The Shuddering

of them, and he had to chop down trees in their front yard. She had made her demand: if he insisted on chopping down treesrather than buying wood in town, he’d have to walk himself out far enough so she’d never see another stump again. She smiled at the memory. That man, just like her father had been, lacking foresight but quick to learn.
    A half mile into her search, she stumbled across the first splintered trunk. But the cuts were old, and his tracks trailed past it farther east. She continued forward, one hand squeezing the cold barrel of the gun while the other stole half of Don’s sandwich. It was his own fault. He knew she never ate without him.
    Idly chewing and humming beneath her breath, she slowed her footsteps when she caught a blip of fire-engine red. It was his sled, half-obscured by the trees. And while that meant he had to be close, there wasn’t a sound to be heard in that forest; nothing but the quiet whisper of wind and the shiver of pine needles.
    “Donnie?” she called out, but the snow deadened her yell. Holding her breath, she listened for a response, but none came. She stopped next to his sled, her eyebrows knitted together. It didn’t make sense. He’d never leave his sled behind, half-piled with wood. Jenny veered around, trying to look in every direction at once. “Don?!” Panic slithered into her tone. What if he’d thrown out his back, collapsed in the snow? She’d warned him not overexert himself, but he was a stubborn old fool, convinced he was in his thirties instead of sixty-five.
    She left the sled behind, jogging along the footprints Don had left in the snow. Her breath hitched in her throat when his path shifted from straight to erratic, and dread coiled itself around her belly, threatening to cut off her air. She could see it in the way his footprints were deeper toward the toe, the way snow had been kicked out behind each footfall: he had been running, weaving through the trees. And he hadn’t been alone. There were prints all around his, but she couldn’t make out exactly what type of animal they could have belonged to. They were too bigto be wolves’, too lean and long to be bears’. They looked almost human, despite their wide, lurking gait. An animal with that wide a step must have been huge.
    She fell into a run as well, following her husband’s footprints no matter how scared she was of the tracks that surrounded them. His name fell from her lips in a gasp. And then she stopped, her eyes wide as she was assaulted by a fetid stink. There was something lying in the snow. An animal. Don’s ax handle jutted out from its skull like a crooked flagpole.
    Jenny crept toward the carcass, her grip tightening around the barrel of the gun as she pressed it against her chest, her heart thudding in her ears. It wasn’t an animal as much as it was a monster, a thin and hairless monster so bony its arms looked like twigs in proportion to its wide, skeletal chest. She couldn’t make out its face, Don’s ax having cut it in two. But she was glad she couldn’t tell exactly what it looked like. Wide at the temples, its head looked almost alien, like a creature that had fallen out of the sky or had crawled out of hell itself. Its stomach was deflated, little more than a hollow cavity covered by thin gray skin. Her breath puffed out from her lungs in short, staggered bursts as she slowly approached, terrified but unable to help herself. It was like nothing she’d ever seen, its long, angular body spread out on the snow. It was its teeth that snapped her out of her daze, reminding her that Don was missing, that there were far too many tracks to belong to this one creature alone. Its teeth were thick and jagged, like the fangs of a massive dog.
    She twisted away, breaking into as fast a run as her sixty-year-old legs would allow.
    That thing was dead, which meant Don was out there somewhere, alive. Alive. He had to be alive.
    But those long, thin, alien tracks followed Don’s footsteps away from the kill. He had fought one of them off, but there hadbeen far more than one. She readied the gun as she ran, determined to blast every last one of those freaks off the face of God’s green earth.
    Skidding to a stop, she sucked in a breath and yelled as loud as she could. “Don, where are you?!”
    This time there was a response.
    This time a communal moan rose in the distance.
    A jolt of terror shot through her torso, radiating out to her arms and legs, because it didn’t