White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Stand up, get up! But she already knew she was too late. She was turned around, facing the wrong way. From the corner of her left eye, she saw the thing rearing up, large as a mountain. Shifting the hammer to her left hand, she put her weight into it, whipping the hammer around and up in a vicious slice.

  The creature never saw it coming, and then, in the next instant, it couldn’t, at least not from that left eye. Rima felt the bone give as the claw slammed into the ridge above the socket. Gravity and momentum did the rest. Snagged on shattered bone and soft tissue, the claw tore out the socket. The eye burst in a sludgy spray of gelatinous yellow muck. Bawling with rage and new pain, the thing reeled, pawing at the ruin as snot-colored goo slithered down its snout.

  She cringed back from the mess. She couldn’t help it; it was automatic, a reflexive moment of disgust and horror; and so she didn’t understand her mistake until a half second too late—because the thing still had that one good eye.

  With a roar, the man-thing drove its fist, hard and fast as a piston. The blow slammed just above the bridge of her nose, and pain detonated in her forehead to spread in molten fingers. It felt like he’d broken every bone in her face. Her mind skipped a beat, and she stumbled, her consciousness suddenly slewing to one side like a car sliding off an icy cliff.

  Stay with it. Fight. But her hand was empty. Hammer … dropped it …

  Another blow, solid as a battering ram, drove into her belly, punching out her breath and what was left of her strength. Doubling over, trying to pull air into lungs that would not obey, she simply crumpled.

  Get up. She knew her feet were moving, but only in a useless shuffle. Her head felt as if someone had buried the business end of an ax in her skull. Her grudging lungs balked. C’mon, get up, get—

  There was a sudden blinding flash of yellow light, firecracker-bright, as a deafening ba-ROOM filled the cab. The blast was so strong she felt it shiver through the deck and into her teeth.

  The thing’s chest erupted in a liquid black halo. An oily rain of blood and mangled flesh sheeted over the walls and fell on Rima in a viscous shower. For a moment, she was too stunned to do anything, much less understand. The roar had been replaced by a muzzy, muffled hoosh, like water rushing past her ears. But then she felt something: a slick creep along her skin, a worming sensation over her clothes, eeling through her hair.

  “Ahhh!” Rima clawed her way to her feet. To her left, the man-thing splayed, its chest replaced by a huge crater of obliterated bone and tissue. Frantic, she began swatting at the mucky bits of the monster’s flesh squirming over her chest and arms and hair. “Get off, get off, get them off!”

  Through the hoosh, she heard someone say, “Rima, what is it?” Then: “Casey, are you … Jesus, what the hell?”

  Still disoriented, she turned a wild look. An older boy, with dark hair and eerie blue eyes, crouched in the entrance to the passenger cab. Openmouthed, the boy stared at the wriggling bits and shivering globules of black blood. “My God, its chest,” the boy said. “It’s moving.”

  “Re-repairing it-itself.” Her voice felt rusty, her tongue thick. From where she stood, Rim could see strings of the thing’s chest muscles nosing and then coiling together. Closing her eyes against a bolt of nausea, she pressed her trembling lips together and gulped against the sudden acid bite on her tongue. Something squiggled on her thigh, and she swatted it away in a fast sideswipe. The black slug of muscle sailed across the cabin to hit the far wall with a moist splot. For a second, it clung there, trembling as if trying to clear its head, before beginning a slow slither toward a neighboring splotch. She turned aside with a shudder. “Just like Father P-Preston.”

  “Who?” Shotgun still in hand, the older boy was helping Casey ease to a sit against an equipment locker. “What’s going on? What is this thing?”

  “D-don’t know.” Groaning, Casey clamped an arm to his left side. “My th-throat f-feels broken,” he croaked. “H-hurts to … ahhh!” He threw his head back as the other boy probed his chest, and Rima saw a necklace of purple-black bruises ringing Casey’s neck. “God, Eric, d-don’t.”

  Eric. Of course, his name is Eric. He and Casey are brothers. She put a hand up to her throbbing forehead and felt the beginnings of a knot. Why couldn’t I remember? What’s wrong with me?

