Whiteout

by Gabriel Dylan

  Hanna held up her open palm to silence Charlie. She leaned closer still to Poppy’s sweating face. “Where? Where are they?”

  Poppy shook her head and squinted at the doorway at the far end of the church. “In the caves. In the caves, by the hidden trail. Where the rocks are kissed by diamonds. She lets me see sometimes. But she’s coming, she’s going to get in, she won’t come through the door, but … but…”

  Poppy’s words stopped and she started to sob uncontrollably again. She nestled next to Ellie for a few seconds, then sat up and wiped at her eyes, glancing around at the shadowed faces.

  “Where am I? Where…”

  Ellie stroked Poppy’s hair and held her close. “You’re safe, you’re OK. You were just dreaming. You’re going home soon. Go back to sleep now.”

  Poppy nodded groggily. Her voice was hoarse, her words a dry, tiny whisper. “I’ve been having the worst dreams, terrible dreams. Voices in my head, screaming at me. And my ankle it…”

  She made as if to reach down to her wounded leg, but the energy seemed to ebb away from her. Her eyes closed and she slipped down next to Ellie.

  For a long time nobody spoke. Charlie counted the minutes as his heartbeat slowly calmed.

  Ellie eased away from Poppy, laying her head down to rest on the bed of cushions that they had taken from the wooden benches that lined the church. She sighed and looked imploringly up at the others. “What the hell was that? She was dreaming, wasn’t she?”

  Tara nodded. “She had to be. She had to.”

  Charlie glanced across at Hanna. There was a look on her face that he couldn’t read, something between fear and incomprehension. He stared at her, a cold certainty forming in his mind.

  “You know, don’t you? The caves she talked about, you know where they are, don’t you?”

  Hanna wouldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, she picked at the cut on the side of her face. “Maybe. There’s a run, not too far from here. It takes you past a sheer a cliff-face. But there’s a crack in the stone, a gap, and you can cut through it, duck down, and the rock there, it’s peppered with shining stones. Diamonds, the villagers used to call them. And in the rock-face nearby, there’s a series of caves. I’ve never been in – they’re far from safe – but I’ve seen them. But there’s no way Poppy could know about that place. Only the locals know. Only the people who live on the mountain know where she’s talking about. She couldn’t.”

  Nico swore. The tone of his voice was several rungs above the edge of panic. “Then how can she know? How can she?”

  Hanna’s voice betrayed a tiny edge of uncertainty. “How should I know? Maybe she … maybe she read about it on the internet? Maybe a friend of hers had been here, had … I don’t know! It doesn’t make sense!”

  Hanna glanced across at Poppy. “She’s dying. I sat with her last night, I looked at her ankle and it’s turned bad. Gangrenous. It’s enough to make anybody feverish. Without a doctor, without a hospital, she’s not going to last another day.”

  She reached across, dug into a pocket of her backpack and pulled out a roll of medical gauze and a pair of scissors. “If she’s still with us in the morning, we’ll bandage it again. For all the good it will do.”

  Tara looked up at the windows above their head. The sky was dark now, the moon all but hidden by a thick layer of clouds. “We can’t do anything, can we? There’s nothing we can do to help her. I don’t know her, not really. But it could be me lying there, couldn’t it, instead of her?”

  Across from Charlie, Ellie leaned forwards, a terrified sheen in her eyes. “Poppy said they were still alive, didn’t she. Changing. I didn’t want to tell anyone this, but … last night I saw something. When I was with Charlie, after you went into the basement. One of those things, at the hostel. It looked just like Malachi. I mean, it can’t have been. But it looked just like him.”

  Charlie felt a cold dread prickle his skin, a flashback to the flaming hostel playing in his mind. He’d recognized one of the creatures, just as it caught fire. He’d seen its face before, sitting two rows behind him on the coach as they set off for Austria.

  A horrified look swam across Tara’s face, but before she could start to speak Nico beat her to it. “Vampires can turn humans. Like in Salem’s Lot. Blade. Near Dark. That’s what they do. That’s how they make others.”

