"Hey. Kid. Listen." He walked toward him, changing clips. "You're taking all this too seriously. It's toying with us, that’s all."
He held out his shotgun to him. "Here. The goo—Chin—he's right. It's still beneath the dock. Probably scared. Why don't you do the honors?"
Lonny hesitated, trembling. "Y-you mean it's just trying to scare us?"
Handlebar tweaked his nose. "That's right."
The fire returned to the young man's eyes—almost. He looked around the shattered dock, at the riddled corpse and the oily, bloody water, at the spitting power lines and the dead lights, the peeling boardwalk on the shore.
He shook his head. "No, it's not. It—it doesn't pretend, like you. It's gonna kill us, that's all." He stepped closer. "Can’t you see that? You posing hillbilly? The spill's given it a—a lean season. It's sick, and it' s hungry, and …"
He glanced at the corpse. "We probably just killed its mate."Wayne Kyle Spitzer (born July 15, 1966) is an American author and low-budget horror filmmaker from Spokane, Washington. He is the writer/director of the short horror film, Shadows in the Garden, as well as the author of Flashback, an SF/horror novel published in 1993. Spitzer's non-genre writing has appeared in subTerrain Magazine: Strong Words for a Polite Nation and Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History. His recent fiction includes The Ferryman Pentalogy, consisting of Comes a Ferryman, The Tempter and the Taker, The Pierced Veil, Black Hole, White Fountain, and To the End of Ursathrax, as well as The X-Ray Rider Trilogy and a screen adaptation of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."