So dark. The woods were nothing but shadows holding aliens; they had to be out here somewhere, probably had already come out of the ship and were closing in. He should have stayed on the road, gotten out of there while he could, he—
“Georgie! Get over here!”
Bernie—the voice was so close. Shadows moved . . . just to the left, heads peeking up from behind a fallen tree, the trunk smooth and softened by snow.
George stumbled toward it, each step breaking through the crust and driving in with that Styrofoam-sounding crunch. He fell more than walked the last three feet. His friends caught him, pulled him down. His chest heaved, drawing icy knives deep into his lungs.
They huddled together out of a need for warmth, or maybe from pure fear.
Another crack, that thing coming through the woods.
George wiped his glove across his eyes, clearing away flakes that clung to his lashes. He rose up on his knees, peeked over the log. The cabin . . . it was so close. How could it be that close? It seemed like he’d been walking forever, each step a battle, but he hadn’t made it more than thirty or forty feet. He was close enough to see smoke slipping out of the thin stove-pipe, instantly ripped into the night by the unforgiving wind.
The cracking again, a branch giving way, maybe an entire tree. And a new sound, a grinding, like machinery that had seen better days. In the woods, a shape, a big shape, backlit by the ship’s red and green and blue lights.
George slipped back down. He looked to Arnold. Shivering Arnold, old Arnold. “Why?” George hissed. “Why didn’t we run?”
“IR,” Arnold said. “Like The Terminator.”
“Predator,” Bernie said. “Like Predator, Dad.”
Arnold’s body trembled horribly, like an invisible hand had him between giant fingers and was rattling him like some child’s toy.
“Heat . . . our heat,” he said. “If we hide behind a big log . . . they won't see us.”
George stared, dumbfounded. They had followed this man here, because of that reasoning? They could have been a hundred yards down the road by now. Instead, they were closer to the oncoming threat.
Arnold—the man he’d once known only as Mister Ekola—had been their rock once, but now he was just a scared old man who had made a shitty decision based on a movie he couldn’t fully remember.
“Hey,” Jaco said. “Couldn’t Terminator see in infrared, too?”
Toivo and Bernie thought, then nodded. George wanted to punch them all right in the nose.
Over the wind’s scream, the cracking and grinding drew closer. George had a flash memory of a summer campfire some thirty years earlier, the night stars above, skin on his face and his toes and knees nearly burning because the closer you sat to the fire the less the mosquitoes and black flies bothered you. Mister Ekola, a flashlight under his chin casting strange shadows on his cheeks and eyes, telling a story of a killer with a limp. You knew this killer because of the sound, the thump-drag sound, a good foot stepping forward, then the slide of the bad foot following behind.
Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .
George had told that same story to his sons. It had scared the hell out of them just like it had scared the hell out of him. And now, a version of that sound had him damn near pissing his pants, a version with the added tones of snapping branches and broken gears.
Thump, drag, crack-crack, snap . . . thump, drag, whir-snap, crack, whine . . .
George’s friends huddled down lower to the ground, pressing into the log like they were newborn pups nursing from their mother.
Someone had to look; someone had to know what was coming.
George forced himself to rise up, just enough to see over the snow-covered log.
Thump, drag, crack-whine, grind-snap . . .
The thing broke through the tree line just thirty feet from the cabin. A robot, a big-ass robot maybe fifteen feet tall. Two legs . . . the left stepping forward, the right dragging along behind, functioning barely enough to position itself so the machine could take another step with its left. Broken branches jutted out of tears in the metal shell, or plastic, or whatever it was made of. Bipedal—no arms George could see—but cracks everywhere, breaks and tears and dents, smoke-streaks . . . the thing was trashed. Part of the shell was ripped free near the top. Hard to see in the darkness and snow, but George could make out a yellow shape . . . a form that moved . . .
Sweet Jesus.
An alien.
Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .
The robot paused just past the tree line, big feet hidden in the snow. Something fluttered open near what George could only think of as the machine’s hips. Then, a flash, and a rocket shot out, closing the distance in less than a second.
He was already dropping behind the log when the cabin erupted in a fireless explosion that launched a hailstorm of broken-board shrapnel into the woods, knocking free chunks of clinging snow that had withstood the blowing wind.
George’s ass hit the ground. He stared into the dark woods, mind blank.
A hand on his shoulder: Jaco, leaning in.
“Georgie, was that the fucking cabin that just blew up?”
I have to get on that road, get to Milwaukee, whatever it takes to reach my children, find a way—
“Georgie!”
“Yes, goddamit! It was the cabin!”
The sound again, thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .
“Shit!” Jaco said, said it with such ferocity that it contracted his body, made his head snap forward. “Screw that! Everyone, shoot that thing on one, okay?”
Thump, drag . . . coming closer.
“Three,” Jaco said.
Counting? Why was he counting? It was a damn robot-thing that blew up buildings, it—
Thump, drag . . .
“Two!”
Holy shit! Jaco was going to fire at that thing out there?
Thump, drag . . .
“Jaco, no, you—”
“One!”
Movement all around, George’s friends rising up, the crack of rifles firing followed by the sound of bolts sliding back, then forward again.
George ripped off his gloves, held the rifle tight as he rose to his knees and turned, all one uncoordinated, lurching movement. He swung the barrel of his Remington 700 over the top of the log, knocking aside clumps of snow. The hand cupping the forestock pressed down on the log, snow instantly melting from the heat of his skin.
The big machine turned sharply, swiveling at the hips like the turret of a tank, the motion herky-jerky and halting.
George fired instantly, without aiming, had no idea if he’d hit.
Gunshots from his left and from his right. He popped the rifle’s lever up and pulled it back, heard the faint ring of the ejected shell, shoved the bolt forward but it stuck; his hand slipped off, his momentum lurched him forward into the log.
The guns kept firing.
I’ve never even shot a deer what the hell am I doing I should have gone to the range more should have—