Bitter Cold (16 page)

The rooftop threatened to crumble into pieces. He knew their only hope was to get out. He studied the distance between the bare gazebo floor and the nearest patch of untainted snow on the deck. To span the roof of the house and cover the gazebo at the same time, the dark creature had stretched itself a little thin. But not thin enough. At the narrowest point, it looked to be about ten feet wide. Still too far to risk a leap.

Suddenly it was irrelevant, anyway. In one tremendous, crackling crush, the roof came down. The kids had barely enough time to scurry for cover next to the spa. Sadie huddled on the floor with them, below the exposed nails and sharp wood fragments. Along with the strewn bits of timber, the sheered metal screws, and bent aluminum brackets, came black snow. It poured in from the fissures in the walls and roof, fell from the house in large clumps, and slithered into the gazebo through the splits in the cedar shake. Now, with the structure practically demolished, it had the chance to complete its assault.

Logan kicked at the fallen beams, hoping to manufacture an exit. Nothing budged. They needed to get out desperately. The blackness was coming. It slid in like thick, black syrup, collecting in a large pile of snow that had fallen during the demolition.

“It’s in here!” Amy pushed harder against the spa. “I told you it would get in! Now it’s gonna fucking get us!”

“No it’s not! It’s not gonna get us! It’s not!”

“Logan, you’re full of SHIT!”

TWENTY-ONE

APRIL SHIVERED, BUT IT WASN’T the winter breeze making her tremble. She was terrified at what they might find in Dead Man’s Dump.

Jeff traced the children’s footprints, craning to see where they led. April hoped they’d gone somewhere else, that the boy had the sense to stay away from that terrible place.

“Looks like he has a friend with him,” he crouched and looked closer. “A girl, maybe.”

April was struck with a sudden skepticism. “How can you tell?”

“The prints look smaller,” he stood and strode forward, following the tracks.

The trees began to tremble. A rumble in April’s chest made her lose her bearings. It was growing louder, from beyond the ridge in front of them, from the direction of Dead Man’s Dump.

“What the hell is that!”

Just as Jeff completed his sentence, a helicopter elevated over the hillcrest, appearing through the innumerable Douglas-firs cluttering the horizon. The black craft hovered among the bare tree trunks, then went up until it disappeared into the canopy. The thumping rotors gave away its presence as it hid among the treetops. It was coming right for them.

“NWP!” she screamed.

“What are they doing here?” Jeff watched the helicopter buzz toward them, sending an artificial windstorm through the hillside. April had to shield her eyes against the blowing snow.

When it got directly over them, she lifted both hands and extended her middle fingers, sneering with the least ladylike face she could manage. The chopper paused in midair, the people inside spying on them, surely. Then it continued south, following the terrain toward the river.

“That’s right, assholes!” she kept flipping them off. “I’m still alive, you criminals! Criminals!”

She looked at Jeff and he stared at her, dumbfounded, holding up what looked like a rope. It was attached to something buried in the snow. A sled. Logan’s sled.

He dropped the rope and started running. She had to sprint to stay within sight of him. When she caught up, he was standing at the lip of the miniature abyss, the canyon where it all began, Dead Man’s Dump.

It looked so peaceful. Even with Dexter’s motorcycle—a reminder of yesterday’s horrific event—the place had a calm, almost blissful coating. She understood why the local kids were attracted to it.

“LOGAN!” Jeff’s voice was strong, yet she saw the desperation in his rapid, shallow breathing, his rigid stare. “Logan, where are you!”

He went down to the valley floor and headed for Dexter’s deserted bike, barely recognizable under several inches of overnight snowfall. When he got close enough, he kicked it.

“Damned kid!” he kicked it again. Snow fell from the handlebars. “If it weren’t for that damned kid and his fuckin’ showing off, this whole thing wouldn’t have happened!”

She didn’t have the heart to tell him Dexter was dead. He turned to the trees and cupped his mouth. “LOGAN!”

They both called out his name for several minutes, sticking together and pacing the canyon. She didn’t want to be there. She thought it was insane, though she didn’t want to tell him. Who was she to tell a father not to search for his missing child? But that place. It was deadly.

Her senses were on high alert. Every sound became magnified. Not even the smallest flutter of a snowflake on her shoulder escaped her scrutiny. She heard everything, saw everything. The slightest movement in the trees, branches shifting ever so subtly, their frozen, icy limbs seemingly alive in the otherwise lifeless zone.

Yet nothing really moved. Nothing made any real sound. Jeff did, though. He was swift and strong and steady. He seemed to have a voice of steel, never wavering, never cracking. Robust, deep, resonant. But she saw his face. His eyes. A ripple of desperation, so profound, had surfaced the second he realized his son was missing. And now that ripple had become a whirlpool, threatening to pull him under.

