He looked…just as an arc of white flame shot out of the darkness. He couldn’t tell what the hell he was looking at. As he watched, one of the skin-suits went up in a blazing inferno. A second skin-suit leapt at the quick-moving figure but was ignited just like his brethren.
It was Bruce. Bloodied and battered, but it was Bruce.
“Holy shit,” Todd mouthed.
Bruce charged across the lawn, igniting every single one of the bastards that hazarded to block his path. Within seconds, the snowy front lawn of the sheriff’s station was alight with burning people, screaming and running and falling on their faces in the snow. Some of the snow-beasts escaped in a whirl of white smoke, but this time they didn’t dissipate into the ether: they swooped toward Bruce now, coming down low as he launched fire from his flamethrower.
“Jesus,” Kate said, “they’re trying to extinguish the flame.”
Todd nodded. “Just like Tully said.”
“Where’s he going?”
Bruce continued across the lawn, his big booted feet leaving behind craters in the snow. He was heading for a thin
fence of trees. And beyond the trees stood the decrepit little gas station.
“They’re following him,” Todd said. “I don’t believe it.”
The thing beneath the snow swirled like a whirlpool, then began tunneling toward Bruce. It was moving too fast; Bruce would never reach cover before the thing was on him.
No,
Todd thought suddenly.
I don’t think Bruce has any intention of reaching cover. I think Bruce is here to end this thing, one way or the other.
The skin-suit that had been squirming through the broken window dropped back out onto the snow. It was a heavyset female with a face like sagging dough. She began running after Bruce—just as they all did.
Todd grabbed Kate’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. “It’s not safe in here anymore.”
Together they ran back to the computer room, Todd slamming the door shut behind them. On the desk, the computer continued to ding as all of Todd’s messages were returned.
Kate hurried to the window, stared out. “He’s luring them to…”
“To the gas station,” Todd finished, coming up behind her.
Bruce had a sizeable lead on the pursuing skin-suits, but the thing tunneling through the snow was coming up on him fast. Moreover, the sky was alive with twisting tornados of snow, each one glowing sliver at its center. As they watched, Bruce burst through the spindly trees and crossed the tarmac of the gas station. The pumps slouched like tired old men. Bruce turned and fired another blast from his flamethrower at the encroaching townspeople.
“There must be a hundred of them,” Kate marveled.
The thing beneath the snow cut sharply to the right and ran the length of the gas station tarmac. The tarmac itself was shaded by a partial steel awning, which kept much of the
snow from falling on the blacktop. It seemed the creature did not want to climb up out of the snow. Or maybe it
couldn’t.
Bruce dropped to his knees and began fiddling with something on the ground.
“Oh, shit,” Kate said. “Did he drop the flamethrower?”
“It’s hooked to a cable…”
“Is he…he fucking tying his
shoe?”
But no—he wasn’t tying his shoe and he hadn’t dropped the flamethrower.
“He’s unscrewing the fuel door,” Todd said. “Where the trucks come and pump full under the gas station…”
“Oh,” Kate said—almost childishly simple.
The townspeople swarmed onto the tarmac. Several of them struck the support beam of the steel awning, knocking the beam askew. The awning wavered from side to side, as if in contemplation, then crashed down onto a tow truck parked on the far side of the gas station.
Bruce stood, looking like a ghost among phantoms.
Just before the townspeople clawed into him and tore him apart, Bruce fired one final blast from the flamethrower: directly down the mouth of the fuel door.
An instant later, it was as though the apocalypse had come.
When Todd came to, he found himself sprawled on the floor and covered in bits of glass. He sat up, aware of the aches and pains throughout his body, as the glass tinkled to the floor all around him. The room was bitterly cold. The second his vision cleared, he understood why: the force of the explosion had busted out the window.
Shaking glass out of his hair, he rolled over to Kate, who lay unconscious beside him, her face a patchwork of lacerations, cuts, and scrapes. Gently he shook her awake, brushing busted glass from her clothes, face, and hair.
Hesitantly, her eyes blinked open. “What happened?”
“Bruce blew up the gas station.”
“Are we…where are we?”
He helped her to her feet. They both went to the window, shuddering at the cold. Across the field, the gas station burned. All around the station, like a photo from some Nazi concentration camp, charred bodies littered the snow. There were dozens of them, some still burning, others smoldering like bits of charcoal in the belly of a grill. The air reeked of scorched flesh and burning gasoline. Also among the carnage, Todd could make out a number of large, hulking shapes, almost amphibian in their appearance, like frozen black relics. Charred scythes stood motionless in the air. Others had melted to a tarry black gruel along the blacktop.
