Bitter Cold

by J. Joseph Wright

  “Cluck, cluck,” Strawn pushed him toward the door.

  “No! Please don’t…you can’t do this…NO!”

  He heaved Armstrong with his feet so hard his calves buckled and cramped. No time to stop now. The worm kicked and thrashed on the end of his hook, reaching and holding the edge of the hatch. That didn’t matter to Strawn. It just gave him the time to aim.

  He grabbed Armstrong’s collar and dragged him over the threshold, dangling him above the skids. The frost-covered fir trees were inches below, between them breaks of white areas, clearings besieged with snow.

  “Where’s the organism!” he yelled at Henderson. “Find it!”

  Wordlessly, the pilot positioned them above the large, dark blemish. Strawn looked close and noticed it was circling a dog, that German Shepard who’d helped those children.

  “This is your lucky day, pooch,” he whispered to himself, then turned to get his bearings, locating the road, and then the house where the reporter and her friends were hiding. He licked his lips. It was time. He gripped the safety rail and shoved the two hundred pound man hard, careful to make sure his own feet were clear of the cable. Didn’t want to be cast out with the worm.

  Armstrong screamed even louder than the chopper. The winch whirred and spun as he fell. Strawn slowed it down just enough to save the worm from breaking every bone in his body when he landed. The deep powder cushioned him, too. He was on his back, writhing and bleeding from his chest and head, but alive. Exactly the way Strawn wanted him. Perfect bait. Jerking and screaming, trying his damnedest to loosen his bindings.

  Strawn’s pulse began to flutter when he noticed the blackness had stopped chasing the dog and began sending thin projections, zigzagging, toward Armstrong.

  “Perfect! Go ahead…MOVE!” he commanded his pilot. The chopper drifted forward and the harness held. The worm spun violently when the cable pulled taut. They were trolling, on a direct course for the organism. For his part, the worm was behaving exactly as Strawn had hoped—frantic and loud. He made an uproar even the dead couldn’t ignore.

  It became obvious Armstrong saw the dark snow, and tried hard to keep from being dragged into it. Leaving an irregular red streak in the pure white, he snatched at everything he passed, desperate for a lifeline. He managed to catch a branch from a mossy old apple tree. It snapped easily under the force of the chopper’s twin D24 Whitney and Pratt Jet Turbine Engines.

  Armstrong’s face contorted. He wept for mercy, flinging his hands to the air, staring straight up at Strawn. His pleas went unanswered. Strawn remained expressionless, watching his bait aproach the blackness. A countdown had begun inside his head. He suspected one had started inside Armstrong’s, too.

  It seemed to go in slow motion, yet at the same time so fast. The helicopter’s swiftness slung the worm through the snow, casting aside a three-foot-tall rooster tail. Before he knew it, Strawn was witnessing bio-warfare history.

  Armstrong hit the dark patch feet-first. Right away, Strawn saw steam, or smoke—he couldn’t tell which. It rose in a large plume, suggesting an immediate boiling or searing of the worm’s clothing, possibly his skin. By the time his upper body hit the blackness, a dense fog had formed, with it came the stench of death, drifting all the way to the chopper. The worm beat his arms, splashing into the strange organism. It looked like he was sinking, like he’d been pulled feet first into a pool of ink and was dropping to the bottom.

  Then the rescue cable began to spin out of control, smoking and sparking. Finally, it seized. The helicopter jolted hard to the side, hurling Strawn nearly off his feet. He reached for the safety railing, missed, reached again and managed to catch it, preventing a fall from the hatch.

  “What the hell are you doing!” he couldn’t believe Henderson’s clumsiness. “Stop fucking around and fly right!”

  “It’s not me!” the veteran pilot squawked. He pitched one hand up like a bull rider. “I’m not doing it. That thing’s got us! We gotta release the line!”

  “No! No!” Strawn got his bearings back as the aircraft leveled out. Henderson was regaining control, but for how long? “Just hold on,” he peered down. What he saw shocked even his stony heart. Legs. The only recognizable parts of Armstrong left were his legs. The rest of his body was buried below the surface as if the blackness had depth. For the first time, Strawn felt fear. Not for the normal reasons. He wasn’t afraid for his life, thinking the creature would somehow be able to get to him. He wasn’t even worried about Armstrong’s life in any altruistic sort of way. He worried if the biological anomaly managed to consume Armstrong completely, he’d run out of bait. And he couldn’t use Henderson.

