The thing’s chest erupted in a liquid black halo. An oily rain of blood and mangled flesh sheeted over the walls and fell on Rima in a viscous shower. For a moment, she was too stunned to do anything, much less understand. The roar had been replaced by a muzzy, muffled hoosh, like water rushing past her ears. But then she felt something: a slick creep along her skin, a worming sensation over her clothes, eeling through her hair.
“Ahhh!” Rima clawed her way to her feet. To her left, the man-thing splayed, its chest replaced by a huge crater of obliterated bone and tissue. Frantic, she began swatting at the mucky bits of the monster’s flesh squirming over her chest and arms and hair. “Get off, get off, get them off!”
Through the hoosh, she heard someone say, “Rima, what is it?” Then: “Casey, are you … Jesus, what the hell?”
Still disoriented, she turned a wild look. An older boy, with dark hair and eerie blue eyes, crouched in the entrance to the passenger cab. Openmouthed, the boy stared at the wriggling bits and shivering globules of black blood. “My God, its chest,” the boy said. “It’s moving.”
“Re-repairing it-itself.” Her voice felt rusty, her tongue thick. From where she stood, Rim could see strings of the thing’s chest muscles nosing and then coiling together. Closing her eyes against a bolt of nausea, she pressed her trembling lips together and gulped against the sudden acid bite on her tongue. Something squiggled on her thigh, and she swatted it away in a fast sideswipe. The black slug of muscle sailed across the cabin to hit the far wall with a moist splot. For a second, it clung there, trembling as if trying to clear its head, before beginning a slow slither toward a neighboring splotch. She turned aside with a shudder. “Just like Father P-Preston.”
“Who?” Shotgun still in hand, the older boy was helping Casey ease to a sit against an equipment locker. “What’s going on? What is this thing?”
“D-don’t know.” Groaning, Casey clamped an arm to his left side. “My th-throat f-feels broken,” he croaked. “H-hurts to … ahhh!” He threw his head back as the other boy probed his chest, and Rima saw a necklace of purple-black bruises ringing Casey’s neck. “God, Eric, d-don’t.”
Eric. Of course, his name is Eric. He and Casey are brothers. She put a hand up to her throbbing forehead and felt the beginnings of a knot. Why couldn’t I remember? What’s wrong with me?
“I’m sorry, Case,” Eric said, calmly enough, although Rima saw a ripple of fear as the older boy touched a gentle hand to Casey’s bruised jaw. “My God, what happened to your face? Can you walk?”
“Y-yeah. It’s a long story.” Wincing, Casey backhanded a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Where’s Emma? How did you guys find us?”
“She’s back at this farmhouse we found. The fog pulled us here, me and these two guys out in the truck …” Eric made a face. “That sounds pretty nuts.”
“No, it doesn’t. Fog got us, too,” Casey said, then looked up as Rima dropped to her knees by his side. “Rima, are you … God, you’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.” She covered his hand with hers. An impulse, not something she really thought about, but which, once done, felt entirely right. “Thank you for coming, for not letting that thing g-get …”
“Would never l-let that happen.” His eyes fastened on hers, and she could feel a slow flush working its way up her neck. He turned his hand over, palm up, and gave her fingers a squeeze. “Tania?”
“Who?” Eric asked.
“Oh God.” She felt a pang of guilt. In all the commotion, she’d forgotten. Hurriedly pushing to her feet, she edged past the thing, sparing it a swift sidelong glance, then stopped dead and gave a much longer stare.
“What?” Eric was there in an instant. “What is … oh shit.”
“Yeah,” she breathed against a clutch of dawning dread. A moist mesh of fresh connective tissue had already formed; a toothy cage of remodeled bone arced over a gray sponge of new lung. Whips of thickening muscle waggled, and she swore she saw that thing’s left hand convulse in a sudden spasm.
“I think we’re out of here, now,” Eric said, and moved to help Casey make his feet. “What about your friend? Is she …?”
“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.