Snow(47)

She went quickly from bedroom to bedroom, making sure all the windows were locked. They were. Tight. Outside, the snow continued to fall. From her bedroom window she peered down into the yard. Mr. Kopeck was still MIA, but those two footprint-shaped divots stared up at her like eyes.

Downstairs, her mother screamed.

Shawna raced back down the hall and took the stairs two at a time. She grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella rack at the foot of the stairs—the only weapon she thought of at the moment—and rushed toward the kitchen amid the sounds of pots and pans clattering loudly to the kitchen floor.

“Mom!”

She arrived in the kitchen just in time to see a fleeting shape yanked backward through the doorway at the opposite end of the kitchen. One of her mother’s slippers skidded across the floor.

Shawna charged forward, wielding the umbrella like a sword, and crossed the threshold into the living room. What she saw there would be etched into her memory until her dying day.

It was her mother, her housedress torn down one side, her ample bosom clad in a padded bra fully exposed, a look of incomprehensive terror on her face. She was on her back…but not necessarily on the floor, because something was sliding wetly beneath her, something big, keeping her up off the floor. The sight caused Shawna to freeze, her eyes blazing like the headlamps of a tractor.

“Shawwwwnieeee!”

The thing beneath her mother bucked and the woman slid to the floor. Then, impossibly, what looked like a narrow funnel of snow corkscrewed up from the floor. Wind blew Shawna’s hair off her forehead and sent loose papers and napkins fluttering about the room. There was a smell, too—something thickly rotten and unearthly.

Something separated from the funnel of snow—something long and tapered, pointed at the tip. In her stupefaction, Shawna thought of a shark’s dorsal fin. Then reality rushed back to her and she lunged forward, swinging the umbrella at the twirling mass of snow like a baseball bat.

The umbrella passed right through it, unencumbered.

“Shawww-NIEEEE!”

It was the last thing she would ever hear her mother say. The dorsal fin blade pitched downward, lightning quick, and buried itself into her mother’s chest. A gout of black blood erupted in a geyser from her mother’s mouth. Around Shawna, the house shook. That hideous, dead-animal stink intensified until Shawna’s eyes burned.

She blinked, her vision sliding away from her.

And when she opened them again, she caught the final vestige of the snow funnel withdrawing up through the chimney. Her mother was gone now, too, but her other slipper lay in the hearth of the fireplace, powdered in soot…

The days following that event had been pure madness. By the time she reunited with Jared, half the town had vanished and those who remained had either turned into drooling savages or had simply become different. Some of the neighborhood children had simply vanished…but the ones who lingered became ghosts of their former selves, faceless little nymphs hiding out in the surrounding woods. It was as if the creatures could not properly meld with children, that they corrupted them visually and ruined them.

Jared’s plan was to get out of town ASAP, but unfortunately he was having trouble starting his Subaru. Gunning the accelerator while the vehicle straddled a snowbank achieved nothing except for igniting a small fire beneath the undercarriage. Jared cursed and panicked but, as it turned out, the fire kept the snow-things away. Fire, Jared told her, could hurt them, maybe even kill them. It had been Jared’s idea to hurry over to the Pack-N-Go for containers of lighter fluid so they could make torches…but when they got there, the proprietor, George Farmer, had changed. And something had gotten inside Jared, too.

She’d had to shoot him, bring him down. She could still see his head coming apart in her mind’s eye…

These thoughts, along with a thousand others from the past week, cluttered Shawna’s mind as she crouched down in the holly bushes, staring at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Her whole body felt numb and her breath was becoming shallower and shallower. As much as she hated to consider this alternative, she knew she had to get out of the cold as soon as possible, not to mention away from those things that were pursuing her…which meant ditching into the nearest shelter.

What if those things are in that house? Those things like Tim Kopeck and Delia Overmeyer?

It was a risk she’d have to take.

When she finally felt more in control of herself, she stood. She was aware of a ripping sensation followed by a surge of pain that raced up her left leg—Fred Wilkinson’s stitches coming undone.

In pain, she hustled across the snow-covered yard toward Rita’s house. Glancing over her shoulder, she was horrified to find spatters of blood left behind in the snow.

She hid briefly in the shadow of the raised deck, catching her breath. Suddenly, the rifle hanging from her shoulder weighed about a thousand pounds. Her breath wheezing through her tightening throat, she leaned forward and looked in either direction, examining the neighboring yards for signs of life. Or signs of…something other…

There were no broken windows at the back of the house that Shawna could find. That was how they got in. Through the chimneys, too, of course. Or open doors. Any way in at all.

Slinking along the concrete wall, Shawna made her way to the basement door. Curling her numb fingers around the doorknob, she said a silent prayer to a god she did not believe in before trying to turn it.