The End Is Now

George tried to stop shivering, but he couldn’t. Wind slid through the trees, drove the cold into him as if he wasn’t even wearing a snowsuit with the hood up over a hat, three sweaters, jeans over long johns, three pairs of socks, gloves and even a scarf wrapped tight around his nose and mouth. His hands felt like there was a steel vice on each knuckle of each finger, and the fingertips themselves stung like he’d sliced off the ends and dipped the raw stubs in battery acid.

And he’d only been outside for five minutes.

Forty below? Maybe worse than that, maybe far worse with the wind-chill factored in.

He followed the footsteps of his friends, mostly by feel because it was so dark. No porch light here, no stars; he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all if not for the barest glimmer from the covered moon turning the snow gray. He had a flashlight in a snowsuit pocket, but knew better than to use it.

Most people don’t know real cold, and most people also don’t know real snow. The kind of snow that piles up week after week, a crispy layer near the bottom with the hidden logs and sticks, a layer so firm that when you break through it and stagger on, sometimes your foot slides right out of your boot. Above that, the dense snowpack, then finally, on top, several inches of the fluffy stuff. Every step sank so deep he couldn’t quite raise his boot all the way out to take the next one. He was wading more than walking.

So dark. The woods were nothing but shadows holding aliens; they had to be out here somewhere, probably had already come out of the ship and were closing in. He should have stayed on the road, gotten out of there while he could, he—

“Georgie! Get over here!”

Bernie—the voice was so close. Shadows moved . . . just to the left, heads peeking up from behind a fallen tree, the trunk smooth and softened by snow.

George stumbled toward it, each step breaking through the crust and driving in with that Styrofoam-sounding crunch. He fell more than walked the last three feet. His friends caught him, pulled him down. His chest heaved, drawing icy knives deep into his lungs.

They huddled together out of a need for warmth, or maybe from pure fear.

Another crack, that thing coming through the woods.

George wiped his glove across his eyes, clearing away flakes that clung to his lashes. He rose up on his knees, peeked over the log. The cabin . . . it was so close. How could it be that close? It seemed like he’d been walking forever, each step a battle, but he hadn’t made it more than thirty or forty feet. He was close enough to see smoke slipping out of the thin stove-pipe, instantly ripped into the night by the unforgiving wind.

The cracking again, a branch giving way, maybe an entire tree. And a new sound, a grinding, like machinery that had seen better days. In the woods, a shape, a big shape, backlit by the ship’s red and green and blue lights.

George slipped back down. He looked to Arnold. Shivering Arnold, old Arnold. “Why?” George hissed. “Why didn’t we run?”

“IR,” Arnold said. “Like The Terminator.”

“Predator,” Bernie said. “Like Predator, Dad.”

Arnold’s body trembled horribly, like an invisible hand had him between giant fingers and was rattling him like some child’s toy.

“Heat . . . our heat,” he said. “If we hide behind a big log  . . . they won't see us.”

George stared, dumbfounded. They had followed this man here, because of that reasoning? They could have been a hundred yards down the road by now. Instead, they were closer to the oncoming threat.

Arnold—the man he’d once known only as Mister Ekola—had been their rock once, but now he was just a scared old man who had made a shitty decision based on a movie he couldn’t fully remember.

“Hey,” Jaco said. “Couldn’t Terminator see in infrared, too?”

Toivo and Bernie thought, then nodded. George wanted to punch them all right in the nose.

Over the wind’s scream, the cracking and grinding drew closer. George had a flash memory of a summer campfire some thirty years earlier, the night stars above, skin on his face and his toes and knees nearly burning because the closer you sat to the fire the less the mosquitoes and black flies bothered you. Mister Ekola, a flashlight under his chin casting strange shadows on his cheeks and eyes, telling a story of a killer with a limp. You knew this killer because of the sound, the thump-drag sound, a good foot stepping forward, then the slide of the bad foot following behind.

Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

George had told that same story to his sons. It had scared the hell out of them just like it had scared the hell out of him. And now, a version of that sound had him damn near pissing his pants, a version with the added tones of snapping branches and broken gears.

Thump, drag, crack-crack, snap . . . thump, drag, whir-snap, crack, whine . . .