by Ronald Malfi
The hallway was a black mine shaft. At the end of the hall, a shape flitted past one window. Something was outside.
Cody Dobbins came racing down the hallway toward them, her face pulled back in a mask of absolute terror. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She slammed against Tully, who hugged her awkwardly with one arm while adjusting one of the fuel canisters clinging to his hip. Behind Tully, Bruce had his pistol raised and was advancing down the hallway with his back against the wall.
“What did you see?” Tully asked the girl.
“There’s someone outside!” Cody cried into his chest.
Todd pulled his own gun and crept along the wall opposite Bruce. They looked like mirror images of each other.
“How many?” Tully asked Cody.
“Just one. A girl. She’s outside in the snow.”
There were only a few windows of pebbled glass at the far end of the hallway, each one reinforced with wire. Bruce and Todd approached them cautiously and attempted to peer out, but the distortion of the glass made it impossible to see anything outside.
“Go back downstairs with Molly and Charlie,” Tully told the girl. He withdrew himself from her embrace and produced the muzzle of the flamethrower from under his coat. He moved down the center of the hallway like a firefighter approaching a burning building.
In the doorway of the office, Brendan stood like someone who’d just been startled out of a sound sleep. His eyes looked muddy behind the thick lenses of his glasses.
Kate took Cody’s hand. The little girl looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you downstairs with your brother.”
“I see someone,” Bruce said. He was leaning against the wall, his back flat against it. He held his service weapon down at his waist and gripped with two hands. He craned his neck to see out the pebbled windowpane, the milky issuance of daylight spilling across his features. Todd noted an angry-looking scar like a cleft in his chin. “Or something.”
Breathing heavily and sweating through his clothes, Todd squeezed the hilt of his own weapon tighter. He kept leaning over to peer out one of the front windows, but everything outside was blurred by the pebbled glass and wire meshing. “I can’t make anything out,” he told Bruce.
“A shape,” said Bruce in a low voice, “just beyond the alcove.”
“Are you sure there’s only one?”
“Can’t be positive, but it looks that way.”
“Any chance it’s someone from town? A survivor?”
The look Bruce gave him suggested such a thing was next to impossible.
His flamethrower in hand, Tully pressed himself against the wall beside Todd. Raising his voice just a bit so that Bruce could hear him on the other side of the window, Tully said, “I’ve got the keys to the doors. I can unlock them and on the count of three, you two yank them open. I’ll light up whatever’s on the other side with the ’thrower.”
Bruce appeared to chew this over. He kept trying to sneak a peek through the glass but was having difficulty making out any details. “Whatever it is, it’s just standing there.”
“Cody said it was a girl,” Todd reminded them. “She must have gotten a better look.”
“From where?” Tully said.
Bruce thought for a moment. He jerked his chin toward a glass-enclosed secretarial office behind Todd and Tully. “She goes in there sometimes and plays secretary. There’s windows.”
Todd and Tully went in. Slivers of light beamed through the blinds over the windows. The light held a greenish tint. Together, Todd and Tully squatted down before one of the windows. With the barrel of his gun, Todd lowered a section of blinds and they both peered out.
“It is a girl,” Tully said.
Todd could say nothing. It was Meg, the girl from the church, who’d somehow followed them from the ambulance and stood now in her dirty blouse in the shade of the alcove, a look of disorientation on her face.
“She could be…” Tully began.
“No,” Todd said. “I know this girl. She’s one of them now.”
“I wonder what scared Cody so much,” Tully said. “She looks normal enough. I mean, what do you think—”
He cut himself off just as Meg turned her head and stared straight at their window. The girl’s eyes looked muddy in her skull, as if they’d been painted on by a careless artist. As they watched, Meg’s mouth came unhinged, as grotesquely wide as a python’s, and a shrill but distant keening vibrated the bones in Todd’s ears. Around them, the windows rattled in their frames.
Tully shuddered and jammed a finger into one of his ears. “What is she doing?”