  Tara leaned in Nico’s direction, a step away from hysterics. “What does that even mean?”

  Nico wiped at his eyes. “Maybe it means that if they take you, they make you just like them. Maybe that’s why they dragged away the bodies of the other students, that first night at the hotel.”

  Tara shook her head, her voice rising, panicked. “I’m not talking about all that fantasy nonsense you and your geek friends nerd out over! What about the fact she saw Malachi? Does it mean that those things caught Malachi and Shiv? That they caught Ryan? That he’s … he’s…”

  Ellie reached across and put her hand on Tara’s. “I don’t know what I saw. It was dark, smoky. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe I was just exhausted.”

  Ellie’s words seemed to calm Tara down, averting the screams that seemed on the verge of echoing around the chapel. Charlie decided it was best not to share what he had seen that night, and he felt a short-lived wave of relief when Tara sat back, her face haunted.

  It was a while before anyone else spoke, Ellie’s admission rendering the group stunned and silent. A small silver chain hung around Tara’s neck, a crucifix, and Charlie watched her lift it out from under her top and study it.

  “Will those … will those things find us here?”

  Hanna shrugged. Tara’s eyes drifted towards the heavy wooden door at the front of the chapel.

  Nico wiped tears away from his cheeks, then lay back on his sleeping bag. Hanna sat and stared at Poppy, her bandaged fingers on the handle of her hockey stick.

  For a while, the only sound was the wind moaning around the eaves. Charlie started to wonder if the rest of the group had gone to sleep, until Nico’s voice abruptly echoed out of the gloom. “I don’t want to die. I mean, there’s so much I never did. I never travelled. This is the furthest I’ve ever been from home. I never got to go to America, I always wanted to go there, go to Comic Con. I never got to see how Game of Thrones ended. It might sound stupid, but it meant a lot to me. And I never even got the chance to, I mean I never had a girlfriend, so I never got to…”

  Hanna glanced across at him. “Have sex?”

  He nodded slowly. Even by the candlelight Charlie could tell Nico was embarrassed.

  Hanna stared at him. “You want to know what it’s like?”

  Nico’s eyes widened. “No! I mean, not like—”

  Tara snorted and Hanna shook her head. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not going to do it with you. I meant, do you want me to tell you what it’s like?”

  Nico put his head in his hands. “I’m such a loser,” he mumbled.

  Charlie looked across at him and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve never done it either. So if you’re a loser, I’m a loser, too.”

  Hanna stared at him and raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry. That day when I walked in on you with that pretty dark-haired girl, Leandra… If I hadn’t disturbed you, perhaps you would have had the chance.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that I would have been too scared to … you know.”

  Nico glanced across at Hanna. “So what … what is it like?”

  Hanna shrugged. “It’s nothing special. It’s supposed to be good with the right person. Better, anyway. Too bad I never found the right person to try out that theory.”

  Maybe it was Charlie’s imagination, maybe it was the light, but Hanna’s gaze seemed to linger on him, studying him. He felt a nervous twinge in his gut as he caught her eye and she quickly looked away.

  On the other side of the altar, Tara sniffed. “I did, I think. I found my right person. But I don’t think I’m going to see him again.”

 
; Ellie leaned her head to one side. “Ryan?”

  Tara nodded. “It was never going to work, was it? As soon as my mum found out where he lived, she’d have grounded me until I agreed to stop seeing him. He made me a better person, I think. He always made me feel special.”

  She stared at the pendant in her fingers and then glanced at the heavy wooden door at the other end of the chapel once more, as if trying to cling on to the dream that Ryan might burst in through it at any second with a rescue party.

  Tara’s bottom lip wobbled, the hope slowly draining from her eyes. “He’s not coming, is he? Maybe Ellie wasn’t imagining it. I’m not going to see Ryan again, am I?”

  Hanna dipped a finger into the line of candlewax that slid down from one of the flames. She glanced across at Tara and picked the drying coating from her fingertip. “Honestly? It doesn’t look good.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  They came in the dead of night, when even the most anxious of the group was asleep. Charlie had been drifting through feverish, colour-bleached dreams, back in the frozen Scottish highlands with his dad.

