Freeze

14

“I can’t take this,” Tess said.

Bub looked up and cocked his head. It was funny how human he looked sometimes, how much he seemed to understand.

“I can’t just sit here worrying,” she told him. “You understand that, right?”

He wagged his tail.

“You’d understand if I got up and made myself some tea or something, right? Kept myself busy? My mind busy?”

Bub wagged his tail harder and panted.

Are you kidding? Are you seriously going to pretend to take advice from a dog? Don’t you move an inch. You could dislodge something. You could make a bad situation terrible.

“More like a terrible situation fatal,” she said. And yet she still wanted to get up. She hated this. Warren couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour, but it felt like days. Bub looked at her, unblinking, waiting.

Are we getting up, he seemed to be saying. Gonna go for a walk?

“Never mind,” she told him. “Lay back down.”

He did. Good old Bub.

She supposed she’d have to get up eventually to tend to the fire, but anything more would have been stupid. She couldn’t let stir craziness get the best of her.

In the fireplace, the logs crackled and burned. Bub rolled onto Tess’s feet. Outside, the blizzard continued. She wondered how much accumulation there was now. Two feet? Three? How was Warren going to get anywhere out there? Judging from the sounds of the snow and wind, if it wasn’t a total whiteout, it was close. What if he got lost and froze to death? Hell, even if he didn’t get lost, how long could he survive? Didn’t he say something earlier about no one being able to survive more than an hour or two out in that weather? Sure, he’d been trying to placate her, but she didn’t think he’d been flat out lying. And the storm was worse now than before. At least it sounded worse.

He’ll make it. It’s not him you need to be worried about. How much blood do you think you lost tonight? How much more can you lose without passing out? Will one more coughing, vomiting fit do it? If not one, two for sure. The blood loss alone might not kill you, but if you lose consciousness and don’t keep up the fire and Warren doesn’t make it back in time, you’ll freeze to death. That’s a fact.

That was all true, but she’d already decided to stay put. What more could she do? Worrying about it wasn’t going to help anything. She watched the flames and tried to think about something else.

But before she’d had a chance to search her memory banks for some happy recollection, the tickle in her chest returned. It wasn’t much of a thing at first, barely noticeable, but before long her entire torso was vibrating and she was rocking back and forth in the chair, trying to will the cough away, praying it would subside and not turn into another violent burst of vomiting.

A single cough escaped her. It was small, but it burned her throat. She braced herself for more blood, but it didn’t come. No blood, and no more coughs. The vibrations died down, and her body stilled. Bub got up, put his head on her knee, and whined.

She waited a full minute before she did anything. Didn’t talk, didn’t move, tried not even to breathe. When she thought it might be okay, she drew in a slow, tentative breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled.

No cough. No blood. No vibration.

“I think it’s okay,” she told Bub. “It’s okay for now.” She scratched him between his ears and gave him a kiss on his snout.

That was when she heard it: a second window breaking. This time it came from the end of the house opposite the kitchen, either from the bedroom or the bathroom.

Bub stood up, tensed, took a few limping steps toward the hallway and growled.

“It’s okay, boy. It’s just a broken window. Probably just a tree limb or a chunk of ice.”

She realized how much she sounded like Warren right then. But with him gone, she guessed it was up to her to be the sensible one.

“Relax, okay?”

But Bub didn’t relax. He took another step toward the hallway and barked. The sound was so sudden and ferocious that Tess jumped back. She’d never heard Bub bark like that (he wasn’t much of a barker in general, as a matter of fact), wasn’t sure she’d ever heard any dog bark that way. She thought again of wild beasts, of wolves and jackals and hyenas.

“Bub?”

And then she heard it. A thump. Like a low drumbeat.

A second thump followed, louder than the first.

Not drumbeats, of course. Footsteps.

There was someone in the house.