Something Is Killing the Children

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Something Is Killing the Children by James Tynion IV and Werther Dell'Edera

Some kids are having a sleepover so of course they’re playing Truth or Dare. A nervous looking boy opts for the truth (Boooo!) and the tough kid asks him, “What’s the most scared you've ever been?” 

WHAT?! That’s the best he can come up with?! One boy had to run around the house naked! The nervous kid admits something happened the other night, and no it’s not the E.T. or cyclops dream. This actually happened.

The nervous kid was home alone when he heard a noise coming from the ravine and through the trees.  He turned all the lights off in the TV room to see better. This room. He saw something stand in the yard, it looked like it was heading to the house. It had long fingers and sharp teeth. The nervous kid confesses he hid under a blanket and just listened to it moving around outside for hours. 

Fuck you. Nah, dog. The other boys call bullshit. It’s supposed to be a real tale, not a scary story to freak them out. The nervous kid protests, telling them it lives in the ravine. They still don’t believe him. Okay, truth or dare? 

In a sterile, white room, the nervous kid looks like he’s shitting his pants talking to a policeman. He’s telling the policeman that his scary story was just that, a story… one of his nightmares. They’d snuck to the ravine before, no big. Except this time, he tripped over a root and fell to where the others couldn’t see him. But he could hear them screaming. 

TWO WEEKS LATER.

A one armed, one eyed girl is sitting in a red wagon with a backpack by her side. She looks scared. Could be because of the wide-eyed blonde with a black mask with a fanged toothy smile covering her face, blood covering her body, and two wicked looking machetes in each hand. This is Erica Slaughter, and she kills monsters.  Erica comes toward her, drops the blades, reaches into the backpack and pulls out a bottle of water, sagging to the ground as she chugs it. The little girl asks if it’s over, Erica says that it is and, using an old flip-phone, calls St George. She writes ARCHER’S PEAK on her arm, asks the little girl if she can grab a shower at her place, and tells St George she’ll be there in sixteen hours depending on bus schedules.

At Archer’s Peak High School, the nervous kid is looking at memorials set up for his sleepover friends. There are more memorials for other kids though, because something is killing the children. A bully starts shouting at him, accusing him of killing them, chopping them up, spreading their organs out, and putting one of the intestines in a tree. His friend tells him to chill, he says he is, but he really, really isn’t and his friend drags him away as he’s screaming at the nervous kid, calling him a perv. Nervous kid shouts at him to shut the fuck up. 

Snap to the Principal's office. We find out the nervous kid’s name is James and Principal Collins has no idea what to do with him. Unofficially, the Principal tells James to punch the bully because he deserves it. The Principal doesn’t want to add to James’ stress by punishing him, and it seems like he doesn’t want to stress himself out more either. There are nine kids dead and more going missing every day, the press keep turning up and the Sheriff is out of his depth. The Principal offers to let James go home for the rest of the day, but he’s going to stick around as they’re watching movies in English. 

A Greyhound bus pulls into Archer’s Peak and the now clean blonde is on it holding a knitted octopus stuffie. The missing persons posters fill the notice board at the bus stop. Meanwhile, James is heading to the motel his family is staying at with strict instructions literally just issued in a call with his dad to go to the room and lock the door. Of course he doesn’t and stands looking at the woods which is where Erica finds him, and knows him by name. She wants to ask a few questions about that night. 

James tells Erica he saw nothing but Erica is patient and sits on the ground waiting for James to open up, promising him that no matter what he tells her, however weird it seems, she will believe him. 

After the screaming started, James found his friends. He followed the blood. One was still alive, terrified, his lower half gone, organs trailing out from his open torso. As his friend is begging for help, something invisible lands a killing blow. James turns and runs only to see another dead friend with his arms ripped off. The sounds of crunching and snapping echo through the trees. James keeps retching and chanting that it can’t be real when he sees another boy, blood everywhere, looking right at him as a monster with dozens of eyes, a mouth full of sharp fangs, an insectoid body, and blade-like claws rip his friend apart. 

Erica thanks James for telling her. Archer’s Peak has a monster in their woods and she’s going to kill it. Tommy wakes up late for work. His mom is downstairs chain smoking having not slept again. She has a stack of missing persons posters for him to put on cars at his job for his little sister. As Tommy gets into his car, he doesn’t see the huge bloody monster on the front lawn. 

