A sudden crash pulled Luis up from the dark waters of dreamless sleep. The sound seemed to rattle at the walls of his mind, echoing in the dark home as rain and wind continued its ceaseless assault.

Luis rubbed the sleep from his eyes, pulling at the crud in the corners of his eyes as he pushed aside the veil of fatigue that shrouded his vision. His eyes settled on a small silhouette in his doorway. At first, it frightened him. The sky was still dark and moonless, and there was no light source in his room, and yet it looked as though the shadow was accentuated by a blue glow. After a few moments of confused fear, Luis recognized the shadow as his daughter. Through the darkness he could see tears hanging from her eyes, her mouth quivering in a terrified frown, her body slumped in paranoid fear. She was frozen in place, her mouth open in a frozen O of shock.

“What’s wrong?” Luis asked

Rose raised her arm toward the open door behind her, her finger wavering as it pointed down the hallway where the sound had originated.

“Is someone out there?” Luis asked.

Rose nodded. She put her hand down by her side and walked up to his bed, where she crawled onto the mattress and slipped under the covers. She continued to shake. Luis kissed her head and slipped out of bed.

In the corner by his closet, seeming to glint in the odd, blue light that was filling his room, was his repeater. Luis’s attention was drawn back to the bed, where he heard muffled thumping sounds. Rose had been hitting the mattress with her hand to get his attention. When their eyes locked, she raised her finger to her lips. Luis nodded and turned back to his weapon.

When he grasped it, the cold metal bit into his flesh with an aggressive tooth. He winced. From the kitchen, amidst all the wind and rain, he could hear wood banging on wood: the back door was open, and wind was pouring into the house.

As silently as he could, Luis walked back to his nightstand, inside of which was a box of shells. He opened the box while listening to the creaking walls and groaning halls of his home. Amidst the chaos of the storm were other sounds, sounds that were more terrifying: claws scratching the wood floor, closing around the legs of a chair, the constant banging of the door knob against their wooden wall, water trickling its way into the home from the outside. Maybe from the river? Maybe from the rain? Luis wasn’t exactly sure what was truth and what was fiction, but a part of his mind was telling him not to find out.

While remaining as quiet as possible, Luis slid up the barrel of his rifle and turned it open. He opened the box of shells and pulled a few out from it, the brass tinkling as he did. He slid the shells into his rifle until it was full, feeling a bit safer with every metallic clink of a bullet falling into place. Once the rifle was full, he twisted the lever closed and slid it down the barrel. With careful deliberation, he cocked the rifle and pushed the butt into his shoulder.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

Rose did not look sure. She had pulled the covers up to her chin, and he could still see her body shivering underneath the thick blanket. He tried to give her a comforting smile – the kind of smile Marta would give her when a bad storm was raging, or when a nightmare would pull her from sleep. She gave him a small smile back: a success in his mind.

“If I say to run, you dive out the window,” Luis said, pointing. “Hit it with something hard if you need to, but get out of the house and start running.”

She nodded once more. Luis turned toward the open door and look down the rifle’s sights as he moved forward.

The hallway was empty. In the distance, the wind was rattling through the open back door, pushing its way into the home and down the hallway. Goosebumps began to form on Luis’s arms as he carefully placed one foot in front of the other. While maintaining his balance, he swiveled his body and looked in his daughter’s room on the left. Her kerosene lamp was still on the night stand. He presumed she had turned it up when she woke up, because it cast a bright, yellow glow on the walls. To Luis’s terror, part of her doorframe had been scratched. Light, brown wood glinted in the light while the darker, finished wood of the door frame seemed to absorb it.

What did this?

It couldn’t have been an intruder. Not only was the wood ripped from the door frame, the marks looked like they had been created by sharp claws. Was it an animal? Perhaps. A bear had the power to create marks like the ones on the doorframe, but what bear would make its way deep into the bowels of a home just to claw some wood? Had Rose seen whatever the intruder was? It was possible. She looked terrified when he had risen from sleep. Maybe she had gotten out of bed and confronted the animal, or perhaps she scared it and that was what had made the crashing sound.

