by Ronald Malfi
It was a car—a muddy brown Oldsmobile with a dented hood and a windshield networked with cracks. It came streaming down the street, collecting momentum, its hubcaps blurring with speed.
Todd’s heartbeat quickened.
“Charlie?”
Kate came to a stop in a storage room at the far end of the sheriff’s station. She held the shotgun in both hands, its barrel angled toward the floor. The halogen lamp hooked onto her belt thumped against her thigh with every step. She’d searched the other rooms and offices for the boy, as well as the chemical-smelling sally port, with no luck. Now, the storage room stretched out before her like a cave, its walls surrendering shelving, its floor littered with heaping boxes and wooden crates. The light fixtures in the ceiling were a column of sightless eyes dangling from thin metal stalks.
A slight shape stood out in the darkness at the far end of the room. Kate brought up the shotgun.
“Charlie?”
The shape shifted, melding with the shadows.
Kate approached, wending around the land mines of boxes and crates, her feet hardly coming up off the floor. The shotgun rattled and shook in her hands. There was a smell—a severe decaying smell—that seemed to permeate her senses and infiltrate every nuance of her body. When she was a young girl she had played hide-and-seek with some of the neighborhood kids. Tired of getting caught all the time, she’d decided to outwit them all by climbing inside a Dumpster behind the supermarket. Five minutes later, alerted by the sound of her cries when she couldn’t open the hatch to climb out, her friends had found her at the bottom of the Dumpster—filthy, reeking, petrified, and painted with greasy swill.
All that rushed back to her now in a wave of memories. The smell, the claustrophobia…
The dark.
“Charlie,” she said, lowering the shotgun. Startled, the boy spun around, his eyes wide, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap. She rushed to him, the lamp banging against her thigh and causing the shadows to jounce and dance as if in firelight. She gripped him by his shoulder, shook him. “Didn’t you hear me calling you? What are you doing back here?”
“I was…uh, Cody was sick…I was trying to find her medicine…” Then he turned his head to look back at whatever had been so attractive to him while Kate had been calling out his name only a moment ago: the circular opening of a pipe jutting from the wall.
Kate unhooked the lamp from her belt and brought the light closer to the pipe’s opening. She sucked in her breath, the light shaking in her grasp.
Snow was billowing out of the pipe and sprinkling to the cement floor.
Kate pulled Charlie behind her. “Get away from it.” There was an oil rag on top of a stack of boxes to her right. She snatched up the rag and stuffed it into the mouth of the pipe.
“Is that…” Charlie began, his voice small. He couldn’t finish the question.
Kate held her breath. She took a single step away from the pipe, bumping against Charlie in the process. She was thinking of those five people-shapes she’d glimpsed across the street from the station, watching the building. Had they been discovered?
Bending to one knee, Kate brought the halogen lamp to the spot on the floor where the snowflakes had fallen. Sour breath escaped her. Instead of melting to water, there were now ink-colored droplets of a bloodlike substance on the concrete floor where the snowflakes had fallen. There was almost a functional formation to the spatter…and the longer Kate stared at it, the more it reminded her of celestial bodies sparkling brightly in a country sky.
“We need to get back with your sister and Molly,” Kate said, jumping back up to her feet.
Out in the hallway, Molly screamed.
The Oldsmobile came careening down the street toward the town square, chunks of ice snapping under its tires. There was no driver behind the wheel and, of course, the car wasn’t actually running—it had been pushed from the top of the hill and was now beginning to swerve out of control.
Any doubt as to the consciousness of the townspeople scattered about the square was instantly eradicated as, in unison, they all swung their heads in the direction of the speeding automobile. Todd’s grip tightened on the handgun. He watched as the vehicle entered the square, moving at a quick clip, jouncing over the rutted snow packed hard as cement atop the street. With no one behind the car’s steering wheel to control it, the vehicle struck a sizeable chunk of snow and hopped a curb. The undercarriage shuddered. Sparks flew from beneath it and one of its hubcaps took off in a different direction. The passenger door flung open, struck a parking meter, and instantly slammed shut again.
