“You ready to do this?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Let’s move.”
CHAPTER TEN
A serrated steak knife affixed to his belt in its Bubble Wrap scabbard, Todd climbed the stepladder and hoisted himself up into the ventilation shaft. His legs kicked out behind him and it required much more strength than he had expected to drag himself forward those first few feet. The shaft itself was about as wide as a coffin—and the comparison did very little to settle Todd’s nerves. His breath reverberated off the aluminum, echoing back into his ears.
He crawled a few feet farther, then paused while he listened to Kate follow him inside. She was a tough chick, Kate Jansen, although he knew there was a softer, more emotional side beneath the surface of her tough, self-reliant exterior. He had caught brief glimpses of it this evening, particularly out by the bronze statue when they’d first come across what looked like the guts of some large animal—or possibly a human being—strewn about in the snow. She was similar to Brianna that way. But of course, just look how all that had turned out.
The divorce wasn’t Brianna’s fault, he thought now, breathing warmth into his cupped hands, his shoulders pressing against the ceiling of the shaft. Brianna wasn’t the one with the problem. I can spend the rest of my life blaming her and hating her, but that won’t change the truth. And it won’t fix the future.
“Okay,” Kate whispered behind him, her voice echoing up through the aluminum chamber. “I’m good.”
Todd began to crawl along on his elbows, feeling the flimsy metal beneath him buckle slightly beneath his weight. It was foolish to have two people in here; their combined weight risked collapsing the structure. Then where would they be?
They continued crawling. Todd hoped to see moonlit slits spilling into the shaft from the ventilation grate on the gun shop’s side, but he could see nothing. Temporarily arrested by panic, he paused and wondered what the hell they’d do if the ductwork wasn’t connected. His heartbeat vibrated against the aluminum.
“You okay?” Kate said, very close behind him. He felt one of her hands graze his ankle. “Is it your leg?”
“Yeah,” he lied. “Just give me a sec.”
Coward, he thought, then pushed on.
He didn’t realize he’d had his eyes pressed shut until he finally opened them and saw those moon-colored slats of light issuing through the gun shop’s ventilation grate. Relief burned through him like a fever. “Up ahead,” he muttered.
“Now we’re cooking,” Kate returned, some humor in her voice.
He reached the grate and pressed his palms against it. It was identical to the one in the Pack-N-Go. The screws would only be accessible from the other side; he’d have to bang this one out of the frame to get it off, and only hoped that it wouldn’t make too much racket.
Before he did so, he pressed his nose to the slats and peered down into the gun shop.
The place looked as quiet and undisturbed as an ancient tomb. Moonlight spilled through the front windows through the twirling snow, casting a bluish-silver haze over the whole place. At that moment, he could have been convinced that he was the only living person on the planet.
“What do you see?” Kate whispered.
“Place is empty.”
“Are you…sure?”
“As sure as I can be, sitting up here in the crow’s nest.” He turned and tried to make out her features in the darkness. “You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
He fisted his hands and proceeded to bang them against the grate. It made less noise than he had anticipated, which was good, but it also felt sturdier than he’d thought, which was not good. It took a good minute to bang the grate out of shape enough for Todd to slip the blade of the knife between the grate and the drywall, and saw away chunks of the Sheetrock. The shaft quickly filled up with floating particles of drywall.
“Try not to breathe this shit in,” he told Kate.
“Just hurry up.” Her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking through the fabric of her shirt pulled over her mouth.
Finally, another two strikes against the grate, and the panel popped off the wall and clattered down to the floor below. Neither Todd nor Kate moved right away, listening to see if the noise had alerted anyone—or anything—else. But all remained silent. Todd pushed himself forward and was soon hanging upside down from the opening in the wall. Kate gripped hold of his ankles and helped ease him forward, but her strength wasn’t enough to combat his weight; she lost her grip and he went crashing to the floor.
“Shit.” Kate’s head poked out of the shaft. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He sat up, rubbing the side of his face and jaw. He’d managed to catch himself midfall, and had landed mostly on his left shoulder.
Standing, he held up his hands to assist Kate. She took his hands and he pulled her out with little difficulty, the blade of her knife scraping along the aluminum as she went. He caught her awkwardly in his arms, almost like a groom about to carry his bride across the threshold, and their eyes lingered on one another for perhaps a second longer than necessary. Then he swung her legs down to the floor as she began slapping the drywall dust from her clothes.
“Do you know anything about guns?” he asked.
“You pull the trigger and it kills someone,” she replied. The shop was cold enough so that they could see their breath.
“That’s about the bulk of it. I say we stick to simple handguns—nothing too complex. I wouldn’t know what to do with anything too fancy.”
Kate was already digging around behind a glass counter. Setting boxes of ammo into stacks, she worked quickly and diligently.
Todd went to the display wall, which was decorated with countless rifles and semiautomatic pistols. He’d fired guns before and had even kept one in the apartment for a while, particularly after the Atlantic City incident, when he thought every creak and groan of the apartment was one of Andre Kantos’s men coming to cut his throat. But anything beyond a typical six-shot revolver was a bit out of his league.
