by Adam Nevill
Snuggled close together, and without suggestion, they touched noses. They lay in silence for a while, and then Amelia reached out and touched Gavin, and then Gavin touched her, and then their lips pressed together. They pulled at one another’s clothes, and for a time they were all right beneath the mass of blankets, wriggling into each other, as if trying to be absorbed by the other’s warmth.
When they were finished they lay panting beneath the blankets, as snug and comfortable as they had been since landing in the wet ocean, and then on the ice.
“Guess we needed that,” Amelia said.
“Needed and wanted,” Gavin said.
Amelia nestled into Gavin’s arms. He was strong. She could feel the muscles in his arm beneath her neck.
“The wind has stopped,” Amelia said.
“Now we’re back to living in the real world. Or the unreal world. Whatever the hell kind of world we are in. Look. I think the smartest thing would be, when the storm calms, we go back to our ship, bring rope, use one of the dog sleds to drag lumber back for firewood. You know, chop it out of this one with the axe. We can mount expeditions that can take us farther, the way you suggested. Figure out some way to make tents, devise heating vessels to take with us. Go as far as we can, using our ship as base.”
“We will need to make snowshoes to travel long distances,” Amelia said. “I think we can figure out how to do that. There’s a lot of odds and ends on board our ship. And to go back to my theme, seeing what’s out there is better than waiting to freeze, or eventually starving.”
“I’ve come to agree,” Gavin said. “Especially now that I have another reason to live.”
Amelia touched his face and kissed him. “You mean me, right?”
Gavin laughed. “Of course. But listen, girl. I’m willing to try and see what we can find, but to be honest, I don’t expect that within a few miles we will come to green grass and cows grazing in a pasture.”
“We could try my other plan, use one of the lifeboats, rig a sail of some sort. Try and find land. Land that isn’t freezing. Land where someone lives and things make sense. I know. I’ve suggested it before, and no one has been keen on the idea, but it’s still something to consider.”
“I’d rather die on the ice than in some boat on a black-ass sea.”
“I’d rather not die,” Amelia said. “Period.”
“A fine sentiment,” Gavin said. “But for the time being we have food at the ship, and we can carry some of these blankets with us to add to our store there. Later we can come back for more, bring some of the others so we can tote more supplies.”
“Provided we can get them to leave the ship to do anything but fish.”
“Food from the sea has proven reasonably certain,” Gavin said. “What’s out here beyond the ships, toward the mountains, there’s nothing certain about that.”
The snow quit swirling and the wind ceased to howl. Moonlight speared through the cracks in the ship. They dressed and climbed off the ship and started walking again. The night was clear and bright, so bright it was as if they were walking under a giant streetlamp. The wind had left snow piled on the ice. As they walked, they came across footprints—bare footprints.
Amelia said, “Hardin?”
“Possibly.”
They went surely in the direction of their ship, able to see landmarks now—ships and sleds and juts of ice they recognized that were close to their destination. Before long they came to a broad snowbank, and lying in it was Hardin.
He was facedown and there was blood on the snow, it had crystallized like ruby jewels and smears of strawberry jam.
Amelia bent down and looked close at Hardin. Finally, with help from Gavin, she rolled him over. It was difficult, and Hardin made a ripping sound as the ice tore away from his flesh. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide. He had died with his nostrils flared, like a horse blowing air. High on his forehead was a tear in his skull, wide and deep.
“He looks terrified,” Gavin said.
“Yes, and look here.”
There were drag marks in the blood. There were places in the snow that gave the impression of an octopus wriggling, and then the places grew larger, and finally there was a great shape in the snow. It was a cylindrical shape with a large star at the top. There were thrash marks in the snow all around it. They could see marks where it had crawled off across the snow, its size swelling.
“Whatever it was,” Amelia said. “It grows rapidly.”
“And it came out of Hardin’s head.”
“Or attached itself to him. What in hell does that?”
“I don’t know, but here’s another thing,” Gavin said. “He walked.”
