by Ronald Malfi
Armed with a shotgun and pistol, Todd stormed into the secretarial office and crawled to the nearest window—oddly enough, the one Kate had been perched out of earlier that day, although Todd had no way of knowing this. The blinds were cockeyed and partially raised. He slid down beneath the window and reloaded shells into the shotgun. His fingers shook. Above his head, dark shapes moved around outside. He was too terrified to sit up and look out.
But he did anyway.
He counted six of the skin-suits staged at the end of the driveway, standing motionless as mannequins. Two more stood closer, at the far corner of the building. They stood so close together their heads nearly touched. Outside, the strong wind rustled the distant trees and flapped the clothes of the townspeople.
Also, something was breathing beneath the snow. Todd thought of the massive creature that had lunged at him back on Fairmont Street—the way it had shuttled up from the ground and towered over him, as unfathomable as an Egyptian god. How many more of those things were out there? And how many other things, stranger and each more dangerous than the next, waiting to attack?
Todd thought of the old H. G. Wells story, The War of the Worlds, and how he’d read it a long time ago to Justin. The boy had grown tired of the standard children’s storybooks and professed an interest in things beyond the appropriateness of his age—aliens and monsters being the two frontrunners. Of course, Brianna had objected. She didn’t want the kid sitting up in bed all night because of scary bedtime stories. Moreover, she said it wasn’t appropriate to tell stories to a boy of Justin’s age if they dealt with ghouls and goblins and strange fruitlike creatures from outer space that descended on the unsuspecting populace to terrorize, torture, and inevitably kill. Yet despite Bree’s protestations, Todd had snagged a handful of books from the local library—books he, too, had enjoyed as a child (although he’d had no father around to read them to him)—and every night before Justin went to bed, they would read a chapter. Or sometimes two or three chapters, if the story was really cooking. If the creatures from those books ever gave Justin nightmares, the boy never let on. And although Brianna, who was no dummy, eventually learned that Todd had ignored her wishes, she never said anything more about it. Todd thought that had probably been one of Brianna’s best moments.
She put up with a lot from me, he thought. A pang resonated in his heart, and his mind added, They both did.
Bleakly, he wondered if he would die here, right here, right in this spot. Crouched on the floor beneath a window in a sheriff’s station in the middle of godforsaken nowhere…
I wonder if Justin asked for me. When I didn’t show up at the house, I wonder if he asked Bree where I was.
But the idea that he had let his son down again was more torture than Todd could handle. He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, then sat up and looked back out the window.
He counted twelve this time.
Kate opened the door to the sally port, once again struck by how bitterly cold it was. Across the garage, she could see the twin nubs of the children’s heads in the backseat of the first police car. She raised the lamp and waved at them. Then she climbed down the steps and went over to the car.
“Hey,” she said, opening the car door.
The children turned their heads in Kate’s direction.
Their faces were creaseless bulges of flesh—featureless.
Kate screamed and threw herself backward against the wall. Behind her, a shelf collapsed, raining empty paint cans and sheaves of paper down on her.
The two faceless children began climbing out of the back of the police car. They moved with the slow uncertainty of someone negotiating a room in absolute darkness.
Kate set the lamp down, then leveled the shotgun at the first child—the one that had been Charlie. Her finger lingered on the trigger. Pulled it back slightly…pulled it…
She lowered the gun. “Fuck,” she groaned, trembling. Across the room and midway up the wall, Kate caught sight of what appeared to be some sort of exhaust vent. Sparkling snow breathed out of the vent slats like confetti, swirling down to the floor.
Kate turned and ran out of the room, slamming the sally port’s door shut behind her. There was a series of deadbolts on this side of the door. Kate turned them all.
There were so many out there now, Todd could not keep count. They all seemed planted at strategic spots, all awaiting some sort of instruction, or so it appeared. That thing beneath the snow continued to breathe—the snow itself rising and falling, rising and falling—and Todd found himself thinking of hospital respirators.
Something moved out in the hallway, collecting his attention. Todd swung the shotgun at the office door as a figure rushed into the half light. The figure moaned and called Todd’s name.
He lowered the shotgun. “Kate? I’m here.”
She rushed to him, her own gun held away from her body as if she wished nothing more than to be done with it, the lighted lantern swinging from her crooked elbow.
“The light.” He beckoned to her. “Put it out.”
She quickly doused it, then crept up next to him against the wall. She was shaking.
“What happened?” he asked. “Where are the kids?”
She just shook her head very fast, not looking at him.
“Kate, what happened to the kids?”
“They’re…they changed.” She stared at him, her eyes frighteningly lucid. “No faces.”
Todd felt his muscles clench. He turned back to the window. “They’re all out there now.”
Kate ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “God, what are they waiting for? Just let it happen already.”
He squeezed her shoulder.
Her smile warmed him, though there was little effort in it. Then her eyes widened and she looked past him and out the window. “Todd, they’re running.”
He looked and saw them—all of them—charging toward the building at breakneck speed, their feet kicking up clouds of snow, their arms pumping like machine pistons.
