The Shuddering (23 page)

“What happened?” she sobbed. “What happened to Ren, Ryan? What did you do to her?” She shook him, trying to get a response.

“Wolves,” Sawyer said, his throat dry, closing around that lie. But it was all he could do to keep everything from falling apart. “A pack of them. It wasn’t his fault.”

“Then why are we in the pantry?” she screamed. “Why aren’t you going out there to get April?”

He swallowed against the questioning. How was he supposed to answer that?

“You’re lying!” she wailed, turning on her brother again, her fists beating against his arm. “Why aren’t we going out there? Why are we locked inside like this?”

Again, there was no response from Ryan. He was catatonic, lost in his own grief, drowning in guilt.

“What was it?” she asked, turning her attention to Sawyer instead. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

Sawyer shook his head faintly. “I only saw them for a second. I was too busy looking…”
at Lauren
. His words faded before he could finish.

She turned her attention back to her brother. “Tell me what happened,” she sobbed. “Please.”

Finally Ryan spoke, a reply so ominous it made the hair on Sawyer’s arms stand on end.

“If I told you what happened, you would never leave this room again.”

H
e was trying to make sense of it, but all Sawyer kept seeing was that thing staring at him, those giant teeth clacking together as it stood in Lauren’s blood. There had been a pack of them, whatever the hell those things were, and while they had been grouped together, they had fought one another, suggesting a definite pecking order. But he couldn’t see past Lauren’s body, cracked open, dying.

But when he had set eyes on her, he hadn’t seen Jane’s blonde-haired friend, but April Bennett, the girl he’d met in a vintage record store, the girl who had been reading the back of a Bauhaus album when he had spotted her from across the shop. She had disappeared while he flipped through vintage new-wave vinyl, and when he stepped out onto the sidewalk with a paper bag full of records tucked beneath his arm, she was smoking a cigarette just outside the door. To say that he hadn’t been smitten by her would have been a lie. Only a few months ago, he could hardly restrain himself from undressing her with his eyes. Now he couldn’t help but picture that body lying out in the snow, probably in a place where he and Jane and Ryan used to run and dig and pretend that they were lost in the woods, nobody but the three of them left in the world.

That was his worst fear.

April was volatile, but she wasn’t stupid. He reassured himself that she would have found a place to hide. Maybe she was in
the Jeep, curled up in the foot well and waiting for someone to find her.

“We can’t stay in here,” he finally spoke. “We need a plan.” Because despite his own terror, he had to find her. He had to save his child.

“There is no plan,” Ryan said toward the floor.

“We have to make one,” Jane cut in. It was impressive, the way her face was going through emotions like a flickering lightbulb—horrified one second, grief stricken the next. But she was keeping it together. “We just need to figure out what to do,” she said. “We’ll be okay…”

“We’ll be okay?” Ryan laughed bitterly. He looked up for the first time since they’d scrambled into that tiny room, his eyes hard. “You have no fucking idea. You have no fucking
clue
.”

Jane’s composed exterior wavered. Sawyer could see Ryan’s severity eating at her, singeing the fine-spun fibers of her self-control. “That’s why you need to tell us what you saw,” she told him. “We can’t fight them if we don’t know what they are.”

“And what are you going to do, Jane? Are you going to teach them how to color inside the lines?” Ryan asked her. “Are you going to teach them how to bake a fucking cake?”

“
Hey
.” Sawyer’s voice snapped Ryan to attention. They locked eyes, challenging each other. “Don’t take this out on her. This isn’t anyone’s fault.”

Ryan’s expression went sour. He looked down at his hands, holding something back, and then those hands covered his face again. Guilt. It was so heavy Sawyer could taste it.

“We can’t stay in here,” Sawyer repeated. “April is out there, right? We have to go look for her. Or at least
I
have to go look for her. You guys can stay here but I can’t.”

“You go out there and you’re dead,” Ryan said flatly. “I know you saw them. April isn’t out there. If Lauren didn’t make it, neither did she.”

“Why?” Sawyer clenched his teeth at the insinuation. “Because you liked Lauren better?”

