by Adam Vine
Blind hunters, perfectly adapted to the cold and the darkness, I thought. I need to get the hell out of here, now.
I was food to them, nothing but warm meat that was slightly superior to the kind they were used to eating. Wherever I was, I was no longer in Country, or any place on Earth. I didn’t know how I’d gotten here, or why, only that I had to keep running.
By the next ridge, the lights were so close that I could make out the outskirts of a city bordered by a vast, frozen river. But the lights weren’t static. They were moving, skimming through the pale, interstitial clouds of blizzard as if on guided tracks, occasionally disappearing behind the vague shape of a building only to reappear again a fraction of a second later.
Just need to make it across the river, I thought, beginning my descent down the mire of snowdrifts that covered the gentle slope of the riverbank. They won’t follow. Dear God, please don’t let them follow. If I can get across, someone can help me. They can give me warmth, shelter, food. Need to get across. Need to…
I dismounted the bank and set one numb, shaking foot down to test the ice. I remembered from being in the Scouts that ice needed to be at least three inches thick to support the weight of an adult human. The ice was solid from shore to shore, so I estimated it had to be at least that thick. It was risky, but falling through the ice and drowning in a frozen river seemed a lot better than whatever the Snowmen would do to me.
As soon as my foot was on the ice, black figures began swarming down the riverbank above me. I took a deep, chilly breath, said a faithless prayer, and stepped out onto the ice. I couldn’t run at a full sprint, but the thin layer of snow made the ice less slippery than I anticipated, and I could move at a slow jog.
When I was halfway across, and the glimmering lights of the opposite shore were closer than the black silhouette of bluffs I’d left behind, I glanced back to see how much the Snowmen had caught up.
They were still standing on the riverbank, arguing with each other and slashing at the air with their bone-axes. Not even one had set foot on the ice. Their cries went lost in the cruel howl of the wind, but I could tell from their gesticulations they were furious that I’d escaped.
The river marks the edge of their territory, I realized. They’re scared of it, or whatever lies beyond it. I’m safe. I’m going to live.
The ice cracked under my feet before I heard the sound. It was like missing the bottom step when you’re drunk and trying to walk down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night. The world split, and black, freezing water swallowed me. Stabbing knives of ice perforated my lungs. I tried to stay calm, but the water was so cold it hurt.
Fuck shit it’s cold holy shit it’s cold-
Open your eyes. Swim to the surface. There’s space under the ice. Air. At least half an inch. Breathe. Then find the opening you fell through and pull yourself back up.
I forced my eyes open. The water stung bitterly, but that was the only difference. I had plunged into a world of darkness absolute. I couldn’t see my hands inches in front of my face. No light penetrated the ice to guide me back to the hole I’d fallen through.
I didn’t know which way was down or up, left or right. As my breath expanded and my lungs began to give, I became a primal, pure state of being guided by terror and mammalian instinct. Water entered my nostrils. I spun and flailed, but my hands and feet touched nothing but a dark, empty infinity. It was in my mouth and lungs, searing my insides like frozen fire. I couldn’t cough. I couldn’t breathe.
Going to die going to die why Jesus why God why fuck
A periscopic filter collapsed my vision down to the head of a pin. My thrashing subsided to a defeated series of numbing twitches. In my last seconds of coherence, I thought about how I’d never see Kashka again, and would never finish translating Arkadius. I hated all the people who would get to do the things I wanted to, but never could.
Cold. Hurts. Lungs going to pop. Hurts. Cold. Goodbye.
A muted crack reverberated somewhere below me and a brilliant white light pierced the darkness. A hard, sharp hand snagged my foot and pulled me down, down, down toward that harsh, terrible light.
I’m dying. This is the end. I’m not ready. I don’t want to go yet. Why
My feet broke through the surface of the river, followed quickly by my legs, chest, and face. I flew down toward the sky, the shattered moonscape of floodlit ice vanishing above my head. Sputtering, choking, coughing up water that spewed from my mouth and nose, I swung through the air like a crane-lifted corpse as the light examined me.
