The Shuddering

me and Ryan, we’d spend all night kicking the shit out of it or something.”
    The flashlight beam bounced at the end of the hallway before Jane could reply. Ryan was returning from the garage.
    “Hold this,” Ryan said, handing Jane the flashlight. She pointed it at the creature’s head, and without so much as a warning, Ryan reeled back and brought the blade down on the dead thing’s neck.



CHAPTER TWELVE
    R yan took out his anguish on the corpse at his feet. Every ax swing was for Lauren. Whack. That was for never seeing her face again. Whack. For the sound of her laughter. Her smell. The taste of her lips—a taste he’d never know. He felt nothing but grief as he chopped off that toothy bastard’s apelike arms, didn’t even flinch when he buried the ax blade in its chest and cracked open its ribs.
    He threw down the ax and drew his sleeve across his face, then looked over his shoulder at his sister. To his surprise, her eyes were locked on the bloody mess that he’d created. The girl who couldn’t handle a bit of gore on television without covering her eyes was now mesmerized by the copious amounts of foul-smelling blood. That was what the stink had been—rotten eggs and the sharp scent of iron—and the fact that he had split open some sort of organ hadn’t helped matters. Ryan waited for her to look up at him, hoping to God she wasn’t going into shock. When she finally lifted her chin, he nodded at her as if to tell her that everything was fine.
    “Check on Oona?” he asked her. That dog was smart. She hadn’t set foot in the kitchen to see what they were doing, remaining in the warmth of a dying fire, the embers giving the living room a haunting glow. Jane slithered out of her seat and carefully stepped around the gore that the tarp failed to contain. Ryan knew there was going to be blood, but he had no idea how much. It seemed like an impossible amount, as though the size ofthe body couldn’t have contained all that fluid. Yet there it was, oozing across blue plastic, creeping across the hardwood floor.
    “Are you ready?” he asked.
    Sawyer swallowed, then reluctantly nodded, snapping a latex glove onto his left hand before pulling another one on top of that, doubling up for good measure. “We’re going to have to be quick,” Ryan warned. “I don’t want to be in the middle of doing this when another one of these motherfuckers decides to make an appearance.”
    “Or gets curious,” Sawyer said, giving a firmer nod of the head this time.
    “God,” Ryan groaned, a bloodied glove grabbing hold of the doorknob. “This thing reeks.” He jerked the door open and stepped back to the carcass, plunging his hands into its body cavity before hurling the offal into the snow.
    Jane stared at the mess at her feet, the contents of the refrigerator unsalvageable, the food that would have sustained them for at least a week completely destroyed. She began to pick up the mess, tossing crushed containers and broken glass into a trash bag, wondering what the hell they were going to do. The snow just beyond the kitchen door was now strewn with body parts and entrails. Despite the moon’s dim shine, she didn’t need the light to see the dark streaks—black in the moonlight but red in reality—decorating a once pristine white surface like abstract art. She didn’t know whether the smell of one of their own would repel the others or attract them, but this was the only way to find out. They’d either avoid the area entirely, repulsed by the scent of the dead, or fall onto it like carrion birds, hungrily picking it apart until there was nothing left.
    Not even sure why she was bothering to clean the mess, she left the trash bag beside the fridge and stepped around the island, the two people she loved most in this life squatting around the remains of a monstrous body. Ryan was decorated with a spray of blood, a smear of red streaking his cheek like a brushstroke. Sawyer had gotten gore onto his arms, that beloved T-shirt completely ruined, offering no protection against whatever disease may have been lingering in that creature’s fluids. Both of them turned to look at her when she stepped into view, their gazes strange in their expectancy, as if waiting for the schoolteacher to tell them what was next.
    “I think we need to leave,” she told them. “Today, when the sun comes up.”
    She watched their faces mirror each other in emotion, shifting from anticipation to a worried sort of surprise.