Whiteout

by Gabriel Dylan

  Hanna caught a glimpse of herself in the windscreen. A thin line of blood ran from her scalp over the shaved hair on the side of her head down towards her ear. She was so full of adrenaline she hadn’t even noticed.

  Hanna turned, looked along the length of the bus. “Don’t stop. And don’t go forwards. We’ll never make it far that way. Keep going straight backwards. Aim at the ski-hire shop, as hard and as fast as you can!”

  Charlie stared back at her. “We’ll just smash into it!”

  She nodded. “That’s the plan. The walls are thin, we’ll go straight through. Keep the wheel straight and go. As fast as you can!”

  She looked back at the other passengers. “Everybody away from the back of the bus! Hold on tight and get down!”

  Hanna’s heart was pounding. She glanced up at the rear-view mirror, saw the side of the shop coming closer and closer. The red arrow of the speedometer flickered past forty, heading to fifty.

  Then they hit.

  While Charlie was flung forwards on to the steering wheel, Hanna threw herself into the two chairs behind the driver’s seat, cushioning her from the worst of the impact. There was a huge thundering crash, like an explosion, and Hanna’s world became a mass of screaming and pain and twisting metal.

  Hanna wasn’t sure how long it was before she staggered up from where she’d landed. She looked backwards and saw that they had gone straight through the side of the shop, so that the front of the minibus protruded out into the car park as if the ski-hire shop had swallowed the back half.

  She scrambled up and fixed her eyes on Ryan, her voice loud above the shudder and rumble of the engine. “You, get that back door open. Now!”

  Ryan struggled with the handle and shook his head desperately. “It won’t! The back’s smashed in! The doors won’t budge!”

  Behind her, Hanna heard a pained cough. Charlie’s body was sprawled over the steering wheel and he couldn’t seem to lift himself. It would only be a matter of seconds until the things from outside made their way in. And Hanna couldn’t afford having anyone along that might slow them down.

  Before she knew it, she’d somehow made a different choice to the one she was contemplating. She dragged him up by the collar from his seat towards the sliding doors, like a dog on a lead. Others were scrabbling through the gap in front of them and Hanna pushed Charlie down the step.

  They emerged into a wreckage of ski poles, collapsed walls and broken mannequins.

  The back end of the minibus had gone clean through the wall of the shop, and almost into the off-licence next door. Wires hung from the ceiling, smoke and dust filled the air, and the dying engine groaned and clicked desperately. Hanna stumbled on to the bottom step and slipped on a railing of fallen coats and trousers.

  The other students milled around the minibus, dazed, uncertain. Hanna reached down and retrieved a steel hockey stick off the floor then spun round as somebody started screaming.

  The noise came from Poppy.

  She was on the floor near the end of the minibus and something had hold of her leg. Hanna moved closer and saw that long, thin fingers had hold of her by the ankle, dragging her slowly under the coach. As she watched, the bottom half of one leg slipped from view and Poppy screamed again, loud and frantic.

  “Please! No! It’s biting me! Get it off, get it…”

  Her screams grew louder and louder, and Malachi took hold of her hands and started to try to pull her free. Hanna scrabbled over the debris and smashed the hockey stick down again and again, hammering the arm of the creature. Poppy cried out and jerked her leg free. Hanna hit at the pale fingers once more then backed away hurriedly.

  She didn’t have time to wonder what it was, or try to piece together what was happening. For now, her mind was fixed only on survival.

  The bottom of one leg of Poppy’s grey sweat pants was dark with blood, dripping off her bare foot on to the floor below. She wiped at her eyes and swore. “I can’t walk, I—”

  Shiv lifted Poppy up and put her arm around her. “I’ve got you. You’re OK.”

  Shiv glanced up at Hanna, waiting for direction. For a moment Hanna considered running out into the night, leaving them to fend for themselves. Before she could come to a decision, noises came from outside, scrapes, footsteps. Hanna caught Charlie’s eye then turned her head towards the back of the shop.

  “This way. Quickly!”

  She turned and ran, still not sure if she wanted the others to follow her or not.

