Todd flipped open the laptop, then squatted down to get a better view of it. Kate held the lighter’s flame closer.
“Oh,” Todd said. “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Panic rang in her ears.
“Shit.” He sounded dejected. “The fucking screen’s cracked.”
Bending down beside him, Kate could see it: the crack from the upper right corner to the lower left, bisecting the screen. “Will it still work?”
“It better.” He depressed the power button and held his breath.
The laptop lay motionless.
Then it beeped and the tiny lights along the front panel illuminated. The screen blinked and then came on—the crack a disturbance, but not one that would hinder the laptop’s ability to perform.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered, very close to Todd’s face. Her cheek brushed his bare forearm; he hadn’t put his shirts back on. “This could really work, couldn’t it?”
“Let’s hope so.” The Windows prompt appeared, requesting his password. Todd typed in
TURBODOGS
and hit Enter.
The screen faded black, then opened to his desktop—the wallpaper depicting a remote island in the middle of some undisturbed Caribbean waters, clear as lucid thought, the skies unmarred by clouds and about as blue as a newborn baby’s dreams of the womb.
“I would give my right arm to be on that island right now,” Kate said, looking longingly at the screen’s wallpaper.
It took less than a minute for the programs to load. Todd danced his fingers over the keyboard and summoned the Internet Explorer box.
“Where are you going?” Kate asked.
“I’m going to contact the Bicklerville Police Department,” Todd said. “It’s the next town over and the closet police station to Woodson.” The Internet Explorer page was still loading, the screen blank. “Come on, come on…” He looked behind the laptop and saw the row of green lights blinking on the faceplate of the modem. “This should work. Come on, baby. Come on.”
The Web page died without loading.
“Fuck,” Kate said, the word nearly sticking to her throat.
Todd slammed a fist down on the desktop. He closed out the box on the screen and attempted it again. A new box appeared as the Internet Explorer began to load. “Come on…let’s make this happen…”
“If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Those things will come back. They know we’re in here and they’ll come back. And they’ll find a way in.” She was thinking of the horrid wormlike thing she’d smashed to death with the hammer. She shuddered.
“It’ll work.”
The page was still loading…
“It’s our last chance, Todd.”
“It’ll work,” he repeated. Digging around in the front pocket of his pants, he pulled out a single dollar bill. He
slammed it down on the table, then turned to her, grinning. “I’ll bet you a buck it works.”
Kate laughed and felt tears trace down her cheeks. “I don’t have any money, Todd.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I know you’re good for it. Take the bet.”
She looked at the computer screen.
The page was still loading.
“Go on,” he urged. “Take the bet.”
Still loading…
“Okay,” she said. “You’re on.”
Still—
“Hot damn!” he howled, slapping his hands together. The Yahoo! home page opened, the Yahoo! icon header outfitted in a Christmas theme with snowmen and an ornamented tree. “We’re in business!”
Laughing through her tears, Kate clicked the lighter shut and said, “I guess I owe you a buck!”
In the search box, Todd typed “Bicklerville Iowa Police Department” and hit the search button.
Back out in the hallway, someone else began pounding on the front doors. “Oh, shit!” Kate cried, hopping up and banging the barrel of the shotgun against the lip of the desktop. She ran out of the office and down the long hallway, the dreary light coming in from the pebbled windowpanes making the hallway look as though it was submerged underwater. She struck the doors with such force she felt a twinge in her funny bone, and quickly unlocked the padlock again.
Brendan slouched through the doorway, bleeding from a gash at the side of his neck. He hooked onto Kate for support and Kate fought off a scream, the shotgun protruding up toward the ceiling between them. One hand pressed to the wound at his neck, Brendan opened his mouth to speak—
“Mawwwh”—
just
as blood as black as squids’ ink spilled from his mouth and dribbled down the front of Kate’s shirt.
“Shut…” Brendan managed, “…doors…”
Still clinging to Brendan, Kate kicked the double doors shut, then shouted for Todd. “It’s Brendan! He’s hurt!” Black shapes began flitting behind the pebbled glass. “Jesus, Brendan, did you bring them
back
here?”
Brendan collapsed in her arms; it took all Kate’s strength to hold him up.
Todd came up behind her. He seemed to do a double take at the horrific amount of blood. “We need bandages,” he said, sliding both hands beneath Brendan’s armpits. “Lock the doors!”