  “Oh, shit! Pull up! Pull, dammit! We’re losing him!”

  “I’m trying!” Henderson strained, clenching at the control stick with both hands.

  “Try harder!” Strawn watched the darkness bubble where Armstrong’s upper body should have been. It looked like a frenzy of piranha under the surface of a murky lake. That’s when he noticed the creature had spread to cover the entire clearing, even climbing up trees where snow had clung to the trunks.

  Henderson let out a loud cry of victory as the chopper lifted skyward. Strawn didn’t feel so triumphant. Armstrong had been chomped to shreds at the waistline. There was some of him left. The spinal cord twisted and turned with involuntary spasms. What looked like part of his liver, his kidneys, and much of his intestines were still intact, though when the chopper jerked him out of the organism’s clutches, most of him came loose, dangling by threads of gristle.

  Strawn knew he couldn’t let such a small setback deter him from his plan. He still had a good portion of Armstrong left. And now that the corpse had been sufficiently ripped apart, it might make a better chum trail, anyway.

  Clumps of black snow fell off the half-eaten bait as they ascended.

  “Wait! Not too high! We need to go back down and get that thing to follow us!”

  Henderson made eye contact. “Sir, dragging that line makes us vulnerable. That creature’s strong. It stopped us like we were nothin’. It’s too risky!”

  “Henderson, stop being a pussy and get us down there!”

  The pilot breathed heavy into the headset. Then he did as directed, leaning into a spiraling descent.

  “All right, all right,” he directed his pilot. “Slowly now. Right over our wonderful new friend, down there,” he watched what remained of Armstrong’s mutilated corpse dangle and sway. The legs were askew, bent and stiff as if rigor mortis had already set in. It looked like he’d been frozen in a pose of terror and violent struggle, a struggle he’d lost. “Further!”

  The pilot nodded without looking. A quick tilt of the control stick put them in place. The shredded, contorted, charred carcass dipped toward the blackness. Strawn’s stomach tightened.

  “Henderson, my good man! I knew you had it in you! You’re practically a surgeon with this thing! A surgeon!” he straightened his jacket and smoothed his hair. “Okay. Wait a second. Let the fish find the worm. Just a little…” he paused, watching the black snow move toward Armstrong’s swinging left leg. “Okay, Henderson—get ready.”

  The thing looked like it was taking the bait. Like any good fisherman, though, he didn’t want to touch the line until he was sure to have the fish on the hook.

  “Wait, wait, wait…NOW! GO!” he slammed his palm against the pilot’s seat. Henderson put the aircraft into a hard vertical ascent, then headed east, directly for the reporter’s hideout.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  JEFF USED A WINDOW in the garage to get a surreptitious view of his front porch. No way would he just walk right into a trap. It could have been anyone at the front door, claiming to be cops. When he spotted Tommy Jenkins of the Rainier Police Department, he felt every muscle in his body unwind.

  “It’s okay,” he told April. She waited in the kitchen. “It’s Jenkins.”

  The second Logan opened the door, Amy flung herself onto Jenkins and wept, screaming for her parents. Jenkin
s stood stiff, bewildered. Finally, April pulled her away.

  “She’s been through a lot in the last few hours,” she said. “There’s some really fucked up shit going on out here. Do you realize we were just shot at?” the clipped beat of helicopter blades rolled through the distant hillsides. “You hear that? Those people shot at us. The NWP helicopter. All to cover up the fact that there’s a monster loose out here. And because you’re either too stupid or too goddam pig-headed, you refuse to even investigate.”

  Jenkins stared at her. “Lady, I believe you.”

  She stopped cold, blinking.

  “You do?”

  Jenkins glanced at Jeff, then at the hysterical teenage girl leaning against April’s shoulder. “Your story stuck in my head. And something down there at the bottom of that canyon just didn’t feel right, so I went to the hospital to see the boy and, and…”

  “He’s dead,” April lost all emotion, as frozen as the forest.

