The truck rumbled across the ice-covered road slowly and methodically, chains wrapping the tires and gripping the ground as best as they could as the piece of engineering ingenuity traversed the rime covered ground. There had been freezing rainfall a week ago, coating everything in a thin sheet of ice creating dangerous driving conditions if it weren’t for the weight of the truck breaking up the ice and the chains digging into the road below. The arctic wind bit and scratched across the tundra that dark brumal day as the temperature dipped into negative twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The snow had been compacted by the rime, protecting its layers so that none of its crystals could be blown away to obscure vision, allowing for a particularly clear evening despite the gale. It was a three-dog night as the driver’s parents would tend to say, or as the passenger riding shotgun might say, “really bleeping cold.” Both were adequate descriptions of the evening.
The air was so cold that the scent of the air was different from what one would otherwise expect. Nothing smelled at those temperatures as you would normally expect, with perhaps the exception of a good wood fire. It was fainter, weaker, and wholly more precise, as if other telltale scents had decided to join in the hibernation of the winter and had been stripped from the air. The only source of sound was the rumbling engine of the twenty-year-old truck, with the static noise of the radio playing country twang for its listeners, interrupted only by a news report of a coming winter storm that evening. The truck itself was green with a silver and red break stripe painted around it.
The inhabitants of the truck were headed back into town, having just finished up with a small hike out in the wilderness and returning home for the evening. The group of young men were all in college and wore brightly colored coats with reflective tape to maximize their visibility for emergency responders should they need to find them. As expected, however, the hike had gone without a hitch, and they had enjoyed themselves immensely.
The previous song ended on the radio, a rather melancholy song indeed, and a new lyrical masterpiece began, one that had a pep in its step and joyous, causing one of the boys to hoot and shout as he recognized it, “Hell, yeah! Turn it up!” The driver complied with a smile, spun the dial with a flourish, and the four started singing slightly out of tune and akilter with the music, laughing and enjoying the polar Alaskan evening, already having turned dark. They lived below the arctic circle and had only a few hours of daylight a day even during the winter solstice, which had been last week, but they made a point every weekend to take advantage of the sublime hours with their expeditions to well-trodden trails. In a few weeks the days would begin getting noticeably longer, and they would soon be dealing with only a few hours a night, needing blackout curtains to help them get proper sleep. During those hours it would afford them time to take more daring expeditions and see some of the most resplendent sights of Alaska.
The driver turned and laughed at his compatriots as they fumbled the lyrics, not seeing the figure emerging from the rime, a pale, white shadow with billowing brunette hair and icicles dripping from her fingertips. Her hair was clumped together, as if wetted before being frozen. She wore white wintry gear and pointed one finger with her pallid face agape in a silent and horrid scream. Her eyes were hazel, but it was difficult to tell as her eyes had clouded up and become flaccid, small ice crystals piercing through its surface where it had frozen. The engine stalled.
The man turned forward in response to the sudden quiet and let out an expletive as he swerved the steering wheel to avoid the woman, not having time to process or realize her strange appearance, causing the truck to lose traction and slide off the road. The truck lurched as it launched into the snow with a loud crunch, and everyone on board was held back by their seatbelts as the vehicle lurched into a sudden stop padded by the snow. “What happened?” asked one of the back passengers, concern dripping into his voice like a faulty faucet, attempted to be contained but leaking into his voice all the same.
“I don’t know, the truck turned off, and I thought I saw a woman on the road,” the driver explained. He looked in the rearview mirror, and saw the road was now empty. There was no hint that the mysterious lady had ever been there in the first place. He cranked the key, but despite his best efforts the starter didn’t even sound, odd considering even if the engine stalled, if the battery worked it should still sound as it attempted to turn the engine. “Come on, help me get her back on the road.”
The four unloaded, grabbed cat litter from the truck’s emergency kit, put some of the granules in the snow behind the tires, and managed to push the old truck with team effort back onto the road. Breathing heavily, the driver popped the hood from the pushbutton in the cabin before grabbing the latch on the front and lifting the hood. He pulled out his flashlight and shined it into the depths of the reliable old truck.
“You see what the problem is?” asked one of the passengers.
The driver just stared incredulously into the engine compartment with his flashlight, “Uh… Take a look.” His tone revealed his own uncertainty in what he was staring at, indeed, it shouldn’t even be possible.
The other three came round and joined in his gawking as they stared at the rime covered engine, frozen over completely in a sheet of clear ice that gleamed clearly under the flashlight. “How in the world did that happen?” asked one, scratching his head.
He never got a chance to hear the response as something grabbed him by the shoulder, swung him around and howled into his face like the wind. The other three turned around in shock as they witnessed the ice-covered woman holding on to their compatriot, chilled air billowing out of her mouth and freezing their friend’s face as ice crystals formed and popped his blood vessels. His face contorted in pain, but he failed to make a noise as his lips split under the cold and his face slowed until it couldn’t move.
The three screamed and one swung at the woman, but she sunk back into the snow, leaving a petrified corpse behind. “Come on man,” said one of the survivors, not quite processing what had happened and pulled his elbow. The body simply fell over on the ground with a disgusting crunch. The driver showed the light on the face of their dead friend and held it for just a couple seconds as all three had time to finally understand that he was dead.
Stolen novel; please report.
Collectively, all three felt adrenaline rush into their veins as their fight or flight responses fired on all cylinders, and each took off running, trying to make as much distance from whatever had just killed their friend as quickly as possible. There was a scream when the woman reappeared and grabbed the second man, tossing him bodily into the snow as he froze over, the ice on her body slowly melting now that she had killed twice. Water dripped from her, and there were disgusting slits in her eyeballs where before the ice crystals had pierced her eyes.