“The window,” Kate said.
“Help me.” He grabbed his laptop’s carrying case from the desk and pressed it against the windowsill. Kate located some masking tape and they taped it up over the window, making sure not to leave any cracks for anything to get in. Not even wind.
“Christ, how long were we out?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t remember…” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the laptop’s screen, which was black. The row of green lights on the modem’s faceplate was dead, too. “I think our battery just died.”
“But they got your message. Everyone did. They said help was coming.”
Their arms around each other, they crept out into the hallway. Cold yellow moonlight pooled in the front hall, issuing in through the place where the double doors had been. The doors themselves now lay in concave heaps on the floor.
Todd and Kate rushed to them, attempted to lift the doors back in place. They were too heavy. Kate yelped and fresh blood dripped down her palm. Todd took her hand anyway.
“Look,” he said, pointing out into the night. The swirling eyelet of light had moved close to the police station; it now sat midway between the gas station and the police station, casting a shimmering artificial light down on the snow. The snow itself appeared to glow.
Things began moving—in the trees and shrubs, down in the ravine and out by the woods. Even beneath the snow. The sense of motion was all around them.
As they watched, bright twists of light spiraled up into the shimmering eyelet. The lights seemed to come from all over the town, drawn to the central location of the eye in the sky like hounds to a scent. They sparkled like jewels, their appearances just barely glimpsed.
“It’s easier to see them if you don’t look directly at them,” Todd said.
“Like stars,” Kate said.
For close to five minutes, they watched the glittery snow lift off the ground, the houses, the trees, the roofs of nearby automobiles, and rise up into the eyelet. The eye itself appeared to undulate, as if viewed through heat waves rising off some desert blacktop. The swirl of colors at its center briefly reflected the world below—the treetops and rooftops, the wrecked cars in the ravines, the dark lampposts staggered like mile markers down to the center of town. Yet Todd could make out faint differences in color and structure of the details…causing him to wonder whether what he was seeing was indeed a reflection, or he was actually glimpsing through a window of sorts into a whole other world, a whole other dimension. But then the glowing colors returned, masking the mirrored image, and both Todd and Kate could make out a distinct sucking sound—a vague and suggestive inhalation. The eyelet’s light grew in intensity—a silvery light not unlike the silver threads in the snow creatures themselves—before the clouds swallowed it up completely.
A moment later, they were left staring at a natural night sky.
Todd put an arm around Kate, hugged her close to him. They were breathless and in awe. Squeezing her tightly about her shoulders, Todd could feel Kate’s heartbeat strumming through her entire body.
“Look,” Kate said suddenly. She pointed down into the valley of the town square. “Do you see?”
He did: down in the square, several pairs of headlights appeared. He thought he could hear the grinding of gears as the heavy vehicles crept slowly through the town square.
“That doesn’t look like the cops,” Kate said. “Those vehicles look military.”
Todd’s arm slipped down off Kate’s shoulder. He grabbed her hand and urged her forward. “Come on.”
Kate began laughing. She was about to run along with him until she heard something behind her. She managed to turn around in time to see Molly standing in the open doorway of the sheriff’s station, her enormous belly protruding from beneath her too-small sweatshirt, her fuzzy pink socks planted firmly in the snow. There was a look of haunted desperation on the girl’s face that caused Kate’s blood to run cold.
Molly raised a handgun and fired a single shot.
Todd was aware of vagaries—the indecision of fragile consciousness. Faces peering down at him. A bright light shining directly in his eyes. The sensation of hands tugging and pulling at his body. Then blackness.
In his dreams, he was running along a snowy hillside that crested high above a model train village. Something chased him. Something hideous and malformed, the noises of its pursuit akin to the feral ululations of wildcats. He ran, his skin burning and his eyes tearing, knowing that he could not keep up the pace forever. It was only a matter of time before a sharp bladed talon pierced through the soft flesh of his back, bursting through his backbone and severing his spinal column…
At one point, Kate was looking down on him. She smiled warmly and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Then he was in a truck or an ambulance or some such vehicle, with whirring buzzers and blinking lights all around him. Faceless people in white attended to him. At one point he sat bolt upright (or at least imagined he did) and shouted nonsense into the ether.
There was a room—puke green walls, paisley curtains, water-stained acoustical ceiling tiles. There was a small television set bracketed to the wall, and in the doorway, shapes blurred back and forth like memories of family members long forgotten.
Justin was there. His son. He stood for a moment in the doorway, his mournful dark eyes almost pleading with him. Todd felt himself wanting to say something, wanting to reach out and touch the boy, but he felt strapped down and helpless.