  Chapter Twelve

  Shiv opened her eyes, coughed and experienced a nauseous wave of images from the night before, an unstoppable tide. She wiped at her nose, held back a stream of tears and tried to distinguish the shapes huddled round her in the tiny room.

  Her voice was a dry croak in her ears. “What time is it?”

  Across from her, Charlie’s face shimmered into view as he squinted down at his battered watch and pressed the button that made it illuminate. “Six-fifty.”

  Somebody moaned in the darkness. Whether it was from lack of sleep, an injury or just plain fear, Shiv wasn’t sure.

  Hanna’s voice whispered somewhere to her left. “Nearly dawn. And I can’t hear those things out there any more.”

  Slowly, Shiv’s world started to fill with slivers of light as the blackness gave way to grey. She glanced left and right, saw Malachi on one side, Ryan on the other.

  Her friends.

  Back home, she trained with them in the gym most days, spotting each other, pushing each other, throbbing hip-hop bouncing off the walls while the three of them competed to see who could lift the most.

  And last night she almost watched them die.

  She swore quietly, struggling to accept what she’d seen, and heard her words echo in the gloom. “We’re alive. We’re still alive.”

  A few feet away, Hanna sighed wearily. “For now. The storm is still fierce out there, but I can’t hear anything else. And I can’t hear those things any more.”

  Shiv closed her eyes and focused on the noises from the world outside. The wind was whipping around the sides of the derelict building, smashing into the shutters, rattling the rotten wood of the windows. But that was all she could make out.

  As hard as she tried to stop herself, Shiv found her mind slipping back to the horrific events of the night before.

  After Charlie had rammed the minibus halfway through the ski shop, Hanna had directed them first through the back of the store then out into the night. She’d run the small group down one alley, then another, to a small, two-storey building with faded wooden panelling. The windows were boarded up, the paintwork on the door chipped and battered, and a chain and padlock wound around the handle. Hanna had shoved the end of the hockey stick behind the chain and started to pull.

  “Malachi, Jordan, help me with this!”

  The rugby boys had put their combined weight on to the end of the stick and pulled down until the latch popped off the old wooden frame, bringing the screws with it.

  Hanna had glanced over her shoulder, jerked open the door and ushered them in. Once they were all inside she’d wound the freed chain around the inside handles and started to scrabble around near the doorway. It had been almost pitch black in the building, the air cold and musty and damp. Somebody had coughed and been rewarded with a hiss from Hanna, who had still been down on her knees. After a few seconds there had been a click and light had seeped into the gloom.

  Averting her eyes, Shiv had just been able to make out an old wind-up lantern clutched close to Hanna’s chest. Its weak glow had been enough to reveal that they were in a large, open space, with a battered desk in one corner and a high, cobwebbed ceiling above their heads. The place looked like it hadn’t been stepped into for years.

  Hanna had dimmed the light so that only the weakest glow was emitted as she’d guided them up a rickety set of wooden stairs to a small, panelled room, closing the door behind them.

  And they had been there ever since, nobody daring to speak more than a few w
ords.

  Now, in the weak dawn light, Charlie put his hand over his mouth to suppress a yawn and whispered in Hanna’s direction. Shiv barely knew anything about him, apart from his questionable reputation, but if not for his quick thinking the night before she wasn’t sure how many of them would still be breathing.

  “What is this place?”

  Hanna took a deep breath, let it out again. “It’s an old hostel, from the seventies. Kaldgellan used to get more visitors in the past, but when it got less popular they shut the hostel down. It’s stayed here ever since, boarded up and empty.”

  Shiv’s eyes stayed locked on the spiky foreign guide. More fingers of light started to filter through a vent in the wall above their heads, so that she could just make out the jagged edges of Hanna’s black hair, the angles of her face. Although she’d led them to safety, there was a cold distance about the Austrian girl, as if those that she had found herself huddled up with were little more than an inconvenience.

  Shiv found herself wondering how trustworthy Hanna really was.