“What—” he began, just as they simultaneously pummeled the side of the building. Blood went everywhere. Some of them fell backward into the snow. But the ones who remained standing, which were most of them, slowly backed away from the building…only to rush at it again. This time, Todd heard a distant window shatter. Beneath the awning, the station’s front doors appeared to buckle.
“They’re smashing their way in,” Kate said.
Todd pulled open the window, the cold quickly sinking its teeth into his flesh, and shoved the nose of the shotgun out. He fired at the closest townsperson, who went down in a gaudy display of radiating innards. One of the snow-beasts whirled out of him and spiraled off into the night.
Kate scrambled over to the next window and followed suit, poking the barrel of her shotgun out, charging a round, and firing.
On the floor between them lay a pile of shells. Not enough to fend them all off, but maybe enough to lessen the numbers.
There’s no use in lessening numbers, Todd thought, continuing to fire the shotgun out the station’s window; he was going deafer with each blast, his entire body vibrating from the recoil. There’s no use in doing any of this. There’s a whole town’s worth of things out there, ready to rip and tear and bite into us…not to mention that thing in the snow and whatever else awaits us…
He chose to think of his son while he shot. The good times, like the Christmases and birthdays, the times they’d gone to Prospect Park or the Jersey Shore. He’d taught the boy to fly a kite in an open field where wildflowers burst like supernovas from the green grass, and the boy had cheered and shouted and beamed as the kite climbed higher and higher and higher. As a tiny baby, eyes all squinty and fists clenched and pink, he’d been nothing more than a mushy hump in his mother’s arms. The way the sunlight coming in through the side windows bleached the nursery, and the one time the hornets’ nest fell and got caught behind the shutter. All the hornets rasping against the windowpane. Laughing. That’s not scary, is it? No, D
addy, it’s not. I’m a big boy. Yes, you are. Yes! Yes! Fishing off Luck’s Pier, hooking bass and, holy Jesus, a snapping turtle, would you look at that? Yes! I’m a big boy. I’m a big boy and I love you, Daddy.
I love you, Daddy.
The front doors caved in and the front awning collapsed. One of the creatures was shambling through an open window. The snow around the building pulsed with a lifelike current.
“Todd!” Kate shouted at his ear. She grabbed hold of his hair, shook his head. “Todd! Look!”
He looked…just as an arc of white flame shot out of the darkness. He couldn’t tell what the hell he was looking at. As he watched, one of the skin-suits went up in a blazing inferno. A second skin-suit leapt at the quick-moving figure but was ignited just like his brethren.
It was Bruce. Bloodied and battered, but it was Bruce.
“Holy shit,” Todd mouthed.
Bruce charged across the lawn, igniting every single one of the bastards that hazarded to block his path. Within seconds, the snowy front lawn of the sheriff’s station was alight with burning people, screaming and running and falling on their faces in the snow. Some of the snow-beasts escaped in a whirl of white smoke, but this time they didn’t dissipate into the ether: they swooped toward Bruce now, coming down low as he launched fire from his flamethrower.
“Jesus,” Kate said, “they’re trying to extinguish the flame.”
Todd nodded. “Just like Tully said.”
“Where’s he going?”
Bruce continued across the lawn, his big booted feet leaving behind craters in the snow. He was heading for a thin fence of trees. And beyond the trees stood the decrepit little gas station.
“They’re following him,” Todd said. “I don’t believe it.”
The thing beneath the snow swirled like a whirlpool, then began tunneling toward Bruce. It was moving too fast; Bruce would never reach cover before the thing was on him.
No, Todd thought suddenly. I don’t think Bruce has any intention of reaching cover. I think Bruce is here to end this thing, one way or the other.
The skin-suit that had been squirming through the broken window dropped back out onto the snow. It was a heavyset female with a face like sagging dough. She began running after Bruce—just as they all did.
Todd grabbed Kate’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. “It’s not safe in here anymore.”
Together they ran back to the computer room, Todd slamming the door shut behind them. On the desk, the computer continued to ding as all of Todd’s messages were returned.
Kate hurried to the window, stared out. “He’s luring them to…”
“To the gas station,” Todd finished, coming up behind her.
Bruce had a sizeable lead on the pursuing skin-suits, but the thing tunneling through the snow was coming up on him fast. Moreover, the sky was alive with twisting tornados of snow, each one glowing sliver at its center. As they watched, Bruce burst through the spindly trees and crossed the tarmac of the gas station. The pumps slouched like tired old men. Bruce turned and fired another blast from his flamethrower at the encroaching townspeople.
“There must be a hundred of them,” Kate marveled.
The thing beneath the snow cut sharply to the right and ran the length of the gas station tarmac. The tarmac itself was shaded by a partial steel awning, which kept much of the snow from falling on the blacktop. It seemed the creature did not want to climb up out of the snow. Or maybe it couldn’t.
Bruce dropped to his knees and began fiddling with something on the ground.
“Oh, shit,” Kate said. “Did he drop the flamethrower?”
“It’s hooked to a cable…”
“Is he…he fucking tying his shoe?”
But no—he wasn’t tying his shoe and he hadn’t dropped the flamethrower.
“He’s unscrewing the fuel door,” Todd said. “Where the trucks come and pump full under the gas station…”
“Oh,” Kate said—almost childishly simple.