“Calling for the others,” Todd said, rushing to his feet and back out into the hallway. By the front door, Bruce was wiping condensation off one of the windows. “It’s one girl,” Todd said. “She’s one of them now. That noise we’re hearing—I think she’s trying to tell the others that we’re here.”
“Fuck this,” Tully said, zipping around Todd and nearly throwing himself into the double doors. He fumbled with the wreath of keys at his waist. After selecting the appropriate key, he jammed it into the padlock and turned it. The chain fell away to the floor.
Bruce came over and grabbed one of the door handles while Todd reached out and snatched the other. Out in the cold, queer afternoon, the high-pitched wailing stopped suddenly.
“Do it now!” Bruce shouted, and he and Todd yanked the doors open.
Tully charged out into the snow, a tongue of fire already spouting from the nozzle of the flamethrower. Guns at the ready, Todd and Bruce rushed out after him.
“She’s gone,” Tully said, looking around.
Bruce sniffed at the air. “Careful, gentlemen…”
“No footprints in the snow,” Todd said. “How could—”
In a blur, the girl dropped down from the roof of the awning and landed squarely on Tully’s shoulders. Her mouth so wide she nearly split her head in two, the Meg-thing drove her teeth into the soft flesh of Tully’s neck. Tully screamed—a horrible gurgling wail—and sent an arc of flame spouting toward the underside of the awning.
Todd was elbowed aside by Bruce, who fired a shot at the thing on Tully’s back. The round tore a chunk of grayish flesh from Meg’s exposed forearm. Snow blew out as if by compressed air and trailed from the arm like smoke from a burning car racing down a hillside. It reminded Todd of the time he’d helped move Brianna’s stuff across town to his apartment in a friend’s borrowed pickup truck; unbeknownst to both of them at the time, Bree’s beanbag chair had sprung a leak, and when Todd had glanced up at the rearview mirror, the bed of the pickup had been domed in a blizzard of white Styrofoam balls…
Tully dropped the flamethrower in the snow, its cable still hitched to one of the canisters at Tully’s hip. Blood gushed from Tully’s mouth as the Meg-thing tore deeper into his neck.
Todd snapped from his stupor. He ran up behind Tully and grabbed a fistful of the Meg-thing’s hair. With a solid tug, he wrenched the girl’s teeth out of Tully’s neck. The Megthing made a sound like truck brakes squealing. Todd pressed the pistol against the girl’s temple and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand.
The Meg-thing’s head rocked and went unnaturally back on its neck. She sloughed off Tully’s back just as Tully dropped to his knees in the snow.
Todd staggered backward, the pistol smoking in his hand. At his feet, Meg’s lifeless body began shuddering, one leg kicking out and carving a swath in the snow.
Bruce ran over to Tully and clamped a hand to the jagged tear in Tully’s neck. Tully uttered something wet and unintelligible, then slumped forward against Bruce, frighteningly still. “Todd!” Bruce yelled, but Todd could barely hear him. Bruce could have been calling to him from underwater, from a distant planet…
Still staring down at Meg’s body, Todd watched as a slurry of snow came funneling out of the exit wound at the side of Meg’s head.
Reality rushed back to slap him in the face.
; “Better get him inside quick!” Todd shouted, rushing over to help Bruce drag Tully inside. The front of Tully’s coat was black with blood and more came spurting between the fingers Bruce had pressed over the neck wound.
“No,” Bruce said. “The legs, the legs! Grab his legs!”
Todd fumbled with Tully’s legs while Bruce grabbed Tully and hoisted him from beneath his armpits.
A blast of icy wind struck Todd’s back. He whirled around in time to see a massive clot of snow rising up like a pillar before him. Twin winglike appendages unfolded from the mass just as a thread of steel-colored light intensified at the center of the thing.
Todd cried out, rolling over on his side in the snow. The pistol went sliding out of his hands. Above Todd, the winglike appendages crystallized into twin blades of curved ice the color of smoke. The creature reared up like a horse, the blades cleaving the air. It emitted an ear-piercing whine. Todd scrambled away on his buttocks, his boots struggling for purchase in the snow.
