The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

  “Get away from him!” she screamed. The battle cry would have made sense if Lauren had some sort of weapon to defend herself, but she stood empty-handed, armed with nothing but her own fearlessness.

  The creature appeared almost startled by her defiance. It lurched backward, then twisted around and bolted back into the trees. Ryan watched Lauren’s determination melt into what could have only been stunned surprise, his own heart clamoring for freedom from his chest. She turned to look at him, bewilderment written on her face. For a split second she almost seemed to smile, proud of herself, but Ryan shook his head.

  No.

  This wasn’t over.

  Run.

  He reached for her hand, unable to breathe, about to choke on his own pulse as the creature down the slope of the drive launched itself forward.

  He heard the thing bolt up behind them.

  His eyes locked with Lauren’s, her expression frozen in time like a snapshot. But her gaze didn’t reflect the horror he felt. Behind wisps of flaxen hair, she looked mystified, as though unable to believe where they were, what was happening, what would inevitably become of them both.

  Her hand was torn from his grasp as she was snapped backward. He stared wide-eyed as the thing threw her onto her back, Lauren kicking her legs at the oncoming horror, trying to scare it away with her screams. She planted her foot against one of its bulbous knees—nothing but a ball-shaped joint suspended between two leg bones—jamming her heel against it as hard as she could, but rather than forcing it to stumble, she made it angry instead. Ryan continued to stare as the hellion reeled back, its mouth open impossibly wide, and then charged her. Ryan’s brain screamed for him to help her while his instincts urged him back up the road. You need a weapon, it shrieked. You can’t fight that thing with your bare hands. The creature’s jaws snapped just inches from Lauren’s face as she shoved it backward with her feet.

  Ryan’s gaze snagged on the snowboard on top of Sawyer’s Jeep. But the Jeep was downhill, and Lauren and the creature were between him and the car. He turned uphill, started to run again—there were three more on top of the Nissan. If he could get back to the driveway, he’d have something to swing at that fucking thing.

  Lauren gave a bloodcurdling scream.

  Ryan’s heart ceased to beat.

  No, he thought. Nonono!

  He reeled around, hardly able to process the scene. There was blood. So much blood. Lauren was still kicking at the thing above her, but with only one leg. Her other leg lay motionless in the crimson snow, detached, the foot twisted at an impossible angle. The creature grabbed her flailing limb, crouched low to the ground in a pool of gore-drenched snow, and, in a move that was a gruesome imitation of a sex act, lifted Lauren’s hips before burying its mouth in the massive, gushing wound below her pelvis. Its black eyes locked onto Ryan as it fed, challenging him as sucking noises punctuated the short-lived silence, broken by Lauren’s final scream.

  Oona was going nuts out on the porch, her bark a mixture of alarm and aggression. Jane stopped at the kitchen door, her hand on the knob, hesitating. Since Oona had turned on her the night before, it was a wise idea to let the husky calm down.

  “What the hell?” Sawyer murmured, watching Oona lose it as she jumped up onto her hind legs, her front paws pounding the redwood railing, shoving her nose through the slats of the deck. But despite her apparent eagerness to get at whatever was out there in the trees, she refused to bound down the stairs and toward the road.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said, her face twisting with worry.

  Every hair on Sawyer’s body stood on end when he heard the wail.

  “Oh my god.” Jane tore the door open, running into the snow in her socks. Sawyer followed her, his hand clamped around one of her arms, the cold biting at his skin as he held her back.

  The screaming continued, impossibly loud for the fact that they couldn’t see where it was coming from. Jane was already crying, panicked, and despite the yell belonging to a female, she was yelling Ryan’s name, weeping it into her hands. Sawyer’s heart rattled in his chest, sure the screams were coming from April, sure that something terrible had occurred. Maybe she had stayed outside so long because she had hurt herself. Maybe she had stepped into a snowdrift or stumbled down the embankment into the ravine that flanked the drive and broken her leg.

  Sawyer tried to pull Jane back inside, pushing through his own fear, his pulse thudding in the hollow of his throat.

