Authors: Tim Curran
Everyone
slid and scrambled down into the ditch as the blizzard raged, throwing snow around in spinning tempests. Doc led the way up the steps, calling for Burt, feeling the warmth reaching out to him. Wenda was right behind him. That’s when the windshield exploded inward, breaking apart into a sheet of glass that blew into flying bits. Then the side windows shattered and the rear. A howling tempest of snow and cold and fragmented safety glass came whipping through the bus. Wenda stumbled back into the others and Doc fell on her and they all went down in a heap.
By the time they got to their feet, the bus made a creaking, groaning sound as it was lifted up five or six feet and then dropped, more glass shattering, thin metal bulkheads collapsing. It was lifted again and dropped, more breakage from within.
“THE TOWN!” Morris called out. “EVERYONE! RUN FOR THE TOWN!”
They clawed their way up from the ditch, trying to run in the heavy snow and arching drifts. Falling, getting up, fallin
g again. The town was maybe two hundred feet from them, the houses and buildings clustered together like toadstools under a tree.
Nobody asked questions. This was pure mainlined survival instinct and nothing more.
Wenda raced forward with the herd, trying not to think about what she had seen when she followed Doc up the steps into the bus: the sight of the windshield shattering inward.
She had seen what had caused it.
A single white human hand whose fingers were long and spidery.
It had slapped against the glass until it came apart.
Then whatever it was connected to crawled inside.
12
They were moving too fast and Morris could barely keep up with them.
Even Doc Blood who had fifteen years on him if he had a day was unbelievably spry as he vaulted through the snow like a hare. It was amazing. Morris worked out three days a week, watched what he ate, jogged on the weekends…and Doc was leaving him in the dust. Doc who smoked two packs a day, had a potbelly, considered napping a competitive sport and bacon to be a condiment, was kicking
his
ass in a footrace. Jesus.
But it wasn’t just him.
It was the others, too.
He wasn’t surprised at Megga or Bailey or Wenda: they were young and in tip-top shape. But Reg was pulling out into the lead, too. Reg who was nothing more than a rack of bones that lived on Doritos, Coke, Red Bull, and take-out pizza, whatever was easiest to consume
while he plugged himself into Xbox.
Quit thinking. Run! Run!
Yes, the rational man had no place in a situation like this.
This was survival.
Make sense of it later, for now…
run!
Yes, yes, yes, rumination was for later when you were somewhere safe and warm, cozied up by the fire in a good chair with a beer in your hand. So he thought no more about any of it, about the insanity of
the entire situation—which was far too much like the movies they showed on
Chamber of Horrors
for his liking. He kept an eye on the others, though, because he was in charge and these were his people and he didn’t want anything to happen to them…though how much of a taste for midnight horror shows they’d have after this ordeal was open to speculation.
The bus was at their backs.
That was a good thing. Despite the pounding it had taken, the battery was still working and the engine was still running and the headlights were directed at the ghost town. That was something. The lights let him see the others, throwing loping, elongated shadows of them over the snowpack.
Morris ran, the others pulling ahead.
Something swooped over his head again and he felt like a rabbit in a field waiting for an owl to descend. The comparison was apt, he knew. He ran and tried to leap a drift, but it was too high and his boots tangled together and he went face-first into it.
Dammit!
He brushed snow out of his eyes and began to run again and something hit him, putting him down and stripping his hat from his head. He pulled himself out of the snow, feeling around to make sure the back of his head was still there. It was. Running again, a sluggish forward jog. Already his legs were tiring. It was like trying to sprint through slush. The cold wasn’t helping. He had no feeling in his face and his limbs felt rubbery and numb.
He tripped
over another snowdrift.
Got up, slipped again.
That’s when he knew he was going to die. He just wasn’t going to make it and the realization of that seemed to sap his strength and he fell into the snow, trying to rise, but crawling forward like a child with little inertia.
This is how it ends.
Out here.
At the perimeter of this fucking ghost town.
He stood up, stumbling along, just waiting for death to take him.
13
A
bove Bailey’s screams and the manic shouting of the others, Wenda somehow heard Morris cry out for help: his voice was shrill and almost childlike. She wanted badly to ignore it, to make for those buildings and get under some cover, but she slowed and turned her head back, looking over her right shoulder.
Shit.
Morris was trying valiantly to pull himself out of a drift. He’d rise, stumble along, fall again like a toddler learning the fine art of balance.
A dark shape that looked oddly like an immense black kite in the wind-driven snow soared just over his head and she got the ugly feeling that whatever it was, it was toying with him and that it could take him any time it so chose.
“Please!” he called out.
“Someone…someone, please…”
Wenda knew the proper thing to do was to help him just as she knew the realistic thing to do was to run and save herself. None of the others were slowing or even looking back. Maybe they didn’t hear Morris…but she didn’t believe that. And if they survived this, it was a point of contention she was going to ram down their throats.
Because right then, as afraid as she was, she was much less Wenda Keegan—who turned the other cheek and wouldn’t spit if her mouth were filled with shit—and much more Vultura.
You know all the nice toys you have, Wenda? The new Corvette in the garage? The cabin out at Lake George? The trips to Aruba and St. Croix? Well, you have them courtesy of Morris. He created the gravy train you now feed upon. He in
vented Vultura and all the rest—you just stepped into the job via genetics and circumstance. You just happened to have the looks and were handy so you got it. He’s done everything for you, by God, so don’t you dare turn your back on him now.