“Because it’s not goddamn logical. How can she be out there, Sawyer? She was wearing jeans and a designer coat, for fuck’s sake. If they didn’t get her, the cold already has.”

Sawyer lunged forward, grabbing Ryan by the front of his coat, jerking him up to his feet before slamming him against the pantry door with a snarl. Jane gasped at the sudden barrage of movement, her hands flying out to grab Sawyer’s shoulders.

“Don’t!” she yelped, but it only made Sawyer shove Ryan again.

“Say it again,” Sawyer challenged, releasing Ryan’s coat a second later, disgusted.

“You guys, stop.” Jane stared at them both with wide, glassy eyes. “We can’t turn against each other.”

Sawyer shook his head. “You’re giving up? Is that it?”

“No,” Jane answered for him. “He’s not. Nobody is giving up.”

“I’m not going to die in here,” Sawyer assured them, taking a backward step.

“Nobody is going to die…” She faltered when she realized that she was wrong. Someone had already died. Lauren was gone forever, and according to Ryan, April didn’t stand a chance. “Ryan?” Her bottom lip trembled. “We’re not going to die out here, right?”

Ryan said nothing.

She tried to compose herself, but her shoulders lurched forward, giving way to a stifled sob. “I have to go back to work. The kids don’t have a sub. I need to at least call in…”

“Jane.” Sawyer reached out to her, his hand grazing her shoulder. It hurt to look at her, hurt to know that he couldn’t do anything to soothe her nerves. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “I promise.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. It’ll be okay.”

Sawyer let his head fall back, staring at the ceiling. Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe there was no way out of there—no possible way they could make it. It was hard to believe that just that morning, less than an hour before, his biggest problem was the wrath of an angry girl. But now, the fabric of the world had changed, reality had shifted, the impossible had become possible.

The blink of an eye.

A snap of the fingers.

Just like that, and everything was different.

Ryan had lost track of time. He knew where he was, knew what he had seen, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember how he had gotten back inside the house, whose idea it had been to pile into the pantry, or what they were waiting for. Because they
were
waiting; otherwise, they would have moved.

Jane had crumpled into a corner. Sawyer was on the opposite side of the room, more than likely contemplating April’s fate—a fate that Ryan hadn’t been very delicate about. He felt guilty about putting those images in Sawyer’s head, but his lapse in sympathy was far outweighed by the way Lauren had stared at him, almost bewildered by the fact that her life was over, that Ryan just stood there not doing a damn thing, because there was nothing left to do. But he could have done
something
. He could have run at that fucking thing, pummeled it with his fists. Maybe he would have scared it off, bought them a few extra seconds, been able to drag Lauren up the road. Maybe if he wouldn’t have been so goddamn scared he could have helped her. But he hadn’t. And now the three of them were sitting in a pantry because of him, rather than fighting.

“Remember why it took us so long to get up here?” he finally asked. Both Jane and Sawyer looked up with matching
expressions—they were surprised to hear him speak. After such a long silence, his own voice made his skin tingle. “The last time we were supposed to come up here was two winters ago, but Jane refused to come up. Remember why?”

“That guy,” she said. “The cross-country skier. It was in the news.”

“It wasn’t just one guy,” Ryan said. “They focused on the one guy because he was a pro, an Olympian, not some amateur on his day off. He did that shit for a living. There were four other people with him.”

“I don’t remember that,” Jane confessed quietly.

Ryan shook his head, tapping a finger against the floor, punctuating his point. “We nearly called this one off too.”

“Wait.” Sawyer sat up from his slouch, squinting at Ryan from across the room. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that we’re not supposed to be here.”

Jane and Sawyer looked at each other. He could see it on their faces—they weren’t getting his point.

“The cross-country team,” he continued. “They were missing for nearly a week. They found the guy dead, found
all
of them dead. They went off the designated trail, which was no big deal because the guy was a pro. And then they found the entire team dead in a snowed-over pass.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. She shot a look at Sawyer, then looked back to her brother. “What happened to them?” she asked.

Ryan shook his head.

“What?” she insisted.

