The creature moved, but not quickly enough. The candle hit it on the side of the face (if you could call that cracked slab of ice a face) and slid down to its torso and the mess of writhing tentacles. The beast shrieked a high-pitched, broken-glass shriek and pulled all of its limbs in on itself, wrapping itself up like a mummy. The candle hit the floor, smoking but no longer on fire, and the room darkened.
“Bub! Run!”
She turned toward the door and heard him right behind her. As they hurried into the hall, she grabbed the knob and pulled the bedroom door shut. She had no idea if the creature would be able to open the door, if it would be able to follow them, but a closed door would at least slow it down for a second.
Just as the door hit the jamb, something pounded against it from the other side. The knob shook in Tess’s hand. The whole wall seemed to shake.
The whole wall? More like the whole damn house.
She backed away, and Bub backed up right beside her, limping worse than ever, never looking away from the door, never losing contact with her leg. Tess put a hand on his head, trying to reassure him as best she could. Or maybe trying to reassure herself. Her teeth continued to chatter. The cold seeped into every last one of her muscles and bones.
The thing struck the door again.
BAM.
Tess realized it wouldn’t need to know how to work the doorknob. Before long, it would break right through the door. Their doors weren’t cheap, contractor-grade things, but they weren’t exactly stone solid either.
She turned around and led Bub into the living room.
What are you going to do? What can you do?
She ran to the fire and huddled in front of it, shivering. The logs burned and sent waves of heat out across her chest, arms, legs, and face. Bub sat down beside her, shaking, whining. She put her arm around his neck and tried to think.
You have to go on the offensive. If you wait for it to come to you, it will. It will come, and it will tear you to bits.
She stared into the fire. The creature had seemed terrified of her little candle. What if she brought something bigger this time?
The thing smacked the bedroom door again. The sound boomed through the hallway and into the living room. Tess jumped, and the muscles in Bub’s neck tightened.
She started to tell him it would be okay, but before she could so much as open her mouth, something thudded in the kitchen. Tess looked up, and the piece of cardboard Warren had taped over the window slid across the linoleum. It had a thick sheet of ice and snow on it and a crater in the middle where it looked like something had kicked it in.
Another series of thuds echoed through the kitchen and into the living room. Like footsteps. Except she didn’t guess you called them footsteps if the creature making them had no feet.
The thing in the kitchen let out a long, hissy shriek.
Tess looked down at Bub.
They were surrounded.
17
For a second, Warren didn’t know where he was. It was worse than wake-up-in-the-wrong-bed disorientation. More confusing. More impossible. Because he wasn’t in a bed at all, wasn’t even in a room. Torrents of icy flecks rained onto his face, and biting wind blew across his body. He thought this might be the furthest from a warm, safe room he’d ever been.
He felt himself sliding on his back through the snow, felt some thick coil of something wrapped around his leg and dragging him up one drift and down another. And then, suddenly, he felt his broken arm flapping along behind him, bumping up and down as he slid along. He screamed, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to ignore the pulses of pain coming from the limb, but ignoring them was impossible. Every bump in the ground brought fresh, white-hot agony. He tried to flip the broken arm up onto his chest, but he couldn’t seem to move it. Couldn’t seem to move either arm, for that matter, or much of the rest of his body.
Paralyzed?
No, probably not, or not completely anyway—if he was, he wouldn’t be able to feel the pain in his arm, would he?—but definitely numb, stunned. He lifted his head, and new pain racked his body. He remembered the tentacle swinging into his face, remembered the wet smack of impact. He had lost his scarf, and he thought he felt something sticky on his cheek, maybe blood, or maybe just a smear of mushy snow. Still, he could move his head, despite the pain. He opened his eyes and blinked through the blizzard at the creature ahead.
It had him by the ankle, its tentacle looped around his leg twice. He saw the tip of his sock and suddenly remembered his boots were still back in the snow; the creature had knocked him right out of them. From the looks of it, the tentacle was squeezing so tightly it had probably cut off circulation to Warren’s foot, but he couldn’t tell one way or the other. There was no sensation down there. He felt only the pain in his arm and head. Pain and a whole lot of cold.
The creature rolled on, moving smoothly over the snow but jerking Warren unevenly, as if purposefully trying to make the ride as rough and painful as possible.
What is this thing? What does it want with you? Where’s it taking you?
Of course, Warren had no idea. No kinds of answers. He was just happy he wasn’t dead, that the thing hadn’t pulverized him back there in the snow, eaten his brains and laid its eggs in his corpse (or whatever the hell it planned to do with him). For now, he was alive, which meant he still had a chance to get away. A good chance? Who knew? But Warren would take a bad chance over no chance at all.
With the sheets of snow flying into his face and more of the stuff puffing up around him as the monster dragged him along, it was hard to see much of anything, but Warren did his best to make out where they were, where they were going. He thought he saw a few trees to one side and then a few more to the other, mostly obscured in the storm. The creature didn’t seem to be doing any weaving back and forth, so Warren guessed they were still on the road. And going down. Despite his remaining disorientation, he could feel the slight pull of gravity. They were heading down the mountain.