“Perhaps not on his own power,” she said.
“That’s insane.”
“You saw what was on his head. Some kind of parasite. He may have been dead for days, moving around, but not truly alive, being fed on and articulated like a puppet by that monster.”
“All right, but the question has to be, what does this parasite feed on normally if humans aren’t in supply?”
“Seals. Sea life. Maybe it’s sea life itself, comes on shore from time to time, but exists in the waters as well. Maybe it eats what it eats because it’s there to eat, not because it needs it for sustenance. Something left that imprint, and whatever it is, is certainly not human.”
They traveled on, tingling with unease. They felt as if they were being watched, but when they looked, nothing was there. Just mounds of snow, a few juts of ice in the peculiar moon and starlight. Still, the persistent feeling of being observed moved with them, and with it came a strange feeling of nausea, as if they were breathing air that had been disgorged by something foul, a primitive perception that something primal and dangerous was nearby.
“Suddenly I’m hoping this pistol works,” Gavin said, pulled it from his pocket and held it in his gloved hand.
Amelia followed suit with the pistol she had found in the plane.
They trudged along with their pistols, and walking near the waterline, they saw a lifeboat banging up against the ice.
“It’s Lifeboat Number Three,” Amelia said. “It washed up here.”
“Well, I never want to be in it again,” Gavin said. “I hate water.”
“And you took a trip on a ship?”
“Thought I might meet women.”
Amelia laughed. “That part worked.”
As they watched, the dark waters caught up the boat and moved it out into the night. The moonlight coated the lifeboat in silver paint, and they watched until it bobbed up and down and out of sight, as if hiding behind the waves.
They continued until their ship was in sight, then tucked their guns away. When they climbed the ice at the stern and stepped on board, they found a sheet of dark ice running from the bridge to the stairs that led to the hold. The ship was as quiet as a snail’s progress.
“That looks like blood,” Amelia said, pushing back her jacket hood, unwinding the scarf over her face. Gavin pushed his own hood back, pulled down his scarf.
They pulled their pistols again, followed the dark trail, crept down the stairs, trying not to slip on the ice. At the bottom of the stairs they encountered cold, though not freezing cold. There were remnants of warmth from human bodies and a near-dead fire in the small stove below. The coals glowed weakly through ash and semi-devoured chunks of wood formerly belonging to what might have been a chifferobe.
There was a clank toward the back of the hold, in the shadows, and Amelia and Gavin hesitated, then eased in that direction, pistols at the ready.
Movement.
Something running in the dark.
Gavin said, “Hey folks. It’s us.”
A flash of shadows, something whirling in the dark, catching moonbeams from a crack in the hold. A flutter of rubbery movement atop something, and then it was gone.
Amelia turned to the right where she heard a faint sound, saw nothing, then turned completely around.
That’s when a shad
ow broke loose and darted into the moonlight, came for Amelia with a shriek and a flash of tentacles.
It was Duchess, or what she had been. Her head was broken open and a great mass of writhing tentacles flapped from her skull. A bladder shape dangled out of a wide crack in her forehead, and the bladder almost covered her eyes. She was stripped of clothing. Her saggy breasts flapped like something skinned. Her hands were reaching, her mouth was screeching.
Just as Duchess reached her, Amelia lifted the pistol and shot her in the face, right above the bridge of the nose, right below the wide crack in her skull. Duchess’s hands brushed Amelia’s shoulders and a black mess came from the bladder inside her skull, squished out and into the moonlight in one long squirt. The beast in Duchess’s head tore loose from its cranial house, flipped through the air, smashed against the deck, began to puff and swell like a bagpipe.
Duchess’s lifeless body collapsed in a heap at Amelia’s feet. The thing on the floor hissed, then squeaked, and then revealed an extended torso that slid slickly out of the bladder like a fat rat from a greased pipe. Its body was tubular and long with a star-fish head. It swelled as it slithered. Sucker-covered tentacles extended from the cylindrical portion of its body, slapped at the floor and waved in the fat slit of moonlight as if trying to grab the moon’s attention.