Kate rushed to the doors while Todd dragged Brendan’s twitching body down the hall toward the bank of offices. Just as she pushed them closed, an arm slipped through the gap, firing like a piston and clawing at her. Kate screamed and began pounding at the arm with the butt of the shotgun. The thing on the other side of the door hissed like a snake just as a
second
arm appeared, this one stained with blood the color of Mercurochrome. The thing shoved itself against the doors, its strength too much for Kate. Instead of fighting against it, she jumped back several feet and allowed the doors to swing open.
The thing that stood on the other side of the threshold had, at one time, certainly been human—but what had happened to it over the past week or so had twisted it, broken it, carved away any sense of humanity it once had, leaving only a fiery, razor-eyed husk in its place. Its head tipped so far back on its neck, Kate was certain its Adam’s apple would burst through the taut flesh of its throat…then, opening its mouth, it released a deafening wail that shook the windowpanes and caused snow to shake off the front awning.
“Cocksucker,” Kate muttered, and fired a round at the thing’s head.
The blast tore through the upper torso of the thing, its chest opening up like some rare undersea plant. Blood splattered everywhere. The thing’s body shook, trembled, then folded almost neatly to the ground as something whitish and forceful as a windstorm funneled out of it. The whitish cloud took off like a shot out across the front yard and vanished into the veil of trees at the other end of the street.
Covered in blood herself, Kate rushed forward and slammed both doors shut. She padlocked them and felt the world tilt, as if to shake her off into space.
When she turned around, she was startled by Molly, who stood just a few feet ahead of her but cloaked in shadows. She had both hands resting on the swell of her belly, her feet clad in fluffy pink socks. “Did they come back?” Her voice sounded like someone had her around the neck. “Where’s Brendan?”
Kate pointed down the hall. “Todd took him down there. Molly!”
But Molly was off running. Kate shouldered the shotgun and went after her, suddenly conscious of all the blood that had slapped across her face and chest after shooting the thing on the front steps.
Todd had placed Brendan down on the floor in the computer room, one of Todd’s shirts wrapped as a loose bandage against the man’s throat. Blood pumped steadily from the wound and spread out in a growing puddle on the floor. Brendan bucked and kicked his legs and blinked his eyes in rapid succession. He was struggling to keep focus and stay alive.
Molly stood in the doorway, gaping down at him, the only light coming from the bluish hue radiating from the laptop’s screen. Kate rushed up behind her and nearly crashed right into her.
“Oh.” Molly’s voice was small—the voice of a dormouse. “Oh. Bren…”
Todd was tearing strips of cloth from a T-shirt, his
bare chest smeared with Brendan’s blood. He caught Kate’s eyes and thrust the T-shirt at her. “Tighten the bandage on his neck,” he told her, then spun back around to the computer.
Kate bent before Brendan, ripping strips of fabric from the shirt. One knee went right into the spreading pool of blood. Brendan offered her a wan smile. His eyes looked as though they were rapidly losing focus.
“Get away from him,” Molly said from the doorway.
“He needs help,” Kate said, ignoring her. She began to tie one of the loose strips of cloth around Brendan’s neck. He winced as Kate slid it beneath his head, soaking her hands and sleeves in his blood.
“Leave him alone,” Molly continued. “You people have done enough.” Her voice softened. “Bren, honey, are you okay? Brendan?”
Brendan made a gurgling sound deep down in his throat.
“I think,” Kate stammered. “Todd, I think he’s choking on his blood!”
Todd dropped to her side and wrapped two hands around Brendan’s right forearm. He gave Brendan a tug, propping him up on his side. Brendan shuddered and a steady stream of thick lifeblood oozed from his lips and puddled at Todd’s knees.
“I said leave him alone!” Molly screamed. She looked instantly like a spoiled child, balled fists and all. “You’re killing him!”
“We’re trying to
save
him,” Todd said. He tightened the bandage around Brendan’s neck, and that seemed to slow the flow of blood. Some semblance of normalcy returned to Brendan’s eyes.
“They…cut me,” Brendan managed. His voice still sounded wet, gurgling.
“We just need to stop the bleeding,” Todd told him. He
kept looking from Brendan to the laptop. A message box was in the center of the screen. Looking back to Brendan, Todd asked about Bruce.
“He was…right behind me…setting fires,” Brendan wheezed. “Whole town…burning.”
“I want to take him downstairs,” Molly said. There was a pleading quality to her voice now that sounded very unlike her. “It’s not safe to be up here, and he should have never gone out with you two.” She glared at Todd. “Help me take him down. He should rest.”
Todd nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.” He looked at Kate. “Help me lift him, will you?”
They stood and each slung one of Brendan’s arms over their shoulders. As Molly looked on, Kate and Todd carried Brendan back out into the hall and down the basement steps. Going down the stairs elicited soft little cries from Brendan as he struggled to combat the pain. In the backroom, they set him down on the cot beside Molly’s, and Todd rechecked the bandage at Brendan’s neck. Blood was still seeping through and the bandage was coming loose from jostling him down the stairs.
