Blizzard

Stephen shook with the biting cold as he stepped into the supermarket. He wasn’t far from home, but he could feel the bone-numbing cold eating away at him. He looked back out the door at the curtain of white and the howling wind. He was used to snow in early November, but never a blizzard. All he had on was a windbreaker. His blue jeans were soaked through, and his legs were still numbing even further, despite the heating of the supermarket’s HVAC.

He looked around, rubbing the snow out of his thin beard, and rubbed at his ears to warm them up. The supermarket was strangely quiet. Quieter than it had ever been. He’d often come in at two in the morning to do some late-night shopping to avoid the rush, but even then, there were workers and a few others who thought along his same lines. Where was Terry? And Susan, the manager? She wasn’t due for another two weeks, was she? She planned to work until the moment she went into labor, she’d once told him. So, where was she?

There was a faint dripping sound coming from one of the employees-only doors, and Stephen knew that it had to be from the leaky sinks they had back there. He’d tried to fix them once, but that hadn’t lasted long.

It was so quiet that he could here the leaky sinks through a closed, albeit thin, door?

Uncomfortable, Stephen began to wander around the shelves. The food was all stocked, and the floors shined fresh wax. He looked behind him, grimacing as he realized that he was leaving footsteps. George, the janitor, was going to be pissed that he ruined the new wax.

A wave of cold washed over Stephen’s face as the HVAC kicked into full gear. The whirring of the heating was louder than he’d ever heard it, and Stephen put his hands over his ears. The cold was replaced by heat as he looked around desperately, moving toward the main aisle. Maybe someone had come in. That would explain the cold and the heating.

He looked down the aisle to the front door. It stood closed, the solid white behind it like a thick wall.

Growing increasingly worried, with his throat tight, he began striding toward the door.

Movement caught his eye, and he froze. He didn’t turn, but he could see something down one of the aisles moving in his peripheral. It didn’t seem to be moving toward him, but instead squirmed in place.

Slowly turning, he could see, on the floor of the frozen section, a baby lying on the linoleum. It was covered in blood, and shaking its little fists in the air, choking out a cry that produced no sound. The umbilical cord led into one of the freezers, holding the baby tight to the door. Stunned, Stephen slowly approached, keeping his distance. The baby’s throat had a thick black substance encasing it, with powerful looking tendrils stabbing through its chest, and wrapping up alongside its face to plunge into its eyes.

Stephen stole a glance up at the freezer door, and found Susan hanging from a hook. She looked at him with fear in her eyes, her breath frosting in the air.

“Susan?!” Stephen shouted, rattling the handle of the freezer. She shook her head and pounded back, motioning for him to run, the movement brought forth a grimace of pain as her shoulder shifted on the giant hook.

The baby stopped squirming.

Stephen stumbled back as the black substance began to overtake the baby’s body, and one of the freezers exploded outwards, sending a shower of broken glass across the fresh wax. Something rolled out with a grace that told of movements beyond commonplace musculature, and Stephan ran away, passing by freezer after freezer. He caught the sight of Terry, of George, of Rinaldo, and a few people he didn’t recognize hanging in the freezers, some limp, some pounding against the glass soundlessly.

Stephen felt the heating reach temperatures he didn’t think possible, the cold wind at his back mixing with the inferno roaring down from the vents above. A snarling came from behind as he reached the front doors. They didn’t open, and stood firm as he clawed his fingernails to nubs trying to force them apart. He threw his back against the doors and started inching his way toward the employees-only door, looking around desperately for the shape that pursued.

He got to the door, and his hand on the knob, before one of the registers exploded, and then another, and then another, in a line coming toward him. The screech of metal and shattering of wood echoed throughout the empty supermarket as Stephen threw the door open, the slammed it closed his shoulder. He locked it, though he wasn’t sure how much good it would do against whatever this thing was. Looking around, he could see, in the dim, flickering fluorescent light, the leaking sink and a toolbox. His eyes first went to the heavy wrench that lay out, but he thought better of it and threw the lid off of the box, pulling out the crowbar he knew lay inside.

A snarling, like a starved beast, came from behind the thin door, and Stephan wiped away the sweat that had begun to crystalize on his face, the cold blasts of air pouring in from under the door freezing the sweat from the boiling heating system that fought to match the beast.

The door tore like thin paper as the creature pushed it in, stepping inside on four legs. The creature vaguely canine, but it shifted and morphed with each step, like its powerful muscles were made of fluid. Along its back grew thick crystals of ice that were covered in blood and looked razor-sharp along their lengths. It warped and shifted in ways that Stephen couldn’t begin to comprehend, like it was using senses beyond simple ones, like sight or smell, to find the man who cowered underneath a table.

The thing stepped forward, each paw freezing the ground beneath it, as it approached the table, a deep gurgling coming from not within it, but within Stephen. Like boiling water in his chest, he could hear the thing talking. The pain of the speech seared his lungs and he finally bolted, scrambling out from under the table as the creature’s face came into view. It was indescribably vast, yet unknowingly small. It was up where it should have been down, and in where it should have been out. Hot where the creature pumped forth cold, and cold where the HVAC should have melted it. Darkness and light. Alpha and Omega.

Stephen slammed the crowbar into the front door, wondering when he had finally passed the thing and made his way out through the broken door. Looking into the creature’s face was an eternity in itself, like an empty void where all one knows is impossible contradictions, where time is lost.

The front doors screeched open as Stephen ran into the night. The blizzard was gone, and Stephen was warm as he collapsed into the empty night road, daring a single look back.

The supermarket was blanketed in white, and an earth-shattering howling cracked the pavement. The full moon went dark.