Not dead. Not heaven. Not hell. Not oblivion. Alive. Something has me. Can’t let go. Can’t fall. Too high up. Oh God, what the hell is that?
The light filled my inverted vision, jerking me left, then right, and finally straight up again, then spun me so I was no longer upside down. A pair of huge armored claws were wrapped around my torso, made of some clear kind of metal, all tangled and gnarled and cold, not crushing me, but still closed too tight for me to get free on my own.
The light in my eyes brightened and an air horn blasted in my face.
Saved me. Won’t kill me. Can’t breathe. Can’t move. Not yet. Can’t die now.
The spotlight suddenly shifted off me, the fleshy stalk it was attached to aiming back toward the shore. Bioluminescence...?
The thing carrying me was huge, terrible and old, its face a crusted chitin mask as pale as porcelain, all clothed in a suit of translucent armored shell that split the light like a prism. It had a curved, demonic beak surrounded by dozens of glowing, pinhole eyes. Its body was a naked bulb of scars and legs, twelve slender, bladed spires that moved in perfect concert, each twice the height of a man. It looked like some kind of giant, alien louse, like you’d see in a heavily magnified photograph in a biology textbook, but adapted to walk and hunt on land.
The Louse’s movement was so fluid I barely felt when it turned and began to run back toward the shore. In an instant I understood that the lights I’d seen hadn’t been streetlights, but a pack of these same giant Lice hunting along the fast-approaching riverbank.
The Lice’s headlights bobbed together in a silent rhythm. Waiting for me, I thought. Waiting for us.
I thrashed and writhed in the Louse’s grip, slamming my fists and knees into its bulky, transparent claws, but the motion only made it close its grip tighter. I choked on the breath and cold water being forced out of my lungs. My skin, nostrils, and eyes screamed in the freezing air. My soaked clothes were already stiffening with frost, making it harder and harder to move my arms and legs. A violent chill rolled through my body and I stopped fighting, too cold and sick to do anything but shiver.
I’m sorry God. I’m sorry Car. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better man. I’m sorry. I’m
Something exploded less than a dozen yards away, near the cluster where the other Lice were gathered. The heart-shaking boom slithered across the ice, hitting me with a harsh blast of pressure and a stinging shrapnel rain. I screamed as tongues of smoke and flame lashed the Louse’s carapace.
When I opened my eyes, the other Lice were gone, reduced to nothing but patches of gore-splattered snow. White-hot bullets of molten shell and scorched meat clung in my hair and on my skin. The smell reminded me of burned crab.
A human voice shouted from the swathes of dead brush lining the riverbank: “We’ve got a live one!” the woman said; then, “Vermin! Attack!”
A dozen shadows materialized out of the darkness around me. Something hissed next to my head. The Louse carrying me groaned as an arrow sprouted from one of the armpit joints in its shell. It aimed the polyps of its flame stalks at the shapes running through the murk, there was a clunk, clunk, clunk like an old engine starting, and twin streams of blue fire sprouted toward the running shapes, turning the night as bright as day.
But it was too late for the Louse; the arrow had found its mark and severed a nerve. The gouts of fire from its mandibles struck wide as one leg wilted under us and the Louse tilted, crumbling into a st
eep snowdrift, the flames carving a harmless, steaming streak from the riverbank. The Vermin were already gone, their dark shapes vanished back into the drifting pillars of smoke.
I braced myself against the Louse’s claws as we toppled over. The snow was deep, so I wasn’t hurt.
A tiny avalanche piled down on us from the upset drifts higher up on the bank, burying the Louse and I under several feet of snow. I fought with all the strength I had left to get free of its vice grip. I wasn’t going to die now, when I was so close to being rescued. I dug a small hole above my face that broke through the fallen snow.
The Louse moved beneath me. Its claws opened a fraction of an inch, and I wiggled free, first one leg, then the other. I kicked up, pushing my head through the hole and pulling myself up onto the hillside with my arms. The snow shifted under me, swirling down into a vortex. I scurried and leapt, barely avoiding being sucked down again. The huge, crippled monstrosity of the Louse emerged behind me, scattering loose snow and smoking meat everywhere.
