A man in a gray wool cap with earflaps and a camouflage winter coat rimmed in rabbit fur stepped out of the nearest doorway behind Kate. He was hefting what Todd at first thought was some sort of long-barreled gun, but on closer inspection proved to be a butane torch connected to a hose that ran up under the man’s coat.
Kate turned around and didn’t make a sound. She stepped coolly over to Todd, who still had the gun aimed in at the stranger.
The stranger eyed them through narrow slits beneath a rough, crenellated brow. His chin and neck were heavy with dark stubble and there was a slick of snot drooling from one nostril like an exclamation. His dark eyes fixated on Todd’s handgun.
“You ain’t from Woodson,” said the man. He had the voice of a rumbling old washing machine.
Todd’s hands shook; the gun rattled. “No.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“We were driving out from O’Hare,” Todd said. “Our rental broke—”
“What town’s that?”
Todd raised an eyebrow. “Town?”
“O’Hare.” Though Todd would have believed it impossible, the man’s eyes actually grew narrower. “Never heard of the place.”
“It’s an airport,” Todd said. “In Chicago.”
The man lowered his weapon. “I heard of Chicago.”
Unsure whether the man was joking or not, Todd kept the gun trained on him. He did not believe this man to be one of the possessed…but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
“Is this your house?” Kate asked. “We didn’t mean to break in.”
“Ain’t my house. I followed you here.”
Sweat trickled down Todd’s brow. “Followed us?”
The man sauntered into the kitchen and glanced casually into the sink, which was loaded with unwashed dishes. “Saw the smoke from the church this morning so I figured I’d have a look. That’s when I saw the two of you coming out of that amb’lance.”
“Who are you?” Todd asked the man.
“Name’s Tully. Up until a week ago I lived over on Acre Drive. I’m down at the sheriff’s station now, which is across town. It’s been safe so far; they don’t know we’re there.” Tully’s eyes flicked toward Todd’s handgun. “You can put that peashooter down now, son.”
Embarrassed, Todd lowered the gun.
“How long you two been tromping around town, anyway?”
“Since last night,” Kate said. “Our Jeep broke down on the highway. We walked through the woods and found the town…found the town like this.” She paused, then added, “There were more of us.”
Tully spat something green into the sink. “There were more of us, too. Whole town’s worth.”
Again, Todd couldn’t tell whether this stranger was attempting humor—albeit morbid—or he’d been living up here in the middle of nowhere for too long. Todd couldn’t read him. “What’s that thing you got there?” he asked Tully.
“Little homemade flamethrower.” He unzipped his coat to
expose a series of fuel canisters strapped to his belt with duct tape. “Can get almost twelve feet out of her if there’s no wind.”
“So fire kills those things,” Kate said. “Or does it just hurt them?”
“Oh,” said Tully, zipping his coat back up, “it kills ’em, all right.” He leaned over the counter and peered out one of the windows. Outside, the sky looked to be the color of old dishwater. “The skin-suits need rest. They sleep during the day, but they sleep light. But those tornado monsters or snowstorm things or whatever they are—they’re still out there and they’re still plenty pissed off.”
“Skin-suits?” Todd said.
Tully raised his elbows and dangled his hands like limp rags, miming a marionette. “People puppets. Whatever you call ’em.”
“I don’t call them anything,” Todd said. “This is all new to me.”
“You think it’s old hat to me, partner?” Tully stared at him hard, his eyes rheumy. He reached up and began opening cupboards, peering inside. “Like I said—a week ago I had a nice little place over on Acre. Worked days at the plant in Bicklerville and played pool down at the Blue Shue every other night.” He bent down and went through the cupboards beneath the sink. “You think I been doing this my whole life? Running around Woodson with a flamethrower strapped to my hips?”
“No, sir,” Kate said. She sounded like someone being reprimanded by a schoolteacher.
“Damn straight,” said Tully. He stood and went over to the refrigerator. Standing on his toes, he managed to peek into the cabinets over the fridge, but they were empty. “Those things came and ate the town. They blew all the power out and then our cars wouldn’t start. Phones went dead. They’ve got us quarantined.”
“How many are left?”
