Tully shuddered and jammed a finger into one of his ears. “What is she doing?”
“Calling for the others,” Todd said, rushing to his feet and back out into the hallway. By the front door, Bruce was wiping condensation off one of the windows. “It’s one girl,” Todd said. “She’s one of them now. That noise we’re hearing—I think she’s trying to tell the others that we’re here.”
“Fuck this,” Tully said, zipping around Todd and nearly throwing himself into the double doors. He fumbled with the wreath of keys at his waist. After selecting the appropriate key, he jammed it into the padlock and turned it. The chain fell away to the floor.
Bruce came over and grabbed one of the door handles while Todd reached out and snatched the other. Out in the cold, queer afternoon, the high-pitched wailing stopped suddenly.
“Do it now!” Bruce shouted, and he and Todd yanked the doors open.
Tully charged out into the snow, a tongue of fire already spouting from the nozzle of the flamethrower. Guns at the ready, Todd and Bruce rushed out after him.
“She’s gone,” Tully said, looking around.
Bruce sniffed at the air. “Careful, gentlemen…”
“No footprints in the snow,” Todd said. “How could—”
In a blur, the girl dropped down from the roof of the awning and landed squarely on Tully’s shoulders. Her mouth so wide she nearly split her head in two, the Meg-thing drove her teeth into the soft flesh of Tully’s neck. Tully screamed—a horrible gurgling wail—and sent an arc of flame spouting toward the underside of the awning.
Todd was elbowed aside by Bruce, who fired a shot at the thing on Tully’s back. The round tore a chunk of grayish flesh from Meg’s exposed forearm. Snow blew out as if by compressed air and trailed from the arm like smoke from a burning car racing down a hillside. It reminded Todd of the time he’d helped move Brianna’s stuff across town to his apartment in a friend’s borrowed pickup truck; unbeknownst to both of them at the time, Bree’s beanbag chair had sprung a leak, and when Todd had glanced up at the rearview mirror, the bed of the pickup had been domed in a blizzard of white Styrofoam balls…
Tully dropped the flamethrower in the snow, its cable still hitched to one of the canisters at Tully’s hip. Blood gushed from Tully’s mouth as the Meg-thing tore deeper into his neck.
Todd snapped from his stupor. He ran up behind Tully and grabbed a fistful of the Meg-thing’s hair. With a solid tug, he wrenched the girl’s teeth out of Tully’s neck. The Megthing made a sound like truck brakes squealing. Todd pressed the pistol against the girl’s temple and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand.
The Meg-thing’s head rocked and went unnaturally back on its neck. She sloughed off Tully’s back just as Tully dropped to his knees in the snow.
Todd staggered backward, the pistol smoking in his hand. At his feet, Meg’s lifeless body began shuddering, one leg kicking out and carving a swath in the snow.
Bruce ran over to Tully and clamped a hand to the jagged tear in Tully’s neck. Tully uttered something wet and unintelligible, then slumped forward against Bruce, frighteningly still. “Todd!” Bruce yelled, but Todd could barely hear him. Bruce could have been calling to him from underwater, from a distant planet…
Still staring down at Meg’s body, Todd watched as a slurry of snow came funneling out of the exit wound at the side of Meg’s head.
Reality rushed back to slap him in the face.
“Better get him inside quick!” Todd shouted, rushing over to help Bruce drag Tully inside. The front of Tully’s coat was black with blood and more came spurting between the fingers Bruce had pressed over the neck wound.
“No,” Bruce said. “The legs, the legs! Grab his legs!”
Todd fumbled with Tully’s legs while Bruce grabbed Tully and hoisted him from beneath his armpits.
A blast of icy wind struck Todd’s back. He whirled around in time to see a massive clot of snow rising up like a pillar before him. Twin winglike appendages unfolded from the mass just as a thread of steel-colored light intensified at the center of the thing.
Todd cried out, rolling over on his side in the snow. The pistol went sliding out of his hands. Above Todd, the winglike appendages crystallized into twin blades of curved ice the color of smoke. The creature reared up like a horse, the blades cleaving the air. It emitted an ear-piercing whine. Todd scrambled away on his buttocks, his boots struggling for purchase in the snow.
The scythes chopped down, slicing through the air with a sound like a passing jetliner. The scythes knifed into Tully’s slumped shoulders. Tully shook as if he’d been zapped with an electrical current. The glowing silver thread suspended at the center of the clot of snow dulled and turned the color of bronze as it passed through Tully’s camouflage coat. Blackish blood was already saturating the coat, and rivulets as dark as India ink ran from the serrations at his shoulders.
Bruce released Tully just as Tully’s head snapped around to glare at Todd. His eyes blazed like torches. His lips and chin were smeared with his own blood.
“…odd…” the Tully-thing croaked—a voice like a creaking floorboard.
Bruce brought his service weapon up to Tully’s head, but Tully’s arm shot up lightning-quick and knocked the gun out of Bruce’s hand. Tully never took his eyes from Todd the whole time.
“…ook…odd…” the Tully-thing growled through lips frothing with blood. The thing inside him managed a hideous smile that seemed too wide for the man’s face. Tully had about a hundred tiny teeth crowded into his mouth.
Bruce administered a roundhouse kick to the side of Tully’s head. Tully’s eyes shook like the last two gumballs in a gumball machine. Then the Tully-thing spun around with animal ferocity and launched itself at Bruce. Bruce just barely dodged the thing, and took off running around the side of the building.
Todd scrambled over to the pistol, grabbed it, and rolled over into a seated position with the pistol clenched in both hands. Without pausing to aim, he fired shot after shot, praying he wouldn’t accidentally strike Bruce in all the mayhem.
One round must have struck one of the fuel canisters on Tully’s belt, because there sounded a dull plink! less than a second before the Tully-thing burst into flames. It began screaming, a flaming comet continuing forward in its momentum, its arms flailing. The heat ignited the other fuel canisters, setting off a series of explosions that launched bits of flaming flesh and articles of clothing across the macadam until they eventually landed, smoldering, in the snow.
The burning man-thing began running toward Todd. It had no discernable shape—just a writhing conflagration with legs. Tully’s steel-toed boots left steaming divots in the snow. Its anguished cries were like the trumpeting of an elephant.
Todd pulled himself to his feet and ran for the double doors, but the thing was bounding toward him at an impossible pace. A mere couple yards from Todd, the fiery Tullything fell down into the snow, the stink of burning flesh and chemical fuel poisoning the air. The flaming heap bucked and roiled in the snow in a mockery of life…until the creature itself burst from Tully’s body and leapfrogged into the snow. It, too, was on fire, its usually translucent form made nightmarishly visible by the heat of the flames. A lion-shaped skull pivoted wildly on a thin stalk of neck as it burned, its eyes like bottomless black pits. As Todd watched from the doorway, the thing dragged itself through the snow by the carved blades of its arms. Smoldering black scales were left behind in the path it carved through the snow, reminding Todd of fireplace soot.
Bruce appeared around the corner of the building. He froze in astonishment as he saw Tully’s body smoldering in the snow and the burning creature dragging itself out from under the station awning.