around, and for a second she’d was afraid she’d slip in the blood and fall over Bub, but she kept her balance. The door pushed the half-melted pile of slush that had been the small creature against the wall, and freezing wind and clouds of icy snow blew in through the doorway. Tess gasped. On some level, she had realized it would be colder outside than in, but she hadn’t been expecting the sudden blast, the unbelievable coldness.
She leaned down, wrapped her arms back around Bub, and pulled him into the blizzard.
19
The first thing Warren thought when he opened his eyes was that someone had found his scarf and wrapped it back around his neck. He lay on his back, his face exposed to the falling snow and ice, freezing. He reached up with his good arm to touch the scarf and found something cold and sticky instead. He held his glove in front of himself, blinking away snow. A mess of red frost stuck to the glove’s fingers.
He reached for the object again and pulled it off his neck. It came unstuck like a huge bandaid, and Warren had to look at it for a long time before he realized what he was seeing. It was the hair that gave it away, the little black curls growing out of the thing from one end to the other. In the center was a bald patch, and in the center of that, a long, white scar.
It was a flap of skin. Ripped right off someone’s leg. Complete with a scarred knee.
Warren screamed and tried to throw the strip of flesh away, but it clung to his glove and swung back into his face. The already-freezing inner tissue hit him across the mouth, stuck there. He pulled it away again, turned his head, spat into the snow, and gagged.
Instead of trying to throw the skin a second time, he lowered it to the snow, held it down with his leg, and pulled his glove free.
He touched his broken arm through the snowsuit but felt almost no pain. He didn’t know whether to enjoy the momentary lack of agony or worry about it. He settled on not thinking about it either way and lifted his head to see where he was.
In the trees ahead, barely visible in the snow, one of the ice creatures had Jan Young wrapped in a tentacle as thick as a fence post, squeezing her arms against her sides. From where Warren lay, it was hard to see what was happening, but it looked like one of her hands was free and that she was trying to pull the blue plumber’s torch out of her pocket.
Between her and Warren, spread across the snow in streaks and piles of cooling meat lay what Warren could only assume had once been Rick Young. Intestines and other, unrecognizable innards littered the ground. Torn bits of clothing blew in the wind. A single boot stood in the center of the mess, a stub of a leg poking out of it and pointing to the sky.
The snowmobile lay on its side to Warren’s right. It looked dented in a few places and plenty scratched but not ruined.
Jan was yelling something at the creature and sobbing. The wind carried her words away, and Warren couldn’t quite make them out, but he supposed he had a good enough idea of what she was saying.
She jerked her arm, and although the creature held on to her, she was able to pull the butane torch out of her snowsuit. The wind died down then, and Warren was able to see the flick of fire coming out of the torch’s nozzle. He also saw another of the creature’s tentacles swinging around toward Jan’s head.
“No!”
Jan turned toward him. The tentacle hit her on the temple and all but decapitated her. Something (maybe her spine) cracked with a sickening
The creature grabbed each of Jan’s limbs and, with a single movement, pulled her to pieces. The torso dropped, but the creature held on to the limbs, raising them into the air and shaking them like some kinds of trophies. It turned its mouth to the sky and screeched.
For a moment, Warren was too shocked to do anything, to think anything, but then his brain kicked back on:
But he couldn’t run, probably couldn’t even walk. He had another idea.
While the monster rammed a tentacle into Jan’s stomach and pulled out long, dripping loops of her guts, Warren forced himself to his socked feet and shuffled to the snowmobile. He remembered the box of bottles strapped to the back. The snowmobile had crashed in snow and not on concrete or dirt or some other hard surface. There was a chance some of the bottles might have made it through. He’d need only one. He hoped.
As it turned out, there were six bottles left. The bungee cords had come undone and the box lay upright in the snow a few feet away from the snowmobile. Most of the Molotov cocktails had shattered or disappeared, probably thrown out during the crash, but half a dozen of the bad boys were right there in their individual compartments. As was the torch, the twin of the one Jan Young had died holding.
Warren glanced back at the creature and scanned the rest of the surrounding area, looking for more of the monsters, unable to see anything but a few trees and all that swirling white nothing. He took one of the bottles from the box. Although the bottle was intact, some of the liquid (gasoline, from the smell of it) had leaked out. The wick was soaked. He’d have to throw it fast or risk setting himself on fire.
He didn’t know, but he’d figure something out.
The creature had dropped Jan’s limbs and was concentrating on digging into her corpse. Its tentacles punched and ripped and scrapped, its clacking fingers audible despite the wind. Blood and bits of flesh flew. Warren expected the creature to take a few big bites of the body (that’s what wild things did with a fresh kill, right?), but it seemed more interested in shredding the remains than eating.
He turned away. If he made it through all this, he thought memories of the massacre would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Whether he watched or not, he could still hear the attack: cracking, splashing, squishing, all backdropped by the wind and falling sleet.
He set the bottle in the snow and pulled the torch from the box. He wrapped his gloved finger around the trigger and pulled, half expecting it to be out of fuel or for the ignitor not to work. A narrow blue flame shot out of the nozzle, and Warren let out the small breath he’d been holding.
He let go of the trigger, knelt by the bottle, and pointed the torch at the wick.
Warren activated the torch again. When the wick caught fire, he dropped the torch, grabbed the bottle, and flung it into the blizzard before it could explode in his hand.
The throw wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. It exploded just before it hit the creature (or looked like it; maybe it had actually hit one of the tentacles), and the burst of fire engulfed the thing’s head.
It screamed and wrapped its blood-stained limbs around itself, but the explosion had melted away most of its upper body. Even as it tried to pull new snow onto itself, it collapsed, twitching and looking mostly dead.
Warren considered it but decided to leave it alone. He thought he had surely disabled the creature long enough to escape, and that was all he needed. There was no guaranteeing another burst of fire would kill it anyway, and he might need the other makeshift grenades if he ran across more of the creatures. He turned to the snowmobile and righted it.
He’d driven similar vehicles before, but never one exactly like this, and never one handed. How had Jan started it? He remembered her pulling the start cord. And he remembered
