Chad was still chanting: “Go, Bode, go. Go, Bode, go, go go go!”
“Bode, slow down, you can’t outrun it! You’re going to lose it, dude, you’re going to lose it!” Eric hooked his fingers into the front seat as Bode jinked the wheel, doglegging to the right. The Dodge’s rear swayed. “Bode, you lose it out here, we’re dead.”
“I’m not going to lose it!” Bode shouted.
“You’re going to get us kill—”
“Man, you don’t shut up, Marine or no Marine, I’m tossing you out of this truck, right now!” Bode roared. “You got that? Now shut up!”
“I only—”
“Did you not hear the man? Ain’t you listening?” In the next instant, there was a pistol in Chad’s hand. He jammed the muzzle into Eric’s cheek. “You want me to end this right now?”
“Hey, hey,” Eric said, raising his hands in surrender. “Easy, Chad, easy, it’s cool, we’re cool.”
“We are not … COOL!” Spit foamed at the corners of Chad’s mouth, and he rammed the gun into Eric’s flesh so hard the front sight clawed his skin. “We will be cool if you shut up, if you shut up, if you just shut up!”
So Eric shut up. There was nothing else he could do. This was out of his control. He shut up, and after a long second, Chad jerked the gun away.
This is a nightmare, but I’m living it. Eric felt blood welling from the fresh wound on his cheek. I’m real; I’m bleeding; you can’t bleed if you’re not real. He watched that fog, all that brilliant empty white, storming after them, filling the world. You can’t be scared to death if you’re already dead.
The truck swayed, slewing into a turn, the world beyond tilting, and Eric’s blood iced, every hair on his neck prickling with a kind of stupid shock, because he suddenly understood.
The snowstorm had been a warm-up. The storm had only been a way of bringing them all together. It was the fog that mattered, the fog that would run them down and swallow them whole.
What then? Where—and when—will we be then?
“Oh JESUS!” Chad screamed. “It’s right on top of us, Bode, it’s right on top—”
RIMA
No Time
“RUN!” CASEY SCREAMED, and then he was dragging her over the snow. Rima staggered, nearly fell, but Casey gave her a mighty jerk, hard enough that a shout of pain balled in her shoulder.
“Casey,” she gasped as they floundered, their legs digging post-holes through deep snow, “the sled, where’s the sled?”
“Blast blew her off the road!” Casey’s grip on her hand was iron. “Saw it from the tree, to the left, in a ditch! No!” He tugged her harder. “Don’t look back!”
But she did—and all the strength drained from her body to seep into the snow.
The fog was a gigantic thunderhead stretching so far overhead there was no limit to it. The fog was a pillar of nacreous, roiling white that built on itself, piling higher and higher. Unlike a cloud, the fog also spread from side to side, and everything it touched, it swallowed. Rima knew the night sky was still there, that above this deadening veil were true clouds and the stars beyond, but the fog was lowering itself, filling the bowl of the valley, obliterating the sky. The fog surged, an avalanche of white steamrolling right for them.
“Come on,” Casey urged. “Come on!”
Something bullet-shaped gleamed a dull silver and black from a deep wallow to her left. “There!” Rima cried. As soon as she stepped off the road, Rima sank up to her thighs, but she bullied through, trenching out a path to Casey’s snowmobile. “What should I do?”
“Dig under the nose!” Casey was stamping snow, beating out a trail. “We got to pack down the snow, then roll it onto the runners and get it pointed downhill.”
No time. Rima could barely move. With every step, the treacherous snow grabbed and pulled, and she was conscious of the fog boiling across the night, pressing against her back. They only had maybe a minute, if that, before the fog reached them. “Casey, there’s no time!”
Casey tossed a wild look over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and frustration. “Damn it. All right, leave it; come on, let’s flip it!”
They wallowed around to the downhill side, and then Casey backed into the sled, hooked his hands under the seat. Rima slid her left shoulder under the left handlebar, felt the snowmobile rock to the right and then try to tumble back, but she dug in and heaved. The snowmobile tilted, and she nearly slipped as the sled wobbled and then did a slow, heavy tumble onto its runners.
“Come on, get on, but don’t sit down!” Straddling the seat, Casey waited until she’d scrambled onboard before pulling up the kill switch, twisting the ignition key, yanking on the start cord—once, twice …
Hurry. Rima shot a quick look over her shoulder. The fog was still coming. Hurry, Casey, hurry, hurry, God, come on, come on!
The sled’s engine sputtered, caught. The machine gave a sudden lurch, and Rima tumbled forward. With a cry, she made a wild grab, snagging Casey’s tattered parka just as they began to move.
“Okay, down!” Casey shouted. “Rima, sit down!”
Arms wrapped around Casey’s middle, Rima obeyed, dropping onto the seat. The sled roared out of the gully, a rooster tail of snow flying behind, and then they were streaking across a sparkling plain of silver-blue snow. With no faceplate for protection, Rima gritted her teeth against bitter air that cut like a bristle of knives.
“Hang on!” Casey shouted as they banked into a tight, fast turn. She felt the back of the sled swing, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d spin out. But Casey wrestled the handlebars back to true, and the sled spurted over the snow with a roar. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, and she felt his body go rigid. “Shit, shit!”
“What?” But even before she looked back, she knew. The fog was there, a seamless curtain stretching from the sky to hug the snow, chasing after them in an inexorable tide: two hundred yards back and gaining. One-fifty, a hundred yards, eighty. Fifty …
Casey, I’m sorry. Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head into his back, hugged him tight. If it hadn’t been for me, you would’ve gotten away.
The fog slammed down.
EMMA
Black Dagger
1
ON A STREET drawn from that terrible summer of The Bell Jar when Emma will become so lost in that book, she will think she really might be better off dead; as she stares at the jacket photo of a McDermott novel she’s never heard of—the hand in the photograph moves.
Horrified, Emma watches those bizarre fingers unfurl and stretch and sprout talons. Its talons lengthen like a cat’s claws. Oozing over the windowsill, the hand slithers down the apron, and now Emma can see that the skin is as scaly and cracked as that of a mummy. The hand bleeds onto the photograph in an inky stain, a black blight, and Frank McDermott …