Chapter Seven
M
orris was on his way to drop off half-unconscious Daniel Murphy at the hospital when a woman stumbled from the darkness out onto the road. Her blond hair obscured most of her face, but something about her frame and her movements, despite her obvious injuries, seemed familiar to him. She lifted her head at the oncoming headlights and waved her arms, and Morris saw the scar on her face. Kathy? It was Kathy! He skidded to a stop, leaping out of the car and over a mound of snow to help her.
Her nose was bleeding, she had the swollen beginnings of a bruise near her temple, and there was an angry red mark high up on her chest reminiscent of a restraint. The way she held her wrist, he suspected that it was either sprained or fractured, and she limped, favoring her left knee.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as she collapsed against his chest. “God, you're half-frozen. Are you okay?”
“Car accident,” she whispered hoarsely. “Can't feel my legs. Are they there?”
“You're walking on them,” he answered softly as he helped her to the back seat. Once he'd slid into the driver's seat and shifted to drive, he said, “Kathy Ryan, meet Dan Murphyâcar accident, too, of sorts. Dan Murphy, Kathy Ryan.”
Kathy waved halfheartedly in the direction of the passenger seat, and Dan moaned back.
“Right, then,” Morris said. “Busy night.”
He drove in silence the couple of miles back to town.
“Thank you,” Kathy said suddenly as they crossed the town border.
“Don't mention it,” Morris said, glancing in the rearview mirror at her.
She tried a smile, but it seemed to bring pain to her face, and she winced. “So what's his story?” she asked, gesturing at Dan. “Something attack him out in the snow?”
“Yeah. Took his girlfriend, he says. Something, ah . . . I'd say some kind of animal, maybe, but it wasn't like any goddamned animal I ever saw. I don't know what to call it, to be honest. But I saw it and I shot the thing. Kathy, I shot it, and I don't even know what the hell I shot, because it
melted
.”
“Funny coincidence,” Kathy said flatly. “Monsters attacking cars. Must be going around.”
The term “monster” made Morris uneasy, but he supposed that's exactly what it was. As crazy as it sounded, there were
monsters
out there in the dark of Colby.
After a few minutes, Kathy asked, “How big was the thing?”
“About the size of a Greyhound, I'd say.”
“Bus or dog?”
“Dog.”
“Hmm. Look kind of like a scorpion?”
Morris shook his head. “More like a rabid fish-monkey. Or one of those, what do you call them, uh . . . anglerfish.”
“I'd laugh at that description, but it hurts enough to breathe, let alone laugh.”
“Want to talk about what happened to you?”
“Not especially,” she said. “I want to sleep.”
“How about you sleep after the doctors confirm you don't have a concussion?”
Kathy grunted.
The car's interior settled into silence again. Morris checked the rearview and saw Kathy's eyes fluttering closed, so he spoke. “Kathy, what's going on out there? I mean, really, what the hell is going on? I've been trying all day to radio out, send an email, hell, even post a call for help on Twitter and Facebook. Nothing's going through. I tried four different computers in different parts of town. Nothing. It's snowing in June. Dead bodies are turning up ritualistically mutilated all over town. And now we've got what? Yetis? Abominable snowmen? Monsters?”
She didn't answer. In fact, the silence stretched out so long that Morris was worried she'd slipped into shock when Kathy said, “They're part of the snow.”
“Pardon?”
“Those . . . things. The creatures out there. They're part of the snow. And the cultists caused the snow.”
Kathy must have caught Morris's incredulous expression in the rearview because she sighed and added, “I know how it sounds. I know. Ten years ago, I would have had much more trouble believing it myself. But what I've seen... what you shot . . . it's not so hard to make the leap that the usual explanations just don't work. Or that crazy, evil people who plunge head first into the strange and unusual might very well have caused something strange and unusual to happen.”
“Guess I can't argue there,” Morris said earnestly. “But why? Why are they doing it?”
“The ex-cult member I talked to today told me it's part of a bigger ritual. The snow, and everything in itâit's just the beginning. There is going to be a lot more deathâa
lot
moreâif we don't stop them.”