Tully spat a second ball of phlegm into the sink, then tromped in his heavy boots over to a new wall of cabinets. The first one he opened elicited a wry smile from his otherwise hardened features: the liquor cabinet. “How many what?” he said.
“How many people,” Todd clarified. “How many of you are still alive?”
“There’s six of us down at the station.” He was collecting the liquor bottles and loading them into a child’s Superman backpack he’d found beside the refrigerator. “I suppose you two make eight.”
“So we’re going with you,” Kate said. It was not a question. She was watching Tully like someone who’d paid a good price to step into a freak show.
“Keep running around out here, you’re both liable to get yourselves killed. That’s a fact. See how easy I followed you both up from the amb’lance and right into this house? Them things out there are ten times sneakier and a hundred times more dangerous. It’s a fool’s game, wandering around out there in the snow.”
“What about getting out of town?” Todd said. “Is there any way?”
Tully stacked the last of the bottles in the Superman backpack, then turned to the refrigerator. He pulled the door open and reached into one of the compartments, worked his fingers around. “Told you,” he said. “Cars don’t start. Can’t call anybody to come and get us. Molly has one of them little handheld doohickeys—BlackBerry, she calls it. Tried to send out an email but the screen went all funny. Kept spitting out random math equations or some shit.” As an afterthought, he added, “Molly’s from town. One of the survivors back at the station. You’ll meet her.”
“That sounds just like what happened with the cell phones,” Kate said, picking the flip phone up off the counter. “No numbers, no letters. Just nonsense.”
“My guess is they’re jamming us,” said Tully. He paused to glance at Kate appraisingly from over his shoulder. “That angry-looking cloud out by the church this morning—well, where the church used to be, I guess—see, I think it’s sending bad signals down to all our electrical appliances. Anything that runs on batteries that they couldn’t knock out with the power—anything from cars to cell phones—they wind up jamming with astro-nonsense.”
“What’s that?” Kate asked.
“Garbage from space.”
“So that’s where you think these things are from?” Todd asked.
“Mister,” Tully said, “I ain’t got a fucking
clue
where these things are from.”
“They’re that smart?” Kate sounded dejected. “To scramble signals like that?” She tossed the cell phone back down on the counter and folded her arms over her chest.
“Smart,” said Tully, “or just driven by some otherworldly instinct. Who the hell knows?”
“Scrambling signals and cutting off power doesn’t explain why the cars won’t start,” Todd said.
“Cars got about a billion little microchips and whatnot in ’em,” Tully explained.
“So there’s no way out of here,” Todd said again.
“Figured we’d sit tight until the power company came out here to see what happened to their line,” said Tully.
“It’s been a week,” Todd said. “I would have thought they’d come out here by now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Tully seemed disinterested. His hand returned from within the refrigerator with a handful of black olives. He popped them into his mouth like medication, then
pushed the refrigerator door closed with the sole of his boot. “We should get out of here.”
They followed Tully back out into the yard. Instead of crossing back to the front and down to the street, Tully led them between properties enclosed by trees.
“Wait,” Todd said, surveying the area. “You said we’re going to the sheriff’s station? Isn’t it on the other side of town?”
“That’s right,” said Tully.
“We’re going in the opposite direction. We should cut through the town square and head up the road.”
“You don’t want to go cutting through the square, friend.” Tully was working something out of his teeth with his tongue while he spoke. “That’s their nest. They’ve claimed it. For whatever reason, they all congregate there during the day. You head that way now, you won’t make it out alive.”
Without waiting for their response, Tully turned and continued pushing through the heavy snow. A beat later, Todd and Kate followed.
They cut between narrow fencing and through overgrown holly bushes, Tully leading the charge like a general about to overtake a hill. Aside from his camouflage coat and wool hat, he wore mud-streaked BDUs (every pocket bulged) and a bandolier of large rounds across his flannel shirt. Although he moved lithely through the snow, he jangled like a slot machine: aside from the fuel canisters at his waist and the clanking bottles in the backpack over his shoulders, his belt was overburdened with countless sets of keys. He looked comically like a janitor gone commando.
“Shhhhh,” Tully said at one point, sinking down low to the ground. Todd and Kate followed suit. Peering through dense evergreen shrubs, Tully jerked his chin at something down in the street. “There’s one now.”
