Freeze

It wasn’t much of a chance, but Warren took it: he kicked back, let his feet slide out from under him, and landed on his broken arm. The fresh burst of white-hot pain was almost unbearable. He screamed and started to flip onto his back.

But he couldn’t do that; he had to deal with the pain or he’d miss his only opportunity. He forced himself back onto his belly, onto his broken arm, and reached out for the torch, not able to move his good arm much because of the ice wrapped around it but still able to wiggle his fingers and bend his hand at the wrist. The monster didn’t sense what he was trying to do, or didn’t think the torch was much of a threat; it swung him right to it.

Maybe it wants you to get it, wants you to put up a fight. Maybe it likes to earn its kills.

Warren’s fingers brushed against the canister. For a second, he thought he’d missed it, but then his pinky caught the trigger and pulled the torch forward. He got hold of it, spun it around so the nozzle was pointed at the coiled tentacle, and pulled the trigger.

The creature screeched and let him go.

Ignoring the waves of pain pulsing through most of his body, he pushed himself back to his feet. He slid on the ice and came close to falling back to the floor, but he caught himself on the oven instead.

He looked down at the appliance and had an idea.

Before the creature could grab him again, he put the torch down on the stovetop and turned on all the burners. They didn’t light—the starters were electric—but that didn’t keep the gas from hissing out. He triggered the torch and waved it across the stove. The burners ignited with soft whumps.

The creature squealed and wrapped its tentacles around itself. Warren dropped the torch, and pulled one of the Molotov cocktails out of his pocket.

He guessed it would have been a perfect time for some kind of action-movie line, but he couldn’t think of one, and so he said nothing as he touched the bottle’s wick to one of the rings of fire and flung the bottle at the creature.

The flaming bottle hit the thing right beneath its head, burst, and engulfed the creature in a fireball that blackened the ceiling and the surrounding cabinets. The monster flapped its limbs. The fingers at the ends clacked together and scraped the floor. The creature’s torso melted, thinned, and finally disappeared altogether, leaving only the mess of legs.

Warren lit a second bottle and tossed it into what was left of the thing. He worried the erupting fireball might burn down the house, but everything flammable seemed to be covered in enough ice and water to keep it from catching fire. Most of the rest of the creature melted away, and the flames died down again, and that was that.

Warren took a long breath, backed toward the doorway leading into the back hall, and leaned against the jamb.

He stayed there for a long time with his eyes closed, catching his breath, trying to ignore the pain in his arm, and listening for more of the creatures. When he opened his eyes, he looked down the hall instead of into the kitchen and saw a mess of ice and something dark that might have been blood on the floor beside the pile of wood he had brought in a million years ago.

There was almost no light in the hallway. He remembered the flashlight and searched his pockets for it. He found it nestled next to another of the Molotov cocktails, pulled it out, and used his mouth to twist the end and turn it on. It still worked.

He pointed the flashlight at the mess down the hall. The thin beam of light turned the dark patch red. Definitely blood.

Tess. Bub.

He went into the kitchen, turned off the stove, put the torch back in his pocket, and returned to the hall.

It seemed like a lot of blood, but it was more of a layer than a pool. It didn’t necessarily mean anyone had…

He shook his head. He didn’t want to finish that thought.

If Tess or Bub had gotten into trouble back here, maybe they’d gone out the back door. Maybe they were still okay.

If they went outside, they’re almost certainly not okay.

He went to the door and pulled it open. Wind and snow blew into his face, and he gasped. He’d have thought he’d be used to the cold by now, but maybe it was something you never got used to. Maybe if you got used to it, you were dead.

He found more blood in the snow just outside the door. It seemed less serious than the smear in the hall, but he supposed the snow had probably covered a lot of it up. And blood loss was still blood loss and never a good thing.

A ragged furrow led away from the blood. Tracks. As deep as the snow was, and as quickly as the blizzard was covering over the tracks, it was impossible to tell if they were Tess’s or belonged to one of the things, but they looked like they headed toward the shed (not that Warren could see the structure in all the falling snow), and he decided to follow them.

He exchanged the flashlight for the torch and shuffled off the porch and into the back yard.

He expected one of the creatures—or maybe a whole group of them—to attack him at any second, but nothing came. Maybe they were still busy tearing apart the snowmobile, or maybe they’d heard the screeches from the kitchen and run away scared.

You wish.

Didn’t matter. They weren’t here. Not yet anyway.

He trudged across the yard, his breath pluming out in front of him, what seemed like a solid sheet of snow falling and falling and falling ahead.

The tracks did lead to the shed. Right up to the door, as a matter of fact. He turned the knob, let himself in, and stepped on the crinkled corner of a tarp.

Something beneath the tarp moaned, and Warren lifted the plastic to see what lay beneath: Tess and Bub, both of them looking about as close to death as you could get. She was wearing only her pajamas, and the skin on her feet, arms, and face looked blotchy, frostbitten.

Tess looked up at him, said, “You.” Her teeth chattered.

“It’s me.” He dropped to the ground beside her and hugged her as well as he could with his good arm. Her skin was ice cold.

“Jesus,” he said. “We’ve got to warm you up.”

She smiled, as if she had some funny response to that, but then mumbled a nonsensical affirmative.

Warren closed the door

(should have done that first thing, idiot)

and went to the woodpile. He picked up a few of the logs and shoved them into the old wood stove in the corner. He stripped the bark off a couple of other logs and tucked that into the center of the pile for kindling.

Unless you want to kill yourself and Tess and Bub, too, you better vent that thing.

The stove’s pipe jutted up and angled into the room. He found a pair of hedge trimmers in a bucket of old, rusty tools and used them to cut a jagged hole in the wall. He turned the stovepipe toward the wall and pushed it through the hole. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

He started the fire with the butane torch, waited for it to catch, and then lay down on the floor beside Tess and Bub. The dog hadn’t moved since Warren came in, but he was breathing. His side rose and fell. Rose…and fell.

The shed warmed up, and although some smoke lingered and swirled around them, most of it seemed to find its way through the stovepipe and out of the shed.

“You’re alive,” Tess mumbled after awhile.

“Barely.”

“You lit a fire.”

He agreed.

“Aren’t we leaving? Getting away?”