The Dinosaur Chronicles (22 page)

Otherwise, nothing moved.

He pulled on his jacket and stepped out three paces.

There, he pounded the broom handle against the walk.

Then he waited.

For a moment, nothing stirred, and he thought—hoped—that the crawl ice had gone, gone back to whatever bizarre world had spawned it.

But Fisher moved—moved with the first harsh squeal coming down the walk toward the door, moved so quickly the pain in his right foot was, for the moment, quite forgotten.

And then he stood, shaking, shoulders against the inside of his front door. He covered his eyes.
It won’t come here. It’s too warm. I’ve got the fire.
 

Fisher dropped his hands and looked at the fireplace.

He needed to haul in more logs. And refill the generator. Those weren’t options. Those were life-or-death necessities.

He picked up the broom from the living room floor where he’d dropped it. Time to try the same trick out back.

Three paces out the back door, he tapped the frozen ground with the broom handle—twice—and waited.

Two minutes later, he gave it another two minutes.

When those were up, he propped open the back screen door and house door and, as quietly as he could, carried several armloads of firewood into the house. Before carrying in the last load, he stopped by the generator to refill its gas tank.

He had just closed the back door and was ready to take his first full breath when the ring of the telephone tore his last few nerves from their proper neurons, and he stumbled across a kitchen chair, knocked the telephone from its cradle on the wall of the living room, and fell to the floor as he scrambled for the handset.

“H-H-Hello!”

“Evan?”

“Sam! My God, you—”

“Oh, c’mon. You couldn’t have been in bed. Mr. Self-Reliant rises with the Farm Report.” Sam’s sassy, impudent tone was almost welcoming in its banality.

Still, she didn’t sound completely like herself. Fisher said, “Are you okay?”

“Dammit, Evan, we should’ve left days ago!”

Don’t I know it.

“The motels in Pineway are crammed,” Sam went on. “And the gas stations are sold out—otherwise I would’ve driven up to Denver. I spent the night in a 24-hour pancake house and my hair smells like fried eggs and maple syrup!”

“I’m sorry—”

“So I’m coming back.”

“What!”

“I’ve got enough gas for that. Spending a week in the boonies with you is still better than sharing a bunk at the Y. So expect me in a couple of hours.”

“No, Sam! Don’t—”

But she had already hung up the receiver.

—

Fisher watched the frozen landscape outside his front window with trepidation. Once Sam arrived in the car, he might have but a minute before the two of them had to be in the car and gone.

After Sam’s call and a wasted moment of panic, he’d dialed the number on the phone’s caller ID screen. It was a pay phone, as he’d expected, and when a passerby finally answered, no one matching his wife’s description was nearby.

With a two-hour arrival warning, and with Pineway only 40 minutes away at a careful 30 miles per hour, Fisher figured Sam would be going for breakfast before driving back.

So he pulled out the area telephone directory and called every eatery open in the a.m., and some not open. With busy signals, unanswered rings and the occasional poverty-wage hash-slinger who had to be told three times that no, he wasn’t placing an order but only looking for his wife, Fisher wasted an hour trying to warn Sam off.

After hanging up the last call, Fisher accepted the fact Sam was coming back, and he made plans for their escape.

First, he doused the fire.

Second, he put the few things he really needed—like a change of clothes, some underwear and a few valuables—into a backpack.

Lastly, he sneaked out the back door and carried two full 5-gallon gasoline cans to the back porch. This was from his stock for the generator. Fisher figured ten gallons of gas would get them at least 150 miles, even with bad roads and detours.

When Fisher saw Sam take the turn up their block, he tossed on his jacket and backpack. By the time Sam was pulling up in front of their house, he was already out the back door and lugging the two five-gallon cans in a wide arc around the house and to the road.

And by the time Sam had climbed out of the driver’s seat, Fisher had lobbed his pack into the back seat and was emptying the first of the two five-gallon cans into the car’s tank. “Get back inside, Sam. We’re getting out of here.”

Sam blinked. “I like your change of attitude, fella, but
this
kitty is changing her smelly clothes and soaking her sore leg, first!”