This isn’t my body,
he thought.
And if it is, I am no longer in control of it.
Which made him think of monsters. Monsters that took over people’s bodies and marched them around like puppets on strings.
But no…no…
Later, the pain came.
Still somewhat groggy, he blinked his eyes open to find a large Hispanic female in a white jumpsuit of sorts drawing blood from his inner forearm. She looked down at him and smiled humorlessly.
“Where…am I?”
“Hospital,” said the nurse. “You were shot.”
“Shot?”
“Do you know your name?”
“Yes,” he said. “What happened to my friend? A woman. Her name’s Kate.”
“There are people outside waiting for you,” said the nurse. “You should rest, but they seem very eager to see you. The doctor said it would be all right, if you are up for it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Please.”
The nurse left and Todd attempted to prop himself up on the stack of pillows at his back. The movement caused a sharp pain to go shooting straight across his right shoulder, where it pooled like lava along the right side of his ribs. Wincing, he gripped the bedsheets in both hands until the pain subsided.
Two men in black suits entered the hospital room.
“Mr. Curry,” said the first suit—a well-built man in his late thirties, sporting a buzz cut that turned silver at the temples.
They both stopped at the foot of his bed, their hands folded in front of them. “I’m Carl Freed and this is Michael Shovenson. We’re with the Department of Defense, Chicago field office.”
“Am I under arrest or something?”
“Not at all,” said Freed. Beside him, Shovenson—skin the color of ground coffee and a bald head reflecting the fluorescent ceiling lights—produced a notepad and pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “We just need a statement from you about what happened.”
Todd attempted to raise his right hand and drag his fingers through his hair, but just lifting it halfway caused the pain in his shoulder to explode again. He sucked air in through clenched teeth.
“You in pain?” asked Shovenson. He had a voice like a bassoon.
“A little.”
“We’ll just take that statement,” said Freed, “then get out of your hair. Your girlfriend is outside waiting to see you,” he added, as if hoping this information would move things along more quickly.
“I’m afraid you won’t believe a word of what happened,” Todd said. He tried on a smile but it felt false on his face. For one horrible moment he thought he might actually break down in tears in front of these two men.
“We just need to hear it from you, Mr. Curry,” Freed said, unrelenting.
“A lot of people in that town are dead, Mr. Curry,” Shovenson added.
Todd took a deep breath, then said, “There were things in the snow.” He thought about this statement for several drawn-out minutes—the agents did not press him at all as he thought—then finally added, “I think they
were
the snow.”
“How did you get into town?” Freed asked.
Todd told them the whole story, starting with the flight cancellation to renting the vehicle to what had happened when they picked up Eddie Clement in the middle of an otherwise deserted road. Shovenson took minimal notes and neither man ever raised an eyebrow. When Todd began telling them about the creatures in the snow and about the walking skin-suits, he did so with terribly forced levity, the words impossible to his own ears…but the men still did not balk.
When Todd finished, he sighed deeply—which also hurt his injured shoulder—and fixed both men with a frank stare. “You probably think I’m full of shit. Ask the woman outside—the one you called my girlfriend—and she’ll corroborate everything I’ve just told you, word for word.”
Shovenson flipped his notepad closed, then stuffed it back into his suit jacket.
“This was just a formality,” Freed said. He walked over to a nightstand and picked up the remote control for the television bracketed to the wall. “We have reports to write.”
“Reports,” echoed Shovenson, as if this were some part of a private joke the two men shared.
Freed clicked on the TV. After the picture came on, he began flipping through various channels. Most of the channels were news stations, each reporter looking grim and uncertain. Freed finally left the TV on one channel where a female reporter was talking about the bizarre events that had occurred in a small town outside Minneapolis, resulting in the disappearance of half the town’s population.
Todd blinked and just stared at the TV.
“So far,” said Freed, “we’re looking at twenty-nine separate incidents across the country. Several more were reported in Canada, and more reports are filtering in every hour. The folks who rescued you wound up rescuing another thirty-eight
people from Woodson, many of them hidden in basements and armed like militiamen.”
Todd studied the seriousness of Freed’s face. “So…so this happened
all over?”
“Twenty-nine different towns,” Freed repeated. “Mostly relegated to the Midwest. By all accounts, it seems there was something in the storm.”
“That wasn’t just a storm,” Todd said.
To this, neither Freed nor Shovenson felt the need to comment. They adjusted their ties and passed a look between them that suggested they wanted to go back to their hotel rooms and go to sleep.
“We left a card with a contact number with your girlfriend,” Freed said as they both moved toward the door. “If you think of anything else, or just need to call and talk to someone about what happened, don’t hesitate to use the number.”