The townspeople swarmed onto the tarmac. Several of them struck the support beam of the steel awning, knocking the beam askew. The awning wavered from side to side, as if in contemplation, then crashed down onto a tow truck parked on the far side of the gas station.
Bruce stood, looking like a ghost among phantoms.
Just before the townspeople clawed into him and tore him apart, Bruce fired one final blast from the flamethrower: directly down the mouth of the fuel door.
An instant later, it was as though the apocalypse had come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Todd came to, he found himself sprawled on the floor and covered in bits of glass. He sat up, aware of the aches and pains throughout his body, as the glass tinkled to the floor all around him. The room was bitterly cold. The second his vision cleared, he understood why: the force of the explosion had busted out the window.
Shaking glass out of his hair, he rolled over to Kate, who lay unconscious beside him, her face a patchwork of lacerations, cuts, and scrapes. Gently he shook her awake, brushing busted glass from her clothes, face, and hair.
Hesitantly, her eyes blinked open. “What happened?”
“Bruce blew up the gas station.”
“Are we…where are we?”
He helped her to her feet. They both went to the window, shuddering at the cold. Across the field, the gas station burned. All around the station, like a photo from some Nazi concentration camp, charred bodies littered the snow. There were dozens of them, some still burning, others smoldering like bits of charcoal in the belly of a grill. The air reeked of scorched flesh and burning gasoline. Also among the carnage, Todd could make out a number of large, hulking shapes, almost amphibian in their appearance, like frozen black relics. Charred scythes stood motionless in the air. Others had melted to a tarry black gruel along the blacktop.
“The window,” Kate said.
“Help me.” He grabbed his laptop’s carrying case from the desk and pressed it against the windowsill. Kate located some masking tape and they taped it up over the window, making sure not to leave any cracks for anything to get in. Not even wind.
“Christ, how long were we out?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t remember…” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the laptop’s screen, which was black. The row of green lights on the modem’s faceplate was dead, too. “I think our battery just died.”
“But they got your message. Everyone did. They said help was coming.”
Their arms around each other, they crept out into the hallway. Cold yellow moonlight pooled in the front hall, issuing in through the place where the double doors had been. The doors themselves now lay in concave heaps on the floor.
Todd and Kate rushed to them, attempted to lift the doors back in place. They were too heavy. Kate yelped and fresh blood dripped down her palm. Todd took her hand anyway.
“Look,” he said, pointing out into the night. The swirling eyelet of light had moved close to the police station; it now sat midway between the gas station and the police station, casting a shimmering artificial light down on the snow. The snow itself appeared to glow.
Things began moving—in the trees and shrubs, down in the ravine and out by the woods. Even beneath the snow. The sense of motion was all around them.
As they watched, bright twists of light spiraled up into the shimmering eyelet. The lights seemed to come from all over the town, drawn to the central location of the eye in the sky like hounds to a scent. They sparkled like jewels, their appearances just barely glimpsed.
“It’s easier to see them if you don’t look directly at them,” Todd said.
“Like stars,” Kate said.
For close to five minutes, they watched the glittery snow lift off the ground, the houses, the trees, the roofs of nearby automobiles, and rise up into the eyelet. The eye itself appeared to undulate, as if viewed through heat waves rising off some desert blacktop. The swirl of colors at its center briefly reflected the world below—the tr
eetops and rooftops, the wrecked cars in the ravines, the dark lampposts staggered like mile markers down to the center of town. Yet Todd could make out faint differences in color and structure of the details…causing him to wonder whether what he was seeing was indeed a reflection, or he was actually glimpsing through a window of sorts into a whole other world, a whole other dimension. But then the glowing colors returned, masking the mirrored image, and both Todd and Kate could make out a distinct sucking sound—a vague and suggestive inhalation. The eyelet’s light grew in intensity—a silvery light not unlike the silver threads in the snow creatures themselves—before the clouds swallowed it up completely.
A moment later, they were left staring at a natural night sky.
Todd put an arm around Kate, hugged her close to him. They were breathless and in awe. Squeezing her tightly about her shoulders, Todd could feel Kate’s heartbeat strumming through her entire body.
“Look,” Kate said suddenly. She pointed down into the valley of the town square. “Do you see?”
He did: down in the square, several pairs of headlights appeared. He thought he could hear the grinding of gears as the heavy vehicles crept slowly through the town square.
“That doesn’t look like the cops,” Kate said. “Those vehicles look military.”
Todd’s arm slipped down off Kate’s shoulder. He grabbed her hand and urged her forward. “Come on.”
Kate began laughing. She was about to run along with him until she heard something behind her. She managed to turn around in time to see Molly standing in the open doorway of the sheriff’s station, her enormous belly protruding from beneath her too-small sweatshirt, her fuzzy pink socks planted firmly in the snow. There was a look of haunted desperation on the girl’s face that caused Kate’s blood to run cold.
Molly raised a handgun and fired a single shot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Todd was aware of vagaries—the indecision of fragile consciousness. Faces peering down at him. A bright light shining directly in his eyes. The sensation of hands tugging and pulling at his body. Then blackness.
