Bonechiller (12 page)

It’s down there! Waiting!

This is not real. Not happening.

The growl blinds me to everything else. It owns me.

I can’t outrun the beast. But it let me go before. It had me. I was dead. And it let me go.

Images flash behind my eyes. That warped face. Those teeth.

Stop it!
I shout at myself.

Make a run for it! Maybe I’ll reach the house. Maybe.

That’s all I’ve got. I suck in a deep breath, then throw myself into an all-out sprint. I don’t look down, don’t think. I leap over the space where the breath mists up through the cracks.

I’m so locked in on the light from the house I forget to breathe. I pick up speed, ears straining for any sound of pursuit. But the rumble rushes at me from all directions.

I stagger up the snowy incline to the house, using my hands to keep from tumbling back down.

I almost catch up to Pike as he steps through the doorway, slouching under Howie’s weight. Pike sets him down on the floor.

I have to reach back out into the dark to grab the doorknob. For a second it feels like I’m sticking my arm into the mouth of that beast. It’ll rip my arm clean off.

Then my hand finds the knob and I slam the door. I lock it and stand there, clutching the knob.

I’m stunned by the quiet. I stare at the door, panting. When I get enough breath, I yell.

“Dad!”

In the morning, I catch a ride to the hospital on the back of Ash’s motorbike. The blowing snow and black ice on the highway to Barrie keep me wide-awake and holding on tight.

Last night was endless. No chance for sleep. I’m still dazed and confused.

After a drive with dead shock absorbers, I feel a little saddle sore as we walk through the parking lot of the Royal Victoria Hospital. I was passing through these same doors not ten hours ago, after Dad raced us up here. With Howie unconscious and half frozen, stripped of his wet clothes and mummified in blankets, we all crammed into the front of Dad’s pickup. The ambulance from Barrie would have taken forever. Howie was shivering like crazy the whole way, which Dad said was a good sign—his body was trying to warm itself. Stop shivering when you’re that cold and you’re dead.

In the emergency room they wrapped him in heating
pads and started him on warmed IV saline. Around here they see a lot of hypothermia, so they had him out of danger pretty quick. He woke up for a little bit, but he just stared through us, like we weren’t there.

“It’s shock,” the doctor told us. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep him overnight. It’ll pass.”

Dad’s back at the lake now, going over the scene around the ice hut with the cops, trying to figure out why the ice gave. Me and Pike never said anything about the growling and the roar. Neither of us actually saw anything. All anybody knows for sure is Howie went through the ice. They didn’t find anything else wrong with him besides hypothermia. No sign of any attack. So I kept my mouth shut, and Pike was busy dealing with his parents.

Everybody’s just waiting for Howie to recover and tell us what happened on the lake. Everybody but me. I’ve got a pretty good idea.

Me and Ash find Howie’s room and take a peek.

The lights are off, but the glare from the snowy day comes through the window. Howie lies buried under a pile of blankets, his eyes shut.

“Still sleeping,” Ash whispers.

“Shhh,” a voice hushes us.

We turn and see Pike slouched in a chair behind the door. Guarding Howie, like always. He looks wiped out. Been on watch all night. He stands now and jerks a thumb toward the door, kicking us out.

Pike follows us into the hall. “Howie keeps waking up. Crying out. Nightmares, I guess. He just got back to sleep.”

“But he’s going to be okay, right?” Ash asks.

“That’s what they tell us,” Pike says. “My mother just went home to get him some clothes. Dad had to head out to the base.” He tries to fight back a yawn. “Man, I need some caffeine.”

“There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” Ash says.

“I’ll keep an eye on Howie,” I tell him.

“Yeah? Stay in the room. Don’t leave him alone.”

“Okay. Don’t worry.”

“I’ll just run down, then. But don’t wake him up.”

“I won’t.”

He stretches his back. “Later we gotta talk, Danny.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Ash takes Pike to the cafeteria as I ease the door shut and step quietly over to Howie’s bed. Even in this low light he looks pale.

A bare foot sticks out from the blankets. I reach to cover it up.

“Danny?”

I flinch at his voice, scratchy, barely a whisper. Howie’s eyes are open, focused on me. They’ve got this glazed, feverish look.

“Thought you were sleeping.”

He shakes his head limply on the pillow.

“Can’t sleep. When I close my eyes I keep seeing …”

I wait for him to finish, but he just lies there. The pile of blankets rises and falls slightly with his shallow breathing.

“You were there?” he finally says. “Last night?”

“Yeah. Me and Pike heard you yell. And we ran out to get you.”

“Did you see it?”

In the winter light his face is ghost white. His eyes are wide but unfocused. He’s seeing last night.

My throat has gone dry. I have to swallow before I can speak. “See what?”

“That thing. With the teeth.”

I lean against the bed to keep my knees from folding on me. I didn’t want to hear that—really didn’t want to hear that!

I open my mouth to say something like:
You’re still in shock, you were seeing things
.

But I know better.

“We heard it. But it was out of sight by the time we got to you.”

“It was huge,” he says. “Bigger than anything I ever …” He trails off, shaking his head. “It had these paws, the size of them … and the claws …”

His breathing’s starting to get ragged, scratching in his throat.

“Howie, you gotta rest. Take it easy.”

But he’s not listening. “Those tracks you showed me. That thing, that’s what made them. It’s real.”

