Freeze

15

When Warren reached the end of the driveway, he almost didn’t believe it.

He couldn’t possibly have made it to the road already, could he? How long had he been walking? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t brought his watch, and he’d been concentrating so hard on not thinking about the time that he’d lost all sense of everything but his thumping heart and his aching legs and back.

His heart hadn’t slowed, and his muscles still burned, but for the first time since leaving the house, he thought he might have a chance. He’d made it to the road, right? That was a third of the trip. Maybe more.

Of course, the road hadn’t been plowed. That would have been too much to ask for, and he’d never really been expecting it. Plowing a rarely-used road in the middle of a blizzard would have been a moronic waste of resources. Someone would drive a plow down the road when this was all over, but not for several days at least, maybe even a week. Finding a plowed road tonight would have been a miracle. He thought (and not for the first time) that he ought to get a plow for the GMC. Or a small snowmobile. Or both. For emergencies.

Isn’t this enough of an emergency to last you the rest of your life?

It definitely was. But when it came to disasters, the universe didn’t exactly hand them out evenly.

The first stretch of road leading away from their driveway was the steepest and usually the slickest when the weather turned bad. He’d driven up and down this particular hill during many bad storms.

Yeah, but this is beyond bad. You’ve never driven in anything like this. And walking isn’t driving. Don’t think you’re going to be able to anticipate any of the upcoming terrain.

He shuffled forward, testing his traction, ready to lean back and catch himself if he started to slip. The deepest layer of snow here was much less icy than he’d expected. His boot slid into the snow and found quite a bit of traction. He pushed his foot all the way down and shuffled his other boot forward to meet it.

The wind was coming at him from the side now. If he looked forward, the sleet pelted the side of his face, so he walked with his head turned to the side. No other choice really. It made it harder to see where he was going, but it was better than trying to bear the onslaught. His breath wafted away from him, carried along with the wind, white upon white. He shuffled forward, took a quick look to make sure he hadn’t wandered off the road and into the trees, and turned his head back to the side. It was like the fence all over again: take a few steps, get his bearings, repeat, repeat, repeat.

When he got closer to the Young place, he’d walk along the side of the road, watch for their mailbox, but until then, he figured he might as well try to aim for the middle of the road. Less chance of tripping over a rock or a log.

You’re lucky this is a a relatively safe road, not one of those half-width numbers cut into the side of a mountain with a three-hundred-foot drop off one side.

Very true. There were plenty of those kinds of roads up here. In comparison, this one might as well have been a Kansas interstate.

He shuffled forward a few more steps, stopped to get his bearings again, and thought he saw the bottom of the hill, a switchback that cut into the trees to the left.

Better be sure. If that’s not the road, if it’s just an opening in the trees, you could get very lost very quickly.

Except he couldn’t be sure, could he? Not when he could see only a few yards ahead of himself and the distinction between the road and the surrounding forrest had become a whole lot of white nothing. He’d have to rely on his memory and the few surroundings he could make out.

He shuffled to the bottom of the hill and stopped for another look around. He turned only his head, not wanting to move his body, afraid that might disorient him. He saw what he thought was a familiar pair of trees to his right, which would mean he’d been right about the switchback, but he was also almost sure he saw something ahead, right in the middle of what he thought should have been the road.

The thing ahead moved. One second it was there, and the next it had zipped away, not trudging through the snow but seeming to glide on top of it or maybe even float above it.

What the hell was that? An animal?

He didn’t think so. It had been too big to be a rabbit or a fox or even a wolf. It had been almost bear sized. But nothing that big would have been able to move so quickly. Not in this weather and through this much snow. Maybe not at all, even on flat, dry ground.

So what does that leave? A fucking cross-country skier?

Warren had no idea. He thought the most likely answer was that he’d imagined it. Or that he was going insane, that the cold had gotten into his brain.

The thing—or maybe another thing—moved again, this time to his right, near where he thought he’d seen the two trees. Through the snow, from this distance, Warren couldn’t make out anything but the shape: a kind of amorphous blob that seemed to be rolling across the drifts like a snowball. It moved deeper into the blizzard, and Warren lost sight of it again.

“Hello?” The wind and snow beat his word to the ground, turned it into a whisper, a non-word. The wind gusted and blew a thick sheet of snow into his eyes. He looked down at the ground and reached up to wipe the mush off his face.

Something moved just ahead of him. He could hear it now, a kind of hissing ring, like music just barely breaking through the static on a cheap radio. Something about the sound made his stomach churn. A wave of adrenaline flooded through his body. His muscles twitched, and the blood pulsed through his temples. He pulled his glove away from his eyes and looked up slowly.

