Chills (5 page)

He made his way toward his car, a silver Hyundai nearly blotted out by the swirls of snow. He popped the trunk from the button on his key fob and took out the snow brush. It would take a while, he supposed, to clear enough snow off the car that he could drive it. He slammed the trunk lid down and trudged toward the driver's-side door, fumbling with a gloved hand in his pocket to return his remaining pack of cigarettes to safety. Wind-driven clouds cast long, dark shadows over the car and the lot around it. It was in one of those shadows that Jason, who happened to glance up from his bracing huddle against the wind, noticed something duck out of sight around the front of his car. It was the movement he caught rather than any particular identifying feature, but some quality about it raised Jason's hackles, and he frowned.

“Uh, hello?”

His boots crunched through the snow as he made his way to the front of the car. He was surprised to find that there were no footprints, no smudges of displaced snow along the bumper. Jason looked up, scanning the slope of grass and the wooded area beyond that cupped the eastern side of the factory building. It was tough to see through the snow, but Jason felt pretty sure there was no sign of movement, animal or otherwise. He glanced down at the front end of the car again.

Wait . . . there
was
a small spot at the far end of the bumper where small grooves had been imprinted into the fluffy snow. They looked like drag marks from thin, tapered fingers. Jason followed it around the far side of the car and crouched down to get a better look.

Up close, the marks struck him as even more puzzling. Not only had something dragged long fingermarks into the snow, but whatever it was had also carved thin furrows into the metal of the bumper.

“What the f—” Jason whispered, but let the final word trail off, muted by the dull, continuous thud of snowfall. There was a new shadow, suddenly darkening the grooves in his bumper. With it came a sound like glass being dragged over glass, a sound not much different in timbre from the wailing gusts of wind. This sound, though, seemed more substantial and much closer—right over his head, in fact.

Jason looked up and opened his mouth to scream, but the thing peering down at him from the roof of the car moved quickly. It was on his throat, tearing it open before the scream could surface. Still, though, the steam of Jason's heat escaped the clawed-open hole with a small whine of breath that could have been a miniature cry. Or, it could have been the wind blowing over the jagged opening in Jason Houghton. Within minutes, small drifts of snow filled the glazing eyes and the slack-jawed mouth. The ragged hole in Jason's throat still pumped a bloody spray that, against the snowy canvas beneath his body, blazed starkly crimson.

The argentine figure, ghost-like, seemed nearly translucent as it bent over the body, absorbing the blood. For a moment, it flickered a more solid outline. Had there been anyone else in the parking lot to see it, he or she would likely have thought it looked vaguely anglerfish-like, wide-eyed and scaly with serrated teeth swathed in fleshy, dull lips, big as a large dog with gangly arms and legs and taloned, three-digit hands and feet. Then it flickered out again, and was little more than the suggestion of movement as it bounded, print-less, across the ever-growing drifts of snow.

* * *

Jack Glazier was having a hell of a morning.

It had started with Katie. His ex-wife had called early, early enough to wake him. She knew he slept until six, so she'd called at 5:45, just to deprive him of those last fifteen minutes. It was one of those little passive-aggressive moves that had driven a wedge between them during their marriage and that had often swelled to flat-out aggression during the divorce. Jack didn't hate Katie, but he sure as hell had come to dislike her. It had taken a while. She was Jack Jr. and Carly's mother, and she had once been a woman he thought he could love and cherish for the rest of his life. But she liked to poke him with situational sticks, and her round refusal to ever take any share of blame or responsibility for the failure of their marriage left it squarely on his shoulders, a belief she worked into nearly every conversation. She'd been a stickler about getting what she deemed “her fair share from a neglectful, job-obsessed husband” and a marriage that, post-children, she had considered “largely a waste of [her] productive years.” She (wrongly) thought he'd had an affair with Kathy Ryan, and so she also found ways to work that into a conversation at least once in a while. Worst of all, she did little to hide her animosity toward him in front of the children, and for that, he found himself often fantasizing about slapping her silly. She could, at times, be warm and thoughtful, at times easygoing and even funny. But those times had grown few and far between since the divorce, and on good days, he still groaned when her number showed up on the caller ID.

