Cold Fury (34 page)
Authors: T. M. Goeglein
Tags: #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Law & Crime, #Love & Romance
The ice cream truck’s engine revved.
“Well, guess what. I’m going to do it to you first!”
The little machine trembled, dying to burst forward.
“I’m going to rip those bloodred peepers right out of your mime face and crush them in my hands like two rotten cherries!”
And then the back tires squealed as it barreled straight for me—twenty feet, fifteen feet, ten—and when it was close enough to see the thing’s bluish lips screwed into a smile, I smiled back, extended a middle finger, and stepped between the girders, falling and snagging a cable in one motion. The truck roared above me, its brakes complaining loudly, searching for traction, but the slick girders rejected them. I hauled myself up just in time to see the truck narrowly miss the Lincoln as it spun around, its back wheels sliding over the edge of the bridge and coming to a precarious, tilting halt. I sprinted for it, determined to shove it into space, but a gentle gust of wind blew past, the truck teetered once, and it was gone. I heard it hit the river before I saw it, and when I looked over the edge, it was submerged with only the windshield visible.
Cold brown water flooded the truck.
The creature stared up at me, clawing at the seat belt, convulsing like it was in an electric chair, trying to scream as its mouth filled with water.
The river covered its face, the red eyes flickered once, and it sank slowly away with Frank Sinatra burbling to silence.
I rose to my feet watching an eruption of fat belching bubbles and stringy motor oil, feeling nothing but disappointment. If I’d been cagier about following
it—
or if that unyielding last chapter in the notebook,
Volta,
would only reveal its secrets—maybe I wouldn’t be where I was now, at a literal dead end. I sighed and turned from the river as something shiny a few feet away caught my eye. I moved forward and picked up a small ice cream cone hewn from silver. It was the size of a Dixie cup, its conical shape crisscrossed by a waffle pattern. Pinkish remnants clung to the inside and a broken chain hung from the outside. It must have been the object hanging at the creature’s neck, the thing from which it lapped up the disgusting soft serve. I turned the silver cone carefully as the sun revealed an engraving.
“Soy belleza y belleza es yo,”
I read aloud, thankful to Fep Prep for two years of Spanish. “I am beauty and . . .”
“Beauty is me,” a voice whispered.
I jumped back, shocked at the creature nearby, its eyes on the cone in my hand. The ghostly thing looked down at the tire tracks made by the truck in its futile attempt to stop and followed them to the edge, peering at the oil slick on the water’s surface. I noticed something different about its face—the shape of its forehead, a smaller nose—and that its sexless model body was dry. It was like seeing tiny discrepancies in one third of identical triplets, and I realized that the creature from my house, the thing at the bottom of the river, and the one standing next to me were three similar but different Ice Cream Creatures. Its jaws constricted as a red line appeared beneath its eye and a bloody tear cut across its snowy cheek. “You killed beauty,” it whispered.
“I didn’t . . .”
“You killed
my
beauty
!” it shrieked, and I gagged a little, looking at gray stumps where teeth had been and a tongue as slick-black as the truck. Seeing that awful mouth, a blip of awareness crossed my mind—to be in such an awful state of decay, the person inside the black suit had to be severely disconnected from society and bereft of people who cared about it. The thing was shaking so violently that the silver ice cream cone at its neck danced across its chest. I looked past it at the truck parked at the bottom of the bridge—I hadn’t heard it approach—and knew now that it had never been only one creature pursuing me, but at least three, and maybe more. I also realized that whatever they’d been to one another—siblings, friends, something else—they’d loved one another. When I looked back, the thing’s eyes were attached to mine—I’d already begun to think of it as Teardrop—and what I saw in them was different from its dead partners, who had faced me with the detachment of hunters. On the contrary, Teardrop simmered with malice and revenge, and I didn’t have time to lift a hand before it sprinted the short length between us and punched me in the face. I staggered to my feet, feeling like I’d been hit by Mike Tyson at his baddest. It was too strong and fast for a thing that belonged on a Fashion Week runway, which meant it was fueled by insanity, chemicals, or both. Its drowned partner slurped soft serve before trying to run me down, and I wondered only briefly what was in that shit before Teardrop charged me. I couldn’t deploy ghiaccio furioso
against it, but the flame leapt nonetheless, and I put it into my left hook. Teardrop caught my fist, squeezing like a vise, crushing bone. It was plain I couldn’t defeat the thing as I swayed, enervated and limp. For the first time, cold fury left my gut, jumping to my chest, needling into my brain, and I saw my own worst fear.
It was my parents and Lou alone in an empty room.
Their throats were cut with eyes wide open.
Vacantly, they stared at the end of the world.
Reality and fear melded into one dark thing and I had no ability to convince myself the image was anything but real—they were dead, and now something inside of me was being murdered, Outfit style.
It was love for my family, the living thing in my soul that drove me ever onward to find and save them.
Now it was as dead as they were, and I owed them nothing but to avenge their murder
with
murder. A line of electricity zigzagged out of my brain, finding the conductive flecks of gold floating in my blue eyes. I was vibrating with hellish potency that made me want to kill Teardrop because I was wired to kill things just like it. My left hook failed but I still had my right, and I connected to its face with what felt like a thousand deadly volts. The thing went into the air and skidded onto its back, rigid and unmoving. I strode to it, determined to crush its bleached face like a rotten egg, and brought my heel down against its cheekbone, hearing it splinter and crack, the sound filling me with morbid pleasure. I lifted my foot, ready to do it again, harder, when the electricity buzzed once, the headache dissipated, and I thought,
What the hell am I doing?!
I lowered my foot, covered my mouth, and slowly backed away. It was the chance I’d hoped for,
to
capture a creature, right at my fingertips. The thing was subdued, nearly unconscious—with a bit more wisely dispensed violence, I could force it to take me to Mister Kreamy Kone headquarters.
Instead I fled.
All of the emotion I’d been drained of came flooding back like a tsunami, smothering me with fear, drowning my priorities, and I sprinted to the Lincoln. Speeding away toward the safest place I could think of, I whispered aloud a silly little term so terrifyingly saccharine that it made me shiver. The creepiest things in the world lurk beneath a veneer of sweetness, like murderous clowns, like possessed dolls.
Like Ice Cream Creatures.