With sharklike eyes, the townspeople followed the course of the runaway Oldsmobile, their heads turning on their necks like wooden puppets.
Todd saw it coming before it actually happened: the Oldsmobile smashed into the front of the hardware store, sending a shock wave across the square and a display of shimmering fragments of glass into the air. An exhalation of debris wrapped in black dust showered the sidewalk.
A deep-octave moan rose up among the townspeople. Like robots programmed to do so, they pivoted in unison and faced the destroyed facade of the hardware store. The front windows were still smoking, the tail end of the Olds cocked at an angle in the center of the store like a sneer.
Then, as if someone had fired a starter’s pistol, the townspeople took off toward the hardware store. They didn’t shamble or stagger like the puppeted skin-suits they were—rather, they loped like gazelles, the width of their strides astounding. Their fierce agility and speed shocked Todd into temporary immobility; even his mind seemed to shut down. He could only watch as they attacked the hardware store, spilling into the busted front windows and swarming over the Oldsmobile like ants.
Great bursts of snow exploded from the ground as vaporous tornados of shimmering snow dust corkscrewed up into the air. Todd counted four…five of them. They rippled through the air as they soared toward the hardware store.
Taking a deep breath, Todd dashed out onto the sidewalk and ran toward the Pack-N-Go.
From the top of the hill, Brendan cheered as he watched the Oldsmobile smash through the front of the hardware store. Without someone inside the car to steer it, he’d had his doubts as to how far the car would actually get before it ran off the road, expecting it to most likely collide with a tree. As it turned out, he couldn’t have planned a better outcome.
“I was fired from that hardware store when I was in high school,” Brendan said, grinning. “Fuck ’em, I say.”
They watched as the skin-suits turned their heads and emitted a resounding wail. It sounded like an orchestra warming up. When the skin-suits began loping toward the hardware store, Brendan clapped his hands, then clapped Bruce on the back.
“Come on,” Brendan said, beaming. “We’re not done yet, compadre.”
Charlie in tow, Kate skidded to a halt halfway down the hallway. Molly stood facing Kate, the pregnant woman’s face a testament to some indescribable horror.
“They’re outside,” Molly cried. “There’s so many of them! They know we’re here!”
Kate ran past her and into the secretarial office. Peering through the blinds on the windows, she could see the shapes had crept closer to the building. There were at least a dozen of them now, all staring at the police station. Skin-suits, as Tully had termed them. Their clothing matted with blood, their eyes as vacuous as muddy pools, they were like creatures that had shuffled right out of a nightmare.
Trembling, Molly appeared in the office doorway. “They know we’re here, don’t they?”
Kate examined the empty faces of the townspeople. “I can’t tell.”
“Of course they do!” Molly shouted. “You brought them here! And now we’re going to die!”
“Shut up,” Kate barked. She doused the halogen lamp, bathing them in darkness. “No one’s going to die. Get back downstairs with Cody.”
“She’s asleep.”
“I said go!”
Startled, beginning to cry again
, Molly retreated down the hallway. Charlie now occupied the doorway in her place, a terrified expression on his pale face. He was visibly quaking.
Kate turned back to the window. Something beneath the snow moved and caught her attention—a mound rose and then sank, rose, then sank, as if the snow itself were breathing. The surface of the snow began to ripple, as if something were vibrating underground. Then, like one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs tunnels under the ground on his way to Pismo Beach, something beneath the snow—or perhaps the snow itself—began tunneling across the front lawn of the police station, leaving in its wake disturbed mounds of upturned powdery snow.
Whatever it was, it was snaking closer to the building, heading for the front doors.
Whatever it was, it was big.
They’re surrounding us, like the fucking cavalry, Kate thought, terrified.
One of the skin-suits—a middle-aged balding man with a beer gut, wearing sweatpants and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt—began walking up to the front doors of the station. He had that same off-kilter look in his eyes that strange Eddie Clement had had when they’d stopped to pick him up last night on the side of the road.
“What do we do?” Charlie said from the doorway.