She'd called to finalize the custody schedule for the summer. In the three years since the divorce, the kids' schedule when they were out of school was to spend two weeks of every month with their dad and two with their mom, with alternating holidays. However, Katie wanted to talk at length about the snow and whether that should change their plans (he didn't see why it should) and whether anyone in Connecticut outside of Colby had been contacted about the weather, like the National Weather Bureau or whoever in the federal government was in charge of such things (he had no knowledge of that, though he reassured her the folks in the municipal building were supposedly in contact with state officials regarding potential resource help). Jack expected a state of emergency would be called, particularly if the rest of the state was also affected, but he hadn't heard anything yet in that regard. It was almost as if Colby was invisible to the rest of the outside world, and all attempts at communication in or out were being swept away by the snow. Jack didn't tell Katie that, of course. He didn't want her worrying the kids. Already she was driving him nuts, wanting to know how he was going to explain all this weather business to the children; he reassured her he would talk about it with them in an informative but non-frightening way.

It took forty-five minutes of such reassurances to finally get her off the phone, and promptly upon disconnecting, he spilled his mug of coffee across his desk. Half an hour later, he received word of Abe Maurner's mother keeling over in the snow on her front lawn, Joe Bishop's request for extended medical for his heart surgery, and Cali Richter's report on freezing deaths a block away from the local homeless shelter on Trensfer Avenue. All throughout, the phone rang off the hook with concerned citizens demanding answers, not unlike Katie, about the weather and some downed power lines that appeared to be limiting cell usage and preventing Internet access altogether, and just what the hell were the police doing about it, anyway?

What he did not get, however, was anything useful from Cordwell's preliminary autopsy report on the John Doe. He hadn't even been able to identify the animal that had left those teeth marks, and there was no forensic evidence on the body whatsoever that could help identify the killer or killers.

Jack had a headache before eleven-fifteen that morning.

Then, around 4
PM
, dispatch notified him of another homicide, a multiple this time. He and his team were being asked to report ASAP to Ormann Field at the end of Woodland Road. Texts had already gone out to the CS team, Morris, Teagan, and Kathy Ryan. Responding officers noted unusual circumstances.

“Unusual how?” he'd asked Sherry at dispatch when she told him.

“They didn't say,” she'd replied. “They just said to get ahold of the task force on the ‘John Doe devil worship case' right away. I'm guessing there are similarities between your JD and this scene, or something in this one that connects it to the last one.”

“Okay, Sherr. I'm on my way.”

“Hey, you be careful out there, huh? Don't want to lose my favorite detective.”

“Yes, ma'am, I will. Wouldn't want to disappoint my favorite dispatcher,” he flirted back, and he could hear her smile through the phone.

“Oh, one other thing—the ROs said to bring heat lamps.”

“Heat lamps?”

“Apparently, some of the evidence was deliberately frozen to the ground. They don't think it can be chipped out without possible damage to the evidence. Jars, as I understand, though the ice surrounding has kept anybody from positively ID-ing anything in them so far. Mixed reports about the state of the bodies—you're going to have a lot to sort out, I think. ROs just said there was ‘Kathy Ryan kind of stuff.' You know how that goes.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause, and then Sherry added, “Uh-oh. Oh . . . oh no.”

“What?”

“Oh God, Jack,” she whispered. The change in her voice alarmed him.

“What? Sherry, what's going on?”

“Calls coming in . . . ROs on two other scenes requesting your help. All multiple homicides in open spaces. All requesting your task force. You have to go, Jack. Go now. I'm texting you and your team all the info.”

Jack got up, setting his new mug of coffee to precarious wobbling. He barely noticed. He grabbed his keys and coat. “I'm on it, Sherry. Tell them I'm on my way.”