Amelia stepped close and shot the star-head. Tentacles snapped out, smacked the top of her hand, nearly knocking the gun loose, leaving a circular welt, red and inflamed, just above her thumb. It made a gaseous sound and slid greasily across the floor as if pulled on a rope, collapsed, tentacles falling and flailing like electrified noodles.
Amelia heard Gavin’s gun snap without firing, snap again. Amelia turned and shot at what was charging across the floor at them, Cyril, his head broken open, giving ride to one of the tentacle-bearing bladders. She shot directly for the bladder this time, and when she did, the black goo went up and out, darker than the shadows around it. Cyril stumbled as if he had stepped into a hole, fell facedown, his naked ass humping up in the air once, then collapsing, his pelvis slamming against the floor. The creature detached from Cyril, scuttled away. Amelia was about to shoot again, but Gavin stopped her.
“Save the shot,” he said. He tossed his useless pistol aside. There was an axe near the stove, one they had used to shatter wood for burning. Gavin grabbed it, swung it into the creature, chopping the star-head loose, causing a dark mess to gush across the floor.
“Jesus,” Amelia said. “What are those things?”
Gavin trembled. “I’m going to guess nothing known to science.”
Gavin made his way to the stove, picked up the matches that lay on the floor nearby, scooped out a partly lit stick of wood from the stove, waved it about in the cold air until it flamed slightly. Amelia, all the while, was turning with her pistol, watching. She had one shell left, as the revolver had only housed five loads. Gavin’s gun was useless, packed as it was with ineffectual loads.
Gavin wagged the small torch about. In the shadows they saw a heap of nude bodies. The remains of their lifeboat companions. Cautiously, Amelia and Gavin moved nearer. All of the heads were broken open, but none contained their former passengers. Carruthers lay on top. All of them were nude. Either their clothes had been ripped from them by the creatures, or they had torn them loose themselves, as if the things made their bodies boil.
Something clattered in the dark.
They turned. Gavin lifted the small torch. Creatures fluttered in the light and hustled away. Nothing was seen distinctly.
“They’re all over the place,” Gavin said.
“We have to go,” Amelia said. “Right now.”
Gavin dropped the torch, and carrying the axe at a battle-ready position, he and Amelia rushed up the steps, onto the deck, and over the side where the ice was high. They scrambled so quickly they fell into one another and slid down the ice in a tumble. At the bottom of their fall, they looked up. There, on the deck, were the things, tentacles waving about like drunks saying howdy. The creatures pushed together. At first Amelia thought it was for warmth, and then she thought: No, they live here. They endure here.
As they watched, the things came together, tighter. There was a great slurping sound, and then they hooked together and twisted and writhed and became one large, bulbous shape with a multitude of heads and an array of tentacles. It started to edge over the side of the ship.
Amelia and Gavin began to run.
They ran along the snow-flecked ice, falling from time to time, and when they looked back, they saw the thing dropping off the side of the ship, falling a goodly distance, striking the ice heavily, and then rolling and gliding after them.
The snow began to flurry again. It blew down from the sky in a white funnel. It spread wide and wet against them, pushed them like a cold, damp hand. They wound their scarves around their mouths as they ran, pulled their hoods down tight, only looked back when they feared it might be at their very heels, but soon it was lost to them, disappearing within a swirling surge of blinding snow.
Winded, they began to trudge, having no idea where they were heading. Without snowshoes, it was a hard trek. Eventually they came to the plane, its bright red skin flaring up between the swirling flakes of snow. They stood and stared at it.
“I’m so cold I don’t care if that thing catches up with me,” Gavin said. “I’ve got to get warm. If only for a little while.”
Amelia nodded. “Yeah. That thing can have me, but only if I get a bit warm first.”