“Goddamn it,” Todd said. He unwound the bandage while Kate brought the halogen lamp closer. The wound was a gaping black maw in the left side of Brendan’s neck. To Kate, it looked grotesquely vaginal, and she fought hard not to lose it and throw up all over the place again. “One of those hooked claws?” Todd asked Brendan, curling two fingers in a pantomime of the creatures’ scythe-blades.
Weakly, Brendan said, “Yeah…”
Todd spun around and snatched a bottle of whiskey off the desk behind him. He unscrewed the cap and hovered over Brendan again like a guardian angel. “This is probably gonna sting like hell.”
“Already stings like hell,” Brendan offered, and there was
a second appearance of that wan smile. His lips frothed blood.
Todd doused the wound in whiskey and Brendan screamed at the ceiling. Thick cords stood out on the poor man’s neck. Todd used up a third of the bottle cleaning the wound, soaking the cot and the nearby blankets in the process, then redressed it with the torn-away sleeves of a fresh shirt.
Eyes wide as Ping-Pong balls, Molly stepped across the room and eased herself down on her own cot. She looked as if she wanted to touch Brendan—either to comfort him or just confirm his existence—but she forced her hands to remain in her lap beneath the push of her pregnant stomach. Her fuzzy pink socks were black with blood; she’d left footprints on the floor.
Todd pulled on a fresh shirt from the pile on the rolling cart. As he buttoned it, he surveyed Brendan, who stared at the ceiling with a disquieting serenity. Todd looked to Molly. “You’ll keep an eye on him?”
Scowling, Molly turned away and stared at the liquor bottles lining the desktop. She didn’t give him an answer.
“It’s getting dark again,” Kate said. She was with Todd in the computer room, looking out the single window against the far wall. The glass wasn’t pebbled like the windows out in the front hall, but it was double paned, its center cloudy with condensation. The sun blazed like a greenish bruise behind the nearby trees. Above, the sky looked like tar paper stretched across the face of the planet.
Todd was rapidly hammering away at the keyboard. He’d been sending out instant messages to various police departments’ emergency hotline connections throughout Iowa and Illinois, each one professing the same message:
Please help! We are hostages under attack by terrorists in Woodson, Iowa. Send heavy firepower—the military and national guard. No phones/power/radio/heat. Send help soon!
It had been Kate’s idea to mention a terrorist threat. Had they written the truth—had they mentioned what was truly going on in Woodson—they risked having their messages instantly deleted and probably laughed at by the neighboring police departments.
Not that it mattered: it had been fifteen minutes and no one had responded to a single message.
Kate sat down in one of the rolling chairs by the desk. She, too, had changed her shirt again, anxious to rid herself of the creature’s blood. She watched Todd type frantically in the lamplight. “Maybe none of the messages have gone through,” she suggested after the silence had grown too thick. “Maybe it’s not making a strong enough connection to the Internet to transmit.”
Todd shook his head. “No. We’re getting Web pages without a problem.”
“Then…” But she caught herself.
“What?” Todd said, looking over his shoulder at her. Half his face was blue from the light of the computer screen. “Tell me. It’s probably what I’m thinking, too.”
For whatever reason, it bothered her to hear him say that. “It’s just…what if this thing isn’t isolated to Woodson? What if it spread to the next town? What if they’re dealing with the same crap we are?”
The look on Todd’s face betrayed his thoughts. Kate knew he’d been thinking the exact same thing.
Then something chimed on the computer screen.
Todd and Kate locked eyes for a heartbeat. Then Kate launched herself out of the chair and crowded around the laptop with Todd, staring at the screen. An instant-message box had appeared in the center of the screen, one word blaring up and filling them both with insurmountable hope:
help is on the way
It had worked.
It had
worked.
Kate sprang up and threw her arms around Todd’s neck. She kissed him, hard and quick the first time around…then slower and with more passion the second time. On the desk,
the laptop began to chime over and over again as similar responses to their SOS came through.
A dark shape flashed by the window. Then two more. Then two
more.
Kate’s smile drained from her face. Todd turned to see what had frightened her, just as more shapes flitted by outside.
“Christ,” Kate uttered. “They’ve come back.”
“Get the kids,” Todd told her. He grabbed his shotgun off the desk. “We should stay together.”
Holding her own shotgun to her chest, Kate nodded, then took off down the hallway.