The scythes chopped down, slicing through the air with a sound like a passing jetliner. The scythes knifed into Tully’s slumped shoulders. Tully shook as if he’d been zapped with an electrical current. The glowing silver thread suspended at the center of the clot of snow dulled and turned the color of bronze as it passed through Tully’s camouflage coat. Blackish blood was already saturating the coat, and rivulets as dark as India ink ran from the serrations at his shoulders.
Bruce released Tully just as Tully’s head snapped around to glare at Todd. His eyes blazed like torches. His lips and chin were smeared with his own blood.
“…odd…” the Tully-thing croaked—a voice like a creaking floorboard.
Bruce brought his service weapon up to Tully’s head, but Tully’s arm shot up lightning-quick and knocked the gun out of Bruce’s hand. Tully never took his eyes from Todd the whole time.
“…ook…odd…” the Tully-thing growled through lips frothing with blood. The thing inside him managed a hideous smile that seemed too wide for the man’s face. Tully had about a hundred tiny teeth crowded into his mouth.
Bruce administered a roundhouse kick to the side of Tully’s head. Tully’s eyes shook like the last two gumballs in a gumball machine. Then the Tully-thing spun around with animal ferocity and launched itself at Bruce. Bruce just barely dodged the thing, and took off running around the side of the building.
Todd scrambled over to the pistol, grabbed it, and rolled over into a seated position with the pistol clenched in both hands. Without pausing to aim, he fired shot after shot, praying he wouldn’t accidentally strike Bruce in all the mayhem.
One round must have struck one of the fuel canisters on Tully’s belt, because there sounded a dull plink! less than a second before the Tully-thing burst into flames. It began screaming, a flaming comet continuing forward in its momentum, its arms flailing. The heat ignited the other fuel canisters, setting off a series of explosions that launched bits of flaming flesh and articles of clothing across the macadam until they eventually landed, smoldering, in the snow.
The burning man-thing began running toward Todd. It had no discernable shape—just a writhing conflagration with legs. Tully’s steel-toed boots left steaming divots in the snow. Its anguished cries were like the trumpeting of an elephant.
Todd pulled himself to his feet and ran for the double doors, but the thing was bounding toward him at an impossible pace. A mere couple yards from Todd, the fiery Tullything fell down into the snow, the stink of burning flesh and chemical fuel poisoning the air. The flaming heap bucked and roiled in the snow in a mockery of life…until the creature itself burst from Tully’s body and leapfrogged into the snow. It, too, was on fire, its usually translucent form made nightmarishly visible by the heat of the flames. A lion-shaped skull pivoted wildly on a thin stalk of neck as it burned, its eyes like bottomless black pits. As Todd watched from the doorway, the thing dragged itself through the snow by the carved blades of its arms. Smoldering black scales were left behind in the path it carved through the snow, reminding Todd of fireplace soot.
Bruce appeared around the corner of the building. He froze in astonishment as he saw Tully’s body smoldering in the snow and the burning creature dragging itself out from under the station awning.
The creature was heading toward Meg’s body. It needed an uncorrupted vessel, even a dead one: the fire was killing it.
A hooked arm rose up out of the flames and planted itself squarely into Meg’s chest. A moment later, Meg’s body jerked. One of the dead girl’s arms swiped in a semicircle through the snow. But as the thing climbed on top of her, the girl’s body also burst into flames. That arm continued to swipe back and forth in the snow, back and forth, until the inferno overtook it and all went still.
Bruce practically tackled Todd, driving him backward into the sheriff’s station. Together they slammed the doors shut and leaned against them, breathing laboriously.
“Jesus,” Todd panted. Even with the doors closed, the acrid stink of the fiery massacre burned the hairs in his nose. “Did you see? It couldn’t…couldn’t get inside her…because the fire kept…kept it solid…”
“I lost my gun,” Bruce gasped.
“Do you think…more will come?”
“I don’t know.”
A dark shape ambled toward them from the opposite end of the hallway. Todd aimed his gun at the darkness.
It was Brendan, shaking with fear. In all the commotion, Todd had forgotten about Brendan.
“Did you kill it?” Brendan’s voice trembled. “Where’s Tully?”
