The Shuddering

a low-octave moan caught his attention. He raised an eyebrow, jamming his arm into the truck to crank down the music. A shadow cut across the wooded backyard, Clyde catching the movement from the corner of his eye. “Hey, Pete?” Another moan sounded in reply, and Clyde couldn’t help but grin. “You okay, buddy?” he asked, looking back down to what he was doing, his cigarette dangling from the swell of his bottom lip. “You want to hand me the socket wrench from the tool chest?”
    The moaning continued, only to be cut short.
    Clyde glanced up, blinded by the high beams, unable to see a thing beyond the truck’s front bumper. “Pete?”
    Nothing.
    He sighed, took another drag off his cigarette, and flicked it into the snow. “You suck at holding your liquor, man,” he said. He stepped out of the headlights and could hardly see a thing. His eyes fought to adjust to the sudden darkness, but all he could make out were the windows of the house—illuminated from the inside out—and the interior of his truck, brightened by the weak glow of the dome light above the dusty dash. He ducked insidethe truck, turned up the music to a low roar, and stepped around to the bed of the pickup. Stopping next to the toolbox mounted flush against the back of the truck’s cab, he shoved the heel of his hand against a push-button lock, sending one of the box’s two metal lids bouncing upward on its spring. A tiny light blinked on, Clyde’s menagerie of tools glittering in the anemic yellow glow. He rifled through the mess, haphazardly shoving his precious gear this way and that.
    “Socket wrench, socket wrench,” he mumbled, as though chanting the tool’s name like a mantra would make it spring from the pile of chrome-plated metal. “Son of a…” It was nowhere to be found, and Clyde’s mind bounced to the last time he couldn’t find a piece of equipment. Pete had borrowed his Dremel tool, and it had been Clyde who had found it in the tool chest on the back of Pete’s truck. He slammed the lid of his box closed and marched across the yard toward Pete’s Chevy, nearly tripping over a fallen branch on his way. He cursed beneath his breath as he regained his footing, grabbing the branch by its brittle wood and tossing it aside.
    The branch came back at him, landing just shy of his boots.
    “Pete?” Clyde blinked, squinting into the dark. “Hey, stop fucking around, man. Where’s my ratchet?”
    Nothing.
    “Whatever,” he muttered, popping Pete’s toolbox open, and there it was, the tool Clyde was looking for. “You know, I don’t care if you use my shit,” he announced, grabbing the wrench and turning back to his own truck. “But it sure as hell would be nice if you’d put stuff back where you found it. It’s called common courtesy.”
    Another moan, this one phlegmy, like a death rattle deep within a chest.
    “I should pay your mom a visit,” he continued, stepping back around his front bumper. “Complain about how she raised youin a barn before giving her a nice Clydey-boy screw.” Pete hated mom jokes. It was one of his pet peeves. And yet there was nothing beyond the drone of Clyde’s music. Not a “fuck you,” not a witty quip in return. The lack of a comeback suggested that Pete was somewhere out there in the dark puking his guts out. “Pete? You gonna survive?”
    He slid the ratchet onto the hood of his truck. Curiosity getting the best of him, he stepped back into the inky early morning, snowflakes drifting across his line of sight. He did a double take when he spotted someone standing in the darkness a dozen yards away, but it sure as hell wasn’t Pete. The guy was tall and toothpick skinny, and while Clyde couldn’t see much of anything it almost looked like the stranger was naked—there were no lines to suggest the fold of jeans or the padding of a winter coat. The silhouette reminded him of the sick pictures Pete had showed him once; naked men and women with their hair shorn standing in long lines, numbers tattooed onto toothpick arms. But there was something about the guy standing a dozen yards away that didn’t sit right; his arms were too long for his body, and that head…it was massive, like one of those old-timey water babies in a circus freak show.
    “What the shit?” he whispered, blinking a few times to try to get a better view. As he was about to take a step forward, a crash behind him made him jump out of his skin. He reeled around, his gaze snagging on his freshly