Erica and James head to Applebeams for information, this just so happens to be the restaurant Tommy is manager of. Bamboozling Tommy, Erica secures a booth for $50 a day plus ordering stuff and tips. Erica and James settle in the booth, Erica starts pulling items out of her bag including her octopus stuffie (don’t ask) and a stack of information on the dead and missing kids. James asks why Applebeams and Erica explains they’re quiet places with big tables as she pulls out a map of Archer’s Peak marked with Xs.

As Erica studies the map, James asks if she’s done this type of thing before and we see flashback panels of Erica kicking the asses of different monsters, blood, dead bodies and children screaming as she does. Yeah, she’s done it before a time or two. As Erica and James pore over the map, Tommy and the waitress are gossiping. The waitress says that James is a suspect because he was the sole survivor of his friends’ violent deaths and that it's weird he’s not at school right now because he should be and it’s also weird that he’s with a weird woman. Tommy interrupts Erica and James, and as he’s accusing Erica of knowing something about his missing sister Sophie, he tries to manhandle Erica but it does not go well for him, and then Erica and James leave. Tommy calls the Sheriff to report “something suspicious.”

Erica sends James home because she has to do the next part herself. She also tells him, in between being interrupted by a phone call from “an asshole,” to just be honest about what happened because no one will believe him anyway. In her room at the motel, whose owner unaccountably has taken a dislike to her, Erica starts talking to someone about the map and the pattern it showed, that kids go missing and are being stashed as food, likely in caves off the lake. She needs more info and asks her octopus stuffie to think about what it could be. It tells her “yes.”

Meanwhile, the motel owner is telling the Sheriff he wants Erica gone because strange noises are coming from her room. The Sheriff approaches Erica’s room, which has a strange tentacled shadow coming from under the door. Erica opens the door without question, and we see a spirit emanating from her stuffie. It’s got tentacles on it’s lower half and its waist is a flower petal-type sharp-toothed maw, the top is humanoid, with tentacle arms, pointed ears, red eyes and no hair. Huh. 

A little girl is hiding, she’s got blood on her and is whispering I don’t believe in monsters over and over. A giant insect monster is looking for her, trying to sniff her out. The girl runs past the broken bloody bodies of her family up the stairs. As she runs her wrist snaps, the bone sticking out. She begs for help. There is none. 

At Johnny V’s bar, a distraught father is talking about the person his missing son was growing up to be. In a booth, Tommy, the waitress, and another person are talking about Erica and James and Erica’s big creepy eyes. They know the Sheriff has gone to pick Erica up, but they don't really trust the police officers. 

Meanwhile, the Sheriff is questioning Erica Slaughter, if that’s your real name, and is not in the mood for games. Erica is being honest, she answered his questions about where she was on specific dates and he’s going to hear a lot of stories about little towns and missing kids that he’ll want to lock her up for, however, the Sheriff saw her get off the Greyhound and will only be using her as a scapegoat. Erica turns the tables and starts questioning the Sheriff on the missing kids, particularly the first kid that went missing. 

The Sheriff loses it, feeling like he’s being messed with though Erica tells him she’s here to solve the problem. Soon, the Sheriff is going to get a phone call and he’ll let her go, he’s not going to understand what happened, but the kids will stop dying. They’re interrupted at this point with news that there are five more kids dead. The Sheriff’s first instinct is to throw Erica into the drunk tank, but he lets her go because she says she can solve the problem and he’s desperate. As Erica leaves, he tells her who the first victim was and when, Sara Washington, a month and a half ago. The Sheriff assigns one of his deputies to watch Erica as he goes to the crime scene. 

Outside, James is sitting on a bench waiting for Erica. As they’re walking along, Erica pulls out her possessed octopus to see what kind of monster she’s dealing with because things just aren’t consistent. Erica tells James they need to get this over with quickly, but to do that, they need weapons. Time to hit House Depot for a chainsaw! James gleefully puts anything that looks sharp and scary into Erica’s cart. 

