Snow(62)

“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 Megthing 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 Megthing tore deeper into his neck.

Todd snapped from his stupor. He ran up behind Tully and grabbed a fistful of the Megthing’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 Megthing’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.