  “Dead?” Jeff stared at her. His pulse went wild. “What’re you talking about? He died from losing a foot? How do you know?”

  “I called the hospital. They wouldn’t go into exact causes of death. Said he had a seizure, but he didn’t die from a seizure. He died because some hired NWP killer went in there and snuffed him out.

  “I told you,” Jeff aimed his scorn at Jenkins. Jenkins, the small-town cop who thought he’d seen it all. Jenkins, the savvy veteran of fifteen years who’d accused Jeff and April of making everything up.

  “We told you,” April corrected him, her narrow-eyed scrutiny fixed on the officer.

  “Listen,” Jenkins said. “You’ve got to put yourself in my shoes. Your story sounded absolutely nuts. Then you call me out to the highway with that other wild tale. It was too much. But it wouldn’t get out of my mind. I mean, why would you two go to such extremes to make something like that up?”

  “And you saw it, didn’t you?” April asked. “Why didn’t you do something sooner?”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” Jenkins corrected. “And I did do something. I started thinking about that tow truck driver.”

  “That lying son of a bitch,” April snarled.

  “Yeah, well, I thought he was acting a little funny, so I went to Clatskanie and, damnest thing…”

  “What!” both Jeff and April said simultaneously.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Disappeared. Truck and all. Girlfriend hasn’t seen him. She’s going nuts. Grampy, the owner of the tow truck company, he hasn’t seen him, either. He’s going nuts. This is weird. This is all getting really, really weird.”

  He looked over the tree line, then back to April and Jeff.

  “So, where’s your backup?” April sounded serious. “Where are the dozen cop cars that should be surrounding that goddam nuclear plant and hauling those criminals to jail?”

  “Just calm down, would you?” he raised his palms.

  “Calm down! How can you tell us to calm down? Kids, get into the Blazer,” she pointed at the Police SUV. Logan and Amy hesitated. Jeff nodded once.

  “Wait a minute,” Jenkins protested. “I don’t advise going anywhere right now. You’d be best off just going back inside and waiting this out. The snowstorm and the troubles with NWP. If there really is some kind of creature out there, I’m gonna go find it.”

  “NO!” April advanced toward him. “You can’t go out there. Please, call someone else. Get some backup.”

  He chuckled. “Look around you. This storm has taken all the available resources. Everybody’s out dealing with emergencies. Besides, what am I gonna say? There’s some sort of shadow in the snow attacking people? You tell me how that’s not gonna make me the asshole of the century. You don’t know how bad these guys can ridicule.”

  April opened the Blazer’s tailgate. “Get in,” she pointed at the big bench seat. Jenkins tried to intervene, and Jeff got in his way.

  “We’re leaving. Now. You’re taking us out. Those assholes in that helicopter fired at us. I don’t care if you believe in snow monsters or not. We’re not gonna spend another minute up here. You got that? Let’s go.”

  The kids piled in and bouncing upright. The cop stood next to his SUV and glared at Jeff. He signaled his consent by pulling open the door and stepping in. Then he stopped and turned south, lifting an ear to the sound of distinct, rhythmic thumping. The helicopter was coming closer.

  Jeff insisted April sit in front, the shotgun position. She agreed. He needed to be with his son, and she needed to be close to Jenkins so she could give him as many details as possible.

  “You okay?” he asked Amy.

  “Y-yeah,” the girl forced a smile. “I guess. I just don’t know what’s happening.”

  “We’re going to get you out of here. First and foremost is your safety,” he looked at Logan, then at April. “Everybody’s safety.”

  April struggled visibly to look calm. “You act like you’ve done this before.”

  “Yeah,” he laughed and faced front. “Every weekend.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  APRIL HUDDLED INSIDE her jacket and waited for Jenkins to get in the truck. She sensed the motion and her heart fluttered. She swallowed, staring with wide eyes at the bottom of the window, where falling snowflakes collected in tiny, frozen flecks on the glass.

