The Shuddering

refusal.
    “Then I’ll come with you,” Sawyer told him. “What are you going to do, hold a flaming torch while siphoning gas?”
    Sawyer had a point, and it was apparent that he was confident in his reasoning by the way he sprang into action. He left Ryan standing there as he moved through the kitchen, heading to the hallway where most of their things were piled up. Suddenly, Jane realized something she hadn’t thought of until then. A sweeping numbness slithered over her insides.
    “Hey, Ry?” she said softly. “He can’t go with you.” The backs of her eyes went hot. She felt the flare of tears burn the delicate tissue of her sinus cavity.
    Ryan looked away from the kitchen, frowning when he saw the look on her face.
    “Sawyer’s clothes,” she told him. “They’re in the Jeep.” Sawyer wouldn’t last ten minutes in jeans and a T-shirt before the painful itch of frostbite would start in on his toes. Jane and Ryan had their gear, but Sawyer’s things were halfway down the road.
    Ryan pressed his hand to his forehead, shoved his fingers through his hair. “Fuck,” he murmured before stepping away, about to give Sawyer the bad news.
    Ryan was biting back a laugh while Jane hid her mouth behind a hand, but her eyes gave her away as she watched Sawyer pull on her boarding pants. She was just as amused as her brother. Her pink-trimmed pants weren’t really Sawyer’s style.
    “Maybe I should have taken my chances,” Sawyer mused, pulling the zipper up on a jacket that was nearly too small to close in the front. There was no way around it: he looked ridiculous, like Alice in Wonderland after she’d eaten the side of the mushroom that made her grow larger, except the clothes hadn’t grown with him.
    “You look good,” Jane said. “Stylish.”
    Ryan nudged Sawyer’s shoulder. “Maybe rather than attacking us, those things will just die laughing.”
    Sawyer rolled his eyes. The jacket was biting into his armpits and the pants were riding up his crotch. And her boots were an impossibility unless he broke all his toes. He wasn’t sure whether to view the black galoshes Ryan had located in the garage as a blessing or a curse.
    “You think this is really going to work?” Sawyer asked, pulling two pairs of thick socks over his original pair. He could hardly shove his feet into the galoshes with all that padding, but it was either that or lose his toes.
    “It should,” Ryan shrugged. “At least for the time being. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to walk five miles like that.”
    Pulling his woven beanie over his ears—the one that matched April’s scarf—Sawyer mumbled and let his hands fall to his sides.
    “This too,” Jane said, offering him the jacket he’d stormed back inside the cabin in. It was the only piece of clothing, other than what he was wearing, that had made it back up to the house after his blowup with April. Sawyer stuffed his arms into his coat, zipped it up to his chin, and exhaled a humiliated sigh.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.”
    “You sure are,” Ryan told him.
    Jane grinned as Sawyer stepped past her, waddling like a duck, unable to bend his knees because the pants were too tight.
    “Let’s get this over with,” he said, stopping a few feet from the kitchen door. Ryan pulled his backpack on, the ax handle jutting out of the top of the pack like a flagless pole. He looped the plastic tubing he had pulled off the back of the washing machine around his shoulder. They could only hope it would work for siphoning gas out of the Nissan.
    Sawyer gripped one of the sharpened pool cues in a gloved hand as Jane detoured into the living room, then stepped back into the kitchen with two torches in tow, one lit, the other not. The strips of drapery she’d wrapped around the tops made them look like giant Q-tips, but they wouldn’t last long. They had no fuel to soak the fabric in, which meant it would burn fast. Without fire, they would have no protection against what was out there.
    “Don’t light this one until you put some gas on it,” she warned, handing Ryan the unlit torch while the lit one smoldered above Sawyer’s head, filling the kitchen with smoke. Ryan patted the front pocket of his jacket, and the outline of the revolver should have made Sawyer feel better, but it did little to soothe his nerves. All it would take was one slipup, one second of letting their guard down. And then there was the question of whether those things really were afraid of