  “I’m sorry, Case,” Eric said, calmly enough, although Rima saw a ripple of fear as the older boy touched a gentle hand to Casey’s bruised jaw. “My God, what happened to your face? Can you walk?”

  “Y-yeah. It’s a long story.” Wincing, Casey backhanded a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Where’s Emma? How did you guys find us?”

  “She’s back at this farmhouse we found. The fog pulled us here, me and these two guys out in the truck …” Eric made a face. “That sounds pretty nuts.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Fog got us, too,” Casey said, then looked up as Rima dropped to her knees by his side. “Rima, are you … God, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine.” She covered his hand with hers. An impulse, not something she really thought about, but which, once done, felt entirely right. “Thank you for coming, for not letting that thing g-get …”

  “Would never l-let that happen.” His eyes fastened on hers, and she could feel a slow flush working its way up her neck. He turned his hand over, palm up, and gave her fingers a squeeze. “Tania?”

  “Who?” Eric asked.

  “Oh God.” She felt a pang of guilt. In all the commotion, she’d forgotten. Hurriedly pushing to her feet, she edged past the thing, sparing it a swift sidelong glance, then stopped dead and gave a much longer stare.

  “What?” Eric was there in an instant. “What is … oh shit.”

  “Yeah,” she breathed against a clutch of dawning dread. A moist mesh of fresh connective tissue had already formed; a toothy cage of remodeled bone arced over a gray sponge of new lung. Whips of thickening muscle waggled, and she swore she saw that thing’s left hand convulse in a sudden spasm.

  “I think we’re out of here, now,” Eric said, and moved to help Casey make his feet. “What about your friend? Is she …?”

  “Just a second.” Dead ahead, the pudding that remained of Father Preston was still SMEE-smeeing over the windscreen. She wondered what they could possibly be rebuilding themselves into. The snowcat’s auger had chopped the priest to hamburger. Could all those pieces be finding their way back together again? How could you kill something that kept regrowing like those nematodes Rima had sliced and diced in eighth-grade science?

  Betcha fire would do it. Steeling herself, she worked her way around the driver’s side transmission box. Cook those suckers.

  Then she forgot all that, pushed it away as irrelevant, when she got a good look at Tania’s face. The girl’s skin was the color of cottage cheese, and her lids drooped, the whites showing in half-moons. Her ruined right arm was dusky, and her lips were purple. She wasn’t breathing. Blood saturated her clothing and had gathered in a crimson lake on Tania’s seat, spilling over into the foot well.

  “Rima?” Casey called.

  “Just … just give me a second.” She closed her eyes against the prick of tears. Come on; do what you have to. Steeling herself, she opened her eyes, blew out a hard breath, then touched her fingers to the angle of Tania’s jaw below her left ear.

  A second later, over the sudden slam of her heart, she heard Casey: “Rima?” When she didn’t answer, Eric said, more sharply, “Rima, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Look at her face.”

  RIMA

  Doomsday Sky

  1

  RIMA! RIMA! SOMEONE … Casey … was shouting, and now another voice, Eric’s, joined his, both boys screaming from the back of the passenger cab and a million miles away: Rima, get down, get down, get out of the way!

  But she couldn’t move. She was beyond shock, into deepfreeze. Her body was icy, numb, like that little kid with the splinters of an evil mirror in his heart and eyes; a child fit only for
the world of the Snow Queen. Rooted in place, she could only stare at Tania, her face, her neck, and if she thought at all in those first few seconds, it wasn’t in words so much as sensations: the skip of her heart, the slickness of new alien blood on her fingers, the hard scent of iron and blasted flesh and spent gunpowder, the airless dead space in her lungs as they emptied.

  And the boys, of course, still screaming from so far away: Rima, Rima, get down!

  Tania’s throat and face were moving, not twitching but undulating and worming as something eeled just beneath the surface, the suddenly elastic skin puffing and then deflating, over and over again, as if Tania were growing gills. Trickles of black leaked from the dead girl’s nose and dribbled out of both ears. Fat, ebony pearls swelled from the half-moons of her eyes. A deep ripple worked its way across Tania’s face from right to left, from one cheek to the opposite, skimming under and lifting Tania’s lips as if the girl were dragging a thick, fleshy tongue over and around her teeth.