My limbs were numb and nearly useless, but somehow I stumbled up the bank toward the angled shadows of the nearest buildings. If I was going to die, I wanted to at least die running.
No sooner had I reached level ground, a second explosion split the night, this time to my rear. Another one of the Vermin’s missiles had struck the Louse as it was climbing out of its snowy grave. Jets of melted ice and hot shrapnel descended in a caustic, violent rain around me. I looked back to see the Louse’s legs crumple and fall over, free of the smoking ruin of its body.
A fanfare of the Vermin’s victorious cries followed, but I couldn’t see where they were, only a wall of lights approaching quickly through the storm.
The edge of the city seemed to grow up around me as I ran. The watchful ghosts of ancient buildings passed silently behind a billowing fog of snow and ash, all bombed-out shells of brick and plaster leaning steadfast over a tangle of cratered, broken streets.
Not a city, I thought. A ruin.
I ran until I could run no longer, and then hid under the blackened windowsill of what appeared to have once been a shop. The sign above the door was written in an alphabet I’d never seen. In my delirium, I thought it might have been Cyrillic, but the more I considered that curving, alien script, as I huddled shivering under the window and waited for the prowling searchlights to pass, I decided that was just my panicked mind trying to rationalize a situation that was inherently irrational.
Impossible as it seemed, this plane, world, dimension, or whatever the hell it was, wasn’t the same as the one in which I’d fallen asleep. I’d sleepwalked or fallen through some kind of hole or doorway into another world, a night world full of darkness and cold, where terrifying abominations waited to prey on unwary wanderers like myself. As far as I could tell, this new Night Country I’d wandered into had no relation to the world I called home.
The window had been blown in long ago. I tried to build a shelter out of the snow packed under the ledge, but I was too weak to do anything but curl into a ball. I fought to stay awake, thinking of anything I could to keep my eyes open: my mom and dad, Dee, the baby, Evan, Kashka; but most of all, I thought of Carly.
There was shrapnel stuck in my shoulder. I’d been too cold, or scared, to feel it go in. The large, jagged fragment of the Louse’s shell wasn’t metal, but it might as well have been. The blood had frozen around the wound, and with no more adrenaline to numb it, the pain became so excruciating that I lost control of my left arm.
Crying and alone, I shivered in the rivers of my wet clothes and waited for death to take me.
THE NIGHT COUNTRY
MY EYES FLICKERED open to a brilliant nimbus of light. The nearby shriek of a siren jolted me from the half-sleep I’d slipped into under the warmth of the windowsill. The noise was so loud I had to clutch my ears just to think.
My clothes were still damp, but I was warm. I was alive. The snow I’d buried myself in as my survival shelter was now a melted pool on the floor around me. At some point, the wall under the window had grown hot. It glowed with a gentle orange radiance.
A heater. Must be automatic. It sensed me dying next to it and turned on.
The light outside the window moved. In my delirious brain fog, I somehow didn’t realize it was a searchlight until it turned and shone its beam directly into the window.
I didn’t think the Louse could see me. I held my breath and tried not to move.
A fleshy gray thing slid through the window. It was a long, prehensile filament with a bioluminescent lure at the end. The searchlight hung in the air a foot above my head. The siren grew oppressively loud, then fell silent. A dozen others answered in the distance.
I clutched my ears and curled into a ball, lying motionless. The spotlight scoured the ancient, crumbling walls of the shop.
Too weak to run. Didn’t freeze. But still cold. Heater kept me alive. Not going to die here. Going to live. It can sense the heat. See it. How else could it hunt in this hellish place? Which means it knows I’m here.
My fingers closed around the handle of the Snowman’s bone axe where it lay forgotten under the window. Somehow I’d held onto it when I fell under the ice, and while the Louse-thing was carrying me.
The searchlight, which was really more of an eyestalk than a lure now that I saw it up close, passed within inches of my face, but by some extreme luck or the Louse’s negligence, stopped short of turning the full 180 degrees to search under the window where I was hiding. My breath begged to burst from my lungs.
