Mountain Madness (41 page)

“Follow me,” she whispered and stepped past him.

He didn’t follow but limped at her side instead, brushing against her leg. They entered the hallway and crept toward the bedroom. Tess had eased the door most of the way shut after she took the mattress to the living room, hoping to contain the heat in the part of the house they were using. Now she wished she’d left it open. An intruder in the room at the end of the hall was scary enough, but an intruder in a room behind a
closed door
was scarier. Almost unbearably frightening. Her heart fluttered. Her hands shook. Not that it was easy to tell. This far away from the fire, most of her was shaking.

She stopped at the threshold and held up the poker to her chest. Bub stopped beside her, stiff looking, growling, his teeth bared. Wax dripped down the candle and onto the crumpled wad of magazine paper. A few drips rolled from there to Tess’s wrist, but she hardly noticed.

She imagined the intruder in there sifting through her underwear drawer, looking for valuables, a hairy, wild-eyed, homeless-looking man with snow in his beard. Or maybe not looking for valuables, maybe just looking for the undies, wanting to sniff them. Then she imagined the psycho standing just inside the door, imagined running in and stabbing the poker into his gut, imagined him looking up at her with confused, accusatory eyes.

Quit it. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.
 

She looked down at Bub once more, took a long, shaky breath, and slid her foot toward the door. Her next movement was actually a series of movements all carried out almost simultaneously: she kicked open the door, angled the poker in front of herself like a lance, and rushed into the room, trying to keep low in case the loonie had a gun and started firing. Bub stayed right at her side, hurrying despite his limp. She watched him from the corner of her eye, careful not to step on him or trip over him. He growled, and saliva dripped from his exposed gums and teeth.

Tess got two steps into the room and stopped dead. She screamed and tried to stop her forward momentum. What she found by the window was so utterly different from anything she’d imagined that her mind couldn’t quite register it. It was like a blur, or an empty space in reality.

Except it wasn’t a blur. And it wasn’t empty space. She had no idea
what
in the world it was.

She fell back on her ass and dropped the poker on the floor. Although it probably should have been the first thing she let go of, she managed to hold on to the candle.

The bedroom was as cold as a walk-in freezer. Colder maybe. The floor felt like steel instead of wood. Tess’s teeth chattered, and her nipples hardened.

Bub stopped just beside her. He didn’t seem as surprised as she felt. Maybe he’d been able to smell this…this thing. Or maybe his instincts had taken over. Or maybe he was just a hell of a lot gutsier than she was. He scurried in front of Tess, crouched there, and barked at the monstrosity standing just inside the broken window.

Monstrosity
. That was the word. Tess had never seen anything like it, not in real life, not on TV, not even in her nightmares.

The creature looked like a mound of frozen snakes, some of which crawled around the body, seemingly unattached, while others whipped around the bedroom like octopi tentacles. Most of the limbs had clumps of finger-like protrusions sticking out of the ends, which clicked together as it moved. It had a stubby head with a jagged fissure of a mouth, which it opened, revealing a whole mess of icy, wickedly sharp-looking teeth. It stood in a puddle. Ice and snow blew in through the window and beat against its back, but it didn’t seem to notice or care. Candle light reflected off its frozen, faceted body, making it look like the ugliest piece-of-shit jewel that had ever been pulled from the ground. It leaned forward and roared at her.

Except it wasn’t a roar. Not like a lion’s roar or a bear’s. It was more like a long crack and crunch, like someone breaking through a thick sheet of ice. And although she never would have guessed such a sound might scare her, it did. Goosebumps broke out on her already-cold arms, and her lungs burned. She realized she’d been holding her breath but couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Trying to breathe in felt like trying to inhale a bowling ball.

This isn’t real. Not even a little bit. Remember the icicle you thought you saw earlier? This is the same thing. Only times a billion. You have brain damage and you’re hallucinating this whole thing. Close your eyes. Close them, and when you open them again, this will all be gone.

