Ronald Malfi - Snow

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.

The creature was heading toward Meg’s body. It needed an uncorrupted vessel, even a dead one: the fire was killing it.

A hooked arm rose up out of the flames and planted itself squarely into Meg’s chest. A moment later, Meg’s body jerked. One of the dead girl’s arms swiped in a semicircle through the snow. But as the thing climbed on top of her, the girl’s body also burst into flames. That arm continued to swipe back and forth in the snow, back and forth, until the inferno overtook it and all went still.

Bruce practically tackled Todd, driving him backward into the sheriff’s station. Together they slammed the doors shut and leaned against them, breathing laboriously.

“Jesus,” Todd panted. Even with the doors closed, the acrid stink of the fiery massacre burned the hairs in his nose. “Did you see? It couldn’t…couldn’t get inside her…because the fire kept…kept it solid…”

“I lost my gun,” Bruce gasped.

“Do you think…more will come?”

“I don’t know.”

A dark shape ambled toward them from the opposite end of the hallway. Todd aimed his gun at the darkness.

It was Brendan, shaking with fear. In all the commotion, Todd had forgotten about Brendan.

“Did you kill it?” Brendan’s voice trembled. “Where’s Tully?”

“Tully’s dead,” said Bruce. “We should probably put the fires out and bury the bodies before any more of those things come sniffing around.”

“Fires?” Brendan warbled. It sounded as though his tongue had grown too big for his mouth.

“Brendan,” Bruce said, still out of breath. “Get a shotgun from the gun locker, will you?”

Stupidly, Brendan nodded, then retreated back into the darkness. Todd listened to his footfalls pad down the floor tiles.

“Come with me,” Bruce said. “There are shovels in the sally port. We’ll have to be quick before those things show up and figure out we’re in here.”

Less than three minutes later, they were back outside. Most of the flames had died, leaving charred and steaming corpses sizzling in gray snow. Tully’s and Meg’s bodies still resembled something vaguely human, but the third corpse—the creature—was unidentifiable. It was large—perhaps twelve to fifteen feet in length—and something about the fibrous twists of its multisectional body suggested something serpentlike. Again, Todd thought of the fleshy, arrow-shaped wings of a stingray. One of the thing’s hooked arms was still buried in the smoldering black flesh of Meg’s corpse.

“I can’t do this,” Todd said, feeling as if someone were tickling the back of his throat with a feather. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Then throw up and let’s get on with it,” Bruce said, his bald pate glistening with sweat.

While Brendan stood guard with a shotgun, Todd and Bruce donned work gloves and tossed handfuls of snow onto the corpses to cool them. When Todd bent and, turning his face to the side, grabbed hold of Tully’s ankles and pulled, he heard a sickening crunch and felt the bones surrender. Tully’s feet came loose in Todd’s hands. Sickened, Todd dropped them and staggered several paces away, where he vomited into the snow. Behind him, he heard Brendan moan.

“Fuck,” Bruce said once Todd returned, feeling hollowed and jittery. “We’ll never be able to move them. Let’s just cover them with snow right here. Give us a hand, Brendan.”

The work was grueling and took longer than Todd would have thought. The men took turns vomiting in the snow while they worked. The worst moment came when Bruce dug the ball of keys from Tully’s belt; they came away with bits of flesh seared to them, and the sound was like ripping up old carpeting.

Once they finished, there were three mounds of snow beneath the awning of the sheriff’s station—one much larger than the other two.

Perched like some predatory bird on her cot, Molly kept stealing glances at Kate when she thought Kate wasn’t looking—but Kate could feel the pregnant woman’s stare like hot embers against her flesh.

They were back down in the basement room, where they counted down the minutes in what felt like eternal silence. Still shaken by what she’d seen outside, Cody clung to Kate, who’d taken up one of the empty cots across the room from Molly. Looking bored, Charlie sat on the floor before the board game, crushing little wooden game pieces beneath his shoe while chewing absently on his Snickers bar.

“Come here, Cody,” Molly called to the girl—the first thing that had been said since Kate had taken Cody down here—though Molly maintained her gaze on Kate.

Cody didn’t move—she had her face buried against Kate’s chest, her spindly little legs folded up under her. In Kate’s arms, the girl felt almost nonexistent.

“When are you due?” Kate asked, once the silence had become overbearing.