“Don’t think about that now. You’re safe here.”

“You said it chased you that night. Did you see it?”

I nod, tugging down a blanket to cover his foot.

“Come over here,” he mutters, fumbling with the sheets pulled up to his neck.

I walk around to the head of the bed. “You need something? Water?”

He stops fooling with the sheets and falls back exhausted. Even his eyes seem a paler shade of brown.

“Look,” he mumbles. “On my neck.”

“You finally get someone to give you a hickey?”

I was hoping to make him smile or bring some pink back into his cheeks.

“Right here.” He touches the left side of his neck. “Do you see anything?”

My stomach goes cold.

A pinprick blue dot, as if someone stabbed him there with a pen.

I start hyperventilating, hit by a surge of panic. I have to sit on the edge of his bed to keep from falling. Closing my eyes only makes it worse.

“That’s where it … bit me.” Howie feels the spot on his neck. “What’s there? What’s it look like?”

Reluctantly, I hold the back of my right hand close enough for him to see and point out the small blue mark.

“Looks like that.”

I have to get out of here.

Hospitals are poison to me. Every sound, sight and smell brings back bad memories.

By the time Pike and Ash return, Howie’s out for the count. He could barely keep his eyes open as I sketched out my own encounter with the beast. Finally, his eyelids drooped shut.

Pike takes his post by the bed, with a tall coffee and a fistful of candy bars. We leave him thumbing through old copies of
Sports Illustrated
.

“Want to hit the cafeteria?” Ash asks as we walk down the hall.

I’m finding it hard to breathe this hospital stink. It’s making me nauseous. “Can we just get out of here?”

But before I make it to the elevators, my stomach starts to heave. I can’t wait for the elevator. Gotta get out. Now!

I clamp my jaws, push through the door to the stairwell
and race down the stairs. My guts are trying to turn inside out. Down two flights I hit the exit door hard and stumble out onto the snowy parking lot.

Cold fresh air. My freakout dies off fast with the wind in my face.

Behind me, the door bangs open. “You gonna puke?”

“Sorry,” I say. “Kind of lost it there.”

She gives me a moment to get a grip, pulling on her leather gloves and zipping up.

“You want to ride back to the Cove, or what?”

I shake my head. “I need to stick around town a couple hours. So I can talk to Howie when he wakes up. Maybe we can walk around? Find someplace?”

So we walk for a couple blocks, silently, with Ash shooting side glances at me like I might jump into traffic or something.

“So what was that?” she says, finally. “Back there.”

“Just a little temporary insanity.”

“You want to talk about it?”

I shake my head, but I start talking anyway.

Before I can stop myself, I’m telling her about Mom. It all comes spilling out. Mom getting sick, all the tests, and the doctors who couldn’t do squat to help her. But they kept finding new ways to hurt her. Useless treatments, burning her with beam radiation. Implanting radioactive
seeds
into the tumor.

“Always wanted a garden,” Mom joked when we got her home, her head wrapped in a turban of bandages. “Just not one growing out of my head.”

Even under that torture she could still joke. She was so brave. And I was a coward.

It got so I was scared to come home from school, because of what I might find. But I was scared not to rush home too, in case she needed me.

Sometimes I’d look at her and see a stranger looking back. She’d forget my name. Her brain would short-circuit, and she’d swear and scream these horrible things at me—words I’d never heard her use before. We were losing her. And she was losing herself.

It felt like it took forever, but really the cancer was quick. It came out of nowhere and ripped her away from us.

I tell Ash everything. I can’t quit till she hears it all.

Finally, when there’s nothing left, I stop walking. The pavement underfoot has given way to gravel. We’ve gone from one end of Barrie to the other, with me talking nonstop.

“Sorry,” I say. “For someone who hates to talk about it, I can’t seem to shut up.”

I’m not even feeling the wind, but Ash is hunched against the cold, rubbing her gloved hands together. For the first time since I’ve known her, she’s speechless. Can’t blame her.

Then she throws her arm over my shoulder and pulls me in close. “Come here and give me some heat.”

We turn and head back into town.

We grab some pizza, and Ash does the talking now. No heartbreak or emotional trauma. Just blunt-force trauma. Boxing injuries and broken bones, stitches and scars.

She describes the different grades of concussions you can get, from first to third.

“Now a third-grade concussion, that’s some serious brain scrambling,” she says. “I got one of those from a wicked uppercut to the chin. So they tell me, anyway. ’Cause that shot knocked a couple days out of my memory banks.”

I wouldn’t mind a little amnesia.

After the pizza, we stroll through the mall, deafened by Christmas carols. I give Dad a call. He wanted to know how Howie’s doing.

Then we make our way back to the hospital.

Before he finally gave in to exhaustion and fell asleep, me and Howie decided we had to tell somebody what was going on. What we saw, what happened to us. But who? Not the cops, no way. We’d end up in the psych ward. So I said let’s try our stories out on some friendlies first. Pike and Ash. See how they take it.

As we jump slush puddles crossing the street to the hospital, Ash tells me what it’s like trying to breathe with a broken rib.

“Is there any part of you that hasn’t been broken or cut or dislocated?” I ask.

“My nose is still in one piece. And all my good bits are still intact. Show you some time.”

Before I can think of a comeback, she pushes through the hospital doors. I’m left stumbling after her. Even when she’s not knocking me out, she leaves me punch-drunk.