  Tania’s mouth suddenly sagged, the jaws unlocking—and at that, Rima’s brain eked a single, small oh. Then she blanked, her mind blinkering white with terror as a nightmare of legs, jointed and bristled as a tarantula’s, unfurled from Tania’s lips like the spiky petals of an alien rose. Deep in the heart of this bizarre flower, two sets of long, pointed fangs clashed, working from side to side like a spider’s mandibles, grating together with a coarse rasp, like the grind of metal files.

  Rima felt a crack of horror, like a jag of lightning, scorch through her mind to burn from her mouth in a high, terrified scream as Tania’s eyes snapped open. The whites were a jet-black sea of hemorrhage. The pupils belonged to a lizard, a snake, the vertical slits narrowing as Tania let go of a shrill, chittering squeal.

  “Rima!” There came a hard jolt as someone crashed into her from behind, a solid body blow that knocked her to one side. Panicked, taken by surprise, she flailed, but Casey grabbed her arms and then he was bullying her back, slamming her flat against a far wall, covering her up, using his weight to hold her in place, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot it, Eric, shoot it!”

  The cab flooded with bright yellow light, and the roar from the shotgun was so huge Rima thought her eardrums would explode. The blast punched whatever Tania had become in the chest, but it wasn’t like the movies. Instead of flying back, Tania, who also had a new gaping hole where her heart used to be, blundered back to crash against the cat’s transmission box. But she didn’t go down, not the way the man-thing had. Still pinned, Rima watched as Tania made a left-handed grab, steadied herself against a seat, and pulled upright. Another roar from the shotgun, and all of a sudden a spool of guts boiled in wet spaghetti tangles. This time, Tania lost her feet, coming down hard and with a sodden splash. Almost at once, she rolled onto hands and knees and then clawed her way upright again.

  “Jesus,” she heard Casey say, his voice catching with pain, and she realized just how much wrestling her out of the line of fire had cost him. Slick with sweat, he was panting, his breaths shallow, his stormy eyes wide with shock. “Look at how fast.”

  She saw. The damage to Tania’s chest and abdomen was already repairing itself, the tissues knitting together at a ferocious rate, so fast the skin seemed to boil. The entire interior of the cabin was now alive with squirming tissue, creeping blood. On the deck, she saw the man-thing shudder with a fresh convulsion and thought they had only a few seconds left.

  “Case! Rima! Now!” Eric was suddenly there, expression taut. He hooked a hand under Casey’s arm. “Shotgun’s dry. You’re out, too, Case. Come on, we go to go.”

  Of course, the guns are out of ammunition. She darted a look at Tania, who was setting her feet. The hole in her chest was gone, and as Rima watched, the last loop of intestine, not pink or white or blue but smoky gray, was sucked back in the way a kid slurped up that last juicy noodle. Even Tania’s nearly severed arm was stitching back into place. Eric and Case could pump out shots all day, maybe even make oatmeal out of Tania’s head and brains, and the end result would be the same. As she crowded after Eric and Casey, she half-expected the jittering man-thing to grab her by the ankle, but she swept past and then she was out, bolting from the cabin, hopping to the snow, running from the nightmare. Wondering if the fog would let them go.

  2

  “THIS WAY!” A boy’s voice, coming from her left. Turning, she spotted a rust-red truck, its gray-white exhaust pluming in the still, frigid air. Eric and Casey were nearly there already, although Casey was listing now, leaning heavily against his brother. Two other boys stood on the running boards. One, so lanky and thin he was like the slash of an exclamation point, hoisted a rifle in the air one-handed, like a cavalry commander ordering a retreat. “Over here, come on, come on!”

  Rima sprinted for the truck. Above the shriek of her breath, she heard the birds, still crowding the dome of the sky, but the grating, mechanical clacks of their cries seemed closer than before. Flicking a quick glance, she heard herself gasp, and for a second, she actually faltered and slowed. Maybe it was an illusion, but was the sky lower? She thought so. It felt as if the glowering, inky sky was beginning to crouch and crowd down. Or perhaps there were only more crows whizzing back and forth, coming together in darker clots before unwinding in screaming spirals to sweep over the trees—where, she saw, the fog huddled. Drawing down the death, she thought, not really understanding what that meant but knowing it was true because the death-whispers she’d sensed before were still gone, taken away when the crows spumed from the snow.

