Freeze

21

It’s funny what you think about when you’re snowmobiling through a blizzard with a broken arm, frozen blood (only some of it your own) on your clothes, and a pack of hellish ice creatures on your tail. As he drove up the long private road leading to their house, Warren remembered the first time he’d seen Tess, the summer dress that had clung to her in a way that seemed almost risqué at the time, the daisy pinned in her hair that might or might not have been real. Warren had never found out, had never asked. In his mind, it had been real; she’d picked it that morning while walking along the riverbank.

He’d always liked that image, real or not, and held on to it now as he approached the house.

He thought he’d found their driveway twice before he actually did. The first time, he’d turned the snowmobile into a clearing in the woods and then turned right back around. No harm, no foul. But the second time he’d almost driven down a steep embankment and narrowly avoided a crash that almost certainly would have killed him.

After that, he’d been doubly careful. When he thought he’d found the driveway for real, he eased onto it a few feet at a time, giving the snowmobile short bursts of gas, waiting until he saw bits of their fence poking up through the snow before accepting that he’d made the right turn.

The trip back up the mountain hadn’t taken as long as the trip down, of course, but the wind and ice blowing against his face made it seem much more tortuous. The snowmobile had a short windshield, and Warren tried to drive with most of his head hidden behind it, but the thing was covered in ice, opaque, and he ended up having to keep most of his face above it in order to see where he was going. In the places where he could still feel it, his face stung and throbbed. Plus, steering one handed had left the muscles and joints in his good arm aching, burning.

When he saw the GMC buried in the snow ahead, he barely believed it. He hadn’t thought he would make it back.

He drove toward the front door, watching for more monsters. When he got close enough, he let go of the throttle and let the snowmobile coast to a stop. Except it wasn’t exactly a coast. The front of the machine hit a drift near the front door and came to a sudden halt, throwing Warren into the handle bars and the small windshield. He hit the safety glass with the top of his head and sat there for a long time, dazed.

Shake it off. Unless you’re dead, you need to keep moving and find Tess.

He pulled the key out of the ignition, transferred the torch and the sloshing bottles from the box on the back of the snowmobile to his pockets, pausing once when his vision blurred and a bout of dizziness almost overtook him, and then shuffled to the front door. When he opened it, snow cascaded through the threshold and he went in after.

“Tess!”

It was dark inside, and cold. The fire had gone out, and, of course, there was still no power. There was also no answer from his wife.

“TESS! BUB!”

Nothing.

His throat closed and his stomach churned. He tried to breathe and couldn’t.

You’re too late.

No. It couldn’t be. They were in the kitchen getting something to eat, or moving firewood from the back hall to the living room, or maybe in the bathroom. They couldn’t hear him, that was all.

You know that’s not true. Tess wouldn’t let the fire go out.

He massaged his throat until he worked out the lump and screamed for Tess again.

Still nothing.

He stepped farther into the room, tracking snow, not caring.

Something crashed at the bedroom-end of the house.

“Tess?”

He moved through the living room and into the dark hallway. There was some ambient light in the house, but he could still barely see where he was going. Of course, he’d just spent who knew how long driving face first into a blizzard. He’d be surprised if he was ever able to see properly again.

He took off his glove, pulled the torch out of his pocket, and wrapped his finger around the trigger. Just in case.

In the hallway, despite the gloom, it was easy enough to see the shredded remains of the bedroom door. He stepped over and around the mess and walked through the bedroom doorway with the torch held out in front of himself.

The bedroom was empty, but something had demolished the window. The ragged hole in the wall where it had been let in billowing snow and gusts of cold air. A slick of ice covered the floor from the hole to the bed. The fireplace poker lay on the floor closer to Warren.

What happened?

As he turned out of the bedroom, something else crashed. Not in the house this time. Outside.

The snowmobile.

He ran through the house, back to the front door. He hadn’t closed it, probably couldn’t have even if he’d remembered to. Beyond the doorway, two of the monsters circled the vehicle’s ruined remains. One of them held the handlebars in its tentacles. The other was busy ripping apart the treads.

Shit. There goes your escape plan.

Warren backed away from the door as quietly as possible. The creatures either hadn’t sensed him there or were too busy destroying the snowmobile to care. Either way, he wasn’t going to stay and see how long the destruction kept them occupied.

Something moved in the kitchen. A rasping, slithering sound. He turned away from the front door, tightened his grip on the torch, and moved across the living room.

He approached the kitchen and saw a square of icy cardboard on the floor. He supposed it was the same piece he’d taped to the broken window earlier. He heard the wind and snow blowing into the kitchen. The same sound he’d heard in the bedroom, the same sound he’d been hearing for days now in some form or another.

He considered throwing a flaming bottle into the room, a sort of preemptive strike, but what if the sound hadn’t come from a creature? What if it had been Tess or Bub making the noise? Or what if it had been a creature, but Tess and Bub where in there with it?

Too risky. He’d have to go in first, or at least poke his head around the corner, see what he could see.

