Something separated from the funnel of snow—something long and tapered, pointed at the tip. In her stupefaction, Shawna thought of a shark’s dorsal fin. Then reality rushed back to her and she lunged forward, swinging the umbrella at the twirling mass of snow like a baseball bat.
The umbrella passed right through it, unencumbered.
“Shawww-NIEEEE!”
It was the last thing she would ever hear her mother say. The dorsal fin blade pitched downward, lightning quick, and buried itself into her mother’s chest. A gout of black blood erupted in a geyser from her mother’s mouth. Around Shawna, the house shook. That hideous, dead-animal stink intensified until Shawna’s eyes burned.
She blinked, her vision sliding away from her.
And when she opened them again, she caught the final vestige of the snow funnel withdrawing up through the chimney. Her mother was gone now, too, but her other slipper lay in the hearth of the fireplace, powdered in soot…
The days following that event had been pure madness. By the time she reunited with Jared, half the town had vanished and those who remained had either turned into drooling savages or had simply become
different.
Some of the neighborhood children had simply vanished…but the ones who lingered became ghosts of their former selves, faceless little nymphs hiding out in the surrounding woods. It was as if the creatures could not properly meld with children, that they corrupted them visually and ruined them.
Jared’s plan was to get out of town ASAP, but unfortunately he was having trouble starting his Subaru. Gunning the accelerator while the vehicle straddled a snowbank achieved nothing except for igniting a small fire beneath the undercarriage. Jared cursed and panicked but, as it turned out, the fire kept the snow-things away. Fire, Jared told her, could hurt them, maybe even kill them. It had been Jared’s idea to hurry over to the Pack-N-Go for containers of lighter fluid so they could make torches…but when they got there, the proprietor, George Farmer, had changed. And something had gotten inside Jared, too.
She’d had to shoot him, bring him down. She could still see his head coming apart in her mind’s eye…
These thoughts, along with a thousand others from the past week, cluttered Shawna’s mind as she crouched down in the holly bushes, staring at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Her whole body felt numb and her breath was becoming shallower and shallower. As much as she hated to consider this alternative, she knew she had to get out of the cold as soon as possible, not to mention away from those things that were pursuing her…which meant ditching into the nearest shelter.
What if those things are in that house? Those things like Tim Kopeck and Delia Overmeyer?
It was a risk she’d have to take.
When she finally felt more in control of herself, she stood. She was aware of a ripping sensation followed by a surge of pain that raced up her left leg—Fred Wilkinson’s stitches coming undone.
In pain, she hustled across the snow-covered yard toward Rita’s house. Glancing over her shoulder, she was horrified to find spatters of blood left behind in the snow.
She hid briefly in the shadow of the raised deck, catching her breath. Suddenly, the rifle hanging from her shoulder weighed about a thousand pounds. Her breath wheezing through her tightening throat, she leaned forward and looked in either direction, examining the neighboring yards for signs of life. Or signs of…something
other…
There were no broken windows at the back of the house that Shawna could find. That was how they got in. Through the chimneys, too, of course. Or open doors. Any way in at all.
Slinking along the concrete wall, Shawna made her way to the basement door. Curling her numb fingers around the doorknob, she said a silent prayer to a god she did not believe in before trying to turn it.
It turned. Blessedly.
She eased it open and waited to see if anything would rush out at her. The rifle at the ready, she counted to ten. Nothing came for her. She leaned into the doorway and examined a basement as black as the solar system. Sniffing the air, she braced herself for that decaying, dead-animal stink they carried with them, but the place just smelled musty and unused. Not dangerous.
Maybe.
Shawna slipped quickly inside, toeing the basement door shut behind her.
The darkness was absolute. Hulking behemoth shapes rose up out of the ether like beasties from some fabled world—a
billiard table, sofas, tables and chairs, boxes of old clothes and appliances. She smelled sawdust and paint thinner and, beneath all that, rodent feces.
She wended her way to one dark corner where she proceeded to stack boxes around her as a sort of improvised shelter. Then she eased herself down onto the cold stone floor, using the butt of the rifle as a crutch. The pain in her leg was a raging conflagration now; it was all she could do not to shout out as she attempted to unbend her knee.
Something thumped on the floor above her head.
Please no please no please no,
she prayed.
Just give me some time to rest. Please. Just a few minutes.
She waited but the noise did not repeat. Setting the rifle down, she unbuttoned her pants and, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, managed to slide out of them despite the agony it caused. Her fingers grazed the wound. The pain was one thing but actually
feeling
it caused her gorge to rise; she leaned over on her side and vomited a stringy acidic paste into one of the cardboard boxes.
The easy thing would be to stick that rifle in my mouth and pull the trigger. After all, it’s not like I’m going to get out of here. It’s futile. And if these things live in the snow, if they
are
the snow…well, around these parts, snow’s liable to stick around until early March. My luck’s bound to run out before then.