“So what's the next step?”
“We need to fill in Jack and Teagan. And then some research. If there's a ritual to start all this, then there's likely a ritual to stop it, too.”
Morris didn't answer.
“Can I sleep now?” she asked, resting her head against the car window. “I'm so tired.”
* * *
As dawn found police and crime scene investigators wrapping up their grim work in various parts of Colby, the cleansing by snow and ice had been well under way for hours.
The streets of the town were nearly silent, except for the faintest crack and tinkle of icy tree branches swaying in the wind and the muted crunch of snow beneath the feet of the occasional desperate or unbalanced person, dead-set on getting somewhere, anywhere. These latter apparitions would appear from the swirl of snow, pass by the darkened window of a survivor's house, and then disappear, hunched over and trudging through the drifts, back into the endless white. Sometimes, screams would follow.
Every neighborhood was a still photo of frozen moments, abandoned by the people who had made and should have owned them. Invisible movement driving the pathways of wind and water over object and pavement alike had been caught and held in frozen streaks. In some cases, old bones had taken on a new kind of flesh, a translucent mantle, cold and inflexible.
The entire town was coated in shades of blue and white, silver and gray. Crystalline sheaths of ice lent a surreal, somehow haunted quality to cars, park benches, fences, telephone poles, and signs. Houses bore rows of long, sharp icicles in a snarl above people's heads. The heavy snowbanks that ate sound, burying it beneath mini-avalanches from roofs and eaves, reminded the few survivors that terrible silent things were still out there. And the wind, the low and mournful moaning and wailing, was always around the head, in the ears. It got into buildings (and people) through any opening availableâevery unsealed crack, every hole that weather had worn through, every raw throat despairing of ever feeling warmth again. It drowned out the mortal sighs and creaks of the body and stole words from right out of mouths.
Dominic Gasbarro, one of those remaining survivors, had been a teacher of freshman biology at Colby High School for almost twenty-five years. He had a master-of-science degree in animal biology and had spent eighteen months in South America studying rare and exotic wildlife. He had even done a three-week cryptozoology research expedition.
None of that prepared him for what he'd seen the night before.
There had been the scorpion things with the tentacles and the blooming mouthsâhe'd come to think of them as fat-tails, after the scorpion species, even though the creatures' tails and backs were really the only similarity. They were big and brutal, but not as quick and deadly as the anglers, who wavered and shimmered in a way that sometimes hurt the eyes, disappearing or deconstructing in one place and, seconds later, reforming somewhere else. The anglers were on people in seconds, tearing them open all over the snow and shoving chunks of flesh into those ugly anglerfish mouths with long, clawed single-fingers. Those creaturesâthe anglers and the fat-tailsâterrified him, but they hadn't been as bad as the spider/hand-things that ate Mrs. Mueller.
For Dominic, the pandemonium in the snow had started earlier the night before, when he had been awoken by barking dogs at 11
PM
. He was much more of a morning person than a night person, but even so, it had taken him a long time to fall asleep. Too many bad dreams of sad, broken people in run-down, broken places. It was withdrawal from the Effexor; he couldn't get the damned pharmacy on the phone for a refill, damn the snow, and the lack of antidepressant in his system always gave him surreally bad dreams.
It had thus put him further out of sorts when the mournful howling and angry barking of Bettie from the house behind and Sir Lawrence from next door managed to penetrate the storm windows of his bedroom and shatter his long-awaited sleep. He padded to the window and looked out on his backyard, but could see nothing but the muted gray of night layered over the snow. A wail and a yip were followed by a throaty growl before the barking of one of the dogsâBettie, he thoughtâceased. The odd suddenness of it jarred him enough to wake him fully, and he went to the other window in the room, the one facing his neighbor Emily Seeger's and Sir Lawrence's house. Dominic knew Emily's husband was a local cop and worked most nights, so she was usually home alone.The motion light on her back porch had been triggered, and Dominic could hear the little Pomeranian scratching frantically at the back door. At first, Dominic thought the hulking white thing with the gangly limbs sneaking onto the porch was a large dog; it was too big to be a raccoon or even a fox. The thing was, it didn't move like any of those animals. It had a predatory fluidity of silent motion, but it seemed more comfortable moving on its hind legs alone, its massive head and front legs sweeping low to the ground ahead without touching it. It didn't walk in the snow but rather
on
it, so Dominic could see the length of those limbs and the shape of them were not right at all for . . . well, any animal that he knew of.
