Freeze (10 page)

Warren thanked him anyway, and the three of them worked together to get his snowsuit back on, letting the now-empty sleeve hang to the side.

They stood. Warren put his good arm around Rick’s neck, and Jan curled her arm around Warren’s waist. Warren’s socks did nothing to protect his feet from the snow. They were wet, clinging. But his arm and head hurt too much for him to worry about his feet. The arm was better in the sling, curled up in the snowsuit, but not by a lot.

The three of them shuffled past the dead creature. Many of its parts were still intact, piled on top of the melted jag of ice that had been its torso and head. Sleet fell all around them, stinging Warren’s face, obscuring the world.

The Youngs helped Warren along for what seemed like a long time; then something appeared in the snow ahead. Not another creature, although that was Warren’s first terrified thought, but a squat, rectangular object that turned out to be a small snowmobile. 

A snowmobile? Wouldn’t you have heard the engine?

He doubted it. He’d been unconscious, the dazed and still very out of it.

The vehicle had a compartmentalized box strapped to the back with a pair of bungee cords. Most of the compartments held glass bottles with strips of fabric hanging from the mouths. The Molotov cocktails, a makeshift arsenal. There was a second butane torch among the bottles, and although Warren didn’t think it was probably a good idea to keep those items in the same box, he didn’t say anything, was too tired to say anything.

“Get on,” Rick yelled. “It’ll be a tight fit, but the three of us should be able to squeeze together and get to town.”

Town? No, you can’t do that, you can’t leave her behind.

Warren tried one more time to stop them, to tell them about Tess, to convince them he needed to turn around. He tugged Rick’s sleeve and opened his mouth, but a flurry of icy snow hit him in the face, choked him; he coughed and spat out the slush.

“Get on,” Rick repeated. He had three heads now, all slithering around one another like a snow monster’s tentacles.

Warren started to laugh and sobbed instead. “House,” he said, barely managing to mumble the word.

Rick shook his heads. “Can’t. We just barely got out. Place is overrun with those bastards.”

His heads rotated, spun, blurred into and out of existence.

He’s talking about
his
house. He doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t. How can he when you barely do.

Rick guided him toward the snowmobile. Warren tried to turn out of his grasp, but he couldn’t do it. The world had become a white whirlpool of a thing. He only just managed to stay on his feet.

Jan got on the vehicle first, Warren slumped down behind her, trying not to sandwich his broken arm between them but unable to avoid it, and Rick sat down in the back. He wrapped his arms around Warren and his wife, holding the three of them together. They had to intertwine their legs to keep them from dangling to the sides.

“Let’s go,” Rick yelled.

Jan attached a strap to her wrist (some kind of kill switch, Warren guessed), pulled the start cord until the engine caught, and twisted the throttle to give it some gas. Warren lowered his head and tried to stay conscious as they took off into the blizzard.

They hadn’t gone far when Warren heard the still-bizarre but now all-too-familiar breaking-glass roar of one of the creatures.

The next thing he knew, he was flying off the snowmobile and through the air.

18

Tess realized she’d left the poker on the bedroom floor. There was still a pair of tongs and a broom and shovel set dangling from the tool holder beside the fire, but none of those things would make good weapons.

Those aren’t the kinds of weapons you need anyway. Remember the candle? You’ve got everything you need burning right there in the fireplace.

In the kitchen, something thumped. She looked that way. A frosty tentacle curled around the doorway, and the wood seemed to freeze where the limb touched it. A layer of ice spread down to the floor and halfway up the frame, but the creature didn’t advance any farther.

Bub whined and barked and then whined again.

She grabbed the tongs, poked them into the fire, pulled out a flaming log.

“You ready for this?” she asked Bub.

He looked up at her and whined again.

“Yeah, me either.”

She twisted the tongs, turning the log sideways so it would be less likely to slip out. The wood was flaming, but it wasn’t exactly a fireball and wouldn’t stay lit forever.

Go! 