She closed her eyes and counted to five. But when she looked toward the window again, nothing had changed. The creature was still there. One of its appendages detached from its body and joined a smaller tendril to form a single, enormous tentacle. It opened its jagged maw and roared at her again.

Bub widened his stance, lowering himself, and let out a series of deep, reverberating barks. The creature unfurled one of its upper tentacles and swung it at the dog. It did this slowly, almost lazily, the way you might shoo a fly, but the tentacle was as thick as a baseball bat and hit Bub with a solid
thunk
. Bub lost his footing and slid across the cold floor with a single, short yelp. He hit the wall beside the dresser and lay there motionless.

“Bub!” The word came out with a puff of white breath.

She started to get up, to hurry across the room after her dog, but before she could get to her feet, the creature swung another tentacle at her. This time, the swing had more umph to it. Tess just barely ducked beneath the attack; the glistening appendage sailed over her head with a whooshing sound and dripped freezing water across her head and shoulders.

Go. Run. Get out of here!

No. She wouldn’t go without Bub.

He’s dead. And you have to get out of this room before you are, too.

The creature attacked again, this time whipping its tentacle instead of swinging it. Tess twisted to the side, and the writhing icicle of a limb glanced off her hip, leaving a freezing wet streak down the side of her pajama bottoms and smacking into the floor by her foot.

She heard a sputtering sound and realized she’d somehow managed to hold on to the candle. It had gotten wet but hadn’t gone out. Her hand shook, and the flame flickered. She turned away before her ragged breath could blow it out. Fresh white exhalations drifted away from her face.

Against the wall, Bub moved. He turned his head and looked at her through watery, dazed eyes.

He was alive! Surely hurt, at least a little, but alive. He got to his feet and shook. Water flew off his fur and onto the wall and dresser.

Tess didn’t know what to do, doubted there was any kind of self-defense playbook for this sort of fucked-up situation, so she did the only thing she could think of: she turned to the monster, pulled back her arm, and hurled the candle at the thing’s head.

The creature moved, but not quickly enough. The candle hit it on the side of the face (if you could call that cracked slab of ice a face) and slid down to its torso and the mess of writhing tentacles. The beast shrieked a high-pitched, broken-glass shriek and pulled all of its limbs in on itself, wrapping itself up like a mummy. The candle hit the floor, smoking but no longer on fire, and the room darkened.

“Bub! Run!”

She turned toward the door and heard him right behind her. As they hurried into the hall, she grabbed the knob and pulled the bedroom door shut. She had no idea if the creature would be able to open the door, if it would be able to follow them, but a closed door would at least slow it down for a second. 

Just as the door hit the jamb, something pounded against it from the other side. The knob shook in Tess’s hand. The whole wall seemed to shake.

The whole wall? More like the whole damn house.

She backed away, and Bub backed up right beside her, limping worse than ever, never looking away from the door, never losing contact with her leg. Tess put a hand on his head, trying to reassure him as best she could. Or maybe trying to reassure herself. Her teeth continued to chatter. The cold seeped into every last one of her muscles and bones.

The thing struck the door again.

BAM.

Tess realized it wouldn’t need to know how to work the doorknob. Before long, it would break right through the door. Their doors weren’t cheap, contractor-grade things, but they weren’t exactly stone solid either.

She turned around and led Bub into the living room.

What are you going to do? What
can
you do?

She ran to the fire and huddled in front of it, shivering. The logs burned and sent waves of heat out across her chest, arms, legs, and face. Bub sat down beside her, shaking, whining. She put her arm around his neck and tried to think.

You have to go on the offensive. If you wait for it to come to you, it will. It will come, and it will tear you to bits.

She stared into the fire. The creature had seemed terrified of her little candle. What if she brought something bigger this time?

The thing smacked the bedroom door again. The sound boomed through the hallway and into the living room. Tess jumped, and the muscles in Bub’s neck tightened.

