The darkness was absolute. Hulking behemoth shapes rose up out of the ether like beasties from some fabled world—a billiard table, sofas, tables and chairs, boxes of old clothes and appliances. She smelled sawdust and paint thinner and, beneath all that, rodent feces.
She wended her way to one dark corner where she proceeded to stack boxes around her as a sort of improvised shelter. Then she eased herself down onto the cold stone floor, using the butt of the rifle as a crutch. The pain in her leg was a raging conflagration now; it was all she could do not to shout out as she attempted to unbend her knee.
Something thumped on the floor above her head.
Please no please no please no, she prayed. Just give me some time to rest. Please. Just a few minutes.
She waited but the noise did not repeat. Setting the rifle down, she unbuttoned her pants and, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, managed to slide out of them despite the agony it caused. Her fingers grazed the wound. The pain was one thing but actually feeling it caused her gorge to rise; she leaned over on her side and vomited a stringy acidic paste into one of the cardboard boxes.
The easy thing would be to stick that rifle in my mouth and pull the trigger. After all, it’s not like I’m going to get out of here. It’s futile. And if these things live in the snow, if they are the snow…well, around these parts, snow’s liable to stick around until early March. My luck’s bound to run out before then.
It was very unlike her to think like that. Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she righted herself against the wall and began patting herself down for the flashlight she’d slipped into one of her coat pockets. But the flashlight was not there; she must have dropped it in all the commotion. And this thought caused her mind to summon the image of Nan Wilkinson being swooped up into the night sky where she’d disappeared.
That’s it…a single pull of the trigger and this nightmare is over, Shawnie. It frightened her to think that was her mother’s voice.
Scrounging around in the pockets of her pants, which were now bunched up at her ankles, she managed to locate her cigarette lighter. She considered the implications of flicking it on—was it possible the flame could be seen from outside?—but in the end decided she had little choice. If she didn’t attend to her wound, she’d die right here, frozen and bleeding to death.
Shawna clicked on the lighter and brought the flame down to her left leg.
Again, she felt her gorge rise…but this time, did an admirable job keeping her ground. The injury was bad, made to look worse by the way half the stitches had come undone and given the wound a half-pursed, mouthlike appearance. Her entire thigh down past the knee was brown and matted in sticky, dried blood.
She let the flame flicker out. Leaning her head back against the wall, she silently counted to one hundred. When she’d finished, she began systematically sifting through the surrounding boxes for loose articles of clothing. She found a number of old shirts, which she collected in a nice pile beside her. She’d use some to dress with and keep warm, others as blankets and pillows. Lastly, she’d use the fabric from some shirts to bandage up her leg.
Taking one of the shirts—a long-sleeved button-down—she set it in her lap and proceeded to tear one of the sleeves off. She wrapped the sleeve just above the wound to prevent any future blood loss. The second sleeve she tied over the wound—gritting her teeth as she did so—and pulled it snug. The pain was unbearable and didn’t let up until she finally loosened the bandage. Lastly, she located a pair of sweatpants and decided to pull these on instead of trying to wriggle back into her cold, wet, blood-soaked slacks. The sweatpants were several sizes too large but they felt heavenly.
Her eyes were already beginning to droop by the time she’d piled extra clothes beneath her head and body and lain down on the floor. She pulled a tattered old shawl that smelled of camphor over her shoulders, then dragged the rifle closer to her in the darkness.
Soundlessly, she slept.
PART TWO:
SURVIVAL
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As the milky pink of predawn bruised the sky, Todd jerked awake. Both hands were still clutching the handgun. The three of them were hidden in the back of the ambulance Todd had seen from the church’s bell tower, the doors pulled shut and locked against anything that might be out there waiting for them. Through the sliding panel of window that separated the rear of the ambulance from the cab, Todd could see daylight bleeding up from behind the distant trees. He could also see the sky, and the bizarre cloud cover that seemed to hermetically seal the town, like the lid on a boiling pot. The clouds looked dense, solid, tangible…and the color of pond moss…
Kate stirred behind him. She had curled up behind Meg and slept straight through the early morning hours, despite her initial protest that she’d never in a million years be able to find sleep. She looked at him now and offered him a crooked yet somewhat seductive smile while she ran her fingers through her matted hair.
“Sleep well?” he said.
“The best. We’re on vacation, right? In the Bahamas?”
“Of course. Would you like a mimosa with your breakfast?”
“Ooh,” she chided, playfully grimacing. “Don’t say breakfast. I could eat a whole cow right now.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking back through the sliding panel and out the windshield beyond. “I’m starving, too.”
Kate crept up next to him and looked out the window. She smelled of sleep and dried perspiration, the combination of which caused something to stir within Todd. Upon their first meeting back at the bar at O’Hare, he’d found her attractive…but something overwhelming was working on him now and he realized, with bittersweet embarrassment, that he was trying to fight off an erection.
“My God, the sky’s funny,” she said. “I’ve never seen clouds like that in my life.”
“Maybe they’re not actually clouds,” he suggested. “Just like those things out there aren’t actually snow.”
The thought caused Kate’s face to draw into a frown. He suddenly wanted to hug her, to cradle her.
“There’s smoke, too,” she said.
“It’s the church.” He’d seen the column of thick black smoke spiraling up into the atmosphere, where it flattened out and spread like oil against the low clouds.
“It burned all through the night?”
“Seems that way.”
“Do you think it’s completely gone?”
“I don’t know.” His stomach growled, and he blushed when Kate turned and smiled at him.
Then her smile faded. She was looking at Meg.
Todd looked at the sleeping teenager, who had her back turned to them as she lay curled on a gurney. She wore a threadbare blouse of thin material smudged with dirt, the collar of which had been torn away at some point during their escape from the church. What was exposed was a narrow serration in the soft flesh of her shoulder, nearly mouthlike, that ran midway down her back and disappeared beneath the fabric of her blouse. The lips of the gash appeared to respire.
“She wasn’t like that before,” Kate said, backing up against the opposite wall of the ambulance. “I checked her back at the church. It must have happened while we were escaping. One of those things must have…must have gotten inside her somehow…”
Todd pointed the gun at the back of Meg’s head.
“Oh.” Kate began to cry. “Oh fuck, Todd…”
His hand shook. He watched the girl’s chest rise and fall as she slept. No, he tried to convince himself, she’s not a little girl. She’s different now. But that did little to assuage his guilt.