Creeptych Read Online Free Page A

as I could see, in every direction. Were we the only regular humans left in the neighborhood?
    “Daddy,” Kara repeated. “They want to come in.”
    The first one had finally reached the car. He was an older man, I’d guess 65 or 70. His hair was white as salt on his head and his lips thin as parchment. He leaned his pale, too-slack face into Kara’s window and leered, teeth exposed and rotten.
    The pounding began then. And from all around us a hum began to wail.
    First the old man began to smack his head against her window. And then from the back window an answering echo, as one of the other Luna Roach automatons began to slap slack fists against the glass. An answering thud joined from my side of the car. One old woman threw her body onto the hood of the car and tried to claw her way up to the windshield. When a gnarled finger grasped at the windshield wiper, I turned the control to full and watched the steel and rubber arm bat her tentative grasp away again and again.
    But nothing was going to keep them away for long.  Kara held on to my arm tighter and tighter as the car began to shake.
    “Daddy, what are we going to do?”
    The metal of the passenger door suddenly creaked and squealed. The golf pin of a door lock snapped, the plastic vanished to the floor.
    “I don’t know what to do,” I finally admitted, as the door wrenched open and six arms reached through the breach towards my baby girl.
    “Daddddddy!” she screamed.
    I pulled her closer, but the hands gripped the fabric of her shirt and pants and then, next to my ear, the glass exploded. Another hand reached through the broken glass to bat at my head.
    “Kara, hold on,” I begged, grasping for her.
    But she was gone.
    From outside the car I heard her screams. I dove after her to follow, but before I had my feet on the ground a dozen fists pounded into my neck and back and shoved me to the asphalt. Through a field of swaying bodies and limbs I saw Kara raised above the mob, and then Jenna appeared, arms held out to take her.
    “Mommy!” Kara cried, arms outstretched.
    My wife scooped my baby up, and Kara hugged her tight. Jenna stared at me over our little girl’s shoulders, and a look of victory flickered in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I was sickened by seeing my wife smile. But then, strangely, that smile grew confused, uncertain. It turned to a frown. Her eyes squinted like they did when she got migraines. I could see the muscles on the backs of her arms begin to tense and shiver as she gripped Kara tighter. Then she opened her mouth, not to kiss our baby, but to scream. I heard it clearly over the cacophony of the mob.
    That’s when the Luna Roach slid out from the wet cavity between her eyeball and eyelid. Kara saw the bug and recoiled from her mother, but Jenna only held our baby tighter, as the roach walked to the edge of Jenna’s nose and poised there to stretch its wings. Then my wife’s whole face convulsed and began to change. Her skin crawled and swelled; her whole body began to visibly tremble.  Jenna’s face exploded at that moment, as the hive of Luna Roaches nesting and gestating in her brain finally clawed their way free of her flesh and bone and took to the air. A cloud of blood sprayed the sky as her eyes and flesh caved in like undermined sand to the angry mandibles of a thousand trapped and buzzing bugs.  As the first spurts of blood misted, a black and tan cloud of buzzing wings instantly hid the sudden ruin of her features. Luna Roaches lit from her exposed flesh to swarm around the bloody mess of her eyes and the sticky, shredded cartilage of her nose, which hung by a thread down her face.
    I launched myself forward to save Kara, but the arms and feet of the mob held me down as my baby beat tiny hands against Jenna’s gore-streaked shoulders, trying to escape. Against all sanity, her blinded, broken mother did not fall or let go. A buzz of wings multiplied in the air, and a cloud of Luna Roaches hovered