  Between the gaps in their conversation, the silence felt endless in the darkness, and before long Shiv’s question filled the void. “How did you know about this place? Don’t you just work here through the winter like Stefan?”

  Hanna leaned her head to one side, studying Shiv, then she shook her head slowly. “Nein. I was born here. I lived in Kaldgellan for the first few years of my life. My brother, he was much older than me, and when this place closed down he and his friends used it as a … how do you say it? A den? When I was little he showed me. There’s a verstauen, a stash by the door, always there, a lantern, candles, some sleeping bags. My brother would bring me here with some of the other children in the village and we’d hide, play. But soon after that our family moved away from here altogether.”

  Shiv pictured Hanna’s life in the remote resort in its secluded corner of the Austrian Alps, far away from any town or bright lights. It made Bristol seem like a throbbing metropolis by comparison, and she wondered what kind of teenager would choose to return to such a desolate, deserted place.

  The same thing had occurred to Charlie, and he turned in Hanna’s direction. “Why did you come back here?”

  A look passed over her face, a flicker of uncertainty. “Something happened here. Something that changed my life. I had to see this place again. I had to put it to rest in my mind and the only way to do that was to come back.”

  Her words were enigmatic, but before Shiv could ask her any more there was a sniff from the other side of the room, and Tara’s voice joined the conversation. “And now you’re never going to leave this horrible place. What is this room? It stinks.”

  Although Tara and Ryan had tried to keep their relationship a secret, Shiv had known about it from the start. Despite Shiv’s initial uncertainty, there was a nicer side to Tara, one that Ryan brought to the surface, buried underneath the pampering and the entitlement.

  From the hostility in Hanna’s voice, it seemed she had already taken a strong dislike to Tara. “What’s your name?”

  Tara leaned her head to the side and gave Hanna a look loaded with animosity. “Tara.”

  “All you’ve done since I met you, Tara, is bitch, moan, cry and complain. This room was used by guests to dry their wet ski clothes and boots. It’s warm and it’s insulated, so the noise of your whining won’t carry outside. But you don’t have to stay here. In fact, I’d prefer it if you left. And if you don’t shut up I’m going to throw you out to those things.”

  “What … what were they? What the hell were they?”

  Shiv reckoned it was Ellie that had asked the question, the same words that had been uttered again and again during the endless night.

  And as with every time before, no one had an answer.

  Somebody snored then coughed. A particularly strong gust of wind hammered a shutter to and fro on the other side of the building. It had been doing that all night long. Shiv closed her eyes, images from the night before drifting in the void. A pair of black-checked Vans, blood spattering the canvas. Angus’s eyes, shot through with horror and shock, a spidery creature pulling him slowly out into the storm.

  Next to her, Ellie started to shake. Shiv reached out and hugged her close, sleep drawing her downwards.

  Some time later Tara’s voice echoed in the darkness, the sound jerking Shiv awake. “I’m hungry. And uncomfortable.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath to Shiv’s left, but before Hanna could bite Tara’s head off, somebody started to cry in the corner.

  Poppy.

  “I feel sick. That thing … it bit me. It hurts like hell. I think it’s still bleeding and it hurts, it hurts so bad. Do you … do you think I’m going to die?”

  “No. Not from that, anyway.”

  Shiv wasn’t sure how reassuring Poppy would find Hanna’s blunt response.

  The silence dragged on again, and Shiv found herself wrestling with her emotions, telling herself she had to hold it together for the sake of the group. Figures took shape amidst the grey. Ryan’s arm, curled around Tara like a branch. Jordan’s pale face, eyes dark-rimmed and haunted. Poppy’s ravaged leg, stretched out in front of her uselessly.

  In her life back home, Shiv had her eyes set on being a paramedic, the A-levels she’d chosen and the universities she was considering all part of her long-term plan. She’d even taken first-aid courses, another selling point on her personal statement that might catch the eye of an admissions tutor. In the darkness, Shiv cast a wary glance at Poppy’s mauled ankle.

  Hanna was right. Poppy wouldn’t die, at least not from blood loss. But if a dog had done that, or some other wild animal, she would have needed jabs, antibiotics.

