it happen. It wasn't worth talking about. I didn't want to upset them—especially not Blake. I looked at him, at his soft sleeping face. He looked strikingly like my own boy.

I turned away. There was a weight in my lungs. It became hard to breathe. I felt like I was going to keel over and die. I wondered if Jack was thinking the same things as me—experiencing the same things. Jack was always the calmest of us all, but now his mind seemed to be unraveling along with mine.

My jittery hand scrawled:

U FEEL SICK?

Jack didn't write—he just nodded, his head buried in his hands.

I didn't know what else to write.

We knew talking meant certain death, but now anything might mean certain death. The rules had been broken. I became afraid to move at all. Immobile and rifle at the ready, I observed a trio of Lich in the window ahead of me.

Then I felt it.

The one I was staring at—the one closest to the window—was looking at me. It didn't have eyes to look, but it was looking right at me. And in that look there was something striking, something indescribable. I wanted to write to Jack, but I couldn't look away.

My focus was split when I heard the creak of the floorboard behind me. Either Mia or Blake—maybe both—had woken up. Maybe they felt it too, I thought.

A palm rested on my shoulder, a palm I recognized as Blake's.

But in my peripheral vision, I noticed it.

The hand wasn't Blake's. Not really. It was crooked and spindly, just like a Lich hand.

And as I continued to stare directly at the other Lich, the one in front of me, looking at me, boring into my soul, I finally realized it.

It was my son.