Slowly, I hoisted the bone axe, and with a single, swift, hacking motion, drove the tip of the blade into the Louse’s eye. The light flickered and died. The wounded eyestalk jerked and recoiled back through the window, its owner screaming a thunderous, piercing wail. A dozen other cries added to the cacophony outside.
I rose to my feet, and was about to duck into the nearest hallway to try and find my way to the back door, when a second stalk appeared in the window, not coming all the way in, but hovering an inch or two inside the frame. The wet clunk of flesh engines started. I dove back under the windowsill as a searing, white-hot burst washed the room in fire.
Hot hot hot hot OW HOT FUCK
I don’t know how close the flames came to touching me, but my guess is within fractions of an inch. Maybe they did graze me a little, and I was only spared from being badly burned, or killed, by the dampness of my clothes. I tucked my chin and arms tight to my chest and waited for the flames to die.
A second deluge bathed the room in white. The flames did touch me, then, dancing across the wound in my shoulder. I cried out in pain and the flames suddenly stopped, aiming toward the direction of the sound with an eerily, silent twitch.
I knew I didn’t have much time, seconds, or fractions of seconds, before I would be burned alive. I lashed out with the bone axe as the flame stalk was turning to aim at me, severing it at the base of its budded tip. A squirt of blue plasma spat and guttered like the last flame of a cigarette lighter, and the flame bud fell and rolled into my lap.
Second chance. I have a second chance. Need to run. Pick it up. Flammable. Could use later. Pick it up. Shit. Run
I crawled to my feet, scooped the flame bud up, and ran full speed through the smoking embers of the room and the hallway beyond. I found the back door at the opposite end of the building. The pursuing lights of countless other Lice were already bobbing on the adjacent streets outside, searching the gutters and alleys for any sign of where I’d gone. A few more flame baths washed the interior of the building, then with one huge blast shot by three or four Lice in tandem, they burned it to the ground.
I ran without hesitation or abandon, trying not to think of the pain in my shoulder. I held the severed flame bud and the Snowman’s axe tight to my chest. I tripped, fell, dragged myself to my feet, tripped and fell again, picking my spoils up each time I lost them.
There was no way to hide my tracks on the thick, fresh-fallen snow. Only speed could save me. I ran through crowded alle
ys of roofless, bomb-bitten brick walls, the charred remains of tram cars, weeping lamp posts, and the limbless, nameless statues of heroes, all of it worn smooth by wind, frost, and time, featureless black shadows under an empty, lightless sky. I ducked and wove between the buildings, leapt fences, cut through alleyways and made switchbacks to keep my pursuers confused, but they kept coming, their blinding spotlights scouring the ruins behind me, never more than a few blocks away.
The dead once-city stretched for miles. The snow cover reflected a little bit of ambient light from some source I couldn’t yet see, giving the streets a nascent, tawny glow. Whatever cataclysm had caused this mighty metropolis to fall and turned it into a frozen, war-torn waste had eradicated its human population. The guerillas who had freed me from the Louse’s claws – the ones the woman with the war-paint had called the Vermin - were long gone.
Eventually, the adrenaline ceased and exhaustion began to gnaw at my muscles. I ran for as long as I could, until my legs could no longer push forward. I slowed and glanced back over my shoulder. The lights of my pursuers were still only several streets behind me. The Lice didn’t get tired. They would follow my tracks until they found me, or they died.
Almost as soon as I stopped to catch my breath, the lights were scouring less than a dozen feet behind me.
Gotta run. Run. Run. But my body was too fatigued to move faster than a pathetic stumble. This was the end. They would be on me in seconds.
I rounded a corner and found myself looking down over the slope of a deep valley. I caught myself on an outcrop of broken asphalt where the road ended just as I was about to trip and plummet off the edge. The valley was hundreds of feet deep, perhaps thousands. The fall would have been certain death. A brutal wind bit my face, sending snow devils dancing up over the sheer, naked cliffs and pushing me backward onto my ass. I crawled back to the rim and looked down, my guts churning at the nauseating height.