She carried the log toward the kitchen. Bub limped beside her. On the other side of the house, the creature in the bedroom smacked the door again, and the cracking sound of splitting wood got Tess moving a bit faster.

She still couldn’t see much of the thing in the kitchen other than that bit of tentacle curled around the doorframe. She aimed the tongs at the ice and inched closer. When she’d gotten within a foot, the tentacle began to glisten and drip; it curled up on itself like the witch’s legs in
The Wizard of Oz
and pulled back into the kitchen. The creature squealed. It sounded like a car crash, like breaking glass and crumpling metal and screeching tires. Tess hurried after the retreating limb, not wanting to give up any kind of advantage she might have gained. Bub followed.

The thing in the kitchen was actually
two
things. The first was refrigerator sized; its head almost touched the ceiling, and its squirming limbs stretched from one side of the room to the other. The other monster was much smaller, not a lot bigger than Bub, really. It scampered across the counter, knocking over the block of knives and the roll of paper towels. When the larger creature saw Tess (or seemed to see her; like the thing in the bedroom, as far as she could tell, it had no eyes), it opened its mouth and screamed. It held out the melted tentacle, as if saying,
Look what you did, you bitch!

The smaller monster screamed, too. It had fewer teeth in its mouth but still looked plenty deadly. 

Wind and snow blew through the broken window. Strips of broken wood hung from the frame, and some of the tiles on the wall around the window had cracked and fallen to the counter below. She couldn’t see from this angle, couldn’t see around the monster, but Tess guessed the sink was probably full of debris from where the big creature had forced its way in.

Although she was less than a room away from the fire (and only a couple of feet away from the burning log in the tongs), she felt no warmth. Her hands shook, and she forced them to still. The last thing she wanted was to drop the wood. Without the fire, she’d be totally defenseless.

Bub hunkered and barked. The sound echoed through the kitchen, sounding to Tess at least as ferocious as the creatures’ screams, although the monsters barely seemed to register the sound.

The smaller creature slid toward the edge of the counter, and the big one knocked it back with a quick flick of one of its tentacles. The little monster flipped over, its tendrils flapping through the air, and then regained its balance. It screeched at the bigger creature, which gurgled something back. A warning? An admonition? A meaningless noise?

When the small monstrosity moved to the edge of the counter again, Tess turned and thrust the fire at the thing. It skittered back, its small tentacles wriggling beneath it. For just a moment, she had a sense of victorious accomplishment, and then the larger creature whipped a limb at her arms and knocked the tongs out of her grasp.

The tongs hit the floor, and the log popped out and rolled across the linoleum. It hit the utility room door on the other side of the room and stopped. Tess stared after it for a second, wondering if the fire would spread to the door and set the entire house on fire, but then she turned her attention back to the creatures.

The big one had raised another tentacle. It swung at her, moving the limb low along the ground, maybe trying to sweep her feet out from under her. She jumped. She hadn’t been especially athletic even in her younger days and couldn’t remember the last time she’d jumped (which was strange if you thought about it, but true), but she managed to get clear of the sweeping tentacle.

Unfortunately, jumping was the easy part. It was the landing that did her in. The kitchen floor was more than just a bit slick. It wasn’t flooded exactly, but damp, like a condensed window. When her bare feet hit the linoleum, they slid out from under her and she tumbled back onto her rear end. The jolt knocked the breath out of her, and she bit her tongue. She tasted blood and saw a bright flash of light.

Although her vision was blurry, she sensed something moving through the air and rolled out of the way just as another tentacle slammed into the floor where she’d been sitting. The soreness in her butt worsened as she moved. She didn’t think she’d broken her tailbone, but the pain was incredible. She’d bruised herself at least. No doubt about that.

She shook her head, tried to clear her vision. Bub scurried around the large creature’s gyrating legs, and then the smaller beast leapt off the counter and onto Bub’s back.

Bub yelped and rolled on his side. The creature wrapped its tendrils around his neck and held on like a cowboy on a bull. Bub got back to his feet and turned in a circle, biting at the monster but unable to reach. The creature opened its jag of a mouth and chomped into Bub’s neck.