  “Come on, come on, move it!” The wiry kid who’d called was already dropping into the passenger seat. “We got to boogie!”

  Running out of time. Tearing her gaze from the crows winging over that doomsday sky, she got herself moving. But her chest was fizzing with panic, suddenly filled with a terrible foreboding. The space of this place was being closed up, pinched off, extinguished the way an upended jar smothered a flame.

  Eric had just slotted in the two empty shotguns and was helping Casey clamber through the back passenger’s side door, so she rounded the nose for the opposite side. She wheeled around the back door just as the driver craned a look—and she almost screamed. Because this was another boy she already knew, had met before, and she thought now as she had then: What are you?

  “Get in!” Then a look of shock swept through the boy’s face, and Bode’s mouth unhinged. “Whoa. What the hell, what are you doing here?”

  She almost said, Trying not to die, but the lanky kid—Chad, she remembered now—interrupted. “Oh shit.” She looked and saw Chad staring back the way she had just come. “Aw, Jesus,” Chad said.

  From his place directly behind Chad, Eric said, “What?” Rima saw his head snap a look, and then his body stiffen. “Oh God. Bode. Bode?”

  “Yeah.” Bode’s tone was grim. “I see them.”

  So, now, did Rima. Tania was on the snow and so was the man-thing Eric had shot. Instead of coming for them, both Tania and the man-thing were heading toward those distant woods, and she thought back to Father Preston’s lightning dash. Tania and the man-thing weren’t exactly running; even half-mended monsters must have a few residual aches and pains. But they weren’t tottering, shambling zombies either. Still, hit the gas, and the truck would leave them in the dust, no sweat.

  The problem was … how the hell to outrun the others.

  RIMA

  Think My Hand

  THE DENSE WOODS beyond Tania and the man-thing and the stalled snowcat, and over which the fog brooded, were alive with creatures—hundreds, thousands streaming from the trees. They were like the crows that had bulleted out of the snow, and Rima watched, stupefied, as they joined into broad, sweeping formations, spreading out to flank the truck like an army. They were a wall, a tidal wave of death, and all the more terrible because they came in absolute silence.

  “Rima!” Casey grabbed her wrist and pulled. She tumbled in, and then Casey was reaching past her, dragging the door shut with a chuck as Chad screamed, “Go
, Bode!”

  “We’re gone!” Bode hammered the gas, the sudden acceleration throwing Rima back against her seat as the Dodge surged forward with a throaty vaROOOMMM. But Rima felt the change almost instantly, after less than twenty feet: how the truck balked and tripped and stumbled, as if they’d hopped onto railroad tracks by mistake. After another moment, the Dodge bogged down even more, suddenly churning what felt like taffy, the tires miring in deep snow that had been as solid as ice only two seconds ago.

  “What the …” Cursing, Bode butted the stick into first and gunned the engine. This time the Dodge jolted forward by less than a foot.

  “Aw, Christ,” Chad said. “Look, right under us. Look what’s happening to the goddamned snow.”

  Rima plastered her face to the window glass and peered down. The snow was no longer unbroken or a vast white expanse but seamed with jagged cracks growing wider by the second. Yet a quick glance past Eric and toward the trees showed the snow there to be intact and unchanged. Beneath the truck, more splits appeared and the seams became ruts that rapidly filled with gelatinous ooze, like lava bubbling from the deep heart of a volcano. Except this lava was black and boiled up so quickly, it overflowed and began to spread over the snow in a tarry lake. It didn’t seem to be hot, but Rima thought it was the fog’s dark twin: quivering and molten, sucking at the truck’s tires to hold it fast. Looking back across Casey and Eric, she saw the creatures still coming, but now those fissures and cracks in the snow were spreading out, stretching in jagged fingers.

  We’re the focal point. It’s all centered on us. It was as if they were the spider spinning a fractured web. Above the woods, the birds were still drawing down in an obsidian curtain, blacking the sky, shutting the lid on this day, this place, their lives. We’re causing this, making it happen. But how?