  And the creatures that had burst into the hotel were something much more terrifying.

  After what felt like the longest time, Hanna sighed. “We need to move. I’m not sure, but I think those things have gone. They’ve been howling and yelling all night, but I can’t hear them any more. What time is it?”

  Charlie checked his watch again. “Eight-fifty.”

  Hanna yawned and nodded.

  “Yesterday, when Stefan and I explored the village, there was no sign of those things. And at least in the daylight we’d be able to see them coming.”

  Tara’s pale features took shape in the gloom. “You’re going to … to go out there?”

  Across from Shiv, Hanna stood and stretched, and Ryan glanced up at her.

  “Is it safe? I mean, do you think they’ll still be out there, whatever the hell they were?”

  Nobody answered, and the building creaked and groaned against the force of the gale. Hanna kneeled back down among them as if she was at confession, and wiped at her face.

  When she spoke, Shiv heard the faintest of tremors in her voice.

  “When I was little … when I was no more than a small child, I remember an old lady, Ingrid, that my parents used to leave me with, to babysit. We were too little for school and there was no nursery, not up here in the mountains, so she would look after the children, four or five of us at a time. One day, one of the other children ran away, into the forest. When Ingrid found the boy, she sat us all down and told us a story. About things that lived in the woods, that slept out there, that waited. Things that only came out at night. Just a story, but the look in her eyes … I’ve never forgotten it. That old lady’s words … I’ve heard them all night long.”

  She seemed to come back to herself and fell abruptly silent.

  Malachi stared across at Hanna. There was a glimmer of hope in his voice.

  “Whatever they are … maybe they’ve gone now … now it’s not night. Maybe they were hungry. And now they took the others they’re not.”

  Hanna stood and placed her fingers on the steel door handle.

  “We’ll see. Either way, we can’t stay here any more. We need to look at the injured girl’s ankle. We’re all hungry, cold. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that needs the toilet. We have to mo
ve.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They emerged into the daylight like zombies.

  Gathered by the others in the lobby of the hostel, Tara shielded her eyes against the weak glow from the skylight and looked around at the rest of the group. There were only nine of them left. There had been at least thirty of them on the coach when they had first arrived at the bottom of the valley, maybe more.

  And now there were just nine.

  It was like a nightmare, a terrifying hallucination that had stretched on into the daylight and was impossible to wake up from. Apart from Ryan, it looked as if none of Tara’s friends had survived the night. She wiped at her eyes and then tried to smile as Ryan squeezed her hand. At least he was still with her. Two of his teammates were with them too, Malachi and Jordan, and they stood on either side of Poppy like sentries, supporting her while she held her savaged ankle just above the floorboards.

  Tara found she couldn’t really bear to look at the wound too much. Poppy’s face was white with pain, and Tara was glad that it hadn’t been her ankle that had been too close to the underside of the minibus. She watched as Shiv kneeled down by Poppy and used a tatty jumper to try to bind Poppy’s wound. Shiv had been friends with Ryan since they were little, and Tara knew that Shiv trained in the gym with the boys. Tara always felt a little judged by the other girl, as if Shiv reckoned that Ryan was too good for her, but they’d barely spoken before this trip.

  Shiv stood up and took Ellie’s hand in her own. Tara had chatted to Ellie once when they’d found themselves sat together in an assembly, but she wasn’t from the right part of town for Tara and her to be friends. Her long blond hair was stringy, and her fingers were covered with cheap, showy gold rings. Ellie had told Tara once that she wanted to get into fashion, but Tara thought that Ellie’s first move might be to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

  Then there was the new boy, Charlie. Tara thought he looked a little bit like somebody that had just staggered out of a rock concert, with his scruffy dark hair that always seemed to be jutting out at jagged angles. Worse still, he dressed like a tramp, in an awful combination of hoodies and torn jeans. And bearing in mind the stories about him, and the fact that the police had bundled him out of school on more than one occasion, he certainly wasn’t somebody that Tara wanted to be trapped alone with.