“Get well,” said Shovenson, and the two men left.
When Kate came in, she looked much smaller and emptier than he had remembered her. She watched him for a few moments in the doorway before coming to his bedside and kissing him squarely on the forehead. Her eyes glittered with moisture.
“Are you hurt?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I guess I was luckier than you, huh?”
“What exactly happened?”
“It was Molly. She shot you just as we were heading from the station down to the road.”
“Molly…”
“Brendan died. She blamed you. After she shot you, she dropped the gun and just sat down in the snow, sobbing, until the guardsmen showed up. She’s been taken into custody.”
“Jesus…”
“There were more people, Todd. In Woodson. They were hiding in basements and attics and in different places throughout the town.”
“Yeah, I heard. Those two federal agents or whatever they were just told me.” He nodded toward the TV, which was still reporting the inexplicable occurrences that had happened across North America over the past week. “Can you believe this?”
“It’s like one big cloud came in and draped itself right over the middle of the country,” Kate said. “But it didn’t happen everywhere. Just quiet, remote towns. Just like Woodson.”
“Because they’re smart. Because to do what they needed to do, they had to be able to cut the towns off from the rest of society. They had to pick places where they could easily do that.”
“And what exactly did they come here to do?”
“Feed,” he said. “Change us, maybe. Did you see what it looked like when that cloud opened up at the end? Just as it started sucking those things back into it?”
“Like you could see through it to the other side,” Kate responded. “Like there were other places up there, beyond our world.”
The notion caused his head to throb. He rested back on his stack of pillows, his respiration labored.
“After it was all over, I went back for Charlie and Cody,” she said. “I thought maybe if those things had left their bodies, maybe they’d…you know…maybe…”
“Were they alive?” he said.
Kate didn’t answer, but Todd already knew what the answer would be. On the TV, the reporter was replaced by a computerized map of the United States alight with red “hot zones,” as they were labeled, throughout the country. “This just in,” the female reporter’s voice carried over the scene of the map. “Eleven people were discovered alive in the small
South Dakota town of East Fork, their stories no different from the hundreds of others we’ve been hearing for the past two days now, bringing the total number of Midwestern towns involved in this uncanny and unexplainable nationwide event up to—”
“Please shut that off,” he said.
Kate clicked the TV off. “Gerald’s down in the lobby. We’ve been here for a few hours. I didn’t want to leave until I knew you were all right.”
“Thank you.”
“I took the liberty of putting my number in your cell phone,” she said. “I hope you’ll keep in touch.”
“After all we’ve been through?”
She laughed. “I’m not your only visitor, by the way.”
His own smile faltered.
Smoothing his hair to one side, she said, “I hope you don’t mind. I found the number in your cell phone and I thought it was the right thing to do…”
Looking past Kate, Todd could suddenly see Justin standing in the doorway of the hospital room. The boy was wearing the same ski jacket and bright boots he’d been wearing in what Todd had assumed had been a dream. When the boy caught sight of his father’s face, he closed the distance from the doorway to Todd’s bed in no time at all. Justin hopped onto the bed and, despite the pain it caused his shoulder, Todd gripped the boy and squeezed him hard. He smelled Justin’s hair, his skin, his clothes—taking in every bit of the boy.
“Daddy,” Justin said against his cheek. “Are you hurt?”
“I think I’ll be okay, sport.”
The boy hugged him hard and painfully around the neck. Todd felt his throat tighten and his vision grow blurry.
Brianna appeared at the foot of the bed. She looked frail and thin in a coat that hugged her too tightly, her hair tucked
beneath a white beret. She clutched her handbag before her with both hands, uncertain what to say or even how to look.
“I’ll leave you guys alone,” Kate said. She turned and rested a hand on Todd’s shoulder. “Take care, Todd.”
“You, too.”
Kate did not look back at him as she walked quickly out of the room.
His arms still wrapped around his son, he offered Brianna a tired smile as he rested his chin atop Justin’s head. He could feel the boy’s heartbeat against his own, the child’s body warm and good. There was no pain here. Not here, not now. Still smiling at Brianna, he could feel the silence between them in the room, interrupted only by the scuffing of shoes outside in the hallway.
After a while, Brianna smiled back. “Merry Christmas, Todd.”
“Merry Christmas, Bree.”
She came and sat on the edge of his bed. Hesitantly, she rested a hand on his leg. After a few seconds, she began rubbing his leg…timidly at first, but gradually warming up to him.
Closing his eyes, Todd leaned back against the pillows and listened as his heartbeat strummed in sync with his son’s.