In The Sight of These Hills (Dolan Twins)

The Attack

Chapter 4: The Attack

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

-Stephen King

Ethan Dolan was never good at baseball, but he never really tried to play. Grayson Dolan, on the other hand, was good at batting. He had a baseball bat in their garage in the corner next to their large white freezer. Sometimes he'd make Ethan pitch balls to him just to see if he could hit them across the yard.

Ethan was good at Lacrosse, though, and had thrown a Lacrosse stick with precision when they used to play sports. He could throw hard too. He knew how to hit.

He didn't know how to pray but he knew how to kneel in the grass, he knew how to feel it with his palms, knew how to inhale the sweet scent as it flowed over him like a curtain. He knew how to lie in the grass, under a soft summer sun, and breathe. He knew how to be alive and how to love and how to hate.

Shock was a unique thing. It seemed to be different for everyone. It could be characterized by pale, clammy skin, and a rapid pulse. Pupils could enlarge to frightening proportions, and there was also the lack of speech and uncontrollable shaking. Some people we're effected after the experience until hours later when it would suddenly hit, making them bend over and throw their cookies, or scream, or faint. Shock was a crazy thing, and little was really understood about it.

For example, Grayson was in shock. He didn't even know it, either.

For Grayson, pain wasn't pain anymore. It was stripped of its previous definition and thrown to the wind.

Pain was an unimaginable thing. Fear was his whole being. His breath had been knocked out of his body, and it all had happened so fast. He was standing there with the light on his phone shining through the forest, and then he wasn't. It was kind of funny how fast bad things could happen.

He didn't know pain or fear or what being alive meant until he was on those dried fallen leaves. He didn't know what anything meant until he was right beside the torn body of that dead dog.

The wolf-like creature, all hot breath and a human-like intelligence shining in its brilliant amber eyes, wasn't tearing into his chest with its claws, it wasn't racking them across his belly like a lover might in the moment of passion. Blood wasn't blooming from the cuts, the material on his sweatshirt wasn't being torn with an audible ripppppp. Grayson wasn't arching his back, teeth clenched. And its massive jaw, its razor-sharp teeth, weren't suddenly pushed into the meat on his side. This thing, this monster, wasn't biting him.

But it was. All of those things were happening.

And all Grayson could think of was Ethan; how Ethan needed to run, how he needed to save himself. Grayson could hear his brother scream through the snarls, the warm breath, the agony.

Ethan was, in fact, screaming, and without thinking he grabbed a large, dead stick that was laying nearby, the closest thing, and it was about as thick as a man's arm. Without hesitation, he took his stance like a baseball player and swung. He began to hit it violently against the side of the thing's large wolf-like head.

It was all over his brother, its monstrous form almost completely covering him. It had its large jaw latched, muzzle crinkled up, onto the area under Gray's arm through his black sweatshirt, biting him. It was biting him. It was biting Grayson.

Maybe luck was on their side, maybe fate, maybe not.

Maybe it was like when moms were known to be able to pull burning cars off their children, and to save them. But Ethan wasn't going to stop hitting that thing, even if it turned on him.