The little he knew about guns he’d learned on his own. His father hadn’t been the type of man to take him hunting, fishing, canoeing. Todd’s old man had spent much of his time carousing and getting drunk, until one spring afternoon Todd’s mother, a typically meager and browbeaten woman with a charitable heart, was struck by an uncharacteristic streak of boldness and spoke the one word that would regain her misplaced sense of self-worth and grant his father the freedom he so obviously desired: divorce. Often, Todd wondered if his old man had been a different person, if he would have turned out to be a different person, too—if things would have been different with Brianna and if he would have been able to see Justin grow up.
You’re an adult now, came a voice in the back of his head—a voice very much like Bree’s. You can’t hand over your blame to other people anymore.
“So, back in the convenience store,” Kate said from behind the counter, “you said you put yourself through law school in two ways. You said the honest way was working construction. What was the dishonest way?”
“Gambling,” he said, selecting various guns from the display wall. He examined each one in the moonlight coming through the front windows.
“You made a lot of money gambling?”
“In the beginning, yeah.”
“But not in the end?”
He looked over at her, but she was busy examining rounds of ammunition. “No one does in the end,” he said.
“That was a racing form in your wallet, wasn’t it? The slip of paper with blood all over it? I recognized it because my dad used to take me to the track when I was a little girl.”
He hefted a nine-millimeter in one hand, surprised by how light it was. “That’s right.”
“You said it was a reminder. A reminder of what?”
“Do we really need to talk about this?”
“No. Not at all. Forget it.”
He tucked the handgun into his waistband and began
searching for more like it. After a few moments of silence, he said, “It’s a reminder of how I fucked up. Brianna—she’s my ex—she left me because I had a problem, got in over my head. There was a time when I owed a lot of people a lot of money. It wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to our son. After she left, I just kept digging myself a deeper hole. I got involved with some not-so-nice guys in Atlantic City, a fella named Andre Kantos and some of his goons, and they showed me the brutal reality of what it meant to owe someone like Kantos a lot of money. That’s my blood on the racing form. They took it out on me pretty good that day, and I spent a lot of time recovering. I was supposed to spend time with my son soon after, but I couldn’t have him see me like that. And I haven’t seen him since.”
The memories burned. Looking down, he saw that his hands were trembling.
Kate came around from behind the counter, her arms burdened with boxes of ammunition. She set them down on a tabletop display, then, much to Todd’s surprise, she hugged him around the shoulders. He smelled the top of her head, a scent that reminded him of waking up in bed with Brianna, and he felt his heart flutter.
“You’ll see your son again soon, Todd,” she told him, finally letting him go. “Real soon.”
He smiled at her, half her face shadowed in darkness, the other half a brilliant white from the moonlight coming in at his back. They were close enough that he could have kissed her without awkwardness, but he let the moment slip by and hated himself an instant later.
“What do you have?” Kate asked, examining the guns Todd had selected. “I want to make sure we’ve got the right bullets.”
“Here.” He handed her one of the handguns. “Do you know how to use this?”
She popped out the magazine, then snapped it back into place. Gripping the slide, she went through the motions of charging the weapon, then pulled the spring-loaded trigger. It clicked dully. “Piece of cake, right?”
“Piece of cake,” he said.
“Todd…”
He was going through the motions with his own weapon now. “Yeah?”
“Todd…” There was slightly more urgency to her voice now.
Todd looked up and saw the frozen expression on Kate’s face as she stared past him and out the front windows. He whipped around, taking an instinctive step backward at the same time. His left shoulder thumped against Kate’s chest.
At first he couldn’t see what Kate saw—just a pitch-black night choked with a heavy snowfall. But then a moment later his mind grasped the wrongness of it. Like a puzzle piece sliding out of position, a section of the snow seemed to unhinge itself from the rest, a compact little vacuum of twirling white filaments sliding into the wind. It passed in front of the windows and paused just at the door, where it seemed to take on a gradual density. The snow began to congeal, the flakes adhering to one another to form a physical shape.
“Oh, Jesus,” Todd breathed. Kate clinging to his back, they proceeded to back farther away from the windows.
A silvery tendril of light briefly ignited at the center of the whirling snow, shimmering like Christmas tinsel. For one horrible moment, Todd was certain he could make out the insinuation of a head taking shape. The thing approached solidity, then wavered back into nothingness, over and over again, as if pulsing with some living current.
“It’s got arms,” Kate said. Her lips brushed against his ear. He could feel her entire body trembling against his. “Does it see us?”
“I don’t think so.”
Suddenly, one of the creature’s limbs became a solid, hooked blade, which it raised above its partially formed head. Kate screamed. Its arm was pale like a corpse’s, its forearm tapering not to a wrist and hand but to a crescent-shaped claw that made Todd think of scythes used to hack down fields of wheat. The arm held solid form long enough for the creature to drive it down into the plate glass. The sound was like an explosion. The entire wall of windows shook. At the point of impact, a bullet-hole opening appeared, a thousand spidery cracks networking like tributaries in every direction.
“Todd!”
A second swipe of that massive, bladed arm turned the window into a shower of ice.