“What? There’s no time. We’ve got to get out of here!”

“
And
I need to go potty. You got a problem with that?”

“Dammit, Sam, get in the passenger seat and I’ll drive. You can hang it out the window!”

“You’re kidding, right? Just when I thought you’d come to your senses. No,” she sniffed, waving her hand. “I’m taking a break before we drive off.”

“Sam, the
crawl ice!
”

“The
what?
”

“The crawl ice! It’s what made the walk ice over. It nearly got me yesterday before I realized what was going on! See my boots there in the walk? Look!”

Sam’s eyes gazed at the walk, then back at Fisher. “You’ve been at the booze.”

Fisher tossed the one can aside and began emptying the second. “I have not. You can check. No, you
can’t
check. Sam, can’t you this once
take my word for it?
”

“What did you do? Break something and not want me to see it? What a lousy story!
Crawl ice
, ha!”

Sam stepped past Fisher and began a slow ascent up the frozen walk.

“Wait!” Fisher pleaded. “All right—you can rest. Let me finish emptying this can and I’ll go with you.”

Sam stopped and looked back. Puzzlement began to replace the arrogance in her eyes. Fisher emptied the second can and closed the gas port. He took Sam by the hand and began leading her around the house.

“Wait! What are you doing?”

“We’re going in the back door.”

“We are not! I’m not slogging through this snow!”

Fisher clenched his fists.
She never saw it. She doesn’t understand.
 

“All right,” he said. “You are
not
slogging through the snow.”

Sam screamed when he picked her up. She screamed again when he tossed her over his shoulder. She was still screaming when they finally made it in the back door.

Fisher kicked the door shut and put Sam down. She pulled back her hand, ready to slap him, when the rage in her eyes turned into a different kind of fire.

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, deeply.

She whispered, “I like a take-charge kind of guy.”

Fisher put his arms around her waist. “Ogg the Caveman must drag his wife around more often.” Then he sobered. “But later. I’ll turn on the generator so the water heater works.”

“And start a fire?”

“We won’t be here that long.”

Sam put on a fake pout. “Party-pooper.”

Fisher had run the generator the night before, so the water in the hot-water heater wasn’t stone cold. Still, it took an hour before the water was warm enough to steam up the bathroom, now the only room in the house where taking off clothes didn’t result in nibs of goose flesh.

At thirty-two, Sam still cut a striking figure, and Fisher invited himself and two glasses of Chianti into the bathroom with her as Sam soaked in the tub.

“Why,” Fisher asked, handing her her glass, “do you have to be so damned stubborn?”

Sam took the wine, sipped and twinkled her eyes. “You’d be bored to death if I weren’t.”

Despite the raw skin on his right foot, Fisher took off his clothes and joined her in the tub. Half an hour later, they stood and rinsed in the shower, letting the soon-cooling water run over their bodies. The demand was outrunning the heater’s ability to keep up, so Fisher turned off the water and held her close. The moment was too perfect, the temptation too great. They spent another half hour in the bathroom, generating their own heat.

Afterward, Sam put on the fresh change of clothes she had brought into the bathroom with her. Fisher had brought nothing fresh but the wine, however, and so hopped through the 40-degree house to their bedroom, where he slapped on icy underwear and stuffed his limbs into the first shirt and pants he could find.

When he exited the bedroom, he found Sam standing in front of the living room window, looking out into the snow, with a pale expression on her face and her lips open in disbelief.

The sun shone brightly, and nary a cloud marred the perfect mountain sky. Yet out at the roadway, shimmering in a glaze inches thick, their car sat, completely iced-over.

—

They stared at the scene for a long, long minute. Their car, edges smoothed by the taffied ice, looked like an ice sculpture from an era when cars ruled the road as slick, streamlined behemoths.

Fisher put his arm on Sam’s shoulder. “It’s time to call for help.”

She turned to him. “And say what? An ice monster has us stranded?”

“Some ‘vandal’ has disabled our car. The authorities won’t like it, but they’ll send someone to help us.”