Kate racked the shotgun and discharged a shell. She held it up to the boy so that he could see what it looked like. “I need you to go to the room with all the guns, Charlie, and bring me more of these. They’re in boxes on the shelves. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Without expression, Charlie nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Now go. Hurry.”
The interior of the Pack-N-Go smelled like death. Todd hurried inside, crunching shattered glass and bits of cereal. The damage was unfathomable, the sights atrocious. The plastic trash bags he had used to cover the two dead bodies had blown away, revealing purpled, crystallized mummies in the aisles of the convenience store. The parts of them that still looked human—a twisted and frozen hand or the teepee bend of a leg—were somehow the hardest things to look at.
Also, there was now a third body, fresher than the other two but more horribly disfigured in death, draped over a section of fallen shelving. The head was opened up like a piñata, trailing ropy crimson goop over cereal boxes, rendering the person unidentifiable. Yet Todd recognized the clothing and knew without doubt that this was what remained of Fred Wilkinson.
As the townspeople tore into the hardware store across the square, Todd ran over to the refrigerated section of the convenience store, where the ventilation grate lay on the floor beside the stepladder he and Kate had used to climb through the ductwork and into the gun shop next door. Blood had been sprayed along one of the glass freezer doors, now frozen to gelatinous syrup. Spilled cola had made the floor tacky.
Todd spied his duffel bag on the floor and dove for it. Unzipping it, he rifled through the items inside until he located the laptop’s nylon carrying case. Relief coursed through him. With trembling hands, he fumbled the walkie-talkie off his belt.
“It’s Todd,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got the laptop and now I’m getting the fuck outta here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Brendan and Bruce ran down Fairmont, parallel to the town square. They planted themselves against the side of a pickup truck parked askew along the shoulder, both of them breathing heavily. On the next street over, they could hear the commotion of the skin-suits tearing the Oldsmobile apart.
Bruce’s walkie-talkie squawked to life: “It’s Todd. I’ve got the laptop and now I’m getting the fuck outta here.”
“He’s got it,” Bruce said, turning to Brendan.
But Brendan hadn’t heard him. He was busy removing the gas cap from the side of the pickup truck.
Kate peeled the blind away from the windowpane and reached up, unlocking the window. She slid the window open just enough so that she could address it with the business end of the shotgun. Cold, blustery air filtered in, freezing the sweat on her brow. The man in the Chicago Bears sweatshirt was standing directly beneath the station’s awning now, looking at the front doors. Kate charged the shotgun, the sound of which caused the man in the Bears sweatshirt to whirl his head around in her direction. His head sat cocked at an unnatural angle. Fresh perspiration burst from Kate’s pores.
She aimed in.
Pulled the trigger.
The sound was deafening.
The man in the Bears sweatshirt slammed against the double doors as his right leg vanished into a spray of buckshot and misted black blood. He howled—as inhuman a sound as the distant, haunting moan of a sperm whale—and propped himself up against the door with one hand. Around him, the snow rippled in half a dozen places, as if alive. Overhead, the sky was briefly blotted out by a swiftly passing shadow.
Kate charged the shotgun again and pulled the trigger.
A large swipe of the Bears sweatshirt was eradicated. Blood spattered the double doors. The man shrieked and shuddered as something large and the color of smoke withdrew from his body; the smoke-colored thing spiraled up, where it got caught in the net of the awning. The man’s body dropped lifelessly to the ground. Trapped beneath the awning, the swirling mass of vapor and snow briefly glowed at its center with a brilliant silver light.
Again, Kate racked the shotgun and aimed this time for the awning. She fired, the butt of the gun slamming against her shoulder, and blew a hole in the top of the awning. The vaporous phantom swirled toward the hole and escaped.
She turned, startled by Charlie, who stood at her side. He was holding several boxes of shotgun shells.
Just as Todd was about to slip out of the Pack-N-Go and back out onto the street, the laptop case over one shoulder, a brilliant flash of light mushroomed up over the storefronts at the opposite end of the square. Shocked into immobility, Todd stared at the rising inferno that blossomed up into the clouds.
