The Shuddering (27 page)

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Sawyer yelled, dropping the shovel once he was sure it was dead. His hands flew into his hair as he backed away.

“The food is gone,” Ryan announced, stepping back into the living room. He covered his nose and mouth a second later, shielding himself from the noxious stench of rotten eggs.

“Gone?” Jane turned her attention to her brother, startled.

“It raided the fridge, tossed it all onto the floor.”

That left them with nothing but what was in the pantry, which wasn’t much at all. She looked back to the creature at her feet, taking a couple of steps back. “It was hungry,” she said softly.

“You think?” Ryan asked, his tone verging on sarcastic.

Pressing a hand to her lips, she felt another breakdown coming on, bubbling at the pit of her stomach like a witches’ brew. She swiped at her eyes, looking away.

“What the hell is this thing?” Sawyer asked, refusing to approach it. “Look at the teeth.” They were massive, predatory fangs stained a deep yellow.

Jane chewed on her bottom lip, considering an idea that was rolling around in her head, not sure whether it was ingenious or
absolutely stupid. All she knew was that if more of those things showed up for a fight, she and the boys probably wouldn’t be as lucky next time.

Taking a seat on the edge of the couch, she stared at the gun still held fast in her hands. “I think maybe we should use this to our advantage.”

Neither Ryan nor Sawyer said anything, and while she didn’t look up from the firearm in her grasp, she knew they were staring at her.

“Aren’t there rubber gloves in the garage?” she asked, finally leveling her gaze on her brother.

“I think so,” Ryan nodded, then shook his head just as quickly. “Rubber gloves for
what
?”

Jane slid the gun onto the coffee table, her fingers dancing on its edge. And then she swept the largest Ginsu knife in their arsenal off the carpet, inspecting it. Ryan slowly glanced over to Sawyer, a dark expression drifting across his face. And from the way Ryan’s mouth turned up at one corner, she knew it was a good idea. It very well may have been a
great
idea. And it was all hers.

Sawyer couldn’t believe they were going to go through with it. He and Ryan were putting all their weight into trying to get the monster up the single step and into the kitchen. Despite its emaciated look, the thing weighed a ton. Sawyer’s fingers were on fire as he yanked on the blue tarp, the creature sliding along the carpet inch by inch as they dragged it, Sawyer’s joints screaming against the tension as he leaned back and pulled.

The plastic sheeting slid across the hardwood of the kitchen far easier than it had across the plush carpet in the living room, and for a moment the boys stopped what they were doing, deliberating whether they wanted to do this in the kitchen or the
garage. But the garage had a steep flight of stairs leading down into it. They’d have to make multiple trips after they hacked the thing to pieces—up and down the stairs with body parts. The kitchen was a better idea. The door was right there. All they’d have to do was open it and hurl the pieces onto the porch.

Jane took a seat in one of the dining chairs and covered her nose and mouth as the boys began to unwrap their gruesome package. Sawyer had seen his share of movies; he was waiting for it to twitch, to rear up and snap its teeth at them like a cheap jump scare. But the thing was motionless. He wrinkled his nose at the stench, not sure if it was the creature’s blood that stank or whether the thing spent its free time rolling around in its own excrement.

Ryan made a face as soon as he unwrapped the tarp and that fetid smell hit him head-on. Jane murmured an “oh god” when the stink finally made it across the kitchen to where she sat. Ryan swept the butcher knife off the kitchen island, the blade glinting with cold winter light. Outside, the snow continued to fall. Sawyer decided to keep his skepticism to himself, trying to convince himself that this was a good, solid plan, their
only
plan. But if it continued to snow, their work would be under inches of powder before any of the others could sniff it out.

He watched Ryan lean in, hovering over the creature that had nearly taken them out, poking at the dead thing with the tip of the knife like a curious kid. The blade scraped across one of the creature’s fangs, setting Sawyer’s teeth on edge.

