Freeze

1

It’s funny what you hear when your house shuts down, when the heater stops coughing air through the vents and the television ceases spewing out its nonsense. As she stood at the kitchen sink, her hands wrist deep in sudsy, too-cold dishwater, Tess listened to the logs burning in the living room, the water heater kicking on, and (loudest of all) the ice-laden wind blowing against the western side of the house.

She grabbed the last dish (a yellowed mug that had started life as white as fresh snow) from the sink and cleaned it the old-fashioned way: rubbing, frowning, cursing. After she’d rinsed and dried the mug with a rag so threadbare you could see right through it, she put it in the cabinet and glared at the dishwasher. As if the outage was the appliance’s fault.

She dried her hands, cupped them around her mouth, and tried to breathe some heat back into them. She felt the air slipping past her lips, but there was no warmth to it. Not even a tiny bit. If she didn’t get back into the living room and spend some quality time in front of the fire, she was afraid her outermost bits might freeze right off.

The water heater turned off. The fire continued to crackle. Besides the sounds in the house, she heard Warren in the shed out back, sifting through wood, loading it onto the sled, heard him through the wall and across at least a couple hundred feet of snow-covered yard.

Never mind what you can hear. Pay attention to what you can feel. Which is going to be just about nothing if you don’t get yourself back to that fire.

She was about to do just that when she heard another sound, a kind of tinkling almost like breaking glass. Only slower, raspy. She turned her head, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. For a second, she thought it must be coming from the fire, an air pocket in one of the logs or something, but after listening a little longer, a little harder, she decided it might actually be coming from outside.

The wind? More snow?

She returned to the sink and leaned toward the window just above it. She parted the curtains, leaned closer, frowned.

Normally, she’d have been able to see the mountains through the window, the highest of the towering Rockies. Although their property officially stood 6,961 feet above sea level, she and Warren lived nowhere near the top of the world. Sometimes she would stare out at those peaks and marvel at their beauty, their magnitude. As far as views went, it wasn’t the worst. Today, however, a sheet of frost covered the glass and made it all but impossible to see through. Still, she thought she could make out something moving toward her, a blurry shadow of a thing. She squinted and moved her face so close her nose almost touched the glass.

The slow crackling got faster, louder. The shape—whatever the hell it was—came closer, and Tess almost thought she could—

The shape pressed against the frosty pane, just inches from Tess’s face. Still blurry, still unrecognizable, but definitely there.

The shape smacked the window, and the glass cracked. Just a single fracture at first, starting in the upper-right corner and running toward the center of the window. But then the shape smacked against the pane again and the single crack became a spiderweb of short, jagged breaks. Almost before Tess knew what was happening, the window blew in against her face, showering her with tiny shards of freezing glass.

She thought: was that…a hand?

It couldn’t have been, but she didn’t have time to think about it. She was too busy bleeding. And screaming.