White Space

“Just a second.” Dead ahead, the pudding that remained of Father Preston was still SMEE-smeeing over the windscreen. She wondered what they could possibly be rebuilding themselves into. The snowcat’s auger had chopped the priest to hamburger. Could all those pieces be finding their way back together again? How could you kill something that kept regrowing like those nematodes Rima had sliced and diced in eighth-grade science?

Betcha fire would do it. Steeling herself, she worked her way around the driver’s side transmission box. Cook those suckers.

Then she forgot all that, pushed it away as irrelevant, when she got a good look at Tania’s face. The girl’s skin was the color of cottage cheese, and her lids drooped, the whites showing in half-moons. Her ruined right arm was dusky, and her lips were purple. She wasn’t breathing. Blood saturated her clothing and had gathered in a crimson lake on Tania’s seat, spilling over into the foot well.

“Rima?” Casey called.

“Just … just give me a second.” She closed her eyes against the prick of tears. Come on; do what you have to. Steeling herself, she opened her eyes, blew out a hard breath, then touched her fingers to the angle of Tania’s jaw below her left ear.

A second later, over the sudden slam of her heart, she heard Casey: “Rima?” When she didn’t answer, Eric said, more sharply, “Rima, what’s wrong?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Look at her face.”

RIMA Doomsday Sky

1

RIMA! RIMA! SOMEONE … Casey … was shouting, and now another voice, Eric’s, joined his, both boys screaming from the back of the passenger cab and a million miles away: Rima, get down, get down, get out of the way!

But she couldn’t move. She was beyond shock, into deepfreeze. Her body was icy, numb, like that little kid with the splinters of an evil mirror in his heart and eyes; a child fit only for the world of the Snow Queen. Rooted in place, she could only stare at Tania, her face, her neck, and if she thought at all in those first few seconds, it wasn’t in words so much as sensations: the skip of her heart, the slickness of new alien blood on her fingers, the hard scent of iron and blasted flesh and spent gunpowder, the airless dead space in her lungs as they emptied.

And the boys, of course, still screaming from so far away: Rima, Rima, get down!

Tania’s throat and face were moving, not twitching but undulating and worming as something eeled just beneath the surface, the suddenly elastic skin puffing and then deflating, over and over again, as if Tania were growing gills. Trickles of black leaked from the dead girl’s nose and dribbled out of both ears. Fat, ebony pearls swelled from the half-moons of her eyes. A deep ripple worked its way across Tania’s face from right to left, from one cheek to the opposite, skimming under and lifting Tania’s lips as if the girl were dragging a thick, fleshy tongue over and around her teeth.

Tania’s mouth suddenly sagged, the jaws unlocking—and at that, Rima’s brain eked a single, small oh. Then she blanked, her mind blinkering white with terror as a nightmare of legs, jointed and bristled as a tarantula’s, unfurled from Tania’s lips like the spiky petals of an alien rose. Deep in the heart of this bizarre flower, two sets of long, pointed fangs clashed, working from side to side like a spider’s mandibles, grating together with a coarse rasp, like the grind of metal files.

Rima felt a crack of horror, like a jag of lightning, scorch through her mind to burn from her mouth in a high, terrified scream as Tania’s eyes snapped open. The whites were a jet-black sea of hemorrhage. The pupils belonged to a lizard, a snake, the vertical slits narrowing as Tania let go of a shrill, chittering squeal.

“Rima!” There came a hard jolt as someone crashed into her from behind, a solid body blow that knocked her to one side. Panicked, taken by surprise, she flailed, but Casey grabbed her arms and then he was bullying her back, slamming her flat against a far wall, covering her up, using his weight to hold her in place, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot it, Eric, shoot it!”