The rope tightened around his hands. He felt his arms nearly pop out of their sockets at the force of the pull. He was still holding his breath, his eyes clenched shut, when he realized he had been pulled clear of the water. He gasped, the force of which hurt his lungs, and he lunged forward until he was flat on his stomach atop the ice. On the other side of the stream, Bruce and Brendan were tugging the rope, dragging Todd toward them.
They managed to drag him up into the snowy embankment. Gasping, his skin stinging from the cold waters, Todd lay on his back, shaking violently.
“Help me get the coat off him,” Bruce instructed, and Todd was quickly manhandled like a rag doll. They stripped him of the police coat and then his shirt, too. His skin began to harden and crystallize. “Here.” Bruce thrust a fresh shirt at him, which he’d dug out of the backpack he had slung over his shoulders. “Lift your arms and we’ll help you put this on.”
Teeth chattering like typewriter keys, Todd obeyed.
Upstairs, the hallway looked slanted in the darkness. Gloomy half light bled through the pebbled windows at the end of the hall, where it pooled in murky white puddles on the tiled floor. Rubbing her forearms for warmth, Kate raced down the hall, stopping in every office she passed on the way. She searched the desks, the shelves, the file cabinets. There was no aspirin anywhere.
Opening a set of massive metal doors, she peered into the sally port. Her breath was visible right before her eyes. She saw the dark, hulking shapes of two police cruisers. The air smelled like radiator fluid.
Continuing farther down the hall, she became overly conscious of every noise that surrounded her—the ticking of a battery-powered wall clock, the rattle of old pipes deep in the walls, the sudden arrival of wind bellowing through the eaves. At the end of the hall she saw a secretarial office enclosed in stenciled glass. The door was unlocked. She entered and tiptoed around a desk, knowing with near certainty that every secretary in the good old U.S. of A. kept a bottle of aspirin in her desk drawer.
She pulled out a chair and began sifting through the drawers. It didn’t take her long to locate the pills.
“Bingo.”
She stuffed them into her pocket and, shaking like a maraca, darted back around the desk toward the office door.
However, she paused as she passed before one of the shaded windows. Peeling away the shade, she looked out into a milky haze of greenish daylight…and at the heavy snow that was falling.
Fear gripped her.
Down by the edge of the road, humanlike shapes shuffled into view. Kate could make out no details but held her breath, hoping it was Todd and the others. Had something gone wrong? Were they coming back so soon?
But no—it wasn’t Todd and the others. She counted five distinct shapes in the shadows of the looming trees. The snow refracted the greenish light from the sky, forcing her to question what exactly she was seeing. It was a trick of the light reflected off the snow.
“I hope,” she whispered, and hurried back downstairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In a fresh, warm shirt and sweater, Todd tried his best not to let both his shivering and his embarrassment show as they scaled the embankment and climbed back out of the woods. The clawing he’d felt at the back of his head had been from one of the overhanging branches. After Bruce and Brendan had pulled him up onto dry land and peeled off his soaking wet clothes in exchange for dry ones, they had all shared a good laugh and a few more cigarettes. But there was a greater nervousness among them now—unspoken, like a child’s worst fear.
Vermont Street was a ghost town. The houses were dark and there was no movement—thankfully—in any of the windows. Heads down and with a purpose, the three of them trucked up Vermont without pausing. Once, the sounds of tree limbs crackling rose up from a nearby yard, but none of them turned to look in that direction. They kept moving, not once looking back.
Vermont Street ran parallel to Fairmont. With Bruce in the lead now, they crossed through two yards, then hunkered down between two houses while Bruce attempted to survey the street ahead.
“There’s something making noise down over there,” Bruce said, trying to peer around the corner of the house to see what it was.
“I hear it, too,” Todd said. “It’s a downed power line. Probably still kicking up sparks.”
“Where are all the skin-suits?” Brendan asked from the rear of the queue.
“Tully said they go into the houses every once in a while,” Bruce said. “I guess those snow monsters can do whatever they like when they’re floating around on their own, but maybe they can’t stay out all day and night in the skin-suits. Maybe the bodies start to freeze.” He sighed and added, “They’re just people, after all.”
Todd put a hand on Bruce’s back. “Let’s keep going.”
They hurried down the slope of the yard toward the street. The snow was coming down hard now, limiting their visibility. Beyond a veil of pines were the brick storefronts that lined the western edge of the town square. So close. Directly above the square, the swirling eyelet in the clouds pulsed with a sickly green light. Todd thought he could feel a change in the air, like how just before a storm the atmosphere would become charged with electricity. It became more difficult to breathe, too; each inhalation was becoming more and more restrictive.
They followed Bruce across the street, where cars were parked on a slant in the shoulder’s ditch and where others had been turned completely on their sides. Todd could see windshields caked with blood and bloody streaks in the snow as the vehicles’ occupants had been dragged away.
The town square sat in a bowl ridged with trees. Bruce led them through the trees, past the bare branches of deciduous flora to where the evergreens clotted together for better concealment. On their hands and knees, the three men crawled beneath the trees and through the prickling swats of bristly, cold branches. The smell of sap was very strong. They paused only when they’d reached the end of the copse, each of the men pulling aside bristling bows to peer down into the town square.
“Oh,” said Todd, “you gotta be kidding me.”
There were perhaps thirty townspeople gathered in the center of the town square, and perhaps another dozen or so lingering in the shaded alleyways between some storefronts. They all affected the same slump-shouldered, loose-limbed stance, their faces, from what Todd could make out at this distance, a mask of catatonic nonattendance. Despite the skin-suits, there was nothing remotely human about their appearance. That empty, vacuous glaze over their upturned faces made them look like wax dummies.
“What are they doing?” asked Brendan.
“They look like they’re…listening,” Todd said. He pointed at the glowing crater carved into the clouds, the crater’s epicenter a storm of electrical current and brilliant, dazzling lights. “Like they’re getting subliminal instructions from that thing in the sky.”
“Like they’re getting something,” Bruce muttered.
Todd could see the Pack-N-Go across the square, its front windows busted out, the interior dark. The icy sidewalk in front of the store was littered with arrowheads of triangular glass as well as boxes of cereal, packets of Ramen noodles, burst soda bottles, and fluttery rolls of paper towels.
“How the hell are we supposed to get into the Pack-N-Go, then back out again without those things seeing us?” Brendan said. He was drumming his fingers against his knees—a nervous habit.