But Ryan remained silent.

“No,” she said, her tone stern. “You can’t just bring something like this up and not finish. What happened to them, Ryan?”

“They thought it was an animal…” he said, sounding almost desperate.

“They were
eaten
?” Jane’s tone rang with alarm.

“Holy shit,” Sawyer whispered.

“And you still brought us here?” She was on the verge of hysteria. “You still brought us here, Ryan? You
knew
there was something out there and you dragged us up here anyway?” A sob wrenched its way out of her chest. “How could you? Lauren’s
gone
,” she cried. “She’s gone.”

“Animal attacks happen all the time,” Sawyer said softly, trying to calm her down. “There’s no way we could have known, Janey. They’re so rare…” But his nerves were buzzing. Those skiers hadn’t been eaten by wolves or bears or anything of the sort. The hellions lived out in those woods. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.

“It was a one-in-a-million chance,” Ryan told them, searching for a sign of understanding, of forgiveness. “One in a billion, Janey.”

“Well, congratulations.” Jane’s words hitched in her throat. “You won…the fucking…lottery.”

“These things…” Ryan hesitated. “They’re like out of a nightmare. They’re impossible. They can’t exist. They’re huge, like seven or eight feet tall. Skinny but strong. They can jump like cats, climb trees…”

Jane’s eyes grew wider with each detail, her expression a mask of horror.

“And their teeth…”

“Their teeth,” Jane whispered, her bottom lip trembling at their mere mention.

Ryan fell silent, staring at the floor, seemingly overwhelmed by his own description, as though listing off their traits somehow solidified that the things he had seen outside were real.

Finally, Jane spoke into the quiet.

“So it’s true, then… We
are
going to die.”

Sawyer watched Ryan ease the pantry door open a crack while he pulled Jane into the farthest corner of the storage room. He stood in front of her like a sentinel, feeling her breath hot against the back of his neck as she jabbed her fingers through the belt loops of his jeans. Had it been any other time, he would have savored being so close, but his attention was on Oona, on thoughts of getting to April. The husky stuck her snout against the crack of the door.

Ryan shot a wary glance over his shoulder. Sawyer could see it in the way he was clinging to Oona’s fur—he was preparing himself for the worst. If the coast was clear, Oona would come get them without incident. If the creatures had somehow gotten inside the house—climbed through broken windows, scavenging for food—she wouldn’t come back at all. Leaning in, Ryan pulled the dog into his arms, momentarily burying his face in her neck. A second later he pulled the door open and let her scramble into the kitchen, allowing her to escape without giving himself enough time to reconsider.

They waited in a silence so oppressive Sawyer had to concentrate on breathing just to get enough air. He was anticipating a terrible yelp, a crash of pots and pans against the floor, a window breaking, or that god-awful clacking of monstrous teeth. His arms broke out in gooseflesh as he pictured one of those creatures catching Oona in its jaws, shaking her like a dog shakes a toy.

Jane moved behind him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. He glanced back at her and she gave him an embarrassed look.

“I need to go,” she whispered.

Sawyer nodded in mute understanding and turned his attention back to Ryan, still crouched beside the door, waiting for his beloved pet to return with good news. Sawyer swallowed against
the lump in his throat, the backs of his eyes suddenly burning at the flash of a childhood memory: crawling into the backseat of a car, needing to pee five minutes later. It was something he’d never get to experience as a father—the frustration, the annoyance, the amusement of a little boy who looked just like him, or a little girl who looked just like April, begging him to pull over. There would be no trips to the toy store, no birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s. He would never get to freeze in the late-October cold, standing on a sidewalk just beyond a stranger’s front door, watching his kid trudge up the front steps, a plastic pumpkin floating just inches from the ground. He wouldn’t get the opportunity to pull into a McDonald’s drive-through and buy a Happy Meal—a secret he and his mini-me would keep from Mom. And the old
Fraggle Rock
episodes he had started collecting the day after April had given him the news—he’d never watch those now, his arm around a little kid, a bowl of popcorn between them both, because Ryan was right—the odds that April was still alive out there were slim to none.