  Then the noises had begun.

  The hammering seemed to start all at once, from every corner of the walls. A cacophony of banging fists, howls, shouts and scratching fingernails.

  Ellie scrambled to her feet before Charlie’s eyes were even fully open. Her voice was high with panic. “Shit, they’ve found us, what do we do? Where do we go?”

  “Quiet, everyone, quiet!” Hanna hissed.

  Charlie’s mouth was dry, but he didn’t feel scared. Instead, he felt a numb finality wash over him, a strange sense of calm. He curled his fingers around the crowbar and turned to Hanna. “This is it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to run this time.”

  Hanna swore. “They’re at the front and the back. The two places they could find a way in. They should hold. But we need to make sure they don’t get in, or we’re finished. Nico, I need you and Tara to go to the back door. It’s chained shut and the wood is heavy, but we need to be sure.”

  Nico didn’t move. He put his hands to his mouth and shook his head. There were tears in his eyes.

  Tara’s eyes were wide and frantic. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want those things to get me, make me one of them! Please.”

  Charlie sighed and licked sandpaper lips. “I’ll go. I’ll guard it. You look after the front door.”

  Hanna nodded and lifted her backpack. A clink of glass came from inside the bag, the last of the alcohol that had started the terrible blaze at the hostel. Outside, the clamouring and hammering seemed to notch up a level, so that Charlie almost had to shout to be heard. “If we burn them, if we use the bottles, there’s no way out. The fire spreads and we’ll burn in here.”

  Hanna’s eyes were flat, her voice steady and resigned. “Better that than turn into one of those things.”

  She turned towards the front door. The old wood jerked and jumped with a multitude of impacts, and Charlie imagined the horde outside, scratching and beating to gain entry. Ellie backed away until she thudded into the wall. “How many are there?”

  Charlie met Hanna’s eyes. “If they get in, run for the back door. We can fight our way out there.”

  Charlie knew it was a lie, but he said it anyway. He was amazed at how steady his voice sounded, how little fear he felt. Hanna seemed on the verge of saying something, and her eyes lingered on Charlie. Instead she nodded, dropped her coat and rucksack, clutched her hockey stick and made her way to the front doors.

  Charlie watched her go and wondered if this might be the last time he would see her. Then he gripped the crowbar between his slippery fingers, turned, and started to run to the rear of the chapel.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Hanna took slow, hesitant steps towards the chapel door. It took all she had not to just turn, run and hide, close her eyes and wait for the inevitable.

  But somehow she kept walking.

  There was a scream from somewhere behind her. Hanna ignored it and took another step. She gripped the battered hockey stick tightly and held it in front of her like a talisman, her burnt fingers throbbing and complaining. While the others had slept, she had entertained the thought that perhaps the creatures wouldn’t find them.

  Now she knew otherwise.

  Perhaps they had followed their tracks. Or perhaps they had smelled them on the wind. Whatever it was, they were here now, and they wanted to get inside.

  As she crept closer, the battered wooden door came more and more into focus. Hanna could see that the thick oak held firm. It juddered and shifted, but there were no cracks in the wood, no talons or fingers poking through. For now, the door was keeping them out.

  Hanna lowered the hockey stick, her breath coming in short gasps. She was just about to turn around when the noise from the other side of the door ceased.

  It was as if someone outside had turned off a switch, or as if whatever was creating the riot of sound had suddenly, instantly, fallen asleep. For a heartbeat there was absolute silence in the dim light of the chapel, no sound in Hanna’s ears except the pounding of her heart.

  Hanna stared at the door, confused.

  As her hockey stick slipped down to her side two words broke the silence.

  “Hello, pretty.”

  The sudden, foreign voice made the hairs on Hanna’s arms stand up. It was as if a cold blast of air had blown straight through the back wall of the chapel and on to her exposed skin.

  She started to turn, knowing she was a fraction too late, knowing that the breath from the words had been at her neck.

