Freeze

She couldn’t let stir craziness get the best of her.

In the fireplace, the logs crackled and burned. Bub rolled onto Tess’s feet. Outside, the blizzard continued. She wondered how much accumulation there was now. Two feet? Three? How was Warren going to get anywhere out there? Judging from the sounds of the snow and wind, if it wasn’t a total whiteout, it was close. What if he got lost and froze to death? Hell, even if he didn’t get lost, how long could he survive? Didn’t he say something earlier about no one being able to survive more than an hour or two out in that weather? Sure, he’d been trying to placate her, but she didn’t think he’d been flat out lying. And the storm was worse now than before. At least it sounded worse.

He’ll make it. It’s not him you need to be worried about. How much blood do you think you lost tonight? How much more can you lose without passing out? Will one more coughing, vomiting fit do it? If not one, two for sure. The blood loss alone might not kill you, but if you lose consciousness and don’t keep up the fire and Warren doesn’t make it back in time, you’ll freeze to death. That’s a fact. 

That was all true, but she’d already decided to stay put. What more could she do? Worrying about it wasn’t going to help anything. She watched the flames and tried to think about something else.

But before she’d had a chance to search her memory banks for some happy recollection, the tickle in her chest returned. It wasn’t much of a thing at first, barely noticeable, but before long her entire torso was vibrating and she was rocking back and forth in the chair, trying to will the cough away, praying it would subside and not turn into another violent burst of vomiting.

A single cough escaped her. It was small, but it burned her throat. She braced herself for more blood, but it didn’t come. No blood, and no more coughs. The vibrations died down, and her body stilled. Bub got up, put his head on her knee, and whined.

She waited a full minute before she did anything. Didn’t talk, didn’t move, tried not even to breathe. When she thought it might be okay, she drew in a slow, tentative breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled.

No cough. No blood. No vibration.

“I think it’s okay,” she told Bub. “It’s okay for now.” She scratched him between his ears and gave him a kiss on his snout.

That was when she heard it: a second window breaking. This time it came from the end of the house opposite the kitchen, either from the bedroom or the bathroom.

Bub stood up, tensed, took a few limping steps toward the hallway and growled.

“It’s okay, boy. It’s just a broken window. Probably just a tree limb or a chunk of ice.”

She realized how much she sounded like Warren right then. But with him gone, she guessed it was up to her to be the sensible one.

“Relax, okay?”

But Bub didn’t relax. He took another step toward the hallway and barked. The sound was so sudden and ferocious that Tess jumped back. She’d never heard Bub bark like that (he wasn’t much of a barker in general, as a matter of fact), wasn’t sure she’d ever heard any dog bark that way. She thought again of wild beasts, of wolves and jackals and hyenas.

“Bub?”

And then she heard it. A thump. Like a low drumbeat.

A second thump followed, louder than the first.

Not drumbeats, of course. Footsteps.

There was someone in the house.

15

When Warren reached the end of the driveway, he almost didn’t believe it.

He couldn’t possibly have made it to the road already, could he? How long had he been walking? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t brought his watch, and he’d been concentrating so hard on not thinking about the time that he’d lost all sense of everything but his thumping heart and his aching legs and back.

His heart hadn’t slowed, and his muscles still burned, but for the first time since leaving the house, he thought he might have a chance. He’d made it to the road, right? That was a third of the trip. Maybe more.

Of course, the road hadn’t been plowed. That would have been too much to ask for, and he’d never really been expecting it. Plowing a rarely-used road in the middle of a blizzard would have been a moronic waste of resources. Someone would drive a plow down the road when this was all over, but not for several days at least, maybe even a week. Finding a plowed road tonight would have been a miracle. He thought (and not for the first time) that he ought to get a plow for the GMC. Or a small snowmobile. Or both. For emergencies.

Isn’t this enough of an emergency to last you the rest of your life?

It definitely was. But when it came to disasters, the universe didn’t exactly hand them out evenly.

The first stretch of road leading away from their driveway was the steepest and usually the slickest when the weather turned bad. He’d driven up and down this particular hill during many bad storms.

Yeah, but this is beyond bad. You’ve never driven in anything like this. And walking isn’t driving. Don’t think you’re going to be able to anticipate any of the upcoming terrain.

He shuffled forward, testing his traction, ready to lean back and catch himself if he started to slip. The deepest layer of snow here was much less icy than he’d expected. His boot slid into the snow and found quite a bit of traction. He pushed his foot all the way down and shuffled his other boot forward to meet it.

The wind was coming at him from the side now. If he looked forward, the sleet pelted the side of his face, so he walked with his head turned to the side. No other choice really. It made it harder to see where he was going, but it was better than trying to bear the onslaught. His breath wafted away from him, carried along with the wind, white upon white. He shuffled forward, took a quick look to make sure he hadn’t wandered off the road and into the trees, and turned his head back to the side. It was like the fence all over again: take a few steps, get his bearings, repeat, repeat, repeat.

When he got closer to the Young place, he’d walk along the side of the road, watch for their mailbox, but until then, he figured he might as well try to aim for the middle of the road. Less chance of tripping over a rock or a log.

You’re lucky this is a a relatively safe road, not one of those half-width numbers cut into the side of a mountain with a three-hundred-foot drop off one side.

Very true. There were plenty of those kinds of roads up here. In comparison, this one might as well have been a Kansas interstate.

He shuffled forward a few more steps, stopped to get his bearings again, and thought he saw the bottom of the hill, a switchback that cut into the trees to the left.

Better be sure. If that’s not the road, if it’s just an opening in the trees, you could get very lost very quickly.

Except he couldn’t be sure, could he? Not when he could see only a few yards ahead of himself and the distinction between the road and the surrounding forrest had become a whole lot of white nothing. He’d have to rely on his memory and the few surroundings he could make out.

He shuffled to the bottom of the hill and stopped for another look around. He turned only his head, not wanting to move his body, afraid that might disorient him. He saw what he thought was a familiar pair of trees to his right, which would mean he’d been right about the switchback, but he was also almost sure he saw something ahead, right in the middle of what he thought should have been the road.

The thing ahead moved. One second it was there, and the next it had zipped away, not trudging through the snow but seeming to glide on top of it or maybe even float above it.

What the hell was that? An animal?

He didn’t think so. It had been too big to be a rabbit or a fox or even a wolf. It had been almost bear sized. But nothing that big would have been able to move so quickly. Not in this weather and through this much snow. Maybe not at all, even on flat, dry ground.

So what does that leave? A fucking cross-country skier?

Warren had no idea. He thought the most likely answer was that he’d imagined it. Or that he was going