“What do you have?” Kate asked, examining the guns Todd had selected. “I want to make sure we’ve got the right bullets.”
“Here.” He handed her one of the handguns. “Do you know how to use this?”
She popped out the magazine, then snapped it back into place. Gripping the slide, she went through the motions of charging the weapon, then pulled the spring-loaded trigger. It clicked dully. “Piece of cake, right?”
“Piece of cake,” he said.
“Todd…”
He was going through the motions with his own weapon now. “Yeah?”
“Todd…” There was slightly more urgency to her voice now.
Todd looked up and saw the frozen expression on Kate’s face as she stared past him and out the front windows. He whipped around, taking an instinctive step backward at the same time. His left shoulder thumped against Kate’s chest.
At first he couldn’t see what Kate saw—just a pitch-black night choked with a heavy snowfall. But then a moment later his mind grasped the wrongness of it. Like a puzzle piece sliding out of position, a section of the snow seemed to unhinge itself from the rest, a compact little vacuum of twirling white filaments sliding into the wind. It passed in front of the windows and paused just at the door, where it seemed to take on a gradual density. The snow began to congeal, the flakes adhering to one another to form a physical shape.
“Oh, Jesus,” Todd breathed. Kate clinging to his back, they proceeded to back farther away from the windows.
A silvery tendril of light briefly ignited at the center of the whirling snow, shimmering like Christmas tinsel. For one horrible moment, Todd was certain he could make out the insinuation of a head taking shape. The thing approached solidity, then wavered back into nothingness, over and over again, as if pulsing with some living current.
“It’s got arms,” Kate said. Her lips brushed against his ear. He could feel her entire body trembling against his. “Does it see us?”
“I don’t think so.”
Suddenly, one of the creature’s limbs became a solid, hooked blade, which it raised above its partially formed head. Kate screamed. Its arm was pale like a corpse’s, its forearm tapering not to a wrist and hand but to a crescent-shaped claw that made Todd think of scythes used to hack down fields of wheat. The arm held solid form long enough for the creature to drive it down into the plate glass. The sound was like an explosion. The entire wall of windows shook. At the point of impact, a bullet-hole opening appeared, a thousand spidery cracks networking like tributaries in every direction.
“Todd!”
A second swipe of that massive, bladed arm turned the window into a shower of ice.
“Run!” Todd screamed, lunging forward to grab the bag of ammunition. Freezing wind filled the shop and blew his hair back from his forehead. He grabbed the bag and yanked it down to the floor. When he looked up, he saw that Kate hadn’t moved; she was standing mesmerized at the whirlwind of snow that floated through the busted window. “Kate! Get out of the way!”
But she didn’t move.
The cloud of snow appeared to rear itself up and, only briefly, looked like a wave about to crash to shore. Todd caught a glimpse of that silvery filament twining in the center of the blustery cloud again. Then he rushed forward and tackled Kate’s legs, dragging her to the carpet. A second later, one of those scythe-like arms crashed through the glass display counter, showering them with crystals of broken glass.
“Come on!” he screamed at her, crawling along the carpet toward the shattered front windows.
There came a sound like the screeching of car tires as the thing behind them shrieked into the night. Blood pumping, Todd jumped to his feet and dove through the opening in the shattered window. Outside, he struck the icy pavement with enough force to fill his mouth with powder from a pummeled tooth. He scrambled quickly to his feet just in time to have Kate slam against his chest, knocking them both backward into the street. Todd’s head rebounded against hard ice and for one terrible moment he feared he was going to pass out.
But Kate was yanking him up onto his feet. He stumbled but rose and she jerked him forward. Like a cartoon character, his boots couldn’t get traction on the ice-slicked ground at first…but when they finally did, he shot forward and hurried after Kate.
Close behind them, that screeching cry shook the world.
They hurried across the square just as two figures emerged from darkened alleyways. They were two of the possessed, human beings with feral faces and eyes that gleamed like jewels. Kate screamed and cut to her right, Todd sticking close to her heels. A third figure sprung out of the darkness and Kate swung the bag of ammo at its head, knocking the shape backward into the shadows.
“There!” Kate shouted, pointing to a narrow avenue that wended through more deserted-looking houses. At the end of the street, the dark fingerlike structure of the church rose up against the black sky.
“Go!” Todd shouted, not daring to catch a glance over his shoulder. “Run!”
Kate took off toward the church, the bag of ammunition swinging like a pendulum. Todd stumbled but got back on his feet quickly, chasing after her. He felt the gun in his waistband beginning to come loose, so he grabbed it and held it in one hand as he ran.
The church was at the crest of a snow-covered hill and surrounded by burly lodgepole pines. Through the curtain of snow, the building seemed to tremble in the night. Kate rushed up the steps to the massive doors. She tugged on the wrought-iron handles but the doors wouldn’t open.
Todd hurried up the steps beside her. It was only then that he paused to look down at the road. “Shit.” A few of the townspeople were running after them up the street.
“It’s locked,” Kate said, nearly in disbelief. “It’s a church and it’s fucking locked…” She began banging on the doors and shouting.
“Better give me some of that ammo,” Todd barked. He’d already popped the magazine out of the pistol.
Kate dropped to her knees and sifted through the bag. Down below, the townspeople were closing in. Worse still, it appeared that sections of the sky were shifting, coming together to form partially solid masses that oozed across the treetops.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned.
“Here! Here!” Kate shoved a box of nine-millimeter rounds at him. Then she spun around and screamed, her back against the locked doors of the church.
Todd fumbled with the box of ammo. His hands numb from the cold, he dropped it, sending the rounds in every possible direction. “Shit!” Dropping to his knees, he began to scoop them up and load them one at a time into the clip.
“Hurry, Todd!”
“I’m trying!”
A man in ripped jeans and a blood-soaked sweatshirt was already scrambling up the stone steps of the church.
“Todd!”
Todd slammed the magazine home and charged the pistol. He didn’t need to aim; their attacker was a mere three feet from them when Todd pulled the trigger and took the man’s face apart. Again, Kate screamed. She had both hands clamped to her ears. Todd’s hand trembled as he kept the gun aimed in. The man’s body folded backward down the steps like a Slinky, his limbs rubbery and lifeless. Then, just as they’d seen happen when Shawna had killed that man in the street outside the Pack-N-Go, the newly dead man’s body began to tremble and buck. Something vaguely vaporous began to withdraw itself from the corpse. Except for a milky opaqueness, it was practically invisible…although looking through it was like looking through heat waves rising off a desert highway. Behind it, the world was distorted.
Kate shrieked and pointed toward the road. Two more townspeople were running toward them, their strides impracticably long. They galloped like horses.