  At first she attributed it to fatigue. She hadn’t slept more than a few unsettled minutes in the last 24 hours. Her tired mind wished it wasn’t there, but it was. Darkness. Invading slowly, surreptitiously. It started in one corner and spread in a rivulet along the bottom, flowing like liquid. Then it began to infect the ice crystals speckling the window. The first few, it took slowly. After it got a foothold, it crept up, stepping from one bit of frost to the next, creating a thin webbing, a network of dark veins encompassing each frozen molecule on the entire sheet of glass.

  The snow blanketing the mirror turned black, then the hood. Then it poured from the roof, first in thin slices, then a large, shapeless mass spread over the windshield.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but her throat didn’t function. All she could do was let out a breathy wheeze, enough to capture Amy’s eye.

  “Oh my GOD!” the teenager shrieked, setting her and Logan off in a frenzy of terror. Jenkins only reacted by looking at them with an annoyed expression, oblivious to the creature.

  “Jenkins!” Jeff ordered. “Get in! Let’s go! NOW!”

  Jenkins flashed the same look at him. “What’s your pro…blem..?”

  His jaw dropped, eyes widening to the point of bursting. The black snow had reached his side of the Blazer. His gaze swept across the top of the vehicle, all the way to the back. He gasped as he looked at the ground, under the vehicle, to his left, his right, then directly at his feet.

  “Son of a BITCH!” he slipped on the icy ground and caught the seat cover, pulling himself in. In a rapid motion, he sat and slammed the door. He breathed hard and surveyed the black veins encircling the Blazer.

  “What the fuck is that!”

  “Start the truck, Jenkins!” Jeff implored him. “Start the truck!”

  He fumbled with the keys in the ignition, unable to keep his hand steady. The children screamed for him to hurry. It only made him tremble harder.

  “For Christ’s sake!” April leaned over, gripped the key, and gave it a firm turn. The strong V8 engine rumbled to life.

  “Come on!” Amy shouted from the backseat.

  Jenkins put the transmission into drive and hit the accelerator, turning the steering wheel to the left. Instead of moving forward, the vehicle shifted sideways a few inches, stopped, then sank. It seemed stuck deep. April thought they’d gone under, but when she peeked through one of the only gaps left in the blackness, she could tell they were still above the ground. Images of McCullah sinking into the creature’s enigmatic jaws made her shudder. She knew the same fate waited for her. Only this time, she’d be swallowed whole instead of bit by bit.

  The roof creaked and pop
ped.

  BAM!

  A dent the size of a fist pounded into the sheet metal above Amy’s head. She jumped over in the seat and pushed Logan into his father.

  SMASH!

  Another indentation, even bigger.

  “Do something!” April tested the limits of her vocal chords.

  Jenkins blinked rapidly, then hit the gas again. The Blazer only seemed to sink deeper into the deadly morass. April saw the black surface, inches from the bottom of the window.

  “We’re gonna die!” she cried.

  “No we’re not,” Jenkins slammed the shifter to the lowest setting and stepped on it. The engine roared so loud, April had to cover her ears. The Chevy lunged forward, but only made it a couple feet. Then it got caught on something. Not to be deterred, he jammed it in reverse and tried again. The rig moved a little and stopped. Without pause, he slammed the automatic transmission back into drive and hit it once more. Again the truck heaved forward, again only a few feet. It was a few feet more than the first time, though, which gave April at least a little hope.

  That thought evaporated when the truck’s front end dipped down hard. The blackness pulled them in, creating enough forward momentum to suck the SUV under.

  “Hold on!” Jenkins ordered over the shrieks, grinding it into low gear. He stomped on the gas pedal and the engine howled at the sudden gush of fuel, working hard, adding tremendous torque to the driveshaft. April could tell the tires wanted to spin so badly, but the shadowy snow held a firm grip. They didn’t budge.

  Jenkins let off the gas, shifted, and hit it again. He was relentless on the accelerator, gritting his teeth, knuckles white on the wheel. This time the 4X4 jerked back. “Come on, baby!” he pleaded. The powerful motor responded, breaking loose from the monster’s grasp, and thrusting them in reverse out of the vicious morass.

  Jenkins slammed on the brakes, but the icy driveway refused to let them stop. Their momentum brought them up the front steps of Jeff’s house, ramming the support columns on the porch. The Blazer’s back end crushed in and the tailgate flew open.