Sounds from within the house next door suggested Emily had been awoken by Sir Lawrence as well. Her scream, returned by the thing on the porch before it wavered, disappeared, and reappeared on the porch railing, was the beginning of the chaos. The Pomeranian leaped through the doggie door and the thing was on it in a flurry of white, followed by a frenzy of steaming blood and mangled fur. Then it went after Emily through the same means....
After that, all up and down his street, he could hear shouting and unnatural animal sounds. There had to be dozens of those things out there, judging by the chaos. A few times, he even thought he heard gunshots. He called 911, but the line was busy. That astounded him. Could 911 even
be
busy? Shouldn't he have been rerouted to another call center or something? He kept trying, all night in fact, as the carnage raged around him, heard but mostly unseen. It was busy every time.
His doors, he thought with a modicum of relief, were all locked. They were always locked, a habit which his Colby neighbors thought an amusing personality quirk. Colby was a small town whose people were, for the most part, decent, law-abiding, honest folk. Most people saw no need to lock their doors all the time. But Dominic had grown up in an urban part of New Jersey, and locking doors was as much a nightly ritual as brushing his teeth. He was glad just then for that, because whatever was wreaking havoc out there didn't seem able to break inâthough not, as evidenced by the commotion from his neighbors, for lack of trying. Maybe they were drawn to sound and porch or interior lights; Dominic had none of those on and had kept as silent inside his house as possible, and nothing had attempted to enter.
By morning, he had begun making serious attempts to block out what he had managed to see and hear all night from windows all over the house. A car had been stopped in the street by a fat-tail's stinger and had overturned. A small posse of jeans-and-winter-coat-clad men who had the group sway of poker-night drinkers and the group resolve of scared husbands and fathers had almost made it to the end of the street when the lot of them had been swallowed whole by the terrible blooming maw of a fat-tail's mouth or thrown against telephone poles and dashed on driveways by its tentacles. A group of teenagers tramping along the snowy sidewalk, possibly to party destinations unknown, had been scattered and hunted down one by one by an angler.
Watching all those people get butchered was almost more than his sanity could take. One of them, a girl of about sixteen with a bob of black hair and glasses who reminded him of his niece, had made it as far as his own front porch. He'd unlocked the door and opened it a crack, motioning for her to come inside to safety, and the look of relief on her face was powerful. That, in the next moment, the expression turned to indignant horror followed by genuine fear as bloody claws suddenly appeared through the gory mess in her abdomen, broke his heart. He slammed the door shut against that look, bewildered and helpless but pleading all the same, and locked the door again. When he'd managed to stop the world from swaying and the gorge in his throat sank, by degrees, far enough for him to breathe again, he peered out the front window.
The girl was gone. Most of her blood, which had spattered the railing and puddled on his front porch, seemed to be seeping into the snow as if being drunk in by something underneath.
And then there had been Mrs. Mueller. She was eighty-seven, a dancer in her early life and a volunteer at the local library in her present one, a sweet but fiercely independent little firecracker who had taken a mildly maternal interest in Dominic's well-being over the last few years. He was quite fond of her, and looked in on her often. He had, in fact, been bolstering up the courage in the pink and gray hours of dawn to venture out and check on her when he saw her emerge, bundled up head to toe in winter clothes, from her house. He went to the door and flung it open, intending to warn her to get back inside and lock her doors. She was a little hard of hearing, a condition that she only grudgingly acknowledged, and Dominic figured it was possible, however incredible it seemed to him, that Mrs. Mueller hadn't heard what was going on outside all around her. Maybe she didn't know the danger. And Dominic couldn't let her walk right out into death's jaws.