The third felt himself grabbed by the ankle, having chosen to try and hide in the underbrush, and he hollered for her to let go even as a smarting burn permeated his ankle until there was a terrible crack and his ankle shattered. The worse part was when he went to stand up, his bone pierced through the snow and scratched horrendously on the permafrost, causing him to scream as white-hot pain replaced where his foot should have been.
The fourth stopped as the initial panic drained away. He searched around in the dark, found a tree branch, and something in him snapped as he decided he needed to rescue his friend, even as his screams grew with intensity. He hefted up the thick bramble and hurried back with purpose just in time to see her taking a step towards her third victim. No more. He wasn’t going to let her hurt anyone else if it was the last thing he did.
He swung the heavy branch at her head as a primal roar rumbled from his chest and erupted from his mouth, empowering him even more, causing the branch to break in half across her, but she did not yield before the sudden onslaught, and continued her death march towards her third victim. The deadly howl of wind erupted from her mouth, freezing the man with the broken ankle over as she had done before.
The fourth stood there breathing heavily, unable to believe what he had just seen. He had been there, he had attacked her even, and all of it was in vain. Now, he was likely going to die, and for what? The fight started to leave him, and his muscles were surprisingly sore from the monstrous exertion the adrenaline had given him access to. The woman’s eyes regained life, and the cloudy veil that prevailed all through the attack finally faded away, even as the rest of the ice thawed on the woman leaving her dripping wet, and she grabbed her throat as she started gasping air. “What is this?” She sounded confused, horrified, and disoriented. “Blessing? I’ve been… no, this is a curse! I won’t do it! I won’t kill again!” Her voice was shrill with panic and horror as she fell down to her knees and started to shake with emotion.
The survivor took a step back and a twig snapped, causing her head to swivel to face him. She spluttered as she tried to explain, “Wait- I- This is…! I can explain!” Her voice turned shrill with panic, and she fell over and started crawling towards him begging and pleading. The young man was not having any of it. He had seen what she had done to his friends, and he wasn’t sticking around to see if she was planning to kill him as well. It didn’t matter that something resembling humanity had returned to her, everything he had seen to that point had been that of a monster. He turned and ran, ran as fast as he could.
He ran despite his muscles aching. He ran as his side burned like fire and threatened to force him to double over from the stitch in his side. He ran even as the wind started to howl. He ran even as the snow started to fall. He ran even as his vision began to be obscured by the whiteout. He ran until everything was numb, and his mind started to become foggy. He urged himself to continue running, even as a pair of headlights lit him up, but his mind was too far gone to even realize he had reached something resembling safety.
He awoke with a jolt in a hospital bed and looked all around him as he struggled to figure out what had happened. He saw a call button and pressed it, and soon a nurse walked in and congratulated him on waking up and surviving the blizzard. She went on to explain that he had been found in the winter storm, unconscious, and had been lucky he had been found as there had been an avalanche in the winter storm, covering up much of the roads. He was found just in time by one of the emergency responders. There were several others who had disappeared into the blizzard, and they were actively trying to find them even as they spoke.
The next day a news network arrived at his room, asking him questions about what had happened. They wanted to interview the survivors and do a story regarding the importance of avoiding inclement weather during the dead of winter. They didn’t understand what had actually happened out there, in the dead of winter. They didn’t understand there were monsters in the dark, as he had discovered, waiting to consume you.
Seven others had died that night, and he tried to explain that a wicked spirit had come out of the snow, claiming the lives of the others. The nurse and newscaster discounted his account as nothing more than delirium from the storm, but he knew what he had seen. He knew there was something that science couldn’t explain at the edge of humanities peripheral. Most importantly, he now felt a hunger for it, a desire to explain it. A desire to conquer it. He had narrowly avoided death, and he was going to be sure it could never happened again.
He lay back in his hospital bed that evening and turned on the vacuum tube television set up in his room. It was all local channels, and there was nothing enjoyable on, so he switched over to the news, curious to see if his story had made the evening program. After a few minutes, the story he was to appear in came on. He sat up in abject confusion. The reporter from earlier that day had interviewed another survivor. She had mentioned there was another, but he hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. It was a woman. It was the woman. He watched even as his jaw dropped as the lady, perhaps a decade his senior, was asked several questions on how she survived the storm, but she merely said she didn’t want to say. Even more confusingly, the reporter stated she had disappeared a week prior, and she was lucky to have been found by emergency responders.
She wasn’t quite the same monster he had borne witness to the other night, she wore the same white clothes, which was how he recognized her at first, but her face was no longer dripping wet from melted water, nor frozen over. She was a plain looking brunette, and her eyes were sunken as if in sorrow. She looked emotionally exhausted, as if she had done or witnessed something horrifying, but even with that expression he could tell it was her. The hair color was right. The eye color was right. It was her face. Her hoarse and worn voice was familiar, and the reporter identified the woman as Rebecca Whitlock.
The next day the man was released from the hospital, and he knew what he was going to do. What he had to do. He was going to track down this woman. He was going to find out what had driven her to murder his friends. And he was going to make the most out of his second chance at life. All of this, he was sure of. The nurse handed him a bag with his stuff, and he changed into his clothes before going over some paperwork and a release form as he prepared to leave. He went ahead and signed his name as he did so. Randolph J. Sorensen.