  “What are you doing?” Jane squealed, shoving Sawyer away from her, trying to get around him, but he wouldn’t relent, blocking her way.

  “Go inside,” he told her.

  “What? No!”

  “Go inside, Jane!” Sawyer yelled, turning to run down the steps. He stopped when Jane’s hands clamped over his wrist, squeezing it tight. “She needs my help,” he told her, tearing his hand from her grasp, then bolted down the stairs, running past the Xterra and toward the road where his Jeep sat incapacitated deep in the drift. He all but collided with his best friend as Ryan took the bend, his eyes wild, his expression unreadable.

  “Get back inside,” Ryan choked, frantically shoving Sawyer backward. But the screaming hadn’t stopped. It was weaker, but he could still hear it. Sawyer grabbed Ryan by his wrists, swung him around so they exchanged positions.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. Where was April? Where was Lauren? Why the hell did Ryan abandon them? All he had to do was take a few steps down the driveway to see what was happening. Breaking free of Ryan’s grasp, Ryan clawed at the fabric of Sawyer’s T-shirt, desperately trying to stop him.

  “No!” he yelled. “Get the fuck back!”

  “Did you find her?” Sawyer shouted in return, panic seizing his throat, but he stopped short when he reached the driveway. A dozen yards away, there was a huddle of what looked to be naked men, their corpse-like skin glistening with splotches of red. They were shoving one another, fighting over a kill. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the amount of blood that was splashed across the snow between them. And then there was a girl, cracked open like a gourd, steam rising from her exposed entrails. Something in his brain clicked, identifying her—April. It was April, torn apart, his unborn child ground down to nothing between a demon’s teeth. But a flash of blonde hair upon red-painted snow snapped him back to reality.

  It was Lauren.

  Sawyer stood frozen in place, his mouth agape, his eyes fixed on the one creature that had stopped contending with the others and was now looking right at him, its nightmarish fangs clacking together. It canted its head to the side like a curious dog, that gruesome grin slathered in blood.

  Sawyer lurched backward when Ryan groped at his shirt, both of them stumbling up the stairs. But Sawyer wasn’t ready to go inside. Despite his terror, he had to get out there, had to find April. He shoved Ryan away, trying to get around him, only to have Ryan push him in return.

  “Get off me!” Sawyer yelled as they struggled, Ryan forcing him toward the open door while Sawyer fought to escape his grasp. Amid the panic, Oona let out a snarl, convinced her owner was under attack. She reeled back, her teeth bared, and bit down, her teeth sinking deep into Sawyer’s skin. But, teetering on the edge of what felt like insanity, he hardly noticed the dog chomping down on his forearm. Shoved inside the house, he watched Ryan throw the dead bolt into place. A flimsy lock wasn’t going to do a goddamn thing against the monsters outside—but it sure would do its job if April came stumbling up the porch steps and tried to get inside. She’d be locked out. Doomed.

  He stared at the lock, sure that lock was sealing her fate, torn between the safety of the group and the safety of the woman who carried his child. She was out there somewhere, hiding, waiting for it to be safe before she bolted toward the cabin. She was smart. Resourceful. She’d come back. She had to come back.

  He snapped out of his daze when Ryan grabbed him.

  “Jane, get in the pantry,” Ryan yelled.

  Wearing a look of terrified confus
ion, Jane jumped at the order and blindly did what she was told, her eyes brimming over with frightened tears.

  Ryan shoved Sawyer away from the door and across the kitchen. They scrambled into the walk-in pantry at the mouth of the hallway, Jane already inside, wide-eyed and terrified, her face a mask of bewildered dread. Oona ran in behind them, her tail between her legs, and Ryan slammed the door closed, searching for something to use as a barricade, but there was nothing. All the shelves were secured to the walls, immovable.

  “What happened?” Jane asked, her voice shrill with fear. “Where’s Lauren?” When Ryan didn’t answer her, Jane’s dread bloomed into hysteria. “Where’s Lauren?!” she screamed, clawing at her brother’s chest, trying to move him away from the door. Sawyer caught her by her arms, pulling her back. She thrashed against his grasp, twisting as she attempted escape, the blood from his fresh dog bite smearing across her arms as she tried to wriggle free. “Tell me where she is!” she demanded, her tone crackling with a desperate rage Sawyer had never heard before, one that made him feel numb. “Let me go!” Jane screamed, trying to escape Sawyer’s grasp. “I need to go get her!”

