Goddammit! He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The old woman dangled upside down, blood trickling from a wound around her neck. Her wails degraded to desperate gurgles. The bass boom of shotguns rattled his rib cage. One of her ankles was lodged in the mouth of the mother of all Jersey Devils. It was everything people, and Boompa, had described. The tan goat head, though as large as a horse’s, looked down at them with eyes black as the empty pit of a haunted mine. It didn’t make a sound, other than the steady whoosh of its wings as they beat at the still, humid air. It pulled its cloven-footed legs up to avoid the devastating shotgun pellets, scaling twenty feet higher in a second. The Piney family opened fire on the creature. It moved so swiftly, they may as well have been throwing rocks at it. “We have to get out of here, now,” Ben said. “While they’re distracted.” His mother snapped, “We have to help them!” “With what?” he said. “Our fists? We can’t fight that thing, and once it leaves, they’ll tie us up for sure.
