Dead Frost - 02 (11 page)

The creature
slumped forward, face-down in the grey water, where it lay
motionless, the back of its head exposed, brain-matter spilling out
on a river of viscous slush.

Marla tried to
breathe; tears were stinging her eyes as she dropped the cistern-lid
down onto the back of the creature's head. She sat for a moment,
gathering thoughts and trying to fathom what had just happened.

Standing, she
pulled her jeans up; wiping seemed pointless now, and would have
simply been a force of habit rather than a necessity.

She pushed the
cubicle-door so hard that it slammed on the next one and snapped off
its hinges.

When she got
outside, and the cold hit her full-force, she fought back the tears
that threatened to betray her.

The Jeep was parked
where it had been; Shane was hanging half-out the window, smiling
ever-so-slightly.

Marla could have
punched him right then. Just walked around to his face and smashed
his nose in, the way she had smashed the lurker's.

'
Better
?'
Shane asked, stepping out of the Jeep. When he noticed that she was
soaked from chest-to-toe, a puzzled expression appeared on his face.

Marla shook her
head. 'You might want to check the cubicles before you piss,' she
said, the tears even closer now. 'Plus, I don't know about the
men's, but the women's was a bit flooded.'

Without another
word she clambered into the back of the Snatch.

No tears.

Not this time.

FIFTEEN

She liked the
dinosaur-room the best. There was something magical about being
surrounded by creatures that had been extinct for millions of years.
Some of the dinosaurs were intended to move, but the power had been
cut – or had failed, somehow – which meant that they just
stood, instead, in magnificent glory.

She felt alive
for the fist time in weeks. Whether it was the fact she was safe,
for now, or had enough food to survive on without putting herself at
further risk, she didn't know. What she did know, however, was that
the Giganotosaurus existed 90 million years ago in the
late-cretaceous period, and that little morsel of knowledge made her
happy.

She had managed
to get into the vending-machine with nothing more than a crowbar and
some brute force. The first chocolate bar tasted good, the second
even better. By the time she reached the third, she had to take a
breather.

And she knew it
wouldn't last forever. It was there now, and it would be so easy to
work through it the way she once had, when such luxuries were readily
available.

No, rationing
was still of utmost importance. The quicker she worked through the
vending machines, the sooner she would have to venture out into the
world. As far as she was concerned, she could spend the rest of her
life in the museum, never seeing another person, never bumping into
another creature.

It wouldn't be
like that, but it was nice to pretend, at least for now.

She searched the
next room, which was something to do with Romans. There were tunics
and togas encased in glass; some of them were in better condition
than others, but it had been a violent time to live and the slashes
across some of the clothes were only to be expected.

Further along,
hanging on the wall, were various warrior clothes. She recognised
the breastplate, the tunics, the belt and arm-guards. If they were
genuine, they were in very good condition. Perhaps the enemy was too
busy chopping up the villagers to attack the soldiers, if the encased
togas were anything to go by.

She found a book
on the Romans and carried it with her, back into the dinosaur-room.

She curled up in
the corner, wearing a genuine American Indian powwow shawl she found
hanging up three rooms away, and began to read.

She was asleep
before the end of page two.

*

'Will they kill
them?' Kelly Bloom asked her mother. 'I don't want them to die.'

Susie almost choked
on her water; it spurted out of her nose like a watery sneeze.
'Kelly, nobody's going to kill anybody,' she said, wiping the liquid
away from her mouth. 'They're just going after them to make sure
they don't do anything stupid.'

Kelly wasn't
stupid, either, and without pausing for thought, she said, 'But that
old lady said they were going to kill them. Why would she say that
if it weren't true?'

Damned Maggie Cox;
Susie had a good mind to give her a round of fucks, not that it would
do any good.

'She was just
speculating, honey,' Susie said, stroking her daughter's hair, which
was matted, greasy, and starting to smell a bit strange. It was
almost wash-day; Susie would make certain that Kelly's hair had a
thorough scrub.

'I was telling the
truth,' a voice said. Both Susie and her daughter turned to find
Maggie Cox standing not three feet away. 'Problem is that nobody
around here wants to listen to a little, old fart like me.'

'Do you mind?'
Susie said. 'I don't like that kind of language around my daughter.'

'Oh, I'm sure she
doesn't mind,' the elderly woman continued, smiling, a mouthful of
discoloured teeth on display. She took a step closer and sat
cross-legged next to Kelly. 'You don't mind if a silly, old fart
like me says naughty words?'

'Mommy says it's
rude to swear,' Kelly said, not sure whether she was allowed to talk
to Maggie Cox, or not. She looked nervously to her mother.

'That's right,
Kelly,' Susie said, with more pride than she could ever explain in
words. To Maggie she said, 'I've brought her up to respect people,
even when they don't really deserve it.'

'Well,' Maggie
said, grinning. 'That's your mistake, ain't it?' She turned back to
Kelly and said, 'It was true, though. What I said to the nasty man
was true.'

Susie wasn't going
to stand for this. Her daughter was impressionable, far too
impressionable for her years. The old lady seemed nice enough, or
she had before everything had erupted earlier that day. Nice,
though, did not give her the right to sprout nonsense and fill her
daughter's head with fallacies and fables.