It was very unlike her to think like that. Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she righted herself against the wall and began patting herself down for the flashlight she’d slipped into one of her coat pockets. But the flashlight was not there; she must have dropped it in all the commotion. And this thought caused her mind to summon the image of Nan Wilkinson being swooped up into the night sky where she’d disappeared.
That’s it…a single pull of the trigger and this nightmare is
over, Shawnie.
It frightened her to think that was her mother’s voice.
Scrounging around in the pockets of her pants, which were now bunched up at her ankles, she managed to locate her cigarette lighter. She considered the implications of flicking it on—was it possible the flame could be seen from outside?—but in the end decided she had little choice. If she didn’t attend to her wound, she’d die right here, frozen and bleeding to death.
Shawna clicked on the lighter and brought the flame down to her left leg.
Again, she felt her gorge rise…but this time, did an admirable job keeping her ground. The injury was bad, made to look worse by the way half the stitches had come undone and given the wound a half-pursed, mouthlike appearance. Her entire thigh down past the knee was brown and matted in sticky, dried blood.
She let the flame flicker out. Leaning her head back against the wall, she silently counted to one hundred. When she’d finished, she began systematically sifting through the surrounding boxes for loose articles of clothing. She found a number of old shirts, which she collected in a nice pile beside her. She’d use some to dress with and keep warm, others as blankets and pillows. Lastly, she’d use the fabric from some shirts to bandage up her leg.
Taking one of the shirts—a long-sleeved button-down—she set it in her lap and proceeded to tear one of the sleeves off. She wrapped the sleeve just above the wound to prevent any future blood loss. The second sleeve she tied over the wound—gritting her teeth as she did so—and pulled it snug. The pain was unbearable and didn’t let up until she finally loosened the bandage. Lastly, she located a pair of sweatpants and decided to pull these on instead of trying to wriggle back into her cold, wet, blood-soaked slacks. The sweatpants were several sizes too large but they felt heavenly.
Her eyes were already beginning to droop by the time she’d piled extra clothes beneath her head and body and lain down on the floor. She pulled a tattered old shawl that smelled of camphor over her shoulders, then dragged the rifle closer to her in the darkness.
Soundlessly, she slept.
As the milky pink of predawn bruised the sky, Todd jerked awake. Both hands were still clutching the handgun. The three of them were hidden in the back of the ambulance Todd had seen from the church’s bell tower, the doors pulled shut and locked against anything that might be out there waiting for them. Through the sliding panel of window that separated the rear of the ambulance from the cab, Todd could see daylight bleeding up from behind the distant trees. He could also see the sky, and the bizarre cloud cover that seemed to hermetically seal the town, like the lid on a boiling pot. The clouds looked dense, solid, tangible…and the color of pond moss…
Kate stirred behind him. She had curled up behind Meg and slept straight through the early morning hours, despite her initial protest that she’d never in a million years be able to find sleep. She looked at him now and offered him a crooked yet somewhat seductive smile while she ran her fingers through her matted hair.
“Sleep well?” he said.
“The best. We’re on vacation, right? In the Bahamas?”
“Of course. Would you like a mimosa with your breakfast?”
“Ooh,” she chided, playfully grimacing. “Don’t say breakfast. I could eat a whole cow right now.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking back through the sliding panel and out the windshield beyond. “I’m starving, too.”
Kate crept up next to him and looked out the window. She smelled of sleep and dried perspiration, the combination of which caused something to stir within Todd. Upon their first meeting back at the bar at O’Hare, he’d found her attractive…but something overwhelming was working on him now and he realized, with bittersweet embarrassment, that he was trying to fight off an erection.
“My God, the sky’s funny,” she said. “I’ve never seen clouds like that in my life.”
“Maybe they’re not actually clouds,” he suggested. “Just like those things out there aren’t actually snow.”
The thought caused Kate’s face to draw into a frown. He suddenly wanted to hug her, to cradle her.
“There’s smoke, too,” she said.
“It’s the church.” He’d seen the column of thick black smoke spiraling up into the atmosphere, where it flattened out and spread like oil against the low clouds.
“It burned all through the night?”
“Seems that way.”
“Do you think it’s completely gone?”
“I don’t know.” His stomach growled, and he blushed when Kate turned and smiled at him.
Then her smile faded. She was looking at Meg.
Todd looked at the sleeping teenager, who had her back turned to them as she lay curled on a gurney. She wore a threadbare blouse of thin material smudged with dirt, the collar of which had been torn away at some point during their escape from the church. What was exposed was a narrow serration in the soft flesh of her shoulder, nearly mouthlike, that ran midway down her back and disappeared beneath the fabric of her blouse. The lips of the gash appeared to respire.