  There was a deep, piercing pain across her bicep. Hanna cried out and felt her hockey stick drop from her numb fingers.

  A bright shimmer of steel slashed for her face and she took two quick instinctive steps backwards.

  A figure stood in front of her, long auburn hair curled around a pale face, a mocking smile on her lips. Its bloodied fingers held a pair of scissors, the curved blade brandished forwards like a knife. The figure took an unsteady step and Hanna saw that one of its feet was bandaged and bloody, the ankle swollen and ravaged.

  Hanna took another step backwards. “You’re…”

  The dreadful smile grew wider. “Poppy isn’t here any more. I drove her out. She was strong. It took a while, but she crumbled in the end. They all do.”

  Hanna felt blood running down her arm, dripping from her fingertips on to the stone floor. Her eyes flickered involuntarily down to the dropped hockey stick at Poppy’s feet.

  The other girl shook her head solemnly and kicked the weapon away. “You’ve done enough damage with that, I think.”

  Poppy lurched forwards and slashed again, the tip of the scissors barely a finger’s breadth from Hanna’s chest.

  Over Poppy’s shoulder, Hanna could see Ellie lying prone by the altar, her eyes lifeless, a widening pool of blood around her head. There was no sign of Nico or Tara.

  Hanna took another step backwards, desperately seeking an escape route. She made as if to dart right, on to the rows of benches, but the thing that had once been Poppy jabbed the scissors that way, herding Hanna up the aisle.

  The smile on Poppy’s face widened further still. Through the torn lips Hanna could see the girl’s decaying gums, some sockets empty, others boasting tiny, glistering teeth that had started to poke up sharply through the torn flesh.

  Hanna realized with endless horror that the other girl was changing.

  When Poppy spoke, it was no longer her own voice. Instead, it was as if a dozen voices at once fell from her lips, a chorus of misery and hatred.

  “I am everywhere. And I’ve seen you before. When I took your friend Stefan. When you led the others to the bus. When you burned my brethren last night. While they burned, I memorized your face. You angered me.”

  The scissors came at Hanna again. She jerked backwards and struck the rough wooden door behind her.

  There was nowhere left to run.

  She cried out as the blades sliced the skin
just under her collarbone, the sudden splash of blood hot on her chest.

  Poppy came a step closer, the rotten stench of her breath warm in Hanna’s face. “I’m going to make you suffer. I’m going to kill you slowly. A little bit at a time.”

  In all the days since the snow had started falling, Hanna had never felt real terror. There had been times when she had known desperation, and resignation, and felt the icy touch of fear, but she had always thought that somehow she would find a way through.

  Now, though, she was petrified.

  Poppy’s right hand came from nowhere, slapping Hanna hard across the face with her open palm. Hanna’s head bounced off the door, then the sweating fingers were round her throat. Tears blurred her vision.

  The creature held her there for a moment, a glimmer of triumph in the eyes that had once been Poppy’s. Hanna beat at its arm frantically, pushing her feet against the wall, trying to force Poppy’s face away from her own.

  It was useless.

  Poppy’s pale skin moved closer and closer until their noses were just inches apart, the full horror of her ruined face too close for Hanna to bear.

  At the edge of her vision, Hanna saw the scissors slide up into the light. They came closer and closer, the tip of the blade drifting up slowly and certainly towards Hanna’s left eye.

  As the light bled from the room, the last thing Hanna saw was the smile on Poppy’s lips, a crimson slash splitting her pale face.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Tara had no idea why this had happened to her. It just wasn’t fair.

  She was always nice to people, at least to their faces, and she had so much to look forward to in life. It was as if she’d been transported into some alternative world, thrown into the middle of a terrifying horror film.

  And Tara hated horror films.

  While Charlie did his best to clean up the blood, dragging the bodies to the back of the church, Tara spent the hours after the attack sobbing and weeping. She wasn’t sure if she was ever going to stop. Whenever the tears seemed to be drying up, she’d suddenly flash back to earlier that night, when the terrible hammering had dragged her from sleep like an electric shock.