Bub howled.

The creature jerked its head left, right, and back, taking a hunk of flesh and fur. Bub howled again and limped toward the doorway into the back hall, probably not sure where he was going, only trying to move, to buck the creature, to do
something
. Before he turned the corner and Tess lost sight of him, she saw a wash of glistening blood run down his fur and onto his leg. So much blood. She thought of the scene in the bathroom, of the hot gunk streaming out of her mouth and splashing into the toilet. How could there be so much blood loss in a single day? How was it any kind of fair?

Before she could decide whether to go after Bub or stay there and face the larger creature, the big monster swung another limb at her, hit her in the chest, and knocked her to the floor. She landed beside the tongs, saw them from the corner of her eye. Behind her, the crackling log continued to burn.

Get up. Get the fire. Attack!

The creature still hadn’t moved farther into the room. Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe it had to stay close to the snow, to the cold.

But the little one didn’t seem to have a problem. How do you explain that?

She couldn’t, of course. She couldn’t explain a damn thing about any of this. Maybe the monster couldn’t come any deeper into the house, or maybe it just didn’t want to, didn’t think it needed to. It had already proved its tentacles reached plenty far enough.

Before it hit her again, she reached over, grabbed the tongs, got to her knees, and crawled across the room to the firewood. Her chest throbbed where the thing had hit her, and she was having trouble breathing, but she supposed it could have been a lot worse. At least the thing hadn’t given her a heart attack, and it didn’t seem to have jarred lose the shards of glass in her lungs (or throat or stomach or wherever else they might have lodged).

Something hit the floor behind her. Cold water splashed her ankles and lower legs, and she looked back to see the tip of the thing’s tentacle wiggling across the floor between her feet, its stiff fingers clacking together. She jerked her legs away before the creature could grab hold of her and scurried the rest of the way to the utility room door.

In the hallway, Bub squealed again, and a series of thumping sounds followed. She tried not to think about it, not to let her heart break. She’d help him when she could,
if
she could. 

On the other side of the house, the first creature smacked the door again. She guessed it had probably been doing it all along, but she’d stopped noticing, had tuned out the sound, had focused her attention on the problem at hand. She noticed it now, however. The sound of cracking wood this time lasted much longer. She imagined the thing squeezing through the splintered doorway, dragging its tentacles along behind and leaving a wet, sluggish streak on the floor as it came after her. She might still have some time before any of that happened. Or she might not.

You have to do this now. Right now. Get the fire. Fight back.

She opened the tongs, gripped the burning wood, and squeezed the handles to pinch the log in place. When she was sure she wouldn’t drop it, she spun around and lunged toward the creature.

She had expected it to swing at her, to try to knock the wood loose again. Instead, it flipped a pair of tentacles behind her back and drew her closer to itself. Her thin shirt did little to insulate her from the freezing limbs. Where they touched her, her skin tightened and her muscles flexed. She thought she would surely drop the fire, and, in fact, the tongs did start to slip out of her grasp, but she managed to hold on to them and lifted the log to the creature’s head. Doing it took every last bit of her strength, although she doubted the firewood weighed more than a few pounds. Her arm muscles had loosened, turned to worthless jelly around her bones. But she did it in the end, raised the tongs up over her head and forced the wood into the creature’s growling mouth.

The monster reacted in two ways: first, it squeezed her against itself, cutting off her oxygen and forcing her face to within inches of the burning log. She tried to turn her head away, but the fire burned the skin on the side of her face. The smell of smoldering hair filled the room, and she screamed. The other thing the monster did was bite down. It hissed and squealed all the while, but it chewed into the flaming log and broke it in half. One half of the wood slid down the thing’s body, leaving a wet streak in its frosty hide, but the other half lodged between the creature’s teeth. It opened its mouth wider, probably meaning to spit out the wood before it melted off its face, but Tess saw a chance and took it: she balled up her fist, swung it, and knocked the chunk of wood into the creature’s gullet.