Got to get away. He rolled to his stomach, his parka bunching around his middle. Oh God, I don’t want to die, please. He began a desperate, flopping wriggle, and he thought about worms trapped on the sidewalk after a hard rain. He had no idea where he was going, or how far he’d get, but if he could just get away, if it would stop hurting him …
Then, around the iron fist of his fear, he registered something hard digging into his belly—and remembered. There was something he could do. It would also be the very last thing he ever did.
No. For a second, everything stilled: the wild rampaging of his heart, the thrum of his blood, the breaths that hacked his throat. No, I can’t. God, don’t ask me to.
From not very far away, the thing let out a high, rusty shriek. He rolled onto his back, eyes bulging from their ruined sockets, straining to see, to make sense. My God, he didn’t even know what was out there, but it would unzip his skin with a single swipe of a claw. His guts would slosh onto the ice, and then it would hunker over him and feed. He might even be still alive when it did; he would die feeling it rip him to pieces. And there was nowhere to run, no place he could find to hide.
The thing screamed again, and he felt the dig at his middle and thought, Well, why the hell not? I’m going to die anyway. And God, was that too weird or what? A laugh boiled in his throat to tangle with a bloody sob. A year left before graduation, and he’d never even kissed a girl. How pathetic was that? But he remembered the moment he and Rima touched. Not love at first sight so much as a connection and, perhaps, a promise. Or maybe it was nothing more complicated than hope and a single kindness. Whatever it was, he knew: despite his fear, he could do it for her.
Groaning, he forced his shredded hand into his pocket, then willed his nerveless fingers to close. He had to move his whole shoulder to tug his hand free. He was starting to shake now, too—shock and pain and the cold and black terror so complete it was a wonder he was still alive. It took nearly all his strength just to twist off the cap. Once done, he leaned back on his elbows, panting, swallowing back blood, listening to the splash and slither as the thing crept closer …
Wait … He could hear his breath shuddering from his throat. Not yet …
And closer …
Please, God—he stifled a scream as ripples of gasoline broke against his legs—if you’re real, if you’re there, please help me, keep me alive just a little longer …
And now so close he heard the moist, fleshy smack-smack of its jaws …
Hang on, Tony. He could feel his mind trying to fall away in a final swoon, like a heavy boulder plunging from a cliff so high the drop was bottomless …
The slap-splash of its body heaving over the ice …
Focus. His heart was racing, frantically trying to pump what was no longer there. The shuddering was out of his control now, and he was cold, so cold … Stay with it. His ears sharpened on the soft plik-plik-plik of the last of his blood as it dripped into the larger lake of gasoline in which he lay. Don’t die yet, Tony. Stay alive a few more seconds.
And now he smelled it: more potent than the cloying reek of gasoline, this was a stink as dank and putrid as the moist carcass of a long-dead animal, so rotten that a single touch would rupture the thin membrane of papery skin to release a runny spume of green goo, yellow pus, a liquefied heart. The smell was, he realized, the reek steaming from his mother at the very end. It was the stink of the fog itself—his personal nightmare—and it was close now, right on top of him.
Now. He put everything he had into it, all that was left. With one shaky snap of his hands, he scraped the striker against the end of the flare. The flare bloomed to life in a sputtering, bright flame. The darkness peeled back in a black shriek; the fog parted, drawing aside like curtains; and what leapt from the night … what he saw …
Oh my God. His mind tilted, and he nearly lost his already failing grip on the flare. No, this can’t be happening. I read you, but you’re not real, you can’t be …
Then, a single, last memory: as he cringed on the strange mirror-ice, he remembered the feel of the fog’s fingers worming into his lungs, snagging his blood, walking his brain …
To find this? Because this was a monster he recognized. It was something he knew, and well, because he had thought it into being, this cancer that burrowed through his mother’s guts, on a dark stage in his mind.
It was a thing with eyes—with an insane sweep of a million myriad black and glittery eyes, a boil of writhing tentacles, a bristle of teeth, a swooning horror that even Lovecraft could never have survived thinking, much less writing—but it was here, it was here, it was on top on him, it was—
Tony didn’t have time for more than that. No time to think how such a nightmare could be, or how it had been plucked from his mind. No time for much of anything, in fact.
With the last of his strength, Tony thrust the sputtering flame into the thing’s bloody, gasoline-soaked maw and then
RIMA
Don’t Look Back
IN THE CAMRY, with no screen of wind-driven snow to block her view, Rima saw it alclass="underline" a quick, bright spark blooming in the dark, and then, for the briefest of instants, the brooding mass of something huge and monstrous.
What is that? She could feel her lungs forget how to work. Are those … are those arms? And then she put something else together: Tony had lit a flare. Oh my God … “Casey,” she said, urgently, “the—”
“The gas,” he finished for her. “Oh sh—”
The darkness broke apart in a fireball, a geyser of orange-yellow flame that shot toward the sky. The light was bright, worse than staring into the full round heat of the sun, and blistered her eyes. With a cry, she threw up her hands as the light seemed to sear its way into her brain—
And Tony was gone. Just like that. She knew it. She had his scarf, after all. One moment Tony was there, cupping her flesh in the most fleeting of whispers—and then not. Poof.
Wait, she thought, suddenly. That’s not how it usually hap—
There was another huge boom as the van exploded. This second fireball was eye-wateringly bright, and she saw the wreck’s mangled metal skeleton actually lift from the snow. Pieces rocketed into the air and then streamed down in blazing arcs just like those big firecrackers on the Fourth of July, the kind that blossomed in a thousand different directions. A flaming tire whizzed past the car; twisted bits of scorched metal rained in a hot shower.
“Oh shit, shit!” Scrambling over the front seat, Casey landed half on, half off the rear bench, then flung himself at the passenger’s side door. He gave the handle a ferocious yank, then cursed. “Rima, pop the locks! We got to get out! Come on, get out, get out of the car!”