“She wasn’t like that before,” Kate said, backing up against the opposite wall of the ambulance. “I checked her back at the church. It must have happened while we were escaping. One of those things must have…must have gotten inside her somehow…”
Todd pointed the gun at the back of Meg’s head.
“Oh.” Kate began to cry. “Oh fuck, Todd…”
His hand shook. He watched the girl’s chest rise and fall as she slept.
No,
he tried to convince himself,
she’s not a little girl. She’s different now.
But that did little to assuage his guilt.
He lowered the gun. He felt Kate’s eyes hanging on him, burning through him. Instead of looking at her he just nodded toward the ambulance’s rear doors and mouthed the words,
Get out.
Comprehending, Kate peeled herself off the wall and practically glided past the sleeping teenage girl. Kate picked up her sconce and somehow managed to unlatch the ambulance doors without making a sound. Todd crept out after her, the freezing temperatures a sudden shock to his system the second he dropped down to the slushy road.
He stood for a long time staring into the open doors of the ambulance. If this were a movie, he’d be cursing the hero, telling him to go back in there and pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull the fucking trigger. But this was real life, and sometimes people were just as foolish as the fake people on-screen.
Let’s be honest,
he thought then, his hand holding the gun trembling.
I’m not even sure shooting this girl would kill the thing inside it. The one Shawna shot outside the Pack-N-Go just seemed to flit away. Maybe they’re injured and weakened when they come rushing out of people like that, but I don’t think shooting them kills them.
Fire, on the other hand…
The thought caused him to turn and watch the conical black smoke rising up from the trees. The church. It was a
goddamn funeral pyre, all right, smoldering straight through the night. He wondered what was left of the building and, moreover, what remained of the creatures inside.
Kate was staring at him by the side of the road. She looked cold and wet and uncomfortable. “Are we going?” she said, her voice just barely audible.
He nodded, and they began walking down in the culvert, out of sight from the road.
In the light of day, the massacre that had come to Woodson was horrifically apparent. Blood stained the snowy hillsides and froze in red rivulets in the ravines and gutters along the roadways. Shredded bits of clothing were strung up in trees like discarded party favors. Worse still, human bones were strewn about at random as if they’d fallen off the back of a passing truck; many of the bones still had chunks of meat on them that glittered with frost. A human head caught in midscream was propped in the Y of a yew tree, its eyes frozen into black marbles, its skin a nightmarish blue-green. At one point Kate asked if she should light the torch, just in case one of those things burst out of the snow again, but Todd said it was probably best to keep a low profile. “Besides,” he said, “it seems like they’re hiding now that it’s daylight.”
“Shawna said daylight didn’t matter, that they’re not vampires.”
Todd shrugged. “Maybe they are. Maybe these things are what we’ve come to know as vampires.”
“The sky looks funny. I’ve got a bad feeling. And that swirling electrical cloud over the hill up there?” She pointed over toward the rotating black eyelet beneath the dome of clouds. “It’s unnatural.”
Todd laughed—he couldn’t help it. “This whole fucking
thing
is unnatural, love,” he said, sending her laughing, too. He was starving—surely they both were—and laughing
only aggravated his empty stomach…but it felt good, too. Suddenly, Todd couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed.
“Where do we go now?” Kate asked after they’d walked for another few minutes, the laughter having subsided.
“I say we stick to the original plan. Hit one of those houses, steal a car, get the fuck outta Dodge.”
“What about the others?” There was genuine hopefulness in her voice that suggested she actually believed they were still alive. “I mean, once we find a car, do we…we just leave them here? Leave them behind?”
“Nan’s dead,” Todd reminded her. “That doesn’t bode well for Fred and Shawna, either.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“When I was up in the bell tower with Chris, I could see that the windows of the Pack-N-Go had been blown out. Chris said he saw two women come running out of there.”
“What about Fred?”
“He said nothing about Fred.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s dead. And what about Shawna? We don’t know that she’s dead, either. Not for sure. She’s lasted the whole week out here on her own, holed up in that convenience store. It’s possible she’s still around, hiding and waiting things out.”
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t like the idea of leaving them behind any more than you do. I feel like shit about Nan. But it’s not like we can tool around the neighborhoods honking our horn and shouting their names, Kate. What do you suggest we do?”
She paused. He thought she was angry with him, but when he looked at her, there was a strange expression on her face.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“I have to pee.”
He snorted, smiling. “So pee. I’ll wait here.”
“No. I’m not traipsing off by myself. Just turn around. I’ll do it right here.”
He took the torch from her, then turned around. He stared at the treetops while she unzipped her pants and, a few seconds later, he tried not to get embarrassed by the sound of her urinating in the snow. To make light of the scenario, he said, “Man, I hope you’re pissing on one of those fuckers right now.”