In the basement, surrounded by the slowly diminishing light of a single dying lamp, Molly watched as Brendan—the father of her unborn baby—took his last breath before expiring in front of her eyes.
At first she didn’t realize he had died. She stared at him, aware that his chest had stopped rising and falling, aware that the ungodly gurgle of his respiration had ceased deep down in his throat, but the full realization of what she was seeing did not dawn on her until many long minutes had passed.
Then, soundlessly, she wept into her hands.
What was going to happen to her child? She was alone in the world now, pregnant and alone. She had no parents—they’d both died a year ago in an automobile accident out on Highway 28, her old man drunk as a skunk behind the wheel of the family Plymouth, the son of a bitch—and now God had seen fit to take Brendan away from her, too. Brendan, who had always cheered her up with raunchy jokes and funny faces. Brendan, who had shunned her the first few days after she’d told him she was pregnant…but who’d eventually come around, because he was a good guy and was going to be a good father, too. He’d said so—
Molly, I’m going to be a good
father.
Just like that. A promise. Brendan had had a shitty old man, too (although the son of a bitch was still alive and living in Vegas somewhere, allegedly with a showgirl with fake tits, though Molly never completely bought into that one). Brendan was going to make up for his own shitty father and for Molly’s shitty father, too.
The world, it seemed, was full of shitty fathers.
Then, for whatever reason, she felt anger well up inside her. Eyes bleary with tears, she looked back at Brendan’s silent and still body. For the first time, his stillness actually struck her, and the thought ripped through her like lights on a Broadway marquee—HE’S DEAD H
E’S DEAD HE’S DEAD
. She looked down and found that her hands were immeasurably calm. She turned them over and examined the pink, puffy palms. As she looked, tears spilled from her eyes and landed in her cupped palms. And for whatever reason, this made her angrier.
For a long time, Molly sat with her legs folded beneath her on the cot as the lamplight slowly died all around her.
Armed with a shotgun and pistol, Todd stormed into the secretarial office and crawled to the nearest window—oddly enough, the one Kate had been perched out of earlier that day, although Todd had no way of knowing this. The blinds were cockeyed and partially raised. He slid down beneath the window and reloaded shells into the shotgun. His fingers shook. Above his head, dark shapes moved around outside. He was too terrified to sit up and look out.
But he did anyway.
He counted six of the skin-suits staged at the end of the driveway, standing motionless as mannequins. Two more stood closer, at the far corner of the building. They stood so close together their heads nearly touched. Outside, the strong wind rustled the distant trees and flapped the clothes of the townspeople.
Also, something was breathing beneath the snow. Todd thought of the massive creature that had lunged at him back on Fairmont Street—the way it had shuttled up from the ground and towered over him, as unfathomable as an Egyptian god. How many more of those things were out there? And how many other things, stranger and each more dangerous than the next, waiting to attack?
Todd thought of the old H. G. Wells story,
The War of the Worlds,
and how he’d read it a long time ago to Justin. The boy had grown tired of the standard children’s storybooks and professed an interest in things beyond the appropriateness of his age—aliens and monsters being the two frontrunners. Of course, Brianna had objected. She didn’t want the kid sitting up in bed all night because of scary bedtime stories. Moreover, she said it wasn’t appropriate to tell stories to a boy of Justin’s age if they dealt with ghouls and goblins and strange fruitlike creatures from outer space that descended on the unsuspecting populace to terrorize, torture, and inevitably kill. Yet despite Bree’s protestations, Todd had snagged a handful of books from the local library—books he, too, had enjoyed as a child (although he’d had no father around to read them to him)—and every night before Justin went to bed, they would read a chapter. Or sometimes two or three chapters, if the story was really cooking. If the creatures from those books ever gave Justin nightmares, the boy never let on. And although Brianna, who was no dummy, eventually learned that Todd had ignored her wishes, she never said anything more about it. Todd thought that had probably been one of Brianna’s best moments.
She put up with a lot from me,
he thought. A pang resonated in his heart, and his mind added,
They both did.
Bleakly, he wondered if he would die here, right here, right in this spot. Crouched on the floor beneath a window in a sheriff’s station in the middle of godforsaken nowhere…
I wonder if Justin asked for me. When I didn’t show up at the house, I wonder if he asked Bree where I was.
But the idea that he had let his son down again was more torture than Todd could handle. He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, then sat up and looked back out the window.
He counted twelve this time.
Kate opened the door to the sally port, once again struck by how bitterly cold it was. Across the garage, she could see the twin nubs of the children’s heads in the backseat of the first police car. She raised the lamp and waved at them. Then she climbed down the steps and went over to the car.