She started to tell him it would be okay, but before she could so much as open her mouth, something thudded in the kitchen. Tess looked up, and the piece of cardboard Warren had taped over the window slid across the linoleum. It had a thick sheet of ice and snow on it and a crater in the middle where it looked like something had kicked it in.

Another series of thuds echoed through the kitchen and into the living room. Like footsteps. Except she didn’t guess you called them footsteps if the creature making them had no feet.

The thing in the kitchen let out a long, hissy shriek.

Tess looked down at Bub.

They were surrounded.

17

FOR A SECOND,
Warren didn’t know where he was. It was worse than wake-up-in-the-wrong-bed disorientation. More confusing. More impossible. Because he wasn’t in a bed at all, wasn’t even in a room. Torrents of icy flecks rained onto his face, and biting wind blew across his body. He thought this might be the furthest from a warm, safe room he’d ever been.

He felt himself sliding on his back through the snow, felt some thick coil of something wrapped around his leg and dragging him up one drift and down another. And then, suddenly, he felt his broken arm flapping along behind him, bumping up and down as he slid along. He screamed, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to ignore the pulses of pain coming from the limb, but ignoring them was impossible. Every bump in the ground brought fresh, white-hot agony. He tried to flip the broken arm up onto his chest, but he couldn’t seem to move it. Couldn’t seem to move either arm, for that matter, or much of the rest of his body.

Paralyzed?

No, probably not, or not completely anyway—if he was, he wouldn’t be able to feel the pain in his arm, would he?—but definitely numb, stunned. He lifted his head, and new pain racked his body. He remembered the tentacle swinging into his face, remembered the wet
smack
of impact. He had lost his scarf, and he thought he felt something sticky on his cheek, maybe blood, or maybe just a smear of mushy snow. Still, he
could
move his head, despite the pain. He opened his eyes and blinked through the blizzard at the creature ahead. 

It had him by the ankle, its tentacle looped around his leg twice. He saw the tip of his sock and suddenly remembered his boots were still back in the snow; the creature had knocked him right out of them. From the looks of it, the tentacle was squeezing so tightly it had probably cut off circulation to Warren’s foot, but he couldn’t tell one way or the other. There was no sensation down there. He felt only the pain in his arm and head. Pain and a whole lot of cold.

The creature rolled on, moving smoothly over the snow but jerking Warren unevenly, as if purposefully trying to make the ride as rough and painful as possible.

What is this thing? What does it want with you? Where’s it taking you?

Of course, Warren had no idea. No kinds of answers. He was just happy he wasn’t dead, that the thing hadn’t pulverized him back there in the snow, eaten his brains and laid its eggs in his corpse (or whatever the hell it planned to do with him). For now, he was alive, which meant he still had a chance to get away. A good chance? Who knew? But Warren would take a bad chance over no chance at all.

With the sheets of snow flying into his face and more of the stuff puffing up around him as the monster dragged him along, it was hard to see much of anything, but Warren did his best to make out where they were, where they were going. He thought he saw a few trees to one side and then a few more to the other, mostly obscured in the storm. The creature didn’t seem to be doing any weaving back and forth, so Warren guessed they were still on the road. And going down. Despite his remaining disorientation, he could feel the slight pull of gravity. They were heading down the mountain.

Warren laid back against the snow. It was a far damn cry from comfortable, but his hood
did
cushion his head somewhat, and it was less painful than trying to keep his neck craned. Anyway, he didn’t see what other option he had. He could barely move and definitely wouldn’t be able to fight his way free, not the way the thing had its tentacle wrapped around his leg. Until some opportunity presented itself, he figured he might as well lay as still as possible and try to keep his arm from bouncing all over the place.

The creature moved forward, jerked Warren, moved forward, jerked Warren. Every yank sent another explosion of pain through his body. Warren didn’t think he’d be able to withstand the agony much longer, thought he’d faint and wake up two days later in this thing’s den with bits of his body chewed off. Or not wake up at all. Maybe these were the last minutes of his life, just a few more moments of hellacious existence. 

(sliiiiiiiide jerk)