Freeze (15 page)
A ragged furrow led away from the blood. Tracks. As deep as the snow was, and as quickly as the blizzard was covering over the tracks, it was impossible to tell if they were Tess’s or belonged to one of the things, but they looked like they headed toward the shed (not that Warren could see the structure in all the falling snow), and he decided to follow them.
He exchanged the flashlight for the torch and shuffled off the porch and into the back yard.
He expected one of the creatures—or maybe a whole group of them—to attack him at any second, but nothing came. Maybe they were still busy tearing apart the snowmobile, or maybe they’d heard the screeches from the kitchen and run away scared.
You wish.
Didn’t matter. They weren’t here. Not yet anyway.
He trudged across the yard, his breath pluming out in front of him, what seemed like a solid sheet of snow falling and falling and falling ahead.
The tracks did lead to the shed. Right up to the door, as a matter of fact. He turned the knob, let himself in, and stepped on the crinkled corner of a tarp.
Something beneath the tarp moaned, and Warren lifted the plastic to see what lay beneath: Tess and Bub, both of them looking about as close to death as you could get. She was wearing only her pajamas, and the skin on her feet, arms, and face looked blotchy, frostbitten.
Tess looked up at him, said, “You.” Her teeth chattered.
“It’s me.” He dropped to the ground beside her and hugged her as well as he could with his good arm. Her skin was ice cold.
“Jesus,” he said. “We’ve got to warm you up.”
She smiled, as if she had some funny response to that, but then mumbled a nonsensical affirmative.
Warren closed the door
(should have done that first thing, idiot)
and went to the woodpile. He picked up a few of the logs and shoved them into the old wood stove in the corner. He stripped the bark off a couple of other logs and tucked that into the center of the pile for kindling.
Unless you want to kill yourself and Tess and Bub, too, you better vent that thing.
The stove’s pipe jutted up and angled into the room. He found a pair of hedge trimmers in a bucket of old, rusty tools and used them to cut a jagged hole in the wall. He turned the stovepipe toward the wall and pushed it through the hole. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.
He started the fire with the butane torch, waited for it to catch, and then lay down on the floor beside Tess and Bub. The dog hadn’t moved since Warren came in, but he was breathing. His side rose and fell. Rose…and fell.
The shed warmed up, and although some smoke lingered and swirled around them, most of it seemed to find its way through the stovepipe and out of the shed.
“You’re alive,” Tess mumbled after awhile.
“Barely.”
“You lit a fire.”
He agreed.
“Aren’t we leaving? Getting away?”
“We can’t,” he said. “Not yet. We’re going to have to wait out the blizzard.”
“Can we do tha—” She coughed and spat something on the floor. When Warren looked, he saw a slick of dark blood. She tried again: “Can we do that?”
He reached over, wiped up the blood, and rubbed it on his pants, out of sight. Then he looked at the massive pile of firewood, although he knew that wasn’t what she meant.”I don’t know.” It was the only honest answer he could think of.
“Okay.”
He kissed her on the cheek and said, “It can’t snow forever.”
He snuggled closer to her, ran his hand down Bub’s side, trying to give the two of them any warmth he had left, and hoped that was true.
ALSO BY DANIEL PYLE
N
OVEL
N
OVELETTE
A
NTHOLOGY
E
DITED
PRAISE FOR DANIEL PYLE
D
ISMEMBER
Dismember’s
a fast-paced grindhouse-movie of a book with plenty of unexpected twists and turns and a fresh new crazy for a villain. The late Richard Laymon would have been grinning ear to ear.
—Jack Ketchum, multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
The Girl Next Door
and
The Woman
With
Dismember
, Daniel Pyle joins the select group of authors who can provide real chills and genuine surprises. Taut, weird, and intriguing.
—Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
The Dragon Factory
and
The Wolfman
The tourniquet-tight plot and constant suspense keeps the pages flying. A solid, suspenseful thriller that enables readers to envision the movie it could become.
—
Publishers Weekly
D
OWN THE
D
RAIN
Pyle's tight little monster tale packs a nasty wallop.
—Michael Louis Calvillo, author of
I Will Rise
and
As Fate Would Have It
Horror should be fun. Scary, of course…but above all, it should be fun. Too many people seem to have forgotten that. Well, Daniel Pyle has not forgotten. With his novella,
Down the Drain
, Pyle has crafted a tale that evokes all the eye-popping strangeness and excitement that got me into horror in the first place. I loved it, and I can guarantee you’ll never look at your bathtub the same again.
—Joe McKinney, author of
Dead City
and
Apocalypse of the Dead
Daniel Pyle is the author of
Dismember
and
Down the Drain
. He lives in Springfield, Missouri, with his wife and two daughters. For more information, visit
www.danielpyle.com
.
Freeze
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Pyle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechinical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Blood Brothers Publishing
www.bloodbrotherspublishing.com
ISBN: 978-0-9828691-4-7
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Artwork Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Pyle
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