“Look at the eyes,” Ryan said, noting the beads of onyx deeply set above those gaping jaws. “No eyelids. And the hands…” They nearly looked human, albeit flattened out, the fingers gruesomely crooked and long.

“Hurry up,” Jane told them from behind a cupped palm. “It stinks.”

“What’s this supposed to accomplish again?” Ryan asked, seemingly hesitant to hack up the thing in front of her.

“They might have an aversion to the scent of their own blood, or the sight of their own kind dead somewhere. Some animals see the corpses of their own species as a sign of danger. They avoid it.”

“And if these things don’t avoid it?” Ryan asked. When Jane failed to reply, he looked back down to the corpse and took a breath. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, and before Sawyer could step back, he plunged the knife into the creature’s chest. Jane gasped and looked away, but the blade hardly pierced the thing’s flesh, striking the breastbone, leaving Ryan struggling to free the knife. A moment later he straightened out of his crouch, cleared his throat, and made an announcement. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I need to get the ax.”

Jane’s eyes went wide.

“
What?
” Sawyer asked, blinking at his friend. He couldn’t believe it. They had fought that thing off with fireplace tools when they could have been swinging a hatchet.

Ryan threw his hands up in surrender. “I forgot about it,” he confessed. “It slipped my fucking mind.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sawyer shook his head, backing away from the cadaver on the kitchen floor. “Are you sure that snowplow I asked you about doesn’t exist?”

Ryan scoffed. “You got me. It’s there. So is the helicopter that’ll whisk us to safety. I’ll grab the keys.”

“We could have been killed,” Sawyer insisted. “That thing nearly took off my shoulder. I mean, really?”

“What do you want me to say?” Ryan asked. “I couldn’t take inventory of the garage that doesn’t belong to me because I was busy
shitting my pants
.”

“What if it had gone after Jane?” Sawyer shot back, aggression tingeing his tone.

“Jesus, seriously?”

“How would you have felt if it had got her and
then
you remembered the ax, Ryan?”

“Hey, guys?” Jane rose from her seat.

“I would have been thrilled,” Ryan said. “Really happy. I’d have thrown a goddamn party.”

“Yeah?” Sawyer challenged. “And I bet if she was outside you would have gone out there to find her, right? No matter how big of a risk.”

Ryan’s expression wavered from defensive to guilt ridden. He looked away, and Sawyer immediately regretted going there. He knew Ryan was doing the best he could. He was trying to protect them, trying to keep his shit together despite watching Lauren get torn apart, trying to be the voice of reason while Sawyer swung from cautious to utterly reckless, ready to stomp into the snow like some kamikaze with nothing left to lose.

“Sorry,” Sawyer said quietly.

Ryan didn’t respond. He marched down the hallway, a flashlight beam illuminating his path.

Sawyer and Jane were left to stare at each other. She tried to look confident, but it was obvious that she was questioning her own plan.

“You think this will work?” Sawyer asked, if only to breach the silence, to keep himself from looking back down at the thing between them.

“I think so,” she said after a moment, but she didn’t sound sure of herself. He supposed that was just as well. How could they be sure of anything with a nightmare lying at their feet?

“It’s a good idea,” he said after a moment, watching her vacillate between going through with it or calling the whole thing off. “You’re right; we can use its scent to disguise ourselves. If it was
just me and Ryan, we’d spend all night kicking the shit out of it or something.”

The flashlight beam bounced at the end of the hallway before Jane could reply. Ryan was returning from the garage.

“Hold this,” Ryan said, handing Jane the flashlight. She pointed it at the creature’s head, and without so much as a warning, Ryan reeled back and brought the blade down on the dead thing’s neck.

R
yan took out his anguish on the corpse at his feet. Every ax swing was for Lauren.
Whack.
That was for never seeing her face again.
Whack.
For the sound of her laughter. Her smell. The taste of her lips—a taste he’d never know. He felt nothing but grief as he chopped off that toothy bastard’s apelike arms, didn’t even flinch when he buried the ax blade in its chest and cracked open its ribs.