She raced over the snow towards him, swearing under her breath.
The wind was trying to drive her towards the ghost town but she leaned into it and fought her way back to Morris who was moving slower and slower now. She tried to keep her head down so what was diving at him wouldn’t take her.
“MORRIS!” she shouted into the wind when she got within feet of him. “RUN! RUN!”
He saw her, maybe realizing he wasn’t the last person on Earth, and jogged over to her. She hooked her arm around his and pulled him forward, making him run whether he wanted to or not. Towing him, she was moving much slower, but she refused to give in. He was dead weight but she was strong from doing an hour of laps in the pool at the Y every day and she would not give up. Something in her demanded that she fight harder now than she ever had in her life. She felt energized and—God help her—really alive, really strong for the first time.
They broke through the last of the big drifts and the running was easier now because the wind had stripped most of the snow away and the pack was less than a foot deep as they neared the drive that circled around the perimeter of Cobton.
They were going to make it and she knew it.
Unless those doors are all locked. Because if they are, you’re fucked and you know it.
The others were already nearing the buildings and they would be with them in a matter of seconds now. Morris started to pour it on, sensing shelter ahead and they ran with renewed vigor. And then something hit them from behind, slamming them both face-first to the ground.
They scrambled to their feet quickly, taking no time to ascertain if they were wounded or missing anything vital.
They ran.
“OVER HERE!” Reg shouted, standing before a tall Georgian house. “DOOR’S OPEN!”
Doc and Bailey were running for the safety it provided. But Megga had already located another house two doors down, a Colonial Saltbox, and she had the door open. She saw Wenda half-dragging Morris and came running over. She shouted something to Wenda but it was lost in the moaning of the wind. She hooked Morris’s other elbow and towed him towards the open doorway. Mole came over to help, slid on the ice, and pulled himself back up again. By then, they had Morris almost to the door.
Behind them, Mole slipped again, shouted something. The wind took him and slid him back another five feet.
“Shit!” Wenda said. “We have to get him!”
Megga got Morris to the door and Wenda called out to Mole. She turned to look at him and he was running in her direction.
But he never quite made it.
A wall of snow was blown over him, making him teeter and take a few fumbling steps off to the side…and then a black form came out of the storm and took him. Took him fast. It
seized him and flew up into the blizzard with him.
They heard him scream and a spray of blood spattered the front of the Saltbox, droplets of it splashing Wenda’s face.
He was gone.
“MOLE!” Wenda screamed.
“MOLE!”
Then a torrent of snow blinded her and she could see nothing. The force of it knocked her into the doorway and her feet went out from under her. The storm was worsening, filled with wrath and anger, it seemed. Visibility was down to maybe ten feet by then. Wenda wiped snow from her face and she saw luminous yellow eyes watching from the blizzard.
And then Megga yanked her through the door.
That was when the impact of the situation really hit her: their little group had been separated, split into two parties.
She wondered if that was by accident or on purpose.
14
Megga got the door closed and searched around for a lock of some sort as Wenda searched around for a light switch. Morris was kneeling on the floor, breathing hard, trying to get his wind back and his mind working again.
“So fucking cold,” he said.
“We’re all cold,” Megga told him.
Though in a snowstorm it was never completely dark, not the way it was most nights, they needed light. The inside of the house was lit by that weird backlight common in a blizzard, but it was still dim and hard to see anything.
“Morris,” Wenda said. “Where’s the flashlight?”
“I had it,” he said.
Stripping off his gloves, he tried to work warmth back into his fingers. Slowly, very slowly, he began to search around for the flaps of his pockets. But it wasn’t fa
st enough for Wenda. She knelt by him, brushing his hands aside and started digging in the deep pockets of his leather coat.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I had it…I don’t know. Maybe I dropped it.”
“Good going,” Megga said.
“All right,” Wenda said, glaring at her in the dimness.
“Luckily I was a Girl Scout,” Megga said. “I’m always prepared.”
She dug a penlight from her pocket. It wasn’t much, but in the gloom it was like a searchlight. There was no lock on the door. There was only a bracket to either side of the frame. She searched around and found a plank. It was heavy and solid. She slid it into the bracket.
“Christ, like frontier days,” she said.
She looked for a light switch but there was none just like there were no fixtures on the ceiling that she could see. But why would there be? This town was supposed to be period in every way, a colonial village. If lights had been installed at some point they would have been taken out when the buildings were restored to their original state. And come to think of it, she had not seen any telephone poles or electrical lines on the drive in.
“You see a light switch?”
she asked.
Wenda shook her head.
“I rather doubt there will be one.”
“No,” Morris said. “There’s no juice out here. No lines within a mile or two of this place.” He breathed onto his hands to warm them. “The caretaker I spoke with said they have a generator in his shack behind the village, but that’s just to run cords so they can use lights and power tools in the buildings. This place is only open in the daytime and only in the summer. But…”
“But what?” Megga said.
“But the caretakers were supposed to have lights rigged for us. For the shoot.”
“Maybe something got to them before they could do it.”
Megga went up to one of the multi-paned windows and looked out into the night. She could see the eyes out there. They were closer than they were before. Whatever was out there was in no hurry; it—or more precisely,
they
—had all night and knew it.