Chills (7 page)

She pushed the down button on the elevator panel, and when the doors slid open, she slipped inside. Already, the part of her that functioned on pure animal instinct was on high alert; she sensed something she couldn't quite put a finger on, a kind of dread whose source was still unknown. She didn't like it.

She noticed in her periphery as she hurried across the lobby that there was no nurse at the front desk. It was weird, but fine with her; she felt a distinct need to avoid human interactions at that moment, even of the most passing kind. She had to get out of there, back to the familiar boxy security of her own car. She'd had enough of hospitals and the dangerous ends of crazy people for one day.

That animal part of her knew, though, that the day wasn't over. Her gut feeling might have been based on nothing more than shadows and the earnestness in Charlene's voice, but Kathy trusted those gut instincts.

There
had
been something at the window—something obviously not human and probably not even animal. Something
big
.

She thought about what Charlene had told her about the cleansing phase and the servants of the greater gods. Part of Kathy's job was to weed through what people like Charlene said for strands of truth or fact. She sifted for useful tidbits of occult belief that corresponded to actual things or events, or that guided and therefore helped predict pathological behavior. That Charlene was such a shell of a person now compared to what she must have once been was both a tragedy and a relief; it was unsettling to watch anyone die slowly of intellectual malnutrition in the deserted wasteland of a broken mind, but if there was even a speck of truth to what the HBS believed, then thank whatever good God existed that there was one less competent person to bring their plans to fruition.

And just how much of it was true? Kathy had always thought that what passed for HBS occult theology was mostly mumbo jumbo, the usual flawed nihilistic philosophy mixed with folklore. But . . . maybe not all of it. Not this time. Despite Charlene's obvious limitations, she had held a position of some power in the HBS and knew what she was talking about, at least so far as their gods and monsters went. Charlene understood the motives of the cult because she believed in them, and knew the practices of the cult because she'd once led them. She believed on good authority, then, that the cult intended to wipe out all of Colby with . . . entities from some other dimension. And frankly, the whipping icy wind and snow outside bore out her story. Kathy had been in the occult business long enough to have had the occasional brush with the unexplainable, the unarguably supernatural, and, once in a while, the flat-out evil. And as she rushed through the double doors, which whooshed open and then closed behind her, cutting off any last warmth or fortress-like security, she shivered. She was fairly certain that whatever had been outside that hospital room window trying to get in, whatever had sent Charlene into such a frenzy, was going to fall into one, if not all, of those categories.

She had to see. She had to know.

When she swung out into the snow blanketing the empty grounds, she made her way around the building to the side where Charlene's room was. It was out of view of the street for the most part, facing a barren lot that had already accumulated a thick carpet of snow. It had grown dark, but surprisingly, there were no doctors, no patients making their way to and from the building, no EMTs in ambulances. There was nothing alive as far as she could see, except for her . . . and the giant creature scaling the side of the hospital's mental health ward in the moonlight.

“Oh fuck no,” she whispered.

It was big, easily the size of a pickup truck. Its body reminded her very much of scorpions, with dark, shiny segments, like large plates of black ice, forming the better portion of its back and the upward curve of its pick-like tail. Four pairs of jointed legs moved the thing with surprising speed over the ice and snow that clung to the side of the hospital. But that was where the similarity to anything Kathy had ever seen ended. A number of muscular, waving tendrils snaked out ahead from the front of the body, seeming to somehow sniff or feel the air. Above and behind them, the body curved upward in a stalk-like neck banded with the same slender muscles, surmounted by a head like a floral bloom knocked on its side; the rather elliptical bulb tapered into tightly entwined petals. When it sensed her, perhaps hearing her footsteps, those petals unraveled with disconcerting speed and bloomed open to reveal a deep, ruddy interior studded with silvery teeth spiraling down into the yawning chasm of the throat. It screamed, that high-pitched sound reminiscent of metals scraping together, and one of those long, silvery-black tentacles snapped with an electric white spark in her direction.

She flinched. The biting cold scraped across her skin. The snow around her boots sank its wet and cold into her feet.

Every part of her wanted to run, to scream, to draw some other human's attention to the thing to prove that what she was seeing wasn't some stress-hallucination. But some primal instinct, perhaps tinged with training or experience with predators, kept her still. The creature's feelers waved and snapped over her head as if blindly groping for her. It could smell her, perhaps, with those odd feelers, but it didn't seem able to locate her. She took a chance of glancing quickly back toward the front of the hospital to gauge the distance to her car in the parking lot. When her head snapped back to the thing sloughing snow as it moved across the wall, its feelers were reaching closer but were still off course. Slowly, she sank straight down and scooped up a handful of icy snow. She packed it into a hard little ball as she rose again. The muscles in her legs and back strained to move as imperceptibly as possible. The thing didn't seem to notice. With a quick flick of the wrist, she tossed the snowball as far from her as she could. Immediately the feelers strained in that direction, the petals of its mouth parting just enough to release a steely whine.

So that was it, then. It could likely sense sound or movement, and maybe even smell the presence of something, but it couldn't see her, at least not in the way she thought of seeing.

Still . . . how fast could it move? What were the odds she could outrun it to her car or, having accomplished that, outdrive it?

It was then that she heard laughter. Immediately, the thing on the side of the building twittered and spidered its way a few feet along the wall toward the ground. The moonlight rippled over the plates of its back.

Oh God, no, nonono
, she thought.

She turned slowly, aware that the feelers, reaching for the source of the voices, were waving right over her head now. Across the street, a twenty-something with a blond bun and a conservative blue dress was walking arm in arm with a young man who looked to Kathy like a member of the Young Republicans.

