Free Chills by Mary Sangiovanni Page A

unpredictable to control. Shit like that was always going down in quiet little nowhere towns like Colby.
    Dan shivered, clapping his hands together and blowing on the stiffening tips of his fingers. He hated the cold. He tried to think about anything else besides the dropping temperature inside the car and the nightmare thing outside on top of it. He was sure the two were related—that thing trying to claw through the roof of his car had caused snow in May, or the weather anomaly had spawned the thing, a military weather/monster experiment or whatever that had eaten his girlfriend.
    Every ten or fifteen minutes that passed, Dan found himself checking the ignition. His fingers ached, and his toes felt like hard glass, fragile enough to send shards of pain across his feet every time he tried to stamp some circulation back into them. The accumulated heat from the interior had completely dissipated, and if he couldn’t start the engine, he’d freeze inside the car just as easily as out on the road. He had to work at keeping his teeth from chattering. He felt cold all over.
    But . . . somebody somewhere had to know Colby was screwed with snow and snow monsters, right? So, where were the police? Where were the firefighters and EMTs and the fucking National Guard? He blew on his fingers again, rubbing them futilely, and flinched at a thump above his head. No doubt people in charge of these kinds of situations, military or SWAT or whatever, were in a (warm) room somewhere planning how to make the Colby problem go away. They had to be.
    Not that their deliberations would do him much good right now.
    A strained part of his brain, the part that had calculated the probability of freezing to death and then being eaten in his future, found it all kind of funny. Yeah, somebody somewhere had a plan, all right. The government would come in and drop bombs and wipe Colby, its townspeople, and the military’s snowbound mistake right off the goddamned planet.
    Welcome to Colby, Connecticut, population negative six. A nice, quiet place to settle down. Snow here? No sir! Colby is as balmy as a paradise island, thanks to its smoking crater—all hot springs and radiation, a regular nuclear summer. How’s that for fun? Bring the kids!
    He started giggling then, and was frightened by the thin, crazed, manic quality it had in his own ears. His teeth began chattering, and he found he didn’t have the strength to stop it. The chattering spread to his whole body until he was shaking. This made him feel a little warmer—not enough to be comfortable, but enough to set off an alarm in his head. He’d heard somewhere that one of the final signs of hypothermia was a kind of numb warmth, sometimes even an unbearable heat, just before death. Was this how it started? Was he starting to freeze to death?
    I have to get out of here. Now.
    He screamed for help into the inky emptiness all around him.
    As if in answer, the thing on the roof jumped down onto the trunk, and Dan turned sharply in his seat. Puffs of its breath fogged the back window, melting the snow. For the first time, Dan saw the creature’s head, and it sucked the breath and scream right out of him.
    The pale head was anglerfish-like, wide-eyed and scaly with serrated teeth swathed in fleshy, dull lips. The body crowding the rear window was all lean muscles and angles, the scales or flesh like snow and ice. It was there one second, and then it blew away, like so many flakes in the window. Then it reformed again. It growled at him, a sound like rending metal, and for one horrific second, Dan thought the thing was tearing through the car. Then it scrabbled up the back window and onto the roof again.
    It seemed like a long time passed after that. The wind blew dry, anxious whisper words of snow against the windows of the car. All around him, the night exhaled its leaden grayness, separating him further from any hope of help. He waited, his breath shallow, and listened