Snow(87)

“To the gas station,” Todd finished, coming up behind her.

Bruce had a sizeable lead on the pursuing skin-suits, but the thing tunneling through the snow was coming up on him fast. Moreover, the sky was alive with twisting tornados of snow, each one glowing sliver at its center. As they watched, Bruce burst through the spindly trees and crossed the tarmac of the gas station. The pumps slouched like tired old men. Bruce turned and fired another blast from his flamethrower at the encroaching townspeople.

“There must be a hundred of them,” Kate marveled.

The thing beneath the snow cut sharply to the right and ran the length of the gas station tarmac. The tarmac itself was shaded by a partial steel awning, which kept much of the snow from falling on the blacktop. It seemed the creature did not want to climb up out of the snow. Or maybe it couldn’t.

Bruce dropped to his knees and began fiddling with something on the ground.

“Oh, shit,” Kate said. “Did he drop the flamethrower?”

“It’s hooked to a cable…”

“Is he…he f*cking tying his shoe?”

But no—he wasn’t tying his shoe and he hadn’t dropped the flamethrower.

“He’s unscrewing the fuel door,” Todd said. “Where the trucks come and pump full under the gas station…”

“Oh,” Kate said—almost childishly simple.

The townspeople swarmed onto the tarmac. Several of them struck the support beam of the steel awning, knocking the beam askew. The awning wavered from side to side, as if in contemplation, then crashed down onto a tow truck parked on the far side of the gas station.

Bruce stood, looking like a ghost among phantoms.

Just before the townspeople clawed into him and tore him apart, Bruce fired one final blast from the flamethrower: directly down the mouth of the fuel door.

An instant later, it was as though the apocalypse had come.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT



When Todd came to, he found himself sprawled on the floor and covered in bits of glass. He sat up, aware of the aches and pains throughout his body, as the glass tinkled to the floor all around him. The room was bitterly cold. The second his vision cleared, he understood why: the force of the explosion had busted out the window.

Shaking glass out of his hair, he rolled over to Kate, who lay unconscious beside him, her face a patchwork of lacerations, cuts, and scrapes. Gently he shook her awake, brushing busted glass from her clothes, face, and hair.

Hesitantly, her eyes blinked open. “What happened?”

“Bruce blew up the gas station.”

“Are we…where are we?”

He helped her to her feet. They both went to the window, shuddering at the cold. Across the field, the gas station burned. All around the station, like a photo from some Nazi concentration camp, charred bodies littered the snow. There were dozens of them, some still burning, others smoldering like bits of charcoal in the belly of a grill. The air reeked of scorched flesh and burning gasoline. Also among the carnage, Todd could make out a number of large, hulking shapes, almost amphibian in their appearance, like frozen black relics. Charred scythes stood motionless in the air. Others had melted to a tarry black gruel along the blacktop.

“The window,” Kate said.

“Help me.” He grabbed his laptop’s carrying case from the desk and pressed it against the windowsill. Kate located some masking tape and they taped it up over the window, making sure not to leave any cracks for anything to get in. Not even wind.

“Christ, how long were we out?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t remember…” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the laptop’s screen, which was black. The row of green lights on the modem’s faceplate was dead, too. “I think our battery just died.”

“But they got your message. Everyone did. They said help was coming.”

Their arms around each other, they crept out into the hallway. Cold yellow moonlight pooled in the front hall, issuing in through the place where the double doors had been. The doors themselves now lay in concave heaps on the floor.

Todd and Kate rushed to them, attempted to lift the doors back in place. They were too heavy. Kate yelped and fresh blood dripped down her palm. Todd took her hand anyway.

“Look,” he said, pointing out into the night. The swirling eyelet of light had moved close to the police station; it now sat midway between the gas station and the police station, casting a shimmering artificial light down on the snow. The snow itself appeared to glow.

Things began moving—in the trees and shrubs, down in the ravine and out by the woods. Even beneath the snow. The sense of motion was all around them.

As they watched, bright twists of light spiraled up into the shimmering eyelet. The lights seemed to come from all over the town, drawn to the central location of the eye in the sky like hounds to a scent. They sparkled like jewels, their appearances just barely glimpsed.

“It’s easier to see them if you don’t look directly at them,” Todd said.

“Like stars,” Kate said.

For close to five minutes, they watched the glittery snow lift off the ground, the houses, the trees, the roofs of nearby automobiles, and rise up into the eyelet. The eye itself appeared to undulate, as if viewed through heat waves rising off some desert blacktop. The swirl of colors at its center briefly reflected the world below—the treetops and rooftops, the wrecked cars in the ravines, the dark lampposts staggered like mile markers down to the center of town. Yet Todd could make out faint differences in color and structure of the details…causing him to wonder whether what he was seeing was indeed a reflection, or he was actually glimpsing through a window of sorts into a whole other world, a whole other dimension. But then the glowing colors returned, masking the mirrored image, and both Todd and Kate could make out a distinct sucking sound—a vague and suggestive inhalation. The eyelet’s light grew in intensity—a silvery light not unlike the silver threads in the snow creatures themselves—before the clouds swallowed it up completely.