He threw down the ax and drew his sleeve across his face, then looked over his shoulder at his sister. To his surprise, her eyes were locked on the bloody mess that he’d created. The girl who couldn’t handle a bit of gore on television without covering her eyes was now mesmerized by the copious amounts of foul-smelling blood. That was what the stink had been—rotten eggs and the sharp scent of iron—and the fact that he had split open some sort of organ hadn’t helped matters. Ryan waited for her to look up at him, hoping to God she wasn’t going into shock. When she finally lifted her chin, he nodded at her as if to tell her that everything was fine.

“Check on Oona?” he asked her. That dog was smart. She hadn’t set foot in the kitchen to see what they were doing, remaining in the warmth of a dying fire, the embers giving the living room a haunting glow. Jane slithered out of her seat and carefully stepped around the gore that the tarp failed to contain. Ryan knew there was going to be blood, but he had no idea how much. It seemed like an impossible amount, as though the size of
the body couldn’t have contained all that fluid. Yet there it was, oozing across blue plastic, creeping across the hardwood floor.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

Sawyer swallowed, then reluctantly nodded, snapping a latex glove onto his left hand before pulling another one on top of that, doubling up for good measure. “We’re going to have to be quick,” Ryan warned. “I don’t want to be in the middle of doing this when another one of these motherfuckers decides to make an appearance.”

“Or gets curious,” Sawyer said, giving a firmer nod of the head this time.

“God,” Ryan groaned, a bloodied glove grabbing hold of the doorknob. “This thing reeks.” He jerked the door open and stepped back to the carcass, plunging his hands into its body cavity before hurling the offal into the snow.

Jane stared at the mess at her feet, the contents of the refrigerator unsalvageable, the food that would have sustained them for at least a week completely destroyed. She began to pick up the mess, tossing crushed containers and broken glass into a trash bag, wondering what the hell they were going to do. The snow just beyond the kitchen door was now strewn with body parts and entrails. Despite the moon’s dim shine, she didn’t need the light to see the dark streaks—black in the moonlight but red in reality—decorating a once pristine white surface like abstract art. She didn’t know whether the smell of one of their own would repel the others or attract them, but this was the only way to find out. They’d either avoid the area entirely, repulsed by the scent of the dead, or fall onto it like carrion birds, hungrily picking it apart until there was nothing left.

Not even sure why she was bothering to clean the mess, she left the trash bag beside the fridge and stepped around the island, the two people she loved most in this life squatting around the remains of a monstrous body. Ryan was decorated with a spray of blood, a smear of red streaking his cheek like a brushstroke. Sawyer had gotten gore onto his arms, that beloved T-shirt completely ruined, offering no protection against whatever disease may have been lingering in that creature’s fluids. Both of them turned to look at her when she stepped into view, their gazes strange in their expectancy, as if waiting for the schoolteacher to tell them what was next.

“I think we need to leave,” she told them. “Today, when the sun comes up.”

She watched their faces mirror each other in emotion, shifting from anticipation to a worried sort of surprise. Ryan rose from his crouch next to the tarp, his arms at his sides, rubber gloves slick with blood.

“I thought we were supposed to wait to see what happens,” he said. “Wasn’t that the plan?”

“Yes, but the longer we stay here, the more opportunity they have to attack too.” No matter how much they planned and waited, there really was no guarantee of safety. No matter what they chose to do, it was going to be dangerous.

“You know that if we do that,” he said, his voice strangely dry, as though he’d just woken up from an eternity of sleep, “there’s no turning back. Once we leave here, we can’t come back.”

Sawyer stood motionless next to the kitchen door, his eyes fixed on the floor, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Jane looked away from him, knowing that his thoughts were with April. But Sawyer eventually spoke, though he never lifted his gaze.