  A flash of Jane running out into the snow: those things falling onto her, snarling, fighting over which one of them got the best piece of his first love. His stomach twisted, the sudden burn of nausea threatening to double him over where he stood.

  “No,” he said.

  Lauren was dead.

  “You can’t.”

  She was dead.

  “We need to stay here.” His voice cracked.

  April was still out there. Scared. Alone.

  Ryan pressed his back to the door and slid down it, his head in his hands.

  “She’s gone, Janey,” Sawyer said, his voice warbling with emotion. “Lauren’s gone.”

  Jane stood motionless in his grasp, as though the life had gone out of her within a blink.

  Sawyer’s heart twisted, burning in his chest, his wounded arm throbbing in time with his pulse. He looked away, unable to stop picturing April out there, freezing, hiding from those things. But he couldn’t go out there. If he did, Jane would follow. Jane twisted away from him, crashed to her knees, and sobbed into Ryan’s shoulder. Her cry tore through Sawyer, punching him in the heart.

  “What happened?” she sobbed. “What happened to Ren, Ryan? What did you do to her?” She shook him, trying to get a response.

  “Wolves,” Sawyer said, his throat dry, closing around that lie. But it was all he could do to keep everything from falling apart. “A pack of them. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “Then why are we in the pantry?” she screamed. “Why aren’t you going out there to get April?”

  He swallowed against the questioning. How was he supposed to answer that?

  “You’re lying!” she wailed, turning on her brother again, her fists beating against his arm. “Why aren’t we going out there? Why are we locked inside like this?”

  Again, there was no response from Ryan. He was catatonic, lost in his own grief, drowning in guilt.

  “What was it?” she asked, turning her attention to Sawyer instead. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

  Sawyer shook his head faintly. “I only saw them for a second. I was too busy looking…” at Lauren. His words faded before he could finish.

  She turned her attention back to her brother. “Tell me what happened,” she sobbed. “Please.”

  Finally Ryan spoke, a reply so ominous it made the hair on Sawyer’s arms stand on end.

  “If I told you what happened, you would never leave this room again.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  He was trying to make sense of it, but all Sawyer kept seeing was that thing staring at him, those giant teeth clacking together as it stood in Lauren’s blood. There had been a pack of them, whatever the hell those things were, and while they had been grouped together, they had fought one another, suggesting a definite pecking order. But he couldn’t see past Lauren’s body, cracked open, dying.

  But when he had set eyes on her, he hadn’t seen Jane’s blonde-haired friend, but April Bennett, the girl he’d met in a vintage record store, the girl who had been reading the back of a Bauhaus album when he had spotted her from across the shop. She had disappeared while he flipped through vintage new-wave vinyl, and when he stepped out onto the sidewalk with a paper bag full of records tucked beneath his arm, she was smoking a cigarette just outside the door. To say that he hadn’t been smitten by her would have been a lie. Only a few months ago, he could hardly restrain himself from undressing her with his eyes. Now he couldn’t help but picture that body lying out in the snow, probably in a place where he and Jane and Ryan used to run and dig and pretend that they were lost in the woods, nobody but the three of them left in the world.

  That was his worst fear.

  April was volatile, but she wasn’t stupid. He reassured himself that she would have found a place to hide. Maybe she was in the Jeep, curled up in the foot well and waiting for someone to find her.

  “We can’t stay in here,” he finally spoke. “We need a plan.” Because despite his own terror, he had to find her. He had to save his child.

  “There is no plan,” Ryan said toward the floor.

  “We have to make one,” Jane cut in. It was impressive, the way her face was going through emotions like a flickering lightbulb—horrified one second, grief stricken the next. But she was keeping it together. “We just need to figure out what to do,” she said. “We’ll be okay…”

  “We’ll be okay?” Ryan laughed bitterly. He looked up for the first time since they’d scrambled into that tiny room, his eyes hard. “You have no fucking idea. You have no fucking clue.”

