“What?” Kate said. “What’d you see?”
“Someone’s dead in there,” he managed. “Head was split open…”
“Oh my God…”
Again, movement from within the store caught Todd’s attention. He jerked his head up and squinted through the darkness just as a whitish shape flitted across the aisles. Whoever—or whatever—was inside was heading for the door.
“Get back,” Todd shouted at Kate. Together, they both stumbled backward off the snow-packed curb.
The convenience store’s door flung open, Christmas bells on a strip of rawhide rebounding off the smoked glass, and a shape sprung out into the night. There was the sound of a long-barreled gun being charged and Todd felt his body brace for impact.
Nan took a hesitant step toward Fred, an odd, almost coy smile playing across her features.
“Fred, what is it?”
But Fred was through pampering. He reached out and grabbed Nan’s wrist, yanking her down off the curb and into his arms. He was still staring at the man in the tattered and bloodied clothes, who was staring right back at him with inkblot eyes. Holding Nan in a strong embrace, Fred began to back away from the curb.
Nan pushed off him, looked up at his face. “What the hell has gotten into you?” But she must have noticed that he was looking at something over her shoulder, because she turned and followed his gaze. When she saw the man in the bloody clothes on the sidewalk, mere feet from where she’d just been, Fred felt her entire body go rigid.
“Are you hurt?” Fred said, addressing the stranger. He continued walking backward, unwilling to take his eyes off the stranger. “Hello? Are you okay?”
“Fred…”
He rubbed Nan’s head with one hand. It didn’t appear that the stranger had a weapon; if he were to rush at them, Fred was pretty confident he could fend him off. Still…
“Todd!” he shouted. “Kate!”
The stranger hunkered down, like an animal preparing to pounce. A silvery rope of spit oozed from the man’s bottom lip.
Fred froze in midstep. He felt his bowels clench. In Nan’s ear, he muttered, “Run.”
“Who are you?” said the stranger who’d just come bursting out of the convenience store. It was a woman—that much Todd could tell from her voice—and she was pointing a rather angry-looking rifle at them.
“We’re lost,” Todd said, somehow finding his voice. “Our car broke down just outside of town.”
“What happened here?” Kate said from behind him.
The woman appeared to scrutinize them from behind her rifle. After a few drawn-out seconds, she said, “Turn around.”
“Please,” Todd muttered.
“I said turn around.”
“Don’t shoot us,” he said, turning around as the woman requested. He consciously stepped in front of Kate, although he wasn’t sure if his body would be enough to arrest any bullets that came shooting out of that gun.
“You, too,” the woman said to Kate. “Turn around. I want to see your backs.”
Kate did as she was told, her hands up in the air.
The woman with the rifle came up behind them, grabbed fistfuls of their coats, and patted them down like a police officer searching for weapons. “Okay,” she said, and Todd and Kate turned back around to face her. With the gun lowered, it was easier to make out her features. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and for the first time Todd saw that she held the rifle somewhat awkwardly, as if doing so was new to her.
“I’m Todd Curry,” he said, hoping an introduction would break the ice. “This is Kate Jansen. We were driving and our car—”
“There was a man,” Kate blurted.
Todd nodded. “Yeah. He—”
From across the square, Fred’s voice carried in a wavering echo: “Todd! Kate!”
The woman jerked the rifle in the direction of Fred’s voice. She looked nervous and too thin, and she was practically swimming in her clothes. Todd noticed a fresh slick of blood running down the left leg of her pants.
“That’s our friend,” Todd said. Then, shouting: “Fred! Over here!”
The rifle swung back around to face Todd. His hands shot up immediately. “Calm down. Those are our friends. We’re lost. We’re not here to hurt you.”
“They’re running,” Kate said.
Todd turned and looked out across the square. Nan was careening across the ice, amazingly balanced, her thin arms and legs pumping like machinery. Fred followed close behind, though he was not facing forward: something, it seemed, was following them.
“Shit,” said the woman with the rifle. “Get in the store.”
Todd shook his head. “Those are our friends.”
“Get in the fucking store!”
In her panic, Nan practically slammed into a parked car. Todd reached out and grabbed her before she lost her balance and spilled to the ground. There was a look of pure terror on her face.
Fred came next, shouting something indecipherable as he ran. Also…there was someone else closing the distance behind him…
“What the hell is going on around here?” Kate muttered.
Fred barreled up over the curb and collided with Todd and Nan, his breathing whistling audibly. Fred’s pursuer slammed on the brakes, skidding to a clumsy stop on the ice before his legs pulled out from under him. Had the circumstances been different, the fall would have been comical. But as it was, tensions were high, and the man did not stay down on the ground for more than a split second. Back on his feet, he appeared to waver in the air, his weight moving from foot to foot, like a swimmer about to dive into the deep end of a pool.
The sound of the rifle fire was almost deafening.
In the street, the man’s head evaporated into a red mist. The body sagged forward, then dropped straight to the ground, its legs folded neatly beneath it.
Nan screamed and Fred cursed. Kate clawed at the back of Todd’s neck, gripping a fistful of hair.
Then something else happened. The headless body in the street bucked once, twice, three times. Hot blood spurted from the abbreviated neck and coursed like an oil slick across the ice. There was the impression of levitation, although the dead man never actually left the ground; rather, something from within the man’s body was rising up, up. For one insane moment, Todd actually believed he was witnessing the dead man’s soul vacating the body.
But this was no one’s soul. What rose up was a hurricane swirl of snow, funneled and compacted so that it was nearly tangible. It held the vague form of a human being, though as it continued to withdraw itself from the man’s body, Todd could see its arms—or whatever served as arms—were nearly twice the length of a normal person’s. It had no definable characteristics beyond the vague suggestion of humanity. And as it peeled away from the corpse—from out of the corpse—it hovered briefly above the body, nearly solid and comprehensible, before it dispersed into a scattering of snowflakes and was gone.
The silence that followed was thundering.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What the hell was that thing?” Todd asked.
They were locked inside the convenience store now, trapped in the dark with a young, rifle-toting stranger who looked barely old enough to drink legally. Fred and Nan sat against one wall, a dazed look on poor Nan’s face. Fred absently rubbed the back of her head while occasionally peering back out the store’s windows at the corpse in the street. Whatever the thing was that had exited the dead man’s body, it hadn’t come back.