They slipped inside, having to really tug the door free this time, the whole machine having been touched with frost. They closed the door and locked it. They moved to the cockpit and looked out. There was nothing to see. Just snow. It had ceased to flurry as violently as before, but it was still blowing.
After a brief rest, Amelia looked around the plane, more carefully this time, found a few rounds of overlooked ammunition, enough to fill her pistol. There was a flare gun they had not found in their initial search, and there were four flares in a box beneath the cockpit. Gavin took the flare gun and loaded a flare in it. It wasn’t a perfect weapon, but it was something. Gavin stuck the remaining flares in his coat pocket. Finally, exhausted, they laid down on the mattress together, and without meaning to, fell asleep.
At some point, much later, Amelia thought she heard a kind of coughing, and then a loud growl. She tried to awake, but exhaustion held her. If the things were on her, then they could have her. She was warm and exhausted by fear. She couldn’t move a muscle.
Shortly the growling ceased, and Amelia drifted back down into deep sleep. Down in that dark well of exhaustion she sensed a darkness even more complete. Things moved in the dark, bounded about inside her head. Images struck her like bullets, but then they were gone, unidentified. It was a sensation of some terrible intelligence, a feeling of having a hole in the fabric of reality through which all manner of things could slip. She slept deep down in that crawling dark, but yet, it was still a deep sleep and in time even the horrors down there in her dreams let her be.
When Amelia awoke, Gavin was missing.
Or so she thought. She sat up. He was sitting in the pilot chair in the cockpit. It was daylight. She went to join him, sat in the co-pilot chair. Gavin had a manual in his lap and was reading.
“No monsters yet?” she said.
“I think we lost them, confused them, or they’re taking a nap. I don’t know. You know what? I can fly this. Theoretically, anyway.”
“Will it fly?”
“The engine was warm not that long ago. It hasn’t been ruined by the cold yet. While you slept, I tried it. After a few false starts it fired. ”
Amelia realized this was what she had heard while sleeping. Not the roar of some monster, but the roar of a machine.
“I think it hasn’t been in the cold so long the engine is ruined, frozen up. It’s cold, though. I think the pilot was driven down by a sudden storm. Nothing in the sky one moment, the next a storm. They probably flew
here through some dimensional gap, the way we sailed here in the ship. Slipped right through, like a child’s toy through a crack in the floor.”
“Then why haven’t you flown us out, if you’re so sure you can do it.”
“I’m not all that sure, actually. Like I said, theoretically, I can fly us out. I cut the engine because I could tell it was stuttering. I wanted it to warm a bit more, or rather I have plans to warm it, and running it before it’s warmer would just use up gas, and I couldn’t see to fly anyway. I couldn’t see six inches in front of me. I got started, though. While you slept I used a board and dug around the wheels, freed them. Wore me out. I’m going to build a fire out front of the plane to warm it more. It might ruin things, catch the damn plane on fire, or it might improve things. I don’t know. But if the storm passes, as the daylight comes, the sun will warm the engine and then I’ll warm it with a bit of fire.”
“A bit of fire might be too much fire. Why not just let the sun warm it?”
“It will be warmer, but it won’t be warm,” Gavin said. “The sun will need some help.”
“That would be the fire,” Amelia said.
Gavin nodded. “If it’s warm, then we might fly out. For all I know I won’t be able to fly it at all. Or I’ll manage to get it up, only to have it come right back down. Or say I get it up and we fly away. Where are we flying too? How much fuel do we have? Still, what else is there? You with me?”
“Get us up, and fly us out,“ Amelia said. “You can do it. Any place is better than here.”
It seemed like a long time, sitting in the cockpit waiting for daylight. Sitting there expecting the monsters to arrive and break through the plane and knock holes in their heads, cause them to tear off their clothes and turn them into naked staggering corpses. They sat back and waited for light, but it was a nervous wait.
The wind died down, the snow blew out, and the daylight finally came. The sun looked at first like a gooey hot-pink lozenge. It turned slowly from pink to orange, spread light like a hot infection across the horizon.