Warren laid back against the snow. It was a far damn cry from comfortable, but his hood did cushion his head somewhat, and it was less painful than trying to keep his neck craned. Anyway, he didn’t see what other option he had. He could barely move and definitely wouldn’t be able to fight his way free, not the way the thing had its tentacle wrapped around his leg. Until some opportunity presented itself, he figured he might as well lay as still as possible and try to keep his arm from bouncing all over the place.
The creature moved forward, jerked Warren, moved forward, jerked Warren. Every yank sent another explosion of pain through his body. Warren didn’t think he’d be able to withstand the agony much longer, thought he’d faint and wake up two days later in this thing’s den with bits of his body chewed off. Or not wake up at all. Maybe these were the last minutes of his life, just a few more moments of hellacious existence.
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on staying awake, staying alive, and eventually he got used to the movement, to the rhythm: pain, less pain, pain, less pain. He couldn’t ignore the aching throbs entirely, but he got to a point where he could at least think around them.
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
Not that the thoughts were especially worth thinking: you failed Tess. You were supposed to get her help, you were supposed to save her, but what’s she supposed to do now?
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
If this thing kills you, how long will she last?
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
He imagined her sitting by the fire, coughing into her fist, taking the hand away and finding it covered in thick, dripping blood. And then he had an even worse thought: what if this creature dragging him down the road wasn’t the only one of its kind? What if there were more of them at the house, terrorizing Tess, dragging her out into the snow and dismembering her? What if her cough was fine but the house was overrun by monsters?
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
He wanted to tell himself that wasn’t possible, th
at she was fine, that there was no way there were more of these things at the house. But who was to say what was possible? After tonight, after getting attacked by this icy snake-pile of an abomination, wasn’t just about anything possible?
He gritted his teeth and grunted his way through another slide and jerk.
How much farther?
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
How could he possibly tell? He had no idea where they were going. Maybe into the woods, maybe into town, maybe into a field full of the beasts for a good old-fashioned game of tug-of-Warren.
(sliiiiiiiide jerk)
(sliiiiiiiide…)
They stopped. Warren tensed, sure the thing was just playing with him, waiting for him to let down his guard before it yanked him forward again, but when they still hadn’t moved after another few seconds, Warren opened his eyes.
The thing stood between two shallow drifts of snow, its tentacles undulating but not writhing about as intensely as they had been earlier. The creature had no eyes or ears that Warren could see, so it was hard to tell what it was doing, what it was looking at or listening to or smelling, but it seemed to be leaning slightly in one direction, toward the barely visible trees along the side of the road. From the looks of it (he still couldn’t feel anything but his arm and his freezing face) the monster hadn’t relaxed its grip on his ankle, but Warren thought this might be his best chance to escape. His only chance.
He prepared himself, took a deep breath, tensed his muscles, and was just about to give his leg the world’s almightiest tug when a burst of blinding light filled the air between him and the monstrosity.
A wave of heat rolled over his face, and the monster screeched its ringing, broken-glass scream. Warren tried to blink away the light and the heat, but what he saw next was mostly a blur of black and white, like an old, out-of-focus film: the monster brought its limbs (all of them) up to its head, screeching all the while, letting go of Warren in the process. Something flew through the blizzard, and although Warren couldn’t tell what it was at first, he made it out just before it struck the creature.
A glass bottle. Flaming at one end. There was a name for a thing like that, something Russian sounding, although Warren couldn’t remember it at the moment. He guessed it didn’t matter.
The bottle hit the monster halfway up its body and exploded in another burst of bright light. Warren closed his eyes and turned his head away. The heat of the explosion warmed the side of his face, and the thing shrieked louder than ever. When he looked back up, half the creature’s body was just gone. Its tentacles slithered around the ground and over one another, spasming, sometimes thumping into the ground with soft thuds. Some of the tendrils lay in the snow, separated from the body, glistening at the end where they’d melted away. The thing had a deep crater in its torso and was using its tentacles to pull snow from the surrounding drifts, trying to fill in the hole.
A third flaming bottle arced through the air. Warren couldn’t see the thrower, but whoever it was, he or she had some great aim. The bottle hit the creature dead on and exploded.
This time, the thing’s scream had a different sound to it, a kind of gurgle, like a draining bathtub. Streamers of water ran down its body, and it doubled over (or melted in half, really; it seemed to have lost control of itself). It continued pulling snow onto and into itself, but more slowly now, less accurately. Clumps of snow rolled across the beast’s body, flew into the air and came back down with muffled plops.
Two blurs moved through the snow beyond the creature. Two people, it looked like. The first had another flaming bottle. The person widened his stance, and the bottle flew through the air. It landed in the snow just shy of the writhing creature. For a second, nothing happened, but then the bottle exploded. A cloud of snow puffed up from the ground, and something whizzed past Warren’s face.
Glass probably. After four explosions, he was shocked he hadn’t gotten a shard or two in the face. No doubt his layers of snow gear had absorbed at least a few bits of shrapnel.
This thought, of course, brought memories of Tess, of her lying on the kitchen floor amid the broken glass, of her poor, lacerated face and the mess of blood all over the bathroom and living room.