She couldn’t blame him. Who knew where Logan was? As they stared at each other, she seemed to know what he was thinking. She was thinking it, too. It was the exact thing they shouldn’t have had on their minds. She sensed his uncertainty. He shook his head and exhaled hard, but didn’t say it. If she were the boy’s mother, she’d feel the same way. She wouldn’t give up. Neither would he.

He yelled into the snowy abyss again, then stopped, his head tilted to the sky. April thought she heard something, too. She turned in the same direction.

The sound was unmistakable, and it made her skin crawl. A girl’s voice, crying out in terror. April jerked into a rigid stance, tightening her shoulders. Something about that girl’s scream—a death yell. The girl was in trouble. Big trouble.

Jeff took a quick breath and began running up the hill. April hurried behind him, shrugging off her fatigue with a jolt of newfound energy.

“Who is that, Jeff? Do you know?”

He answered through heavy breaths. “Not sure. Don’t care. She needs help.”

The girl screamed again.

“Where’s it coming from?”

TWENTY-TWO

STRAWN HAD SPENT FAR too long with his eyes in the binoculars. Keeping a rock solid gut in a helicopter required the ability to see the horizon and anticipate the aircraft’s movements. Staring into a pair of binos took that away. Luckily, he could crack the window to get some cold air on his face. The freezing temperature had a benefit for once, although the snowstorm made flying terribly unsafe. He didn’t have time for such worries, though. And he didn’t have time to be airsick, so he swallowed both concerns down.

“Should we circle back, sir?” Henderson asked through the com-set.

“I don’t know. Let’s see. We’re out here in the freezing goddam snow, risking our lives just to see the sights. Is that what you fucking think? YES! Of course! Turn the fuck around! I’ve got to find this goddam thing!”

He paused, collecting his thoughts. Henderson did as ordered and leaned into the cyclic stick, banking the chopper left. Strawn’s stomach didn’t like it. “Should we turn around,” he grumbled, mimicking his pilot. “Goddam imbeciles. Especially McCullah—and YOU!” he glared into the back. Armstrong stared out the window, pretending not to hear, but Strawn knew he heard. He wore a headset like the rest of them.

“Armstrong!”

The guy flinched as if coming out of a daydream. Maybe he was reliving McCullah’s death. Strawn shook his head, wishing Armstrong had been the one to die. Men like McCullah were hard to come by. He was part of the golden two percent, a genuine sociopath. Modern warfare psychology had discovered that ninety-eight percent of the population found killing other human beings detestable, unnatural. But then there was that other two percent, the coldblooded killers. Two percent of the human species had it in them to murder without remorse, slay a man in the morning and then sleep like a log that night. McCullah was such a man. Strawn loved him like a master loved a well-trained attack dog. Now his dog was dead, and he wanted answers.

“Point out to us one more time where that thing attacked McCullah.”

Armstrong nodded. “Yeah. We gotta find that thing, sir. If it gets into a populated area…I don’t want to think about it.”

Strawn cleared his throat and tried to calm down.

Henderson circled low over the treetops. Strawn trusted him. He was one of the old-school pilots, the type of guy who wouldn’t ask questions. Armstrong, though, was a different story. Didn’t have the nerve for this type of work, but no matter how much he wanted to murder the son of a bitch, Strawn needed him. Armstrong was the only living NWP employee to actually lay eyes on the biological anomaly, whatever it was.

He was fascinated. Imagine the possibilities. Could it be captured, studied, replicated, and marketed as a biological weapon? The implications were staggering. Strawn might have been sitting on a mountain of gold. By Armstrong’s description of the entity, it sounded like a merciless, efficient killer. It made him tingle with anticipation.

“Describe the creature again.”

Armstrong lost the color in his face. “Sir, I don’t—”

“Do it!”

He cleared his throat. “It was pitch-black. The blackest black I’ve ever seen. It moved in the shadows, skirting along the edges of the canyon. Then it struck like a snake, with these tentacles shooting at McCullah’s feet. It surrounded him. Then it swallowed him piece by piece. It was horrible. Horrible.”

“You just let him die?” Strawn looked outside without his binoculars.

“There was nothing I could have done. Shooting the damned thing wouldn’t have worked. McCullah already tried that. He emptied his clip into it point blank, but that didn’t do shit. I’m telling you, this thing, whatever it is, it’s so lethal, he was dead the second it got ahold of him.”

