After three minutes of shoveling, he was puffing; by ten, his muscles screamed. He kept hoping the work would dull him out, but Tony’s mind just wouldn’t quit. How had Rima known about his mother? How could she?
Almost a year gone by and his mother’s death still felt like a slow nightmare, the kind where you’re running in place from a monster with a million eyes, spiky teeth, and a zillion tentacles. Tony got so he hated mornings, because that meant one more day watching his mother get eaten up alive. Lung cancer gutted her, chewed her up inside, until she was nothing more than a papery husk of skin stitched over brittle bone. She reeked: an eye-watering fog of rot and shit and sour vomit. Whenever she coughed, he kept expecting bloody hunks of gnawed lung or liver or intestine to come flying out of her mouth. She always wanted a kiss, too. He couldn’t say no; he wasn’t a monster; he loved her. Yet no matter how much he washed his teeth afterward, her taste stayed with him. Got so bad he wanted to rip off his lips, tear out his tongue. Forget food.
Come to think of it, wasn’t that when he’d started in with the horror comics, the Lovecraft? Yeah, had to be, because that’s when he’d brought home the Twisted Tales Casey had been thumbing through, and Tony knew that because of what happened when his preacher-dad got on him to make time for God. The second story in the comic was about a platoon fighting off this giant rat, only the soldiers turned out to be toys. So when his dad started in, Tony showed him the story: Dad, you ever stop to think that maybe God’s just a kid and we’re the dolls? That shut his dad up good.
His mom finally, finally died a week before Christmas. As soon as the principal showed up in his chem class, Tony knew. He’d driven home, taking it as slowly as he could. There would be people at the house: the deacon and pastor, probably a gaggle of church auxiliary ladies trying to find room in the freezer for the ten trillion casseroles sure to turn up. Would his mother still be there? Or would they have taken her to the funeral home already? He hoped they had. He didn’t need to say good-bye. Her dying had been the longest good-bye of his life.
On the way, he passed a burger place, and he was suddenly, inexplicably starved. So he pulled in. Ten o’clock in the morning, and he couldn’t cram in the onion rings fast enough.
Three blocks from home, he pulled over just in time to vomit everything into the gutter. He vomited so hard, and for so long, that he thought his stomach would fly out of his mouth and land with a squishy splat. When he finally lurched into the house, which reeked of Kraft macaroni and cheese, his father was too deep into his own grief to ask Tony where he’d been, and Tony saw no reason to volunteer.
For the next two weeks, he endured meaningful looks, mournful sighs, and a steady stream of people who were just so sorry. The church ladies brought over so much tuna fish casserole he kept expecting his shit to squirm with cheesy noodles.
But his mother was gone. No viewing, no open casket. He never saw her again, and he was so frigging relieved, he knew God would hate him forever.
Now, here was proof. There was a dead girl out there. His car was useless. They were stuck in the snow, far away from anyone who might help them.
And now Rima had touched him and stroked the nightmare to life.
2
NEARLY AN HOUR later, they were done. Tony was drenched in sweat, but now that he’d stopped moving, he could feel his clothes stiffening as his sweat began to freeze. “Let’s go back and crank on some heat. Then we can deal with the sled.”
“Fine with me.” Steam rose from Casey’s watch cap in curls, which the wind shredded. “What about the van?”
Tony tossed a glance over his shoulder toward the general direction of the spruce grove. Maybe fifty, sixty yards, and nothing to see, not even the suggestion of trees. Slogging through the deep snow would be a complete hassle, and he was tired, scared, and not exactly thrilled with the idea of rooting around a dead girl. Yet he had promised, and it wasn’t as if Rima didn’t have a good point about food. Tony turned the flashlight back to study the trail they’d broken through the snow and all around the Camry. Their tracks were already filling, an inch of new snow dusted the hood, and the wind had thrown two or three more inches onto the trunk. If this kept up, they might be at this all night. Wait too long and digging out the van could take hours.
“I’ll check it out. Take me fifteen minutes,” he said. “You get warm.”
With the balaclava, Casey’s face held about as much expression as Jason’s, only Jason’s hockey mask was white. “If we can’t see the van, you won’t be able to see us.”
“I’ll look every couple yards and make sure I still can, okay? If I lose you, I won’t go any further.”
“Whatever,” Casey said, already turning away. “Your funeral.”
ERIC
Devil Dog
1
SHE’D LOST HER gloves somewhere along the way, so Eric had taken Emma’s icy hands and thrust them beneath his parka. Body heat, he’d explained; keep them out of the wind. Her hands were still there, but warm now, her long fingers laced over his stomach. Her chest spooned his back. Eric liked how that felt—as if her touch was a kind of promise.
Emma’s voice fizzed through his headset, “What are you thinking?”
About how good you feel. How I like that we kind of fit together. How I think we could talk about things. “I’m thinking it’s weird,” he said, swiping a thin rime of fresh snow from his plastic visor. Thank God, he’d found the faceplate before he and Casey ventured into the valley. With this wind and cold, driving the sled without one would’ve been impossible. At bare minimum, his nose would have fallen off, and he’d be looking at some serious frostbite.
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “Something’s … off. You know?”
She was right. The turnoff Tony and Rima described was a half mile back of the wreck. There’d been tire tracks, but the storm reduced their speed to a crawl, and eventually, the tracks were no more than suggestions. They’d been about to turn back when Emma spied a slight silver smudge in the distance that grew brighter and more distinct as they approached, still using the truck’s tracks as a guide. Fifteen miles from the turnoff, those furrows took a sharp dogleg left at a mailbox nailed to a post and so lathered with snow they couldn’t make out the name. Eric didn’t care. A mailbox meant a house, and that meant people.
The driveway was long. Two miles and change, according to Eric’s odometer, which was … a little odd, but people did like to spread out in the country. Then the silver smudge suddenly resolved to an actual light—and became a farm.