Pushing aside the fruitless theories that were racing through his mind, Luis swiveled his body again and continued to walk down the hallway toward the dining room. He pushed the barrel tighter into his shoulder as he swiveled his rifle toward the open, banging door.

The dining room was empty, too. One of the chairs was destroyed, ripped out from its place by the table and smashed into a pile of broken sticks. A large scuff was visible on the wooden wall, underneath which the mess of the chair had fallen. The table had thin holes in its surface, and long scratch lines carved deep into the wood trailing behind them. The pictures he had hung around the house, the pictures of he, Marta, and Rose, had fallen from the walls as well, and glass littered the floor.

Luis refocused his mind and walked toward the back door. His shock turned to dread when he noticed that the door jamb had been ripped apart; there was nothing to keep it closed. Even worse, the river had risen significantly during the night. Water was rippling across the surface of what used to be their farm, making its way toward their house with hellish persistence. The Red River would be sloshing on their floor before midday, he estimated.

He heard the sound again: thick claws crushing wood, digging into floorboards. Low, ragged breathing joined the noise. Terror began to creep up Luis’s throat, clawing up his esophagus, as his heart dropped into his stomach. He kept the rifle butt pushed into his shoulder as he turned, sucking in his breath to avoid making any sound. A trickle of water or sweat was moving downward from his forehead, in between his eyes, down the bridge of his nose where it hung, threatening to fall at any moment.

When Luis made eye contact with what was in front of him, his entire body went numb. Even his teeth were lost feeling, succumbing to the buzzing ebb of dread that was washing over his body.

Standing on all fours, with its claws sunk into the floor, was an emaciated creature. Its beady eyes were crimson, and they were both focused on Luis’s face. Its arms were thin. Despite the dark, its skin looked to carry a light blue hue, and purple veins twisted underneath the flesh in winding roads. It snarled, and Luis noticed that blood was dripping down its mandibles, with bits of flesh stuck in its teeth and gums. It was crouched low to the ground, and as Luis stared at it, the wood floor began to crack and snap from the pressure of its claws. Silence filled the space between them, permeated by its flat nose, sniffing and growling.

Luis’s mind began to race. The repeater became light in his hands, and he was acutely aware of the rain whipping against his back, flying through his hair. His thoughts turned to Marta, to Rose, to the only people in his life he had ever loved or ever been proud of. His throat was closing from terror, but even in his immediate fear he knew what he had to do.

“ROSE, GET OUT!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

Its head snapped in the direction of his voice, and the monster bellowed. The sound was deafening, and his ears began to ring as the wail bounced off the thick walls of his home. It leaped at Luis, and he pulled the trigger of his rifle.

The bullet struck it in the chest, propelling it backward. A jolt of blood jetted from its body as it smashed into the wall by the front door. The entire house shook. Luis wasted no time; he bolted down the hallway, running as fast as he could while jerking the repeater’s action down and back up. A hot shell was ejected from the rifle, bouncing off the hallway wall and falling to the ground with a small clink. He could see his bedroom on the left just as he heard claws scratching on the floor behind him, followed by another high-pitched cry. Luis swiveled around at the last moment and fired blindly. The monster shrieked, its body smashing into the side wall, leaving a long, crimson smear behind.

He burst through his bedroom door, his skin bristling against the cold wind and spitting rain that was billowing through the open, broken window. Without stopping, he ran toward the window and leapt through it.

Luis heard his leg crack as he smacked against the hard ground. Muddy water sprayed outward, splashing the walls of his home. Cold rain drove into his skin, freezing his bones, as he scrambled to his feet. As he began to run again, pain lanced through his leg in long, white flashes. He gritted his teeth and pushed forward. A few hundred feet in the distance was the winding road that traveled over the river.

The creature screeched again as it rushed toward Luis, its claws squelching in the soft dirt. Its emaciated body glinted as rain glanced off its body. Luis wrenched the action downward again, the rifle spitting a shell outward onto the wet ground. He rushed forward as fast as his pained leg would allow.

It wasn’t fast enough.