But before he could, an icy tentacle popped through the doorway and curled around the frame. Warren didn’t hesitate to trigger the torch and attack. The fine blue flame etched a line in the limb, and the creature in the kitchen withdrew it.

Score one for you.

He screamed his best war cry and rushed in with his finger still squeezing the torch’s trigger.

He didn’t see the next tentacle until it was too late. It hit the torch and knocked it out of his hand. The blue cylinder flipped up into the air and landed on the floor by the stove. The creature wrapped its tentacle around Warren’s arm, dragged him the rest of the way into the kitchen.

The monster was huge. Bigger than any of the others he’d seen. Its head brushed the ceiling. If it had slid forward, it would have destroyed the room’s only light fixture (not that that would have made any kind of difference right then).

Warren tried to pull his arm out of the thing’s grasp, but it held on tight. He’d managed to stay on his feet, but the floor was iced over and he couldn’t get any traction; the creature pulled him easily along.

As he moved, he couldn’t stop thinking about Jan Young coming apart at the joints, about her blood—and her husband’s—about the body parts littering the snow. Here, now, the creature opened its mouth and ran its bluish tongue across its rows of teeth. It slid him in an arc across the floor, toward itself but also toward the stove and the torch, either not realizing it was moving him within reach of his only weapon or not caring.

It wasn’t much of a chance, but Warren took it: he kicked back, let his feet slide out from under him, and landed on his broken arm. The fresh burst of white-hot pain was almost unbearable. He screamed and started to flip onto his back.

But he couldn’t do that; he had to deal with the pain or he’d miss his only opportunity. He forced himself back onto his belly, onto his broken arm, and reached out for the torch, not able to move his good arm much because of the ice wrapped around it but still able to wiggle his fingers and bend his hand at the wrist. The monster didn’t sense what he was trying to do, or didn’t think the torch was much of a threat; it swung him right to it.

Maybe it wants you to get it, wants you to put up a fight. Maybe it likes to earn its kills.

Warren’s fingers brushed against the canister. For a second, he thought he’d missed it, but then his pinky caught the trigger and pulled the torch forward. He got hold of it, spun it around so the nozzle was pointed at the coiled tentacle, and pulled the trigger.

The creature screeched and let him go.

Ignoring the waves of pain pulsing through most of his body, he pushed himself back to his feet. He slid on the ice and came close to falling back to the floor, but he caught himself on the oven instead.

He looked down at the appliance and had an idea.

Before the creature could grab him again, he put the torch down on the stovetop and turned on all the burners. They didn’t light—the starters were electric—but that didn’t keep the gas from hissing out. He triggered the torch and waved it across the stove. The burners ignited with soft whumps.

The creature squealed and wrapped its tentacles around itself. Warren dropped the torch, and pulled one of the Molotov cocktails out of his pocket.

He guessed it would have been a perfect time for some kind of action-movie line, but he couldn’t think of one, and so he said nothing as he touched the bottle’s wick to one of the rings of fire and flung the bottle at the creature.

The flaming bottle hit the thing right beneath its head, burst, and engulfed the creature in a fireball that blackened the ceiling and the surrounding cabinets. The monster flapped its limbs. The fingers at the ends clacked together and scraped the floor. The creature’s torso melted, thinned, and finally disappeared altogether, leaving only the mess of legs.

Warren lit a second bottle and tossed it into what was left of the thing. He worried the erupting fireball might burn down the house, but everything flammable seemed to be covered in enough ice and water to keep it from catching fire. Most of the rest of the creature melted away, and the flames died down again, and that was that.

Warren took a long breath, backed toward the doorway leading into the back hall, and leaned against the jamb.

He stayed there for a long time with his eyes closed, catching his breath, trying to ignore the pain in his arm, and listening for more of the creatures. When he opened his eyes, he looked down the hall instead of into the kitchen and saw a mess of ice and something dark that might have been blood on the floor beside the pile of wood he had brought in a million years ago.

There was almost no light in the hallway. He remembered the flashlight and searched his pockets for it. He found it nestled next to another of the Molotov cocktails, pulled it out, and used his mouth to twist the end and turn it on. It still worked.

He pointed the flashlight at the mess down the hall. The thin beam of light turned the dark patch red. Definitely blood.

Tess. Bub.

He went into the kitchen, turned off the stove, put the torch back in his pocket, and returned to the hall.

It seemed like a lot of blood, but it was more of a layer than a pool. It didn’t necessarily mean anyone had…

He shook his head. He didn’t want to finish that thought.

If Tess or Bub had gotten into trouble back here, maybe they’d gone out the back door. Maybe they were still okay.

If they went outside, they’re almost certainly not okay.

He went to the door and pulled it open. Wind and snow blew into his face, and he gasped. He’d have thought he’d be used to the cold by now, but maybe it was something you never got used to. Maybe if you got used to it, you were dead.

He found more blood in the snow just outside the door. It seemed less serious than the smear in the hall, but he supposed the snow had probably covered a lot of it up. And blood loss was still blood loss and never a good thing.

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.