Read Online Final Scream by David Brookover - Free Book Online

the storm’s dancing light. It stood so still that it could have been a grotesque statue. Didn’t Reese’s screams stimulate its curiosity to check out the source of the screams? Or was it waiting to assail him?
    His cousin Nick’s favorite gripe about mysterious and dangerous situations was there were often too many questions and not enough ready answers. Noah couldn’t agree more.
    Another lightning display highlighted Reese’s footprints! They hadn’t been completely washed away yet. What luck! He mopped the raindrops from his eyes with his wrist for the thousandth time and stole to the edge of the ridge, which drew him closer to the mammoth carnivore.
    As he neared the lip of the ridge, all hell broke loose! Reese shrieked shrilly again as thundering footfalls shook the copse. The silhouette reacted to the new sounds and slightly shifted its position. Another cloud-to-cloud lightning web brightened and irradiated a charging herd of eight-legged, boar-shaped creatures the size of rhinoceroses. Three spiraling horns poked out of the top of their bony, maroon-skinned heads, and their gaping toothy mouths and leathery forked tongues nearly obscured their whiskered, piggish snouts. The blackness didn’t deter their reckless charge toward the monster mantis, and Noah reasoned their four globular scarlet eyes could see into the pitch night.
    He promptly ducked behind a tree trunk barely thick enough to conceal his ribcage. He prayed it was enough to hide him from the charging, reddish purple aberrations. When they raced past him, he sagged forward with relief. Thankfully, the savage carnivores had bigger fish to fry. The mantis emitted an earsplitting bawl as it hunched its stick-thin body into a rigid defensive position, but the charging rhinos overpowered it, and they all disappeared from the mountain crest.
    Reese screamed again.
    Clutching his Gander Mountain knife, Noah cautiously felt his way tree by tree in the dark until he peered down the opposite side of the mountain. The next lightning fork exposed several broken monster bodies strewn on the boulders below. The vicious rhinos hadn’t gotten to enjoy their dinner after all.
    The light faded before he caught sight of Reese. Noah waited impatiently for Mother Nature’s next dazzling light show, and when it came, he spotted Reese halfway down the slope. She was barely visible, because dozens of squirming, bloody white tentacles slithered over her trapped form. That’s when his eyes shifted to the numerous, corpulent cabbage-like plants tethering Reese with their tentacles. The damn bloodsucking plants were feeding off her!
    Noah sat in the loose muddy soup, shoved off from the edge, and skidded down the mud. It was similar to sledding—without the exhilaration. It was displaced by raw fear. Countless sucking tentacles reached out as he zipped past the cabbage carnivore plants above Reese, but he slashed them with his knife. At the midway point of the slope, Noah purposely slammed into the cluster of plants feeding off Reese. He sliced the fat tentacles between her and the plants, and then yanked the suckers off her exposed arms, legs, and neck.
    When he severed them all, Reese’s limp body tumbled down toward the treacherous beach boulders before he could grab her. He lunged head first toward her, caught her when she temporarily snagged herself on another tentacled plant, and slipped his arm around her waist. Together, they rode the muddy slope down to the raging ocean. Noah steered them away from the deadly rocks, and they landed with a teeth-rattling jolt on a narrow strip of sand. Wave after kamikaze wave crashed and perished on the enormous boulders protecting the island from erosion. The towering, drenching plumes washed the mud and blood off them in minutes. Both sputtered and coughed from the briny cascade as they staggered to a higher position among the boulders, but out of range of the killer tentacles.
    They sat in a large crevice between jagged