Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
How do you catch a moth?
A big light, that’s fucking how.
3
Desperate times call for desperate measures. There are no official protocols for apprehending a mothman, so I’m getting creative.
The next night, I find myself on the top of my apartment building, taping twenty hundred-thousand-lumen flashlights together, wondering if I’ve gone mad. If my mathematics is correct, that adds up to a total of two million lumens. Might not be the brightest thing in the city, but it’s got a chance of working. I point it in the direction the last murder took place, and my last sighting of what, hell, I’m just going to call the monster.
At three in the morning, I switch my flashlight array on. Twenty buttons take some time to press, but I hammer through them all as quickly as possible, one finger pushing the buttons, the other hand on my sidearm. I’m officially afraid of this monster thing. He might not have been hostile when I talked with him in the alley, but he’s left his moth scale dust all over half a dozen victims, and I have no intention of joining their number.
The light is BRIGHT. Bright enough that until I angle the array back up over the nearby buildings, I see curtains twitching in the windows across the street. Hopefully by the time they call the cops I’ll be done with this mission.
I sit behind the flashlight array, cast in darkness, and I drink a beer. This is not official protocol but lying in wait on your own rooftop for a flying creature from hell to appear isn’t exactly in the manual either.
The block is quiet. The city is never really fully quiet, but there are parts of Brooklyn where sleep happens. Tonight is one of those still nights, where the wind plays with loose wrappers and leaves from the few trees tolerated along the sidewalks.
It’s nice out here.
I hear wings.
Holy fucking shit, I hear wings.
The sound of them beating nearby is enough to make me immediately wish I had not come up with this plan at all. I didn’t actually think it would work, or that it would work so fast. Damn my good ideas and impeccable execution thereof.
I see him pass in front of the bright beams of light. He’s even bigger than I remembered him being. When those wings are stretched out in flight mode, he seems to be at least twenty feet wide. He’s a monster, in both shape and size.
I pull my gun. “Stop and surrender!”
I shout the way I was trained to shout, attempting to dominate the suspect with volume and bass. It is completely ineffective. The mothman does not care at all about my shouting, or my gun for that matter.
His arms reach out and grip me powerfully. He pulls me up against his hard body and I feel the rooftop below me abandon me entirely as I am swept up into the air.
I discharge my weapon blindly. I have no idea if I hit him or not, but I do know that he is easily able to hold onto me with three of his powerful arms while the fourth hand disarms me. I curse and start fighting. I still have my baton at my belt. I grab it out, whack it to extend it, and start smashing him directly in the face.
“Aggressive little thing,” he snarls. “Stop fighting me.”
I am obviously not going to do that. I am going to go down fighting. When they find my body split open like a bloody hamburger bun, they’ll find bits of him with me.
His hair is long and flails out behind him, but as he slows his flight to try to deal with me, it comes whipping forward. For a brief moment, we are caught in a cocoon of his hair, his red eyes boring into mine. I am face to face with terror and death, and in this moment I feel peace. Not good peace. The dangerous kind of peace that directly precedes dying, in my experience. I don’t like it when people I am trying to save get calm, and I refuse to go softly into this dark night.
I kick him where his genitals would be if he were a person.
I feel something very large. Very long. Very dangerous.
“The fuck!?”
He lets out a laugh, a sound that sends a physical chill down my spine. If that is his moth-hood, it is monstrous, just like the rest of him.
“Stop fighting me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’ve killed people! Why would I believe you!”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Oh, it was another massive mothman, was it?”
“Yes. My brother.”
This is the kind of bullshit I hear from people all the time. People generate identical twins at an astonishing rate when they’re talking to police. If I had a dollar every time I arrested some guy who said it was his brother, or some girl who said I was really looking for her sister, I’d be a thousandaire.