Todd maneuvered so he could see through the bushes.
Down between two houses, the street sloped close to a muddy ravine, beside which rose the leafless branches of ancient gray trees. At first Todd couldn’t see what Tully was talking about…but then he happened to catch sight of a slight
wrongness
up in one of the trees. He squinted and leaned closer on the balls of his feet. Midway up in one tree, the air looked slightly discolored, almost brownish, and the tree branches in that particular spot seemed less defined than those around them. It was up there in the tree, perhaps fifteen feet wide, unfurled and just barely visible. The closest thing Todd’s mind could compare it to was a stingray, with those triangular fins and an ill-defined underside.
“Where?” Kate whispered, crawling closer to him. “I don’t see anything.”
“There.” He pointed and spread the bushes just a bit farther apart. “See?”
“I don’t—
oh
…” Her hand closed around his arm. “I
see
it. My God, what
is
it?”
“That, my dear lady,” said Tully, rising back to his full height, “is a question for the ages.”
Tully led them the long way, but claimed it to be safer. They stayed mostly hidden between shops and houses or behind curtains of trees. The only time they crossed out in the open was when Tully led them up the snowy hillside that led to the old church. “It’ll be safest to travel by the church because last night’s fire would have frightened them off.” There was a hint of accusation in Tully’s tone that suggested he knew Todd and Kate, these two outsiders to his town, were somehow responsible for burning down the church. “Yeah…they’ll steer clear of this spot for a while, is my guess,” Tully repeated, his heavy boots smashing craters in the hardening snow. Even with his backpack full of liquor he moved at a quick pace; Todd and Kate had a strenuous time keeping up with him.
“The whole thing burned.” Kate was in awe. She paused to stare at the smoldering black teepee that, only the night before, had been a church. Smoke still poured up into the false sky where it spread out along the low cloud cover as if the clouds themselves were solid, tangible things. As a teenager, Todd had once tried to light a fire in his mother’s fireplace without thinking to see if the flue was open. The result sent billowing columns of black smoke straight to the ceiling where they seemed to collect like helium balloons. Looking at the way the smoke from the church collected at the base of the clouds, Todd was reminded of that day, and how his mother had never been able to get the stink of smoke out of the sofa.
There was something that resembled an enormous scythe blade jutting up from the center of the smoldering rubble, charred black and brittle looking. Todd’s eyes hung on it for a very long time.
“That funky opening in the sky is gone now,” Kate noticed, examining the sky above her head. The clouds were the color of soot and the air itself had a tallow tinge to it.
“Nope,” said Tully, pointing out over the hill at a distant ridge. The sky over the ridge was a circle of midnight in which multicolored lights strobed. “It just moved.”
Kate staggered and came to a standstill. She stared out across the valley with her mouth hanging open in disbelief. Todd thumped her back as he passed, waking her from her daze.
“We’re starting to learn something about these things,” Tully said as he walked. “They’re mostly air, just thin air. Can’t hurt you, can’t do a damn thing except maybe blow your skirt up. But at certain times it seems they’re able to concentrate and focus their energy just long enough to make those two sword-shaped arms of theirs grow solid. You can tell when they’re getting ready to do it because that thread of light floating in their middles gets brighter.”
“Yes,” Todd said, “I’ve seen it.”
“They can’t stay solid for very long. That’s where the skin-suits come in. They grab some poor soul, jab ’em in the shoulders, and slide into ’em like a diver climbin’ into a wetsuit.”
Todd was thinking of what had happened to Chris, the crazed zealot, back at the church—the way that thing had broken through the ceiling and swooped down, to crawl inside the boy’s body to attack them.
“They do it so they can feed,” Tully was saying. “And they feed off us.” He paused, looking out over the town he’d probably grown up in—a town he’d never feel the same about. There was a melancholic twinkle to his eye. “If you shoot one of the skin-suits, they come flying right out. They’re not killed but it makes ’em real weak. You’ll see—they just spout off into the sky, probably to tend to their wounds. Or their hurt feelings or whatever.” Chuckling, Tully shook his head and continued walking.