Snow(80)

“We’re just tired,” Charlie said. Eerily, he sounded much older than he was.

“Here,” Kate said, opening the bag and pulling out the various articles of clothes. “I grabbed whatever was there. Put these on and stay warm. It’s cold in here. Just keep warm, okay?” She looked over to Cody. “How’s your headache?”

“Hurts.”

“Okay, okay. Todd and the others will be back soon, okay?”

“And then what?” Charlie said.

Kate did not have an answer for him. “And here,” she continued, filling their laps with the junk food and sodas. “Eat if you’re hungry, but don’t get sick.” She slipped back out of the car.

“Where are you going?” Cody said.

“I need to go back out into the hall, sweetheart. I need to check things out.”

“With the gun?” Cody sounded so small.

Kate nodded. “Yeah. With the gun.” She looked at Charlie. “Keep your sister warm.”

In the hall, she went around to every window she could find, peering out. The pebbled glass made it difficult to see what exactly was going on out there. At the double doors, she checked and rechecked the lock on the inside of the doors, even though she hadn’t unlocked it since Todd and the others left.

Get the f*ck back here, Todd.

Nonetheless, she managed to drag one of the secretary desks out into the foyer and prop it up in front of the door. It might not stop the possessed townspeople from breaking in but it might slow them down. Enough to take a few down and then reload the shotgun, anyway.

She hoped.

Returning to the darkened storage room, she began looking around for things with which to board up the windows. There were more than enough wooden crates and the slats seemed sturdy enough; it was locating a hammer and nails that proved difficult. Eventually, though, she found some in a tool chest under an old poker table. Quickly, she set to work prying apart the crates, working like a demon and sweating through the layers of her clothes.

She stopped only when she felt a cold breeze at her back.

Holding the hammer up by her face as a weapon, she spun around and faced the darkness. Only stacked boxes caroused in the shadows, leaning into one another like deteriorating architecture. She bent and groped for the shotgun that she’d set on the floor, walking her fingers across its girth before snatching it up and propping the hilt beneath her right armpit.

I’m just scared and jumpy. I’m alone. There’s no one here.

But was she? Was she alone?

One of those things had been trying to come in through that pipe, she recalled. Had Charlie not seen it…had I not plugged it up…

She went to the wall to see if the oil rag was still jammed into the mouth of the exposed pipe. It was.

But there could be more.

The thought caused goose bumps to break out along her arms.

Frantically, she searched all the walls, and even moved heavy boxes out of the way to make sure there weren’t any more exposed pipes. Satisfied that there weren’t—and exhausted from the exercise—she paused to give herself a few moments to catch her breath.

Something was moving across the floor.

Her hand vibrating like a seismograph, she lifted the halogen lamp to better illuminate the room.

At first she didn’t see it—a dark patch in a world of dark patches; a slick of spilled oil on the concrete—but then it moved, betraying all sense of the inanimate, and Kate uttered a sharp cry. The halogen lamp fell from her hand and struck the floor. There was a shattering sound and the room went pitch black.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God what was that thing?

She’d caught only the vaguest glimpse of it, yet its image resonated like the afterimage of a flashbulb in her mind—a meaty twist of fibrous tissue, perhaps as long and as thick as an infant’s arm, that arched like an overgrown inchworm along the floor while trailing a slick of glistening mucus behind it…

And now it was somewhere in here with her.

In the dark.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God what was that THING?

Trying not to panic, she began patting down her pockets until she felt the bulge of the Zippo lighter in her hip pocket. She tweezed it out with two fingers, flipped open the lid, and rolled the flint wheel. A narrow white flame issued out of the lighter, illuminating a circle roughly three feet in diameter around her.

Then she heard it—a sandpapery shhhh as it dragged itself across the floor, followed by the tacky peel of the sticky mucus. The sound was like an old man smacking his lips in his sleep.

Kate squatted and brought the flame closer to the floor. She could see it, less than a foot away from her, coming toward her. Disgusted, she thought of dried meats hanging from deli ceilings, the phallic protrusion of cured, uncut salami. Acid burned at the back of her throat.

It was heading toward her, yes, but it was also moving away from its spot of origin: the place on the floor directly beneath the jutting pipe, which was now clogged with a balled-up oil rag. The inky drops of syrup were no longer patterned on the floor. With mounting horror, Kate realized that the thing before her was what had become of those gooey drops of bloodlike milk—that they had melded together to form this eel-like obscenity, this creeping phallus.

She realized she still held the hammer in her left hand. Steeling herself, she drew the hammer down on top of the atrocity. Its head was flattened and emitted a yellow puslike substance that stank like sulfur. Its rear still wriggled, side to side now as if in pain, and she brought the hammer down again and again and again until the thing stopped moving. When she’d finished, on the floor before her was a gnarled fibrous abortion in a puddle of yellowish glue.