He yelped as claws dug into his calf, pulling Luis to the ground. His head hit the ground with a sickening splat. The world split into three different versions of itself, weaving and winding their way in between one another. The pain in his head was usurped by the agony in his leg as it pulled its claws out. Its spidery body climbed over him, and its emaciated mouth widened. Luis pushed the rifle into its chest and fired again.

The creature gave an angered growl as it was propelled backward. Crawling on his elbows while ignoring the pain, Luis wrenched the action down and up and fired again before the it could attack. It gave a shocked cry as one of the bullets hit it in the face.

Luis scrambled to his feet and began to limp as fast as he could toward the bridge over the river. He looked over his shoulder. The creature was gone, though a trail of crimson blood was spotting the dirt, washing away in the downpour of cold rain.

The bridge was almost flooded over, but it was still stable enough to walk across. He limped over the walkway as he watched the waters course underneath him, white-capped waves frothing and sloshing up the sides of the bank. He pushed forward, even as purple dots began to encroach his vision.

When he reached the other side of the bridge, his heart lifted. Standing in the rain, drenched from head to toe, was Rose. Her hair was plastered to her face, and thin streaks of water were running down her body like tributaries, but she was alive. She pointed down the road to the left of the bridge. Luis nodded and motioned for her to follow as he limped forward.

“Your leg?” she said in her small, untrained voice.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll bandage it later.”

Together, they walked down the road, their bare feet squelching in the mud. Luis did not know where they were going, or whether it would be safe for them when they arrived. His thoughts turned to the children he had seen across the river, the one who had raised her hand at him before it had started to rain.

Before Marta had died, she had talked about the good in the world. One day, after returning home from town, she told him about a young boy who had offered to give her a ride on his horse. The sickness was taking hold by then, and Marta was getting weaker by the day, even though she tried to hide her symptoms as much as she could. She said that she had been struggling with the groceries she had bought, and the young boy – who could have been no more than fifteen – had seemed nice enough. She said that her ride back home on the back of this strange boy’s horse had given her hope there was something worth saving in the world. For the longest time she was unsure whether she wanted to have a child because of the way white folks in town treated them. Occasionally, someone was nice and offered them greetings. When Rose had been born, Marta had wanted to hide her from the world. Even after her ride on the horse, to her dying day, she was skeptical that they would be okay in this strange new world, in a country that seemed intent on expelling them from it, despite constant invitations to the contrary. But the boy had given her a small amount of happiness, something she had needed more than ever on that day.

Luis had heard stories from a stranger, who had traveled out east, about a giant statue erected on an island. It was the day after Marta’s death, and he had driven into town to drink himself blind. Rose was still at home. He felt guilty about leaving her there, but he had made sure to provide her with enough food to survive the night without him. The stranger said the statue was of a woman, thrusting a torch toward the air with a defiant gaze out toward the open ocean. On the day this statue was opened to the public, a poem had been read. The stranger had restated it with a dreamy expression. Dark, purple bags hung under his eyes, which contrasted his pale skin.

“I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” he had intoned, his voice carrying a majestic echo.

Now, moving through the mud and filth with his barefoot daughter, Luis held onto the hope that had flickered in his wife’s eyes, that had burned in that stranger’s stomach as he had recited the poem, that encompassed the statue’s gaze out over the ocean, keeping watch for evildoers and those in need of help.

On their left was a long fence, behind which was a house. Luis pushed forward as the rain slashed through the air and dug into the muddy ground beneath them. Rose walked behind him. His leg burned with fierce intensity as he approached the front door, slowing his limp as he lifted his hand.

An animalistic scream burst through the world, shattering the skies, followed by claws crunching against tree bark and squelching on the muddy road.

Luis began to pound on the door with his wet fist, looking over his shoulder as he did. He could see a shadow moving through the trees; he could hear the ragged breathing and creaking bones of the being that had almost killed him.

Luis began to pound harder and faster on the door as he put his arm around Rose.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

When the door opened, Luis was unsure whether he had found harbor, or if he had made his and his daughter’s situation worse.

Next Chapter: Jackson