“All right. Hey! Quit pushing—”

They staggered. Glass rattled and a lamp tipped over. They made for the wall and held on until the shaking stopped. Sam gasped, “My God, that was as bad as the original quake!”

“Or even worse,” Fisher said. He’d noticed a few small aftershocks over the past several days, but nothing to compare to the last. “All right. It’s done. Let me ...” Fisher’s gut twinged as a thought ran through him, and he cut himself off. He rushed to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

Slowly, he put it back down.

Sam’s eyes showed white all around and her hands were over her mouth. Fisher’s mind raced.

“Don’t panic,” he said. “You get the fire going and I’ll see to the generator. Then we can think this out.”

“B-But the monster!”

“It’s out front. I’ll be as quiet as I can.”

Sam only stood and stared.

He walked back and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Sam! I need your help!”

She blinked. “You never say you need me.”

“I need you
now
.”

She kissed him. “Be careful.”

Fisher put on the boots and jacket he’d left in the bathroom and went out to the generator. He checked the oil and emptied the last of the gas—a partly-filled five-gallon can—into the generator’s tank.

As he screwed the tank cap back into place, his ears picked up the one sound he didn’t want to hear: the scream of ice, muffled and intermittant. But when he turned to look, he saw nothing.

The noise returned, louder, followed by silence.

It’s under the snow.
One part of his mind spoke the words, and the other part understood:
That’s why the sound’s muffled. And the intermittance—it only makes noise when it has to build ice.
 

Fisher stepped away from the generator just as the squeal of ice rang at his feet. He ran three paces and stomped on the ground. He ran three more paces and stomped again.

Sometimes he could hear the thing, sometimes not. It was a dangerous game of cat and mouse, but he had to steer the thing clear of the generator.

The generator stood on a brick base sheltered by an overhang from the shed. Fisher worked his way out from the shed, then back, toward the end of their lot, then behind the shed.

Once he was certain the thing was behind the shed, he ran for the back door, stopping only to grab another armload of firewood on the way.

The smell of burning newspaper and kindling welcomed him.

“What took you so long?” Sam said. “I was beginning to worry.”

He put down the firewood. “It’s in the back.”

Sam rose from where she had been nursing the fire and looked out the living room window. “But the car’s still iced!”

“It’s not the ice itself. It’s
in
the ice.”

“What?”

“After you drove off, I took the axe and the snow-shovel and cleared off the spot where you fell. I had no problems. It wasn’t there anymore. It only uses the ice to travel.”

She continued to stare at the car but slowly nodded her head.

“And where there’s no ice,” he added, “it has to make its own.”

Sam looked back at him. “I can’t believe no one’s ever reported this before.”

Fisher told her about the lone Internet reference he’d found. “My guess is these things crawl up from time to time—maybe from the depths—but no one notices. Who notices ice? They probably mind their own business and have little, if anything, to do with Man.”

“Except for now.”

Fisher flushed. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably my damned fault.”

“Your fault!”

“After clearing the ice, I saw it oozing across the walk a few paces away. I didn’t think. I started pounding it with the axe and chipping off pieces left and right. I probably hurt the thing.”

Sam’s eyes flared with her old temper but quickly softened. “You couldn’t have known.”

“No. But now it’s mad as hell, following any heat source it can find.” Fisher paused as another realization hit. “Maybe—despite traveling in ice—it needs heat as an energy source. That’s what it was doing on the walk—sunning!”

Sam said, “That’s great stuff for
National Geographic
. But what do we do now?”

“If there’s another vehicle in town, we could take it.”

“I don’t know how to hot-wire a car.”

“Neither do I, but the Internet can tell us.”

“No cell towers,” Sam reminded him, “and now no phone.”

“No phone.” Fisher sat on the sofa and put his head in his hands. “We could walk across town, break into a house and live there until help arrives.”

“That’s assuming they have firewood and food. And assuming their pipes aren’t already frozen. And assuming the
thing
won’t follow us. All right. We can do that if we must. But I’m not crazy about it.”

Fisher looked up. “Here’s one more idea. I figure you made 30 miles per hour getting here from Pineway, and it took you a little more than half an hour. Is that about right?”