“Run!” Todd screamed, lunging forward to grab the bag of ammunition. Freezing wind filled the shop and blew his hair back from his forehead. He grabbed the bag and yanked it down to the floor. When he looked up, he saw that Kate hadn’t moved; she was standing mesmerized at the whirlwind of snow that floated through the busted window. “Kate! Get out of the way!”
But she didn’t move.
The cloud of snow appeared to rear itself up and, only briefly, looked like a wave about to crash to shore. Todd caught a glimpse of that silvery filament twining in the center of the blustery cloud again. Then he rushed forward and tackled Kate’s legs, dragging her to the carpet. A second later, one of those scythe-like arms crashed through the glass display counter, showering them with crystals of broken glass.
“Come on!” he screamed at her, crawling along the carpet toward the shattered front windows.
There came a sound like the screeching of car tires as the thing behind them shrieked into the night. Blood pumping, Todd jumped to his feet and dove through the opening in the shattered window. Outside, he struck the icy pavement with enough force to fill his mouth with powder from a pummeled tooth. He scrambled quickly to his feet just in time to have Kate slam against his chest, knocking them both backward into the street. Todd’s head rebounded against hard ice and for one terrible moment he feared he was going to pass out.
But Kate was yanking him up onto his feet. He stumbled but rose and she jerked him forward. Like a cartoon character, his boots couldn’t get traction on the ice-slicked ground at first…but when they finally did, he shot forward and hurried after Kate.
Close behind them, that screeching cry shook the world.
They hurried across the square just as two figures emerged from darkened alleyways. They were two of the possessed, human beings with feral faces and eyes that gleamed like jewels. Kate screamed and cut to her right, Todd sticking close to her heels. A third figure sprung out of the darkness and Kate swung the bag of ammo at its head, knocking the shape backward into the shadows.
“There!” Kate shouted, pointing to a narrow avenue that wended through more deserted-looking houses. At the end of the street, the dark fingerlike structure of the church rose up against the black sky.
“Go!” Todd shouted, not daring to catch a glance over his shoulder. “Run!”
Kate took off toward the church, the bag of ammunition swinging like a pendulum. Todd stumbled but got back on his feet quickly, chasing after her. He felt the gun in his waistband beginning to come loose, so he grabbed it and held it in one hand as he ran.
The church was at the crest of a snow-covered hill and surrounded by burly lodgepole pines. Through the curtain of snow, the building seemed to tremble in the night. Kate rushed up the steps to the massive doors. She tugged on the wrought-iron handles but the doors wouldn’t open.
Todd hurried up the steps beside her. It was only then that he paused to look down at the road. “Shit.” A few of the townspeople were running after them up the street.
“It’s locked,” Kate said, nearly in disbelief. “It’s a church and it’s fucking locked…” She began banging on the doors and shouting.
“Better give me some of that ammo,” Todd barked. He’d already popped the magazine out of the pistol.
Kate dropped to her knees and sifted through the bag. Down below, the townspeople were closing in. Worse still, it appeared that sections of the sky were shifting, coming together to form partially solid masses that oozed across the treetops.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned.
“Here! Here!” Kate shoved a box of nine-millimeter rounds at him. Then she spun around and screamed, her back against the locked doors of the church.
Todd fumbled with the box of ammo. His hands numb from the cold, he dropped it, sending the rounds in every possible direction. “Shit
!” Dropping to his knees, he began to scoop them up and load them one at a time into the clip.
“Hurry, Todd!”
“I’m trying!”
A man in ripped jeans and a blood-soaked sweatshirt was already scrambling up the stone steps of the church.
“Todd!”
Todd slammed the magazine home and charged the pistol. He didn’t need to aim; their attacker was a mere three feet from them when Todd pulled the trigger and took the man’s face apart. Again, Kate screamed. She had both hands clamped to her ears. Todd’s hand trembled as he kept the gun aimed in. The man’s body folded backward down the steps like a Slinky, his limbs rubbery and lifeless. Then, just as they’d seen happen when Shawna had killed that man in the street outside the Pack-N-Go, the newly dead man’s body began to tremble and buck. Something vaguely vaporous began to withdraw itself from the corpse. Except for a milky opaqueness, it was practically invisible…although looking through it was like looking through heat waves rising off a desert highway. Behind it, the world was distorted.
Kate shrieked and pointed toward the road. Two more townspeople were running toward them, their strides impracticably long. They galloped like horses.
Todd fired two shots but both missed.
“Shoot better!” Kate screamed. “Shoot better!”
“I’m trying!”
The thing that had extricated itself from the dead man’s body now hovered before them like a phantom. It was comprised of snow, though the snow itself shimmered like crystal, and again Todd could make out that slender filament of silver at its core. That’s its soul. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It’s alive and it has a soul.
Todd fired the pistol at it but the bullet passed right through it. In his head, he heard Shawna saying, They’re like smoke.
That silvery filament grew brighter just as the semblance of an arm began to form. Once again, Todd could make out the curling blade of its arm…and he could see it grow into solidity right before his eyes.
This is where we die, he thought. We die now.