Tommy heads to his deadbeat dad’s house. He’s butt naked and definitely not sober, but thankfully he puts on a pair of skidmarked tiny once-whiteys. Tommy’s not there for a social call, he’s picking up a gun. Meanwhile, the Sheriff has reached the crime scene. The coroner, the Sheriff’s older brother, points out that whatever killed these people ripped into them but left them whole, so it’s probably not an animal because they would be after the meat. Something scary wanted to make a mess. They also didn’t leave any evidence, but they did leave a big fucking hole in the wall rather than use the door. It’s then the Sheriff finally gets the promised phone call.

Erica, her cart of scary weapons, and James are heading to a life-and-death situation which gives James carte blanche to ask questions and monsters. Because kids' brains are still developing, they’re still open to believing in monsters, and seeing them while adults can’t. When they reach the part of the woods close to the first disappearance, Erica is fully prepared to leave James while she goes hunting for the monster's den, but James insists he wants to help. If he listens to her and does as she says, Erica will let him come, but it’s going to be horrible. 

The deputy is still following Erica. He reports into the Sheriff, grabs his boots from the trunk and prepares to follow her, James and her arsenal into the woods. The Sheriff however tells him not to. Disregarding his orders, the deputy gets out of his car and is pistol-whipped by a pissed off Tommy. 

In the woods, Erica has found the den. It’s bigger than it should be and stinks. Erica calls her octopus stuffie a piece of shit, it knew more than it was telling. Giving James her backpack and coat, Erica orders him to hide as she enters the den with her chainsaw and her black toothy mask covering the lower half of her face. Inside is a pile of body parts. As Erica is examining the carnage, Tommy confronts her for killing the children. He doesn’t see the giant monster behind him, but Erica does. 

James is bored and cold. He looks around his hiding spot and sees a dead deer which reminds him of his dead friend which freaks him out. The octopus stuffie then talks to him, calling him weak and scared and accusing him of leading his friends to their deaths, and now he’s done the same to Erica. James protests so the stuffie tells him to do something, there is a pile of weapons, he needs to act. 

In the monster's den, Tommy thinks Erica is tricking him when she’s trying to save his dumb ass. He still doesn’t see the monster as Erica attacks it with her chainsaw and blood starts flying, sure it’s a trick. Tommy shoots, screaming at Erica “you killed my sister!” but he misses her. As Erica and Tommy brawl, James tells them he’s been shot which stops them both. Erica shoulder charges Tommy, knocking him down, and runs to James asking him to be quiet so she can keep him alive. Erica throws James' jacket at the monster, it’s blind and his jacket helps mask the smell of his blood. 

As Tommy keeps whining about not being able to breathe and not understanding what is going on, a small girl calling herself Bian comes out from further inside the cave. There was no Bian on Erica’s list so she must’ve been in the cave a long, long time. Erica picks up Bian as Tommy sees his sister's corpse. Time is running out and Erica needs Tommy on the same page as her so she uses a weird green pen looking thing on him, stabbing it into his temple. 

Erica calls it a one way door, horde gold from the House of Slaughter, something to help Tommy see. After some pain and some blood, Tommy has a vision of five people sitting around a table with stuffies in front of them, each wearing different colored cloth toothy masks, except the middle man. He looks ancient and wears a gold oni face mask, molded to his mouth. Everyone’s eyes are the same startlingly green as Erica’s. 

Back in the cave, Tommy can see the huge monster looking none too pleased and slightly beaten up from Erica’s earlier chainsaw exploits. Erica hands Tommy James and Bian telling him to get them the hell out of there. She says he can come back for his sister's body, which he really wants to do, if she can kill the monster. Chainsaw in one hand, machete in the other, Erica starts pulling some kickass acrobatics bullshit to murder the monster. 

Outside, the deputy is coming to from Tommy’s attack just as Tommy approaches with James and Bian. They pile into the deputy’s car to head to the hospital. Tommy passes out in the backseat as James mutters about telling the octopus he didn’t want to die. 

In the woods, the octopus stuffie is sitting on Erica’s backpack. A bloody hand reaches into the bag and pulls out an old flip phone. Angrily, Erica tells the person on the other end of the phone that they fucked up. The monster wasn’t classed correctly, the den wasn’t food storage, it was a nest. She’s killed the mother, but the babies are out.