She barked laughter, then scolded him: “Don’t make me laugh! I’m squirting all over the place back here.”
When she’d finished, she balled up some snow in her hands to clean them, then took the torch back from Todd. Together they continued walking along the muddy culvert until they could see the houses looming up on the other side of the street. Someone had driven a Ford Taurus into a fire hydrant, the car’s occupant gone. A stop sign was bent at a perfect right angle, the large white STOP printed vertically.
They crossed up over the embankment and out into the street with considerable trepidation. Every footfall seemed to echo down the street. It was like walking onto a movie set. Nothing seemed real and everything was eerily quiet.
“Where do you think they all are?” Kate said. She was holding the unlit torch like a baseball bat now.
“I have no clue. But let’s not take it for granted.”
“Deal. Which house?”
“The closest one.”
They moved up the snow-packed sidewalk, their feet sinking straight down to their ankles in the freezing muck. Beyond a copse of pines, Todd thought he recognized the backs of some of the buildings. “I think we’re on the other side of the town square,” he said, trying to peek through the trees.
“God.” Kate froze.
“What is it?”
“I feel like someone’s following us.”
“Someone?”
“Or one of those things.”
Todd surveyed the empty road, the strip of houses, the surrounding wedges of trees. “I don’t see anything.”
“I think that’s the idea.” She shivered, hugging herself. “Let’s keep going. I feel like a moving target out here.”
They hurried up the sloping lawn to the first house, a quaint little Victorian with Christmas decorations in the darkened windows. Off to their left, something sizzled. Todd spun around, the gun aimed in. Kate said, “What was that?”
Across the street, a thick black cable snaked through the snow, occasionally spitting sparks from its truncated end.
“Downed power line,” Todd said. “I saw that from the bell tower, too.”
“You’re a regular Quasimodo.”
Kate advanced up the lawn but Todd grabbed her sleeve. “Wait. I think we should go around back.”
“Okay.”
The backyard was protected by a wooden fence roughly six feet high. Todd could just barely see over the top but there was no hope for Kate. However, an ivy trellis clung to the side of the house, flimsy but workable. Todd slipped the handgun into his waistband, then propped a foot into one of the diamond-shaped grooves. Hoisting himself up, he felt just how weak the trellis was. He managed to secure another foothold before leaning over the fence. A quick survey of the yard showed nothing out of the ordinary—a drooping hammock dipped in ice and a bird feeder that was, like everything else in this town, deserted. In fact, it occurred to him at that moment that he hadn’t seen a single animal—not a bird or a squirrel—since arriving in Woodson. It troubled him to think of what might have happened to all the little woodland creatures…
He clambered over the fence and dropped down on the
other side, his boots plowing through several inches of snow. Kate’s head appeared over the fence next, looking nervous and unsteady.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“You’re eighteen inches off the ground. Come on.”
She managed to swing one leg over the fence, then panicked when she didn’t know how to get the other leg over. Todd lifted her up beneath her thigh and buttocks and hoisted her over and into the yard. It wasn’t until she’d thanked him and turned back toward the rear of the house that he registered his disappointment—he had hoped she’d kiss him.
Brilliant, asshole,
he thought.
Great time to start thinking with your libido.
It wasn’t his fault—the last woman he’d slept with had been some floozy he’d picked up in a bar in the Village; both of them drunk, they’d stumbled back to her place and he’d gored her like a bull in heat right on her loveseat. Then she’d gotten up and vomited in the bathroom where, presumably, she’d spent the rest of the evening.
What a life I lead,
he thought.
Makes me wonder why I’m trying so desperately to stay alive.
But he knew the answer to that.
His son.
They went to the back door, a sliding glass door behind which hung heavy drapes. If it had been his hope to peek in through the glass, he was shit out of luck. He produced the gun from his waistband and held it by the barrel, intending to use the butt of the weapon to shatter the glass.
“Wait,” Kate said. “Try the door.”
He tried the door and it shushed open, unlocked.
“I grew up in a small town,” she said, beaming. “No one locks their doors.”
Todd pulled aside the curtain to reveal a house that looked relatively unharmed. They stepped into the kitchen, a cozy little room with bright ceramic tiles on the wall and plastic fruit in a basket on the table. Photos of children cluttered the refrigerator.
Out of habit, Todd’s hand went immediately for the light switch…but of course, nothing happened. Kate went directly to the telephone on the wall, picked it up and listened, then shrugged and hung it up. “Was worth a try,” she told him with a wry grin. “You think we could hit that fridge?”
“Let’s do it quickly.”
They devoured sliced lunch meat, half a loaf of bread, two pieces of strawberry shortcake, and washed it all down with half a carton of milk.
“I think that was the best meal I’ve ever had in my life,” Kate said through a mouthful of cake.