Dollar figures flashed through Strawn’s mind. The thing was sounding more and more lucrative by the second. This organism, when captured, would become priority one. He looked at his pilot. He sure would miss Henderson, the old boy. But after this, he most definitely would have to be liquidated. Loose lips and all. Sure, Strawn could pay him off, but why do that when a nice little industrial accident would be much cheaper? They’d cash in on Armstrong, too. He needed to go regardless. A coronary would do nicely.

Armstrong shouted. “Sir! Sir! I think I see somebody, and, and I think it’s her! It’s the reporter!”

Strawn stretched to see from the same angle as Armstrong. Impossible. “Spin this thing around!”

Henderson got the helicopter pointed in the other direction, giving Strawn a perfect view of a deep, narrow canyon. Standing in a clearing at the bottom, he saw two people, adults, one of them did indeed look familiar.

“You have got to be shitting me! You know what, Armstrong? You just saved your own life!”

Armstrong chuckled quickly. Then his laughter grinded to a nervous giggle. Then to nothing. He noticed Strawn was serious.

“Get low, Henderson,” Strawn ordered. “Let’s let her know we see her.”

Expertly, Henderson navigated the chopper to within feet above the evergreens, some as tall as small skyscrapers. They buzzed the two people trudging through the snow. As they passed, Strawn strained to lock onto the face of the shorter one. He got her in the stereo vision of his high-definition scopes, identifying her without a doubt. It was that reporter—April Murray.

“Now what, sir?” Henderson looked straight ahead.

“We keep an eye on them, that’s what. Armstrong, you got them?”

“Yeah,” he peered at them in the screen of a camcorder. “They’re heading, uh, northeast it looks like. Toward the homes just over the ridge.”

“Okay,” Strawn nodded. “Let’s go see what they’re looking for.”

TWENTY-THREE

THE TOXIC SNOW burned Logan’s nasal passages, constricting his throat, causing him to choke on his own mucus. Amy coughed so hard, she drooled all over the front of her purple and pink ski jacket.

Logan heard the thing, too, crackling and snapping as if someone was grinding a sheet of bubble wrap. Sadie barked ferociously. She didn’t seem to be affected by the stench. Either that, or she didn’t show it. Logan never thought that old dog could be so fierce.

Amy huddled close to him. Logan noticed she had snow on her pants, some more on her boot. He brushed it away, knowing even the slightest bit could allow a trail for the creature to follow.

The living stain inundated every surface with even the slightest bit of snow, seeping along the small, frozen crannies, the tiny areas where ice had become imbedded. It was all pitch-dark. The cedar shingles on the gazebo’s roof looked like they had been painted black. The splintered, wrecked two-by-fours were draped with strips of darkness. Everywhere he looked, blackness was surging toward them, long, thin fingers reaching, yearning for flesh.

“DAD! HELP!” his voice cracked. He didn’t care. He screamed again and again. Amy yelled, too. For Logan’s father, for her own father, for anyone. Sadie bayed louder, spurred on by their desperate cries.

“I’m sorry, Logan,” her eyes were swollen.

“For what?”

“For getting you into this.”

“Just sit tight,” he told her. “And don’t let any snow touch you.”

She peered up. “It’s snowing right now.”

They called out again for help. Logan’s lungs felt on fire. Then he realized what had happened. A strong gust whipped up from the spoiled snow in a fine mist and he’d inhaled some of it. In his ideas of how the creature could get around, he hadn’t thought of it being carried by wind. His skin burned, too. Not enough to kill, but it proved the monster could find other ways to get them.

He hacked up enough phlegm to wet his throat so he could yell for his dad some more. Jeff had to hear. The wind blew harder, making it impossible for Logan to keep up with the snowdrifts entering through the gaping maw where there once was a roof. The gazebo’s protected environment was now a broken, battered tangle of lumber. Only a matter of seconds before the creature found its way through the maze of frost surrounding them. He kicked some of it away, but as he did, more fell in its place.

The stink became too much. He felt his stomach seize, yet he didn’t let it stop him from shouting and wiping away the snow. Then the full force of the cold sent his body into uncontrollable shivers. Through chattering teeth, he kept screaming, even as the dark creature crawled around the corner of the hot tub, where snow had collected on the floor.

For a moment, he thought they were safe. The monster seemed to have nowhere else to go, no more snow to use as a conduit. But the euphoric feeling didn’t last long. Wedging between the floorboards, it found something he’d overlooked. He’d wiped away the ice on the floor, but he didn’t think about the residue it left behind, especially in the cracks between the planks. It didn’t seem important at the time. He was wrong. The monster only needed a tiny scrap in order to move about. As long as the path was uninterrupted, it didn’t matter how thin it was.