“Tully’s dead,” said Bruce. “We should probably put the fires out and bury the bodies before any more of those things come sniffing around.”
“Fires?” Brendan warbled. It sounded as though his tongue had grown too big for his mouth.
“Brendan,” Bruce said, still out of breath. “Get a shotgun from the gun locker, will you?”
Stupidly, Brendan nodded, then retreated back into the darkness. Todd listened to his footfalls pad down the floor tiles.
“Come with me,” Bruce said. “There are shovels in the sally port. We’ll have to be quick before those things show up and figure out we’re in here.”
Less than three minutes later, they were back outside. Most of the flames had died, leaving charred and steaming corpses sizzling in gray snow. Tully’s and Meg’s bodies still resembled something vaguely human, but the third corpse—the creature—was unidentifiable. It was large—perhaps twelve to fifteen feet in length—and something about the fibrous twists of its multisectional body suggested something serpentlike. Again, Todd thought of the fleshy, arrow-shaped wings of a stingray. One of the thing’s hooked arms was still buried in the smoldering black flesh of Meg’s corpse.
“I can’t do this,” Todd said, feeling as if someone were tickling the back of his throat with a feather. “I’m going to throw up.”
“Then throw up and let’s get on with it,” Bruce said, his bald pate glistening with sweat.
While Brendan stood guard with a shotgun, Todd and Bruce donned work gloves and tossed handfuls of snow onto the corpses to cool them. When Todd bent and, turning his face to the side, grabbed hold of Tully’s ankles and pulled, he heard a sickening crunch and felt the bones surrender. Tully’s feet came loose in Todd’s hands. Sickened, Todd dropped them and staggered several paces away, where he vomited into the snow. Behind him, he heard Brendan moan.
“Fuck,” Bruce said once Todd returned, feeling hollowed and jittery. “We’ll never be able to move them. Let’s just cover them with snow right here. Give us a hand, Brendan.”
The work was grueling and took longer than Todd would have thought. The men took turns vomiting in the snow while they worked. The worst moment came when Bruce dug the ball of keys from Tully’s belt; they came away with bits of flesh seared to them, and the sound was like ripping up old carpeting.
Once they finished, there were three mounds of snow beneath the awning of the sheriff’s station—one
much larger than the other two.
Perched like some predatory bird on her cot, Molly kept stealing glances at Kate when she thought Kate wasn’t looking—but Kate could feel the pregnant woman’s stare like hot embers against her flesh.
They were back down in the basement room, where they counted down the minutes in what felt like eternal silence. Still shaken by what she’d seen outside, Cody clung to Kate, who’d taken up one of the empty cots across the room from Molly. Looking bored, Charlie sat on the floor before the board game, crushing little wooden game pieces beneath his shoe while chewing absently on his Snickers bar.
“Come here, Cody,” Molly called to the girl—the first thing that had been said since Kate had taken Cody down here—though Molly maintained her gaze on Kate.
Cody didn’t move—she had her face buried against Kate’s chest, her spindly little legs folded up under her. In Kate’s arms, the girl felt almost nonexistent.
“When are you due?” Kate asked, once the silence had become overbearing.
“Next month. But Brendan says I should be prepared for the worst. He said the particles or pulses or whatever from those clouds could have caused…maybe caused…” Molly’s voice trailed off.
“Brendan shouldn’t talk about things he knows nothing about,” Kate told her. “He doesn’t know any more about what’s going on than we do. He shouldn’t have scared you.”
“He didn’t scare me.” Molly’s eyes were lucid.
“Do you know the sex?”
“No. We wanted to wait, to be surprised. Brendan says if it’s a girl, the electrical pulses in the air may have, uh, compromised her reproductive capacity. Those were his exact words, just how he said them—‘compromised her reproductive capacity.’ Brendan’s very smart.”
“Sounds like he’s been thinking a lot about things.” Then a notion came to her. “Brendan’s the father?”
“We’re not married,” Molly said defensively. “Not yet, anyway. We will be, though. We agreed the baby needs both parents. It’s important to have both parents be a part of a child’s life.”