Freeze

He was alive! Surely hurt, at least a little, but alive. He got to his feet and shook. Water flew off his fur and onto the wall and dresser.

Tess didn’t know what to do, doubted there was any kind of self-defense playbook for this sort of fucked-up situation, so she did the only thing she could think of: she turned to the monster, pulled back her arm, and hurled the candle at the thing’s head.

The creature moved, but not quickly enough. The candle hit it on the side of the face (if you could call that cracked slab of ice a face) and slid down to its torso and the mess of writhing tentacles. The beast shrieked a high-pitched, broken-glass shriek and pulled all of its limbs in on itself, wrapping itself up like a mummy. The candle hit the floor, smoking but no longer on fire, and the room darkened.

“Bub! Run!”

She turned toward the door and heard him right behind her. As they hurried into the hall, she grabbed the knob and pulled the bedroom door shut. She had no idea if the creature would be able to open the door, if it would be able to follow them, but a closed door would at least slow it down for a second.

Just as the door hit the jamb, something pounded against it from the other side. The knob shook in Tess’s hand. The whole wall seemed to shake.

The whole wall? More like the whole damn house.

She backed away, and Bub backed up right beside her, limping worse than ever, never looking away from the door, never losing contact with her leg. Tess put a hand on his head, trying to reassure him as best she could. Or maybe trying to reassure herself. Her teeth continued to chatter. The cold seeped into every last one of her muscles and bones.

The thing struck the door again.

BAM.

Tess realized it wouldn’t need to know how to work the doorknob. Before long, it would break right through the door. Their doors weren’t cheap, contractor-grade things, but they weren’t exactly stone solid either.

She turned around and led Bub into the living room.

What are you going to do? What can you do?

She ran to the fire and huddled in front of it, shivering. The logs burned and sent waves of heat out across her chest, arms, legs, and face. Bub sat down beside her, shaking, whining. She put her arm around his neck and tried to think.

You have to go on the offensive. If you wait for it to come to you, it will. It will come, and it will tear you to bits.

She stared into the fire. The creature had seemed terrified of her little candle. What if she brought something bigger this time?

The thing smacked the bedroom door again. The sound boomed through the hallway and into the living room. Tess jumped, and the muscles in Bub’s neck tightened.

She started to tell him it would be okay, but before she could so much as open her mouth, something thudded in the kitchen. Tess looked up, and the piece of cardboard Warren had taped over the window slid across the linoleum. It had a thick sheet of ice and snow on it and a crater in the middle where it looked like something had kicked it in.

Another series of thuds echoed through the kitchen and into the living room. Like footsteps. Except she didn’t guess you called them footsteps if the creature making them had no feet.

The thing in the kitchen let out a long, hissy shriek.

Tess looked down at Bub.

They were surrounded.

17

For a second, Warren didn’t know where he was. It was worse than wake-up-in-the-wrong-bed disorientation. More confusing. More impossible. Because he wasn’t in a bed at all, wasn’t even in a room. Torrents of icy flecks rained onto his face, and biting wind blew across his body. He thought this might be the furthest from a warm, safe room he’d ever been.

He felt himself sliding on his back through the snow, felt some thick coil of something wrapped around his leg and dragging him up one drift and down another. And then, suddenly, he felt his broken arm flapping along behind him, bumping up and down as he slid along. He screamed, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to ignore the pulses of pain coming from the limb, but ignoring them was impossible. Every bump in the ground brought fresh, white-hot agony. He tried to flip the broken arm up onto his chest, but he couldn’t seem to move it. Couldn’t seem to move either arm, for that matter, or much of the rest of his body.

Paralyzed?

No, probably not, or not completely anyway—if he was, he wouldn’t be able to feel the pain in his arm, would he?—but definitely numb, stunned. He lifted his head, and new pain racked his body. He remembered the tentacle swinging into his face, remembered the wet smack of impact. He had lost his scarf, and he thought he felt something sticky on his cheek, maybe blood, or maybe just a smear of mushy snow. Still, he could move his head, despite the pain. He opened his eyes and blinked through the blizzard at the creature ahead.

It had him by the ankle, its tentacle looped around his leg twice. He saw the tip of his sock and suddenly remembered his boots were still back in the snow; the creature had knocked him right out of them. From the looks of it, the tentacle was squeezing so tightly it had probably cut off circulation to Warren’s foot, but he couldn’t tell one way or the other. There was no sensation down there. He felt only the pain in his arm and head. Pain and a whole lot of cold.

The creature rolled on, moving smoothly over the snow but jerking Warren unevenly, as if purposefully trying to make the ride as rough and painful as possible.

What is this thing? What does it want with you? Where’s it taking you?

Of course, Warren had no idea. No kinds of answers. He was just happy he wasn’t dead, that the thing hadn’t pulverized him back there in the snow, eaten his brains and laid its eggs in his corpse (or whatever the hell it planned to do with him). For now, he was alive, which meant he still had a chance to get away. A good chance? Who knew? But Warren would take a bad chance over no chance at all.

With the sheets of snow flying into his face and more of the stuff puffing up around him as the monster dragged him along, it was hard to see much of anything, but Warren did his best to make out where they were, where they were going. He thought he saw a few trees to one side and then a few more to the other, mostly obscured in the storm. The creature didn’t seem to be doing any weaving back and forth, so Warren guessed they were still on the road. And going down. Despite his remaining disorientation, he could feel the slight pull of gravity. They were heading down the mountain.

Warren laid back against the snow. It was a far damn cry from comfortable, but his hood did cushion his head somewhat, and it was less painful than trying to keep his neck craned. Anyway, he didn’t see what other option he had. He could barely move and definitely wouldn’t be able to fight his way free, not the way the thing had its tentacle wrapped around his leg. Until some opportunity presented itself, he figured he might as well lay as still as possible and try to keep his arm from bouncing all over the place.

The creature moved forward, jerked Warren, moved forward, jerked Warren. Every yank sent another explosion of pain through his body. Warren didn’t think he’d be able to withstand the agony much longer, thought he’d faint and wake up two days later in this thing’s den with bits of his body chewed off. Or not wake up at all. Maybe these were the last minutes of his life, just a few more moments of hellacious existence.

(sliiiiiiiide jerk)

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on staying awake, staying alive, and eventually he got used to the movement, to the rhythm: pain, less pain, pain, less pain. He couldn’t ignore the aching throbs entirely, but he got to a point where he could at least think around them.

(sliiiiiiiide jerk)

Not that the thoughts were especially worth thinking: you failed Tess. You were supposed to get