Something had exploded.
The townspeople poured back out of the hardware store as fiery debris rained down around them. Some caught fire and began shrieking and flailing their arms. When the entities inside them vacated their bodies, the skin-suits slumped lifelessly to the sidewalk, where they burned like funeral pyres.
Clutching the laptop case to his chest, Todd ran.
The explosion shook the sheriff’s station. Kate dropped a shotgun shell as she sat reloading the weapon in her lap. She twisted around toward the window in time to see a fireball rise up over the distant trees.
“Jesus,” she breathed.
“What was that?” Charlie said, sitting down beside her.
“I don’t know, honey.” The things beneath the snow cut sharply to the right and began tunneling toward the street down below. Likewise, the remaining townspeople turned and looked at the flower of flame rising up above the treetops. They began moving in the direction of the fire, slowly at first…then graduating to a deerlike run, their feet cleaving the snow like knife blades.
“They’re leaving,” Charlie said, peering out the window over Kate’s shoulder.
“For the moment,” Kate said.
After Brendan had unscrewed the pickup’s gas cap, they’d emptied some of the extra fuel canisters down the side of the truck and, backing up through the snow, left a trail of fuel from the pickup to the opposite side of the street. Bruce had launched a blast of flame from the flamethrower to the fuel that was soaking into the snow. The fuel had ignited and traced across the street where it climbed up the side of the pickup truck and vanished into the throat of the gas tank.
The truck had exploded.
Now, the two men ran like bandits up Fairmont Street. White faces appeared in the windows of the surrounding houses. Behind them, the flames from the explosion burned like a holocaust at their backs.
On the front porches of the houses along Fairmont, the skin-suits emptied out of the houses and watched them run. On the lawns, the snow rippled and appeared to breathe. Whirlwinds of snow funneled up from the ground and speared into the sky. Around them, a whole inv
isible world was awaking from its slumber.
“Run!” Bruce shouted, slightly ahead of Brendan. “Don’t look back!”
But Brendan did just that—he staggered and glanced over one shoulder in time to see the skin-suits come streaming off the porches, giving chase. Brendan lost his footing and crashed to the snow. His tongue exploded with a sharp and sudden pain as his mouth filled with the taste of copper.
Ahead of him, Bruce skidded to a stop and began running back toward Brendan, who was already struggling to his feet. The ground vibrated with the pounding of countless feet closing the distance. Brendan propelled himself forward, managing to just barely duck out of the way as Bruce’s flamethrower belched out a stream of dazzling white fire toward the oncoming mob.
Blood seeping from his mouth, Brendan continued to run until the earth rolled and undulated beneath him. It shook him to the ground. Rolling over, he managed to swing the shotgun’s strap over one shoulder and rack the weapon. Behind him, the skin-suits cried out in agony as Bruce hosed them with fire…but they were still closing in, hungry to get at them both.
Directly in front of Brendan, the ground seemed to rise up—a white, formless monolith as tall as a school bus standing on end…
Screaming, Brendan fired the shotgun at the rising crest of snow. The blast was ineffectual: it rendered a hole in the center of the mass that quickly refilled with fresh snow. Brendan attempted to chamber another round but the shotgun jammed. He threw it to the ground and, on his hands and knees, crawled away from the looming snow-beast just as it began to take definite shape.
To Todd’s ears, it sounded as though World War III had erupted on the other side of the town square. Smoke blackened the sky and some of the trees behind the rows of shops at the opposite end of the square were on fire. An acrid stench simmered in the air.
The laptop secured against his chest with both hands, Todd raced back up the incline behind the storefronts, crashing through needling pine boughs. When he emptied out into the street on the other side of the trees, he could see the insanity and confusion working its way up Fairmont toward the intersection: townspeople on fire were dropping like uprooted fence posts in the middle of the street. There was what looked like a burning automobile on the shoulder of the road. And Todd caught the glimpse of a rising pillar of snow driving straight up from the ground, maybe three stories tall…