Kathy made a move in their direction, and immediately the feelers snapped back toward her. She stopped, holding her breath and then letting it out slowly. She had a .45 in her car; even though she was no longer with the Bureau, she had kept up her firearms license. But her car was a good sprint away, and the snow would slow her down. And a gun was no guarantee anyway; those back plates looked pretty thick. Maybe its underside was a vulnerability, but—

While Kathy was considering her options, the thing on the hospital wall skittered around to the front of the building.

“Shit!” she whispered, and loped over the snow drifts after it. When it came into view, she froze again, glancing slowly across the street to the couple. The man held out his key fob as they were walking, and the
boop-boop
of the unlocking mechanism was followed by the flashing of headlights from a car about two hundred feet away.

The creature let out an ear-piercing whine and jumped down onto the snow. Its feet, Kathy noticed, didn't sink as she would have expected with the obvious weight of the thing. Instead, it skittered across the ice and snow as easily as it had scaled the side of the hospital building. Fixated as it was on the couple, the thing paid no attention to Kathy, and so she detoured toward her car, grasping for the driver-side door handle just as the thing reached the middle of the street. The couple had reached theirs as well, and it was when the woman opened the passenger-side door that she saw the creature bearing down on them. Her scream echoed down the empty street.

Kathy dove across the driver's seat to the glove compartment and grabbed her gun as the man's screams joined the woman's. She opened the passenger door, aimed as best she could at what she thought was the underside of the thing, and fired. It wailed, a bloom of white opening up where she hit it, and the feelers lashed out wildly in multiple directions.

The wound didn't slow the creature down, though. It climbed partially onto the hood of the car and shattered the windshield with a leg, spearing the man through the chest as he cowered behind the wheel. Kathy fired again, but the creature moved and the shot glanced off its back plates. Another bullet tore into its leg, and for a moment, Kathy had hope as the thing wobbled and slid along the car hood. Then it regained its balance. The woman cried out as the creature's tail dove straight for her. When it rose again, Kathy could see the woman dangling from the spiked end of the tail like a limp rag doll, the blood surrounding the hole in her gut soaking her top, raining down, and staining the snow beneath her.

Kathy yanked the passenger door shut and sat up, then slammed the driver's door closed as well. She started the car just as the creature down the street managed to shake the woman free of its tail. It withdrew its leg and turned toward her.

“Let's go, bitch,” she muttered, half to herself and half to the thing as she threw the car in drive and peeled out of the lot. She tore down the street, fishtailing at the corner as she made a left, but she barely let off the gas. Behind her, the thing screeched, and that screeching kept up with her, though she could make out no crunching of snow. It had to be practically flying over the drifts, closing the gap between them. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw it leap into the air. She slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the car jerked just out of reach as the thing landed behind her. The tail came down, breaking the ice-crusted layer of snow along the curb behind her. Kathy fixed her gaze on the road ahead. She turned off on one of the country roads, a back way to get to Colby, along which she felt fairly certain she could keep the thing away from anyone else. The creature followed. The road, flanked by thick woods on both sides, was a strip of darker white amidst growing mounds of glistening snow. Occasionally, the thing behind her grabbed hold of trunks or branches and swung from one to another, closing the distance between them. She couldn't see the center line or even a good portion of the pavement. There were no streetlights on the road, either, so only her headlight beams, twin arms of amber-white glow, reached into the darkness ahead of her. Occasionally, the overhanging tree branches pulled back and the moon reminded her that she had not fallen off into an endless void. That, and the metallic squeal of the thing gaining on her.

A tail or leg—Kathy had not seen which—shaved the side of her car, furrowing through paint and metal and jerking her to the left. She nearly lost control of the wheel but compensated quickly, swerving toward the left to put space between her car and the creature.

Then she hit a patch of ice. The tires slid, tractionless, toward a snow bank ahead and to the right. Panic welled up into her throat, threatening to choke her, but she swallowed it down. She pumped the brakes, cut the wheel into the skid, and regained control, pulling the car back onto the road just seconds before it would have buried its front end into the snow drift.

The creature behind her wailed into the wind and dove forward.

A half-obscured sign that swam up in her headlights told her the center of town and the police station were seven miles away. Almost there . . .

A terrible rending sound, followed by the sudden descent of a leg into her back seat, sent her on another skid. The creature was above her now, on the roof of the car. She could hear the groaning of metal and the scraping sounds of its other legs as it sought a way to hold on. Feelers smacked against the windshield; one took hold of a wiper blade and wrenched it free. Kathy screamed, as much out of anger as fear. She hit the brakes, hoping the sudden stop would throw the thing, but this sent the car spinning in circles. The feelers clamped down on the frame of the car; against her windshield, she could see small suckers like tiny, hungry mouths slurping at the glass.

She cut the wheel again, trying to stop the spin—hoping, even praying a little, that she could get the car moving forward again.

The back end of the car hit the post of a sign that said the police station was now only three miles out of reach, and miraculously, the car righted itself, nose pointing in the direction of the town center.
Thank the universe,
she thought,
for small favors.
Within seconds, she was moving again, but the thing was still latched on to the roof of her car like a barnacle

The car was coming up on a bridge over a small pond, not terribly high but high enough to warrant care when crossing. The county had never gotten around to replacing the wooden guardrail with a metal one. It was a lonely bridge on a county back road hardly anyone ever took; that it had even been kept up with as well as it had was enough to let county officials sleep at night.

It was pitch black over the side of that bridge, and the water cold enough, Kathy imagined, to stop a heart. A glance down at her steering wheel, though, and a scream from above her as another leg tried to puncture the roof made the decision for her. She clicked on her seat belt.

With its leg firmly embedded into the back seat of her car, Kathy floored it and cut the wheel. The wooden guardrail splintered on impact with her bumper, and as the car sailed off the bridge, it hit a patch of moonlight in midair and then slammed through the first layer of ice on the pond.