It felt like a punch in the gut. No way could he scrape the snow out of the seams. There was too much of it. The blackness took several routes, each only millimeters thick, each leading toward him and Amy. He tried not to make a sound, afraid to let her know. She already knew, and let out a desperate cry. Nothing intelligible, just raw emotion. The dog mimicked her master, wailing along with her.

On her butt, she kicked away from the encroaching darkness. Too late. The deadly creature grabbed her boot, sizzling into the rubber sole. She screamed again. Logan did, too. Nothing else seemed possible. The creature had them pinned in on all sides.

“No! It hurts! It hurts!” she managed to get the boot off. Then the blackness got onto the other boot. She untied and slipped that one off, too, then examined the bottoms of her feet, finding no real damage. Her socks were singed, but she was in one piece. The danger wasn’t gone, though. The blackness was all around them, closing in quickly.

Amy went quiet, presumably in shock. Crowded by the collapsed lumber, Logan crouched and held her. The only one who wouldn’t give up was Sadie.

The German Shepard toed the line of darkness sweeping toward them. She backed up, barking quickly and forcefully, playing chicken with the amorphous predator.

Then she began to whine, her paws inches from the creature. Logan thought she was hurt, but her next move proved him wrong. She squatted low on her hind legs, whined again, then pushed off hard, springing higher and farther than he thought possible, even for a dog. Twenty feet at least. An amazing leap.

She landed under an awning, in untainted snow, but skidded into the blackness, skirting along the edge. Yelping wildly, she rolled on her side and tried to stand, though clearly her paws were killing her. She licked her pads, front and back, over and over.

The blackness stopped its approach. Logan stared at it, questioning its motives. Amy lifted her head from her knees and watched. She started to speak. He stopped her. Maybe they could fool it.

Back on all fours, Sadie dug her heels into the snow and was louder than ever, barking, growling, snapping her jaws. She even snatched a piece of the backyard gas barbeque, biting the tarp Mr. Mitchell used as a cover and toppling it onto its front.

The impact shook the deck and the black stain reversed course. Sadie retreated, away from the gazebo. The wood beams and cedar shingles cracked and groaned as the creature slid off. The tiny structure seemed appreciative to be rid of the burden. Blackness slipped down from the house, dripping like hot wax, regrouping with the main bulk, then shifting toward the German Shepard.

Man’s best friend
, Logan thought. The canine backed down the steps. The dark snow moved as one, forming a wall around the stairs, closing all other exits, playing a game of chess by anticipating its victim’s escape. It seemed calculating, intelligent, and it made Logan cringe.

Before descending the stairs, Sadie peeked over her shoulder, making sure the creature was still following. She then looked at Logan. Her soulful eyes conveyed only one message:
Save yourselves
.

She scrambled out of sight and the creature chased her, tracing her path to the yard below, squeezing and funnel down the steps, pouring onto the lawn like a black waterfall.

Logan saw the dog bounding across the snowy grass, howling and glancing back at the darkness just behind.

Amy broke the silence, whispering. “I think it’s gone,” she started to crawl out. He wanted to stop her, but she’d already made it most of the way before he could react. His nerves were so deadened by the experience. Amy didn’t have a problem getting herself moving.

“It
is
gone. My brave Sadie. What a good girl. That fuckin’ thing better not hurt her,” she started toward the stairs in only socks. “Oh, Daddy!” she sniffled. “Daddy! Daddy!”

“Amy, we’ve got to go before that thing comes back.”

She sniffed hard. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. “No! I can’t leave. What about Daddy!”

“We can’t do anything, Amy. Do you understand? He’s gone!”

She lifted her head and glanced down to the snow-covered back lawn.

“AMY!” he made her flinch.

“What?” she said meekly.

“We have to get outta here!”

She blinked, looking at the backyard again. Then she stared at the demolished gazebo, the trashed deck chairs and table, the broken planters and the gray tracks in the snow. Through her tears, she managed a shaky, “Okay.”

He took her elbow. “Come on. We’ll go to my house.”

They made it a few steps when she stopped. “Wait. What about Sadie?”

He didn’t know how to answer. Honestly he thought the dog had been killed, probably trapped, cornered, and then devoured by the monster. He just hoped Sadie had enough sense to lead the creature far away. Still, there was a chance, however remote, that the dog had survived. He knew the odds were slim, but Amy needed some kind of hope. So he lied.

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

She eyed him, her cheeks glowing. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. She’ll be okay.”

He heard a sound sort of like thunder, only continuous, a steady, rhythmic drumbeat.

“What is that?” he wondered out loud.

“A helicopter—look!” Amy pointed up into the trees. She was right. A black chopper hovered above the woods, a vulture looming overhead.

“LOGAN!”
a familiar voice called out over the helicopter’s clatter. It was unmistakable.