“It's bad, Jack. Children, too, on these . . .”

An awful lump rolled over in Jack's stomach. He hated when crimes involved children. It was really turning out to be a clusterfuck of a morning.

“What the hell's going on out there, Sherry?” Jack's question was soft, sad, and almost inaudible.

“Don't know,” she answered, her voice wavering. “Maybe it's the weather.”

T
he local community college had closed its campus on account of the weather; so had nearly every business in town—at least those who employed experienced adults who knew better than to think they had to risk their lives for retail. Twenty-somethings like Dan Murphy and Jessica Florey were apparently not counted among either the experienced or the indispensable, since the Quick Mart where they had met and both worked for the last eight months or so had remained open and indifferent to their potential safety. Dan had offered to drive his girlfriend home, to see to it that she made it safely. They had left her car half-buried in a mountain of gray. Although it was in better condition than Dan's old beater, it didn't have snow tires or four-wheel drive, so he had insisted they take his. He'd meant the best; he really had.

As they passed Ormann Field on the far side of Colby, though, Dan's car shivered in the snow. They got a mile or so farther down the road and then rolled to a stop.

Dan was not inclined to panic, but feeling control of the car slip away from him in the whiteout made him distinctly uneasy; it didn't help that the snow immediately began to pile with almost unnatural quickness on the hood of the car.

“Dammit.” He was also not, as inclinations go, particularly interested or skilled in the mechanical workings of cars, which he felt now was coming back to bite him. He scanned the dashboard to see if any lights were flashing, but nothing indicated a problem. The car had jerked a little as if the anti-lock brake system had detected a patch of ice, then just rolled to a stop.

He braced himself. Jessica would have something to say. She always did. It would be his fault, as nearly everything that afternoon apparently was. She wouldn't even have to voice the blame; it would be dripping all over her tone.

He tried the key in the ignition. The car wouldn't start. The engine wouldn't even turn over. He tried again: no dice.

“Dammit,” he said louder, pounding a hand on the steering wheel. He sat a minute, then tried the ignition again. Nothing happened. He figured it could be the battery; maybe the cold had affected it somehow. . . .

Jessica frowned in his periphery. “Did you run out of gas?”

Dan cast a frustrated glance in her direction. “Of course not. Look—it's at half a tank still.”

“Well,” she returned his irritation, “maybe the battery froze. Or something is wrong with the engine. Aren't you supposed to run it to keep it going in the winter? I mean, I don't know. I'm not a mechanic.”

“Obviously,” he muttered under his breath, yanking on his gloves. He flipped up the hood with a switch beneath the dashboard and opened the car door. A frigid blast of air stabbed into the car's interior. “Be right back. Stay here.” He slid out into the snowfall and slammed the door.

* * *

While he was gone, Jessica waited in the car, steaming the windows with her irritation. She could catch dark glimpses of Dan's coat through the blizzard as he made his way to the front of the car, brushed the snow off it with his sleeve, and popped the hood. She couldn't see him at all then, and could hear nothing but the creaking of the wind and the chuffing of the snow. It made her feel nettled. She didn't like the idea of being left alone in the passenger seat, with him doing God-knew-what to the insides of the car in some half-assed attempt at being Mr. Fix-it. She took her cell out of her purse with half a mind to just call Triple-A, but a sound outside, louder than the storm, made her jump. It had sounded like a heavy thump against the outside of her car door. She waited, listening, and thought she heard, though she couldn't be sure, something like glass scratching against metal.

“Dan?” Her voice barely broke a whisper; she shook her head and buzzed the power window down. A gust of snow-choked air smacked her face. She grimaced against it and stuck her head out the window. “Dan? Dan!”

Her hand found the door handle and hesitated. She shielded her eyes against the wind and snow as best she could and looked out into the darkness, but could see nothing. She looked down, scanning the snow drift piling up against her door for whatever could have made the banging and scraping sounds. She saw nothing.