  Jane’s composed exterior wavered. Sawyer could see Ryan’s severity eating at her, singeing the fine-spun fibers of her self-control. “That’s why you need to tell us what you saw,” she told him. “We can’t fight them if we don’t know what they are.”

  “And what are you going to do, Jane? Are you going to teach them how to color inside the lines?” Ryan asked her. “Are you going to teach them how to bake a fucking cake?”

  “Hey.” Sawyer’s voice snapped Ryan to attention. They locked eyes, challenging each other. “Don’t take this out on her. This isn’t anyone’s fault.”

  Ryan’s expression went sour. He looked down at his hands, holding something back, and then those hands covered his face again. Guilt. It was so heavy Sawyer could taste it.

  “We can’t stay in here,” Sawyer repeated. “April is out there, right? We have to go look for her. Or at least I have to go look for her. You guys can stay here but I can’t.”

  “You go out there and you’re dead,” Ryan said flatly. “I know you saw them. April isn’t out there. If Lauren didn’t make it, neither did she.”

  “Why?” Sawyer clenched his teeth at the insinuation. “Because you liked Lauren better?”

  “Because it’s not goddamn logical. How can she be out there, Sawyer? She was wearing jeans and a designer coat, for fuck’s sake. If they didn’t get her, the cold already has.”

  Sawyer lunged forward, grabbing Ryan by the front of his coat, jerking him up to his feet before slamming him against the pantry door with a snarl. Jane gasped at the sudden barrage of movement, her hands flying out to grab Sawyer’s shoulders.

  “Don’t!” she yelped, but it only made Sawyer shove Ryan again.

  “Say it again,” Sawyer challenged, releasing Ryan’s coat a second later, disgusted.

  “You guys, stop.” Jane stared at them both with wide, glassy eyes. “We can’t turn against each other.”

  Sawyer shook his head. “You’re giving up? Is that it?”

  “No,” Jane answered for him. “He’s not. Nobody is giving up.”

  “I’m not going to die in here,” Sawyer assured them, taking a backward step.

  “Nobody is going to die…” She faltered when she realized that she was wrong. Someone had already died. Lauren was gone forever, and according to Ryan, A
pril didn’t stand a chance. “Ryan?” Her bottom lip trembled. “We’re not going to die out here, right?”

  Ryan said nothing.

  She tried to compose herself, but her shoulders lurched forward, giving way to a stifled sob. “I have to go back to work. The kids don’t have a sub. I need to at least call in…”

  “Jane.” Sawyer reached out to her, his hand grazing her shoulder. It hurt to look at her, hurt to know that he couldn’t do anything to soothe her nerves. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “I promise.”

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. It’ll be okay.”

  Sawyer let his head fall back, staring at the ceiling. Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe there was no way out of there—no possible way they could make it. It was hard to believe that just that morning, less than an hour before, his biggest problem was the wrath of an angry girl. But now, the fabric of the world had changed, reality had shifted, the impossible had become possible.

  The blink of an eye.

  A snap of the fingers.

  Just like that, and everything was different.

  Ryan had lost track of time. He knew where he was, knew what he had seen, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember how he had gotten back inside the house, whose idea it had been to pile into the pantry, or what they were waiting for. Because they were waiting; otherwise, they would have moved.

  Jane had crumpled into a corner. Sawyer was on the opposite side of the room, more than likely contemplating April’s fate—a fate that Ryan hadn’t been very delicate about. He felt guilty about putting those images in Sawyer’s head, but his lapse in sympathy was far outweighed by the way Lauren had stared at him, almost bewildered by the fact that her life was over, that Ryan just stood there not doing a damn thing, because there was nothing left to do. But he could have done something. He could have run at that fucking thing, pummeled it with his fists. Maybe he would have scared it off, bought them a few extra seconds, been able to drag Lauren up the road. Maybe if he wouldn’t have been so goddamn scared he could have helped her. But he hadn’t. And now the three of them were sitting in a pantry because of him, rather than fighting.