The creature stood a few feet in front of him, big and looking even bigger standing on top of the nearest drift. It was covered in snow and ice, or maybe even made entirely of ice, although that didn’t seem possible.

Are you kidding? None of this is possible. You fell and hit your head. You’re dreaming. Wake up and open your eyes before you freeze to death.

Warren wished he could believe that, but this was no dream. No dream in the history of dreams had been this vivid. He could hear the blizzard blowing around him, feel the cold sneaking in through the gaps in his clothes, smell and taste the damp, nasty wetness of his scarf, and of course see the thing in the snow ahead. His senses were working overtime, and that didn’t happen in dreams. At least not in his.

The creature had dozens of tentacle-like appendages, each one tipped with clacking digits that were at once both finger like and entirely alien. It looked something like a frozen, upside-down tree. Except none of its limbs stayed in place for long. One tentacle detached itself from the body, slithered up around the thing’s bulbous head, and then re-attached itself on the other side. Another limb moved to replace the empty spot the first had left. And so forth.

Warren couldn’t see any eyes on the monstrosity, but it seemed to be staring at him all the same. It had no neck—its jagged protrusion of a head rested directly on top of its center mass—but it sure as hell had a mouth: it opened and closed the hole once, twice, revealing multiple rows of shark-like teeth, and a frosty, wriggling tongue.

Seriously, wake up. For the love of God, please wake up!

He sucked breath after breath through his musty scarf, afraid he’d start to hyperventilate but unable to do anything about it.

The thing slid off the top of the drift and closer to Warren. Warren had never seen anything like it and still couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing despite looking right at it. He tried to turn away, to run, although he knew he had no chance of escaping, but he couldn’t move his legs. It felt as if his boots had gotten snagged on something under the snow. He jerked his legs up as hard as he could, but they didn’t move. The creature came closer still—it was composed entirely of ice and snow, Warren could see that now, in places it was see-through—and with nothing else to do, Warren covered his torso and face with his arms, cowering.

The thing chomped its teeth. Bits of ice, tips of jagged fangs, broke off and fell to the snow below. New teeth, sharp and glistening, formed to replace the broken ones. It made a sound (Warren guessed you’d call it a growl, although it really sounded more like a low, reverberating whistle) and swung a tentacle at Warren’s head.

Duck!

But even as he thought it, he brought his arm up instead, shielding his face. The icy limb struck him somewhere between his wrist and his elbow, breaking his arm with a loud, gunfire-like crack. The creature’s arm broke, too—the tip of it flew into the snow and lay there slithering for a second before burrowing under the snow and out of sight—but another coil of snow and ice was already snaking its way down the limb to replace the missing bit. It melded into place and curled into the air like a cat’s tail.

His arm drooped and throbbed. Hot white pangs pulsed through his forearm and into his chest, belly, and head. He screamed. A puff of white exhalation floated past his eyes, obscuring the monster for a moment. He tried to curl his arm against his stomach, but moving the arm at all was horrendously painful. He was afraid if he tried to move it again he’d pass out. And be at the mercy of this unthinkable, impossible beast.

The thing pulled back the tentacle for another swing. This time, Warren did duck. The limb swung over his head, whooshing through the air, and continued swinging until it had wrapped itself around the creature’s body. It melted into the thing’s torso, and another limb grew in its place.

Warren tried pulling his feet free again. He let his arm dangle at his side, but the movement brought fresh pain nonetheless. He hissed and did his best to ignore it. His boots wouldn’t move, felt frozen in place, but he thought he could feel his feet pulling free, right out of the footwear.

One of the creature’s tentacles shot straight at Warren. He tried to dodge it, but it was much quicker than he was and hit him square in the shoulder. It knocked him back, right out of his boots, and sent him flying through the air.

He was weightless for a second, floating through the falling snow, and then he hit the ground and the air woofed out of him. He lay there for a second, trying to find some oxygen to breathe, trying to turn his head out of the falling snow but finding only more snow to either side. He coughed and finally caught his breath. He gasped and scrambled backward through the snow with his good arm, but it was too late, and he was far, far too slow.

The creature slid across the snow, moving effortlessly, its body crackling and ringing. It leaned over him.

Warren’s hand found a clump of hard snow. He gripped it as best he could with his thick glove and hurled it at the creature’s head. The clump hit the thing in the face but didn’t affect it at all.

Of course it didn’t. Are you kidding? You’re trying to fight off an ice monster with a goddam snowball?

The creature chomped its teeth together again, raised a tentacle, and swung it into Warren’s head.

For a moment, Warren felt the snow continue to fall into his face, but then he felt nothing at all.

And the freezing white world became cold black nothingness.