'I would appreciate
it if you kept your little conspiracies to yourself,' Susie said,
trying not to sound too rude, but it was more difficult than she had
imagined.

Maggie, ignoring
Susie with everything that she had, said, 'You want to know the
truth, don't you? There's no point being lied to by adults, just
because you're a little girl, is there?'

Kelly shook her
head. 'Mommy says that lying is a bad thing.'

Susie could feel
her blood boiling. She reached across and placed a hand on Kelly's
shoulder and was about to remove her from the situation when a voice
interrupted her.

Across the room,
one of the soldiers – she didn't know his name – called
out for Maggie.

A look of fear and
confusion spread across the old woman's face; a look that wasn't
entirely certain.

'If I'm not back in
half an hour,' Maggie said, clambering to her feet, her back audibly
cracking with each movement, 'then you will know that I was telling
the truth.' She smiled. Kelly smiled back, although she was worried
for the old lady.

'Over here,' Maggie
said, jabbing a rheumy hand in the air. 'Have I won something?'

A few people
laughed, although the seriousness painted on the soldier's face
suggested that her humour was not appreciated, not in the slightest.

He beckoned Maggie
forward, without speaking. She calmly made her way across the room
and through the doors. As she went, she tightened the lilac scarf
that hung loosely around her neck.

'Are they going to
hurt her?' Kelly asked. It was so sudden, so unexpected, that Susie
almost choked on her own saliva.

'Of course not,'
Susie said, stroking the side of her daughter's face with the back of
her hand. 'The lady probably just needs to take some medicine, or
something.'

She knew that to be
a lie, but couldn't for the life of her think of anything else to
say.

Kelly shook her
head and stared towards the groundsheet on which she sat. 'I have a
really bad feeling, Mommy,' she said. 'I think I want to go to sleep
for a while.'

Susie smiled,
forcibly scrunching her face into something approaching comfort. 'I
think that would be a good idea,' she said. 'I'll wake you when it's
time to eat.'

Kelly was sleeping
in less than four minutes; her mother sat stroking her hair,
pondering just what had gone wrong with the world.

SIXTEEN

They passed a sign
reading
JACKSON 170Mi
soon after the toilet
stop. The snow had waned a little, dropping to the ground now with
more of a flutter than anything else. It didn't make the driving
conditions any better, though. In fact, Shane found the Snatch even
more difficult to control, and on several occasions the steering
locked and they motored forward, uncontrollably, until decent-sized
snowdrifts brought them to a halt.

At the current
speed, they would reach Jackson before dark. That was assuming there
were no other stops and the snow remained the same.

Shane
doubted it would. The skies looked full of
it
– off-white blankets that seemed to go on forever.

In the
passenger-seat, Terry silently read his bible. Shane could hear
snoring from the back, a deep rumble of guttural snorts, which he
didn't think Marla was capable of. Jared, on the other hand...

'How are we for
fuel?' Terry asked without looking up from his book.

Shane looked to the
gauge, which still sat quite nicely between the quarter- and
half-mark. 'Why are you so worried about the fuel?' he asked. 'I
said I'd let you know as soon as we needed to stop.'

Now Terry did look
up, but glanced out of his window. 'As soon as we hit the
Interstate,' he said, 'we ain't gonna be able to stop for a while.
I'm just making sure we've got enough to get us to where we need to
be. The last thing we want to do is break down in the middle of
nowhere, especially when the chances of lurkers is severely
increased.'

Shane slowly
drifted past a snow-covered cadaver; he could see it was – or
had been – female, but was now nothing more than a freezing
mound of half-eaten flesh.

'You're right,'
Shane said. 'Probably best if we fill up at the next station.'

He
didn't want to. Fuck, why
would
he? Stopping for anything was dangerous. He hadn't questioned
Marla, but he knew that something had happened back at the last stop.
Maybe she would tell them later, or maybe she would keep it to
herself the way women had a strange knack of doing.

'I think that would
be for the best,' Terry said, returning to Revelations.

They drove in
silence for the next few miles. The snoring from the back worsened,
before there was a thumping noise and the sound of Marla cursing.
She had given Jared a slight nudge – or a powerful kick –
and now he was wide awake, trying to figure out what had caused him
to wake.

The flickering
lights of a gas-station neared, and Terry began to prepare his
shotgun, just in case.

'In and out,' Shane
said. 'I don't expect there to be too many lurkers around, not way
out here, but you never know so don;t take any fucking chances.'

'Same goes for
you,' Terry replied. 'You see anything creeping up on me, make it
count.'

Shane nodded.

He pulled the Jeep
onto the forecourt and hoped to God the refuelling went without a
hitch.

'I take it we're
staying put?' Marla's voice said, although she didn't sound too
annoyed at the prospect.

'There's no point
all of us getting out,' Shane said as he switched the engine off and
opened his door. 'I've got Terry's back, which is one more than I'm
comfortable with.'

Terry was already
making his way across the court; he was equidistant to the pumps and
the station. Shane was about to call out when he noticed the eerie
silence about the place and decided against it. Besides, there was
nothing creeping up on Terry, nothing on the other side of the
windows, either, although Terry would probably see more once he
reached the place.