White Space

HANG ON. TOO far away to help when he’d spotted the man-thing breaking into the snowcat’s passenger cabin, Casey was closer now, running as fast as he could, grimacing at the grab and tear in his chest, trying to look everywhere at once, the pain stinging his veins. Thirty more yards, twenty, ten …

A howl blasted from the passenger cabin, followed by a shriek. No, God, please. “Rima!” Hooking one bloodstained hand on the jamb, he wheeled round and onto the steps, and then he was bursting through, bringing the shotgun to bear. “Rima! Get—”

The thing barreled into him. Crashing to the metal floor, Casey screamed as a swoop of pain churned through his chest. He made an instinctive move to cover up, protect himself, raise the shotgun, but the thing swatted the weapon away. Before he could do anything to save himself, the thing clamped its powerful hands around his throat and dug in.

No! Panicked, pulse galloping, fingers scrabbling for purchase over furry knuckles, Casey surged, tried bucking the man-thing off, but it was too heavy, and he was only sixteen, not very tall, and already hurt. The thing was shaking him hard enough that the back of his head thunked and clunked and bounced on metal. Losing it … His arms were going as limp as overdone noodles. Wavering blood-spiders unfurled in front of his eyes, his vision going blotchy before suddenly squeezing down to a pinprick: red spangles going to black, diminishing to a single bright speck, like the end of a very long tunnel. The world muted, flattened, and he thought, stupidly, of that deadening fog. And then even that was slipping away, and Casey saw nothing, couldn’t hear anything other than the feeble thump of his heart, and that was dying, too.

But then … something happened. He felt the thing jerk, but the sensation was very far away, a whisper that his brain didn’t seem to have the will or energy to hang on to. Another jerk, a faraway flop, the way a fish struggled to free itself from a hook.

All of a sudden, the pressure around his neck was gone.

He wasn’t thinking anymore, didn’t know what was going on. What happened next was instinct, reflex. He heard, very dimly, a tortured, wheezy caw, the rasping cry of a bird fighting the jaws of a cat with the last of its strength. A razor of cold air sliced his throat. In the next instant, his chest exploded a bright hot burn as his tortured lungs struggled to inflate. Casey’s eyes snapped open, unseeing, his vision still blinkered, patchy, and molten, and he began to retch. Gawping, he managed another stinging, croaking bird’s caw of a breath, and another—and then, above the thunder of blood in his ears, he made out a very strange sound: a hollow, dull thuck!

Running over pumpkins. The thought was hazy, hard to hang on to, like trying to cup a fine mist. Running over pumpkins on Halloween.

2

“AH!” RIMA SWUNG again, with both hands, bringing the hammer whizzing down. Its black claw whickered, cleaving air. She’d gotten it between the shoulders the first time and was aiming for the head now, but even hurt and surprised, the thing was fast. At the last second, it flinched away, and she missed, the claw whizzing past, pulling her off-balance. She stumbled, her right knee banging into an equipment locker. Gasping against a starburst of pain, she caught herself on her hands, the hammer gripped in her right hitting the lid with a dull clank. To her left, the man-thing let out a huge bellow that she felt, blasting over her back and humming through metal.

Stand up, get up! But she already knew she was too late. She was turned around, facing the wrong way. From the corner of her left eye, she saw the thing rearing up, large as a mountain. Shifting the hammer to her left hand, she put her weight into it, whipping the hammer around and up in a vicious slice.

The creature never saw it coming, and then, in the next instant, it couldn’t, at least not from that left eye. Rima felt the bone give as the claw slammed into the ridge above the socket. Gravity and momentum did the rest. Snagged on shattered bone and soft tissue, the claw tore out the socket. The eye burst in a sludgy spray of gelatinous yellow muck. Bawling with rage and new pain, the thing reeled, pawing at the ruin as snot-colored goo slithered down its snout.

She cringed back from the mess. She couldn’t help it; it was automatic, a reflexive moment of disgust and horror; and so she didn’t understand her mistake until a half second too late—because the thing still had that one good eye.

With a roar, the man-thing drove its fist, hard and fast as a piston. The blow slammed just above the bridge of her nose, and pain detonated in her forehead to spread in molten fingers. It felt like he’d broken every bone in her face. Her mind skipped a beat, and she stumbled, her consciousness suddenly slewing to one side like a car sliding off an icy cliff.