“Dan!” she shouted, but in reply, there was only a rush of snow and ice in her eyes and down her throat, and suddenly close behind her, that metallic whine of glass on metal.

The cold formed a hard lump around the panic in her gut, and she turned her head slowly toward the source of the sound.

What she saw set loose a scream from her that the wind matched, picked up, and carried away.

* * *

Dan swore into the wind. Whatever was wrong with the car, it was far beyond his limited knowledge. No loose wires or burnt-out spark plugs. In fact, the engine was still giving off heat, so he couldn't imagine the cold had done any damage. As far as he could tell, the battery was fine, but what the hell did he know? He was no mechanic, either.

His fingers throbbed beneath the gloves, and his toes felt like they had been shoved between sharp rocks. He'd always had poor circulation in his hands and feet, and so had little tolerance for the cold weather. He'd only gotten out to look under the car's hood to get away from Jessica for a minute. She could get on his nerves like nobody else, and while he liked her in some ways, she often made him want to smack that expression of smug satisfaction in her own good looks and charms right off her face. He'd done a lot for her because of those looks and what those charms promised, and over the last month or so, it had not proved worth the headaches she caused him.

He slammed down the hood and huddled into his coat. He'd have Jessica call AAA. Hell, she probably already had the cell phone out, and if she wasn't on the phone arranging for someone to come get them already, then she was biding her time, bitching to friends over texts, until he came back and she could make a big show of calling for a tow.

Dan's overhead light was busted, so when he opened the door, it remained dark. He slid in, fully expecting an onslaught of criticism. He didn't notice the blood until he turned toward the unexpected silence.

Jessica was gone. Her purse lay open on the floor. On the seat where she'd been, the cracked screen of her crushed cell phone offered pale slivers of light and darkness as it sat in a small puddle of congealing blackness.

“Jess?” A cloying coppery smell came from the passenger seat, from that puddle.
Blood?
When a gust of wind brought snow through her open window, Dan caught a whiff of something else. It was a sour smell he couldn't place, but it reminded him of the way one's fingers smelled after touching a metallic surface in a public place—layers of other people's skin oils, dirty metal, germs, or how he imagined petting-zoo animals might smell after they di—

A high-pitched wail carried over the wind, scraping across his bones so that the hairs on his arms and neck stood on end.

Something was outside in the snow.

Outside—where he had just been, alone and completely unaware.

Dan pushed the window button just enough to buzz the passenger window all the way up, cutting off the cold, and then locked the doors. He peered cautiously from one dark pane to another, trying to make out what might be out there. The flakes of snow and ice brushed and slapped against the window like a thousand tiny fingertips trying to get in.

It occurred to him then that if the power windows had worked—for Jess when she'd lowered the window, and again for him when he raised it back up again—then that had to mean the car had at least
some
power somewhere, maybe enough to get it going again. He tried the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. Dan swore softly. What was going on? Should he go back out there and try to find Jess? He glanced again at the puddle of blood on the passenger seat, and decided a search for her would be moot. She couldn't leave that much blood behind and still be alive, could she?

He heard the wail again, closer this time, although he couldn't tell exactly which direction it was coming from. He whispered Jessica's name and realized he hadn't really made a sound. His heart pounded loudly in his ears.

A thump on the hood rattled the car, and Dan fought the urge to cry out. Through the ice-crusted windshield, he could see a shape, or at least, the occasional outline of a shape, sometimes dark and sometimes almost nonexistent. It slapped an enormous . . . paw—or claw?—onto the windshield, and Dan flinched. He could make out what looked like three unusually long, multi-segmented fingers with curving black talons. Their points screeched against the glass as whatever those fingers belonged to moved around on the hood of the car.

He could run, but how far, and for how long? Even if he stayed on the road instead of saving time by cutting through the woods, it was a whiteout out there. It was dark now, and cold enough that if he lost his bearings in the snow storm, he could very well freeze to death even with a heavy coat.