Please let her be okay. Please, oh please, oh please.
The two shapes moved closer. The second held another flaming object. Warren thought it must have been another bottle,
(Molotov cocktail)
but as the couple moved closer, he saw it was actually a small butane torch, blue and cylindrical, the kind of thing a plumber uses. The torch carrier (both people wore scarves over their faces, and Warren couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought this second one had a woman’s build) hurried over to the creature and lowered the torch’s flame to its head. The thing started to wrap a tentacle around her legs, but before it could tighten its grip, the limb went limp. The monster gurgled one last time, shuddered, and then stilled.
Warren pushed himself up on his elbows and fell back into the snow screaming when he accidentally put pressure on his broken arm. The bottle thrower hurried over to Warren, leaned over him, asked if he was okay. The voice was a man’s and familiar.
Warren tried to answer, tried to tell the guy about his broken arm, but he couldn’t find the words. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, he wasn’t able to produce anything but unintelligible sobs.
“We need to get you away from here,” the man said, yelling it over the wind.
And Warren remembered where he’d heard the voice before. It made sense once he’d forced the information through his dazed mind. Up here in the middle of nowhere, there was really only one person (or two people, he guessed) he’d had any chance of running into: the Youngs.
Mr. Young (Rick, he was pretty sure the guy’s first name was Rick) had a faint New England accent. You could hear it in his missing Rs: heah instead of here.
“My wife,” Warren said. “I…I have to…” He tried for the next word. And tried again. But his mouth and throat wouldn’t cooperate.
“Jan,” Rick yelled through the storm, “come help me get him.” He bent down further and dug into the snow under Warren, getting his arm around his back. Warren winced but managed to grab Rick’s neck with his good arm. He wanted to resist, to insist he had to turn around and go back for his wife, but he just…couldn’t…do it. Every last one of his body parts was shaking, and his lips might as well have been frozen together. Maybe they were.
“My arm,” Warren managed. “Broken”
Rick helped him into a sitting position and touched his limp arm gingerly. “We’ll have to get it into a sling,” he said. “Can’t just leave it like that. I’m going to unzip your snowsuit.”
Warren nodded.
Rick managed to remove the upper half of the snowsuit without causing Warren a lot of pain, although Warren could tell he was fighting the urge to hurry, to get out of here.
Jan made it over to them. She’d turned off the torch and stuck it into the side pocket of her snowsuit. She knelt in the snow by Warren’s legs.
Rick took off his scarf, tied it around Warren’s neck, and made a makeshift sling. He and Jan helped Warren ease the broken arm into the loop of fabric.
“It’s not perfect,” Rick said.
Warren thanked him anyway, and the three of them worked together to get his snowsuit back on, letting the now-empty sleeve hang to the side.
They stood. Warren put his good arm around Rick’s neck, and Jan curled her arm around Warren’s waist. Warren’s socks did nothing to protect his feet from the snow. They were wet, clinging. But his arm and head hurt too much for him to worry about his feet. The arm was better in the sling, curled up in the snowsuit, but not by a lot.
The three of them shuffled past the dead creature. Many of its parts were still intact, piled on top of the melted jag of ice that had been its torso and head. Sleet fell all around them, stinging Warren’s face, obscuring the world.
The Youngs helped Warren along for what seemed like a long time; the
n something appeared in the snow ahead. Not another creature, although that was Warren’s first terrified thought, but a squat, rectangular object that turned out to be a small snowmobile.
A snowmobile? Wouldn’t you have heard the engine?
He doubted it. He’d been unconscious, the dazed and still very out of it.
The vehicle had a compartmentalized box strapped to the back with a pair of bungee cords. Most of the compartments held glass bottles with strips of fabric hanging from the mouths. The Molotov cocktails, a makeshift arsenal. There was a second butane torch among the bottles, and although Warren didn’t think it was probably a good idea to keep those items in the same box, he didn’t say anything, was too tired to say anything.
“Get on,” Rick yelled. “It’ll be a tight fit, but the three of us should be able to squeeze together and get to town.”
Town? No, you can’t do that, you can’t leave her behind.
Warren tried one more time to stop them, to tell them about Tess, to convince them he needed to turn around. He tugged Rick’s sleeve and opened his mouth, but a flurry of icy snow hit him in the face, choked him; he coughed and spat out the slush.
“Get on,” Rick repeated. He had three heads now, all slithering around one another like a snow monster’s tentacles.
Warren started to laugh and sobbed instead. “House,” he said, barely managing to mumble the word.
Rick shook his heads. “Can’t. We just barely got out. Place is overrun with those bastards.”
His heads rotated, spun, blurred into and out of existence.
He’s talking about his house. He doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t. How can he when you barely do.
Rick guided him toward the snowmobile. Warren tried to turn out of his grasp, but he couldn’t do it. The world had become a white whirlpool of a thing. He only just managed to stay on his feet.
Jan got on the vehicle first, Warren slumped down behind her, trying not to sandwich his broken arm between them but unable to avoid it, and Rick sat down in the back. He wrapped his arms around Warren and his wife, holding the three of them together. They had to intertwine their legs to keep them from dangling to the sides.