“Hey,” she said, opening the car door.
The children turned their heads in Kate’s direction.
Their faces were creaseless bulges of flesh—featureless.
Kate screamed and threw herself backward against the wall. Behind her, a shelf collapsed, raining empty paint cans and sheaves of paper down on her.
The two faceless children began climbing out of the back of the police car. They moved with the slow uncertainty of someone negotiating a room in absolute darkness.
Kate set the lamp down, then leveled the shotgun at the first child—the one that had been Charlie. Her finger lingered on the trigger. Pulled it back slightly…pulled it…
She lowered the gun. “Fuck,” she groaned, trembling. Across the room and midway up the wall, Kate caught sight of what appeared to be some sort of exhaust vent. Sparkling snow breathed out of the vent slats like confetti, swirling down to the floor.
Kate turned and ran out of the room, slamming the sally port’s door shut behind her. There was a series of deadbolts on this side of the door. Kate turned them all.
There were so many out there now, Todd could not keep count. They all seemed planted at strategic spots, all awaiting some sort of instruction, or so it appeared. That thing beneath the snow continued to breathe—the snow itself rising and falling, rising and falling—and Todd found himself thinking of hospital respirators.
Something moved out in the hallway, collecting his attention. Todd swung the shotgun at the office door as a figure rushed into the half light. The figure moaned and called Todd’s name.
He lowered the shotgun. “Kate? I’m here.”
She rushed to him, her own gun held away from her body as if she wished nothing more than to be done with it, the lighted lantern swinging from her crooked elbow.
“The light.” He beckoned to her. “Put it out.”
She quickly doused it, then crept up next to him against the wall. She was shaking.
“What happened?” he asked. “Where are the kids?”
She just shook her head very fast, not looking at him.
“Kate, what happened to the kids?”
“They’re…they
changed
.” She stared at him, her eyes frighteningly lucid. “No faces.”
Todd felt his muscles clench. He turned back to the window. “They’re all out there now.”
Kate ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “God, what are they waiting for? Just let it happen already.”
He squeezed her shoulder.
Her smile warmed him, though there was little effort in it. Then her eyes widened and she looked past him and out the window. “Todd, they’re running.”
He looked and saw them—all of them—charging toward the building at breakneck speed, their feet kicking up clouds of snow, their arms pumping like machine pistons.
“What—” he began, just as they simultaneously pummeled
the side of the building. Blood went everywhere. Some of them fell backward into the snow. But the ones who remained standing, which were most of them, slowly backed away from the building…only to rush at it again. This time, Todd heard a distant window shatter. Beneath the awning, the station’s front doors appeared to buckle.
“They’re smashing their way in,” Kate said.
Todd pulled open the window, the cold quickly sinking its teeth into his flesh, and shoved the nose of the shotgun out. He fired at the closest townsperson, who went down in a gaudy display of radiating innards. One of the snow-beasts whirled out of him and spiraled off into the night.
Kate scrambled over to the next window and followed suit, poking the barrel of her shotgun out, charging a round, and firing.
On the floor between them lay a pile of shells. Not enough to fend them all off, but maybe enough to lessen the numbers.
There’s no use in lessening numbers,
Todd thought, continuing to fire the shotgun out the station’s window; he was going deafer with each blast, his entire body vibrating from the recoil.
There’s no use in doing any of this. There’s a whole town’s worth of things out there, ready to rip and tear and bite into us…not to mention that thing in the snow and whatever else awaits us…
He chose to think of his son while he shot. The good times, like the Christmases and birthdays, the times they’d gone to Prospect Park or the Jersey Shore. He’d taught the boy to fly a kite in an open field where wildflowers burst like supernovas from the green grass, and the boy had cheered and shouted and beamed as the kite climbed higher and higher and higher. As a tiny baby, eyes all squinty and fists clenched and pink, he’d been nothing more than a mushy hump in his mother’s arms. The way the sunlight coming in through the side windows bleached the nursery,
and the one time the hornets’ nest fell and got caught behind the shutter. All the hornets rasping against the windowpane. Laughing.
That’s not scary, is it? No, Daddy, it’s not. I’m a big boy. Yes, you are. Yes! Yes!
Fishing off Luck’s Pier, hooking bass and, holy Jesus, a snapping turtle, would you look at that?
Yes! I’m a big boy. I’m a big boy and I love you, Daddy.
I love you, Daddy.
The front doors caved in and the front awning collapsed. One of the creatures was shambling through an open window. The snow around the building pulsed with a lifelike current.
“Todd!” Kate shouted at his ear. She grabbed hold of his hair, shook his head. “Todd! Look!”