He imagined her sitting by the fire, coughing into her fist, taking the hand away and finding it covered in thick, dripping blood. And then he had an even worse thought: what if this creature dragging him down the road wasn’t the only one of its kind? What if there were more of them at the house, terrorizing Tess, dragging her out into the snow and dismembering her? What if her cough was fine but the house was overrun by monsters?
He wanted to tell himself that wasn’t possible, that she was fine, that there was no way there were more of these things at the house. But who was to say what was possible? After tonight, after getting attacked by this icy snake-pile of an abomination, wasn’t just about anything possible?
He gritted his teeth and grunted his way through another slide and jerk.
How could he possibly tell? He had no idea where they were going. Maybe into the woods, maybe into town, maybe into a field full of the beasts for a good old-fashioned game of tug-of-Warren.
They stopped. Warren tensed, sure the thing was just playing with him, waiting for him to let down his guard before it yanked him forward again, but when they still hadn’t moved after another few seconds, Warren opened his eyes.
The thing stood between two shallow drifts of snow, its tentacles undulating but not writhing about as intensely as they had been earlier. The creature had no eyes or ears that Warren could see, so it was hard to tell what it was doing, what it was looking at or listening to or smelling, but it seemed to be leaning slightly in one direction, toward the barely visible trees along the side of the road. From the looks of it (he still couldn’t feel anything but his arm and his freezing face) the monster hadn’t relaxed its grip on his ankle, but Warren thought this might be his best chance to escape. His only chance.
He prepared himself, took a deep breath, tensed his muscles, and was just about to give his leg the world’s almightiest tug when a burst of blinding light filled the air between him and the monstrosity.
A wave of heat rolled over his face, and the monster screeched its ringing, broken-glass scream. Warren tried to blink away the light and the heat, but what he saw next was mostly a blur of black and white, like an old, out-of- focus film: the monster brought its limbs (all of them) up to its head, screeching all the while, letting go of Warren in the process. Something flew through the blizzard, and although Warren couldn’t tell what it was at first, he made it out just before it struck the creature.
A glass bottle. Flaming at one end. There was a name for a thing like that, something Russian sounding, although Warren couldn’t remember it at the moment. He guessed it didn’t matter.
The bottle hit the monster halfway up its body and exploded in another burst of bright light. Warren closed his eyes and turned his head away. The heat of the explosion warmed the side of his face, and the thing shrieked louder than ever. When he looked back up, half the creature’s body was just gone. Its tentacles slithered around the ground and over one another, spasming, sometimes thumping into the ground with soft thuds. Some of the tendrils lay in the snow, separated from the body, glistening at the end where they’d melted away. The thing had a deep crater in its torso and was using its tentacles to pull snow from the surrounding drifts, trying to fill in the hole.
A third flaming bottle arced through the air. Warren couldn’t see the thrower, but whoever it was, he or she had some great aim. The bottle hit the creature dead on and exploded.
This time, the thing’s scream had a different sound to it, a kind of gurgle, like a draining bathtub. Streamers of water ran down its body, and it doubled over (or melted in half, really; it seemed to have lost control of itself). It continued pulling snow onto and into itself, but more slowly now, less accurately. Clumps of snow rolled across the beast’s body, flew into the air and came back down with muffled
Two blurs moved through the snow beyond the creature. Two people, it looked like. The first had another flaming bottle. The person widened his stance, and the bottle flew through the air. It landed in the snow just shy of the writhing creature. For a second, nothing happened, but then the bottle exploded. A cloud of snow puffed up from the ground, and something whizzed past Warren’s face.
Glass probably. After four explosions, he was shocked he hadn’t gotten a shard or two in the face. No doubt his layers of snow gear had absorbed at least a few bits of shrapnel.
This thought, of course, brought memories of Tess, of her lying on the kitchen floor amid the broken glass, of her poor, lacerated face and the mess of blood all over the bathroom and living room.
The two shapes moved closer. The second held another flaming object. Warren thought it must have been another bottle,
but as the couple moved closer, he saw it was actually a small butane torch, blue and cylindrical, the kind of thing a plumber uses. The torch carrier (both people wore scarves over their faces, and Warren couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought this second one had a woman’s build) hurried over to the creature and lowered the torch’s flame to its head. The thing started to wrap a tentacle around her legs, but before it could tighten its grip, the limb went limp. The monster gurgled one last time, shuddered, and then stilled.
Warren pushed himself up on his elbows and fell back into the snow screaming when he accidentally put pressure on his broken arm. The bottle thrower hurried over to Warren, leaned over him, asked if he was okay. The voice was a man’s and familiar.
Warren tried to answer, tried to tell the guy about his broken arm, but he couldn’t find the words. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, he wasn’t able to produce anything but unintelligible sobs.
“We need to get you away from here,” the man said, yelling it over the wind.
And Warren remembered where he’d heard the voice before. It made sense once he’d forced the information through his dazed mind. Up here in the middle of nowhere, there was really only one person (or two people, he guessed) he’d had any chance of running into: the Youngs.
Mr. Young (Rick, he was pretty sure the guy’s first name was Rick) had a faint New England accent. You could hear it in his missing Rs:
“My wife,” Warren said. “I…I have to…” He tried for the next word. And tried again. But his mouth and throat wouldn’t cooperate.
“Jan,” Rick yelled through the storm, “come help me get him.” He bent down further and dug into the snow under Warren, getting his arm around his back. Warren winced but managed to grab Rick’s neck with his good arm. He wanted to resist, to insist he had to turn around and go back for his wife, but he just…couldn’t…do it. Every last one of his body parts was shaking, and his lips might as well have been frozen together. Maybe they
“My arm,” Warren managed. “Broken”
Rick helped him into a sitting position and touched his limp arm gingerly. “We’ll have to get it into a sling,” he said. “Can’t just leave it like that. I’m going to unzip your snowsuit.”
Warren nodded.
Rick managed to remove the upper half of the snowsuit without causing Warren a lot of pain, although Warren could tell he was fighting the urge to hurry, to get out of here.
Jan made it over to them. She’d turned off the torch and stuck it into the side pocket of her snowsuit. She knelt in the snow by Warren’s legs.
Rick took off his scarf, tied it around Warren’s neck, and made a makeshift sling. He and Jan helped Warren ease the broken arm into the loop of fabric.
“It’s not perfect,” Rick said.
Warren thanked him anyway, and the three of them worked together to get his snowsuit back on, letting the now-empty sleeve hang to the side.
They stood. Warren put his good arm around Rick’s neck, and Jan curled her arm around Warren’s waist. Warren’s socks did nothing to protect his feet from the snow. They were wet, clinging. But his arm and head hurt