And those circumstances ignored the most glaring and immediate problem—the one which now scrabbled up the windshield. Dan had one brief, sickening glimpse of gangly, nearly translucent legs and animal feet, each with three long, taloned toes.

A thump and steel groan from the roof of the car made him jump. Over the wind, Dan heard the thing wail in frustration as it clawed at the car.

He dug his phone out of his pocket and then swore, fighting the urge to slam it against the dashboard. It had died an hour ago. He looked reluctantly at Jessica's phone, sitting in the congealing puddle of her blood. He didn't want to touch it or, by any extension, touch the horrible thing that had happened to her. Another thump from outside, however, decided for him. He took a deep breath, let it out in a cool white puff, and snatched the phone. The screen was cracked, and when he tried to turn it on, it stuck on the brand logo for a bit and then faded to black. He tried again, but couldn't even access her password screen. Disgusted, he tossed it back onto the passenger seat. He plugged his own into the car charger, hoping there might be just enough juice somewhere in the car to power it back up. The thing on the roof wailed into the wind. Dan was going to die in that car, alone in the snowy dark....

Think
. His stomach lurched, and he fought the rising gorge of panic in his throat. He could stay in the car. Whatever that was out there, it didn't seem to be able to get in, so maybe he could wait it out. Maybe it would get frustrated and go away.

He glanced at Jessica's seat again, at the blood, and felt his stomach twist in fresh knots. That thing had probably been going for him, until she'd opened the window. Why had she opened it? Why had she gotten in its way? He mashed away the beginning of tears with his fist. God only knew what that thing had done to Jessica—he didn't really want to think about it. But if it had eaten her (his own stomach cramped at the thought), then maybe it would go away.

And just what the fuck was that thing out there, anyway? His bet was on some military experiment gone wrong, some kind of biological or zoological warfare that had gotten too powerful and too unpredictable to control. Shit like that was always going down in quiet little nowhere towns like Colby.

Dan shivered, clapping his hands together and blowing on the stiffening tips of his fingers. He hated the cold. He tried to think about anything else besides the dropping temperature inside the car and the nightmare thing outside on top of it. He was sure the two were related—that thing trying to claw through the roof of his car had caused snow in May, or the weather anomaly had spawned the thing, a military weather/monster experiment or whatever that had eaten his girlfriend.

Every ten or fifteen minutes that passed, Dan found himself checking the ignition. His fingers ached, and his toes felt like hard glass, fragile enough to send shards of pain across his feet every time he tried to stamp some circulation back into them. The accumulated heat from the interior had completely dissipated, and if he couldn't start the engine, he'd freeze inside the car just as easily as out on the road. He had to work at keeping his teeth from chattering. He felt cold all over.

But . . . somebody somewhere had to know Colby was screwed with snow and snow monsters, right? So, where were the police? Where were the firefighters and EMTs and the fucking National Guard? He blew on his fingers again, rubbing them futilely, and flinched at a thump above his head. No doubt people in charge of these kinds of situations, military or SWAT or whatever, were in a (warm) room somewhere planning how to make the Colby problem go away. They had to be.

Not that their deliberations would do him much good right now.

A strained part of his brain, the part that had calculated the probability of freezing to death and then being eaten in his future, found it all kind of funny. Yeah, somebody somewhere had a plan, all right. The government would come in and drop bombs and wipe Colby, its townspeople, and the military's snowbound mistake right off the goddamned planet.

He started giggling then, and was frightened by the thin, crazed, manic quality it had in his own ears. His teeth began chattering, and he found he didn't have the strength to stop it. The chattering spread to his whole body until he was shaking. This made him feel a little warmer—not enough to be comfortable, but enough to set off an alarm in his head. He'd heard somewhere that one of the final signs of hypothermia was a kind of numb warmth, sometimes even an unbearable heat, just before death. Was this how it started? Was he starting to freeze to death?