Read Online Freeze by Daniel Pyle - Free Book Online Page A

word to the ground, turned it into a whisper, a non-word. The wind gusted and blew a thick sheet of snow into his eyes. He looked down at the ground and reached up to wipe the mush off his face.
    Something moved just ahead of him. He could hear it now, a kind of hissing ring, like music just barely breaking through the static on a cheap radio. Something about the sound made his stomach churn. A wave of adrenaline flooded through his body. His muscles twitched, and the blood pulsed through his temples. He pulled his glove away from his eyes and looked up slowly.
    The creature stood a few feet in front of him, big and looking even bigger standing on top of the nearest drift. It was covered in snow and ice, or maybe even made entirely of ice, although that didn’t seem possible.
    Are you kidding? None of this is possible. You fell and hit your head. You’re dreaming. Wake up and open your eyes before you freeze to death.
    Warren wished he could believe that, but this was no dream. No dream in the history of dreams had been this vivid. He could hear the blizzard blowing around him, feel the cold sneaking in through the gaps in his clothes, smell and taste the damp, nasty wetness of his scarf, and of course see the thing in the snow ahead. His senses were working overtime, and that didn’t happen in dreams. At least not in his.
    The creature had dozens of tentacle-like appendages, each one tipped with clacking digits that were at once both finger like and entirely alien. It looked something like a frozen, upside-down tree. Except none of its limbs stayed in place for long. One tentacle detached itself from the body, slithered up around the thing’s bulbous head, and then re-attached itself on the other side. Another limb moved to replace the empty spot the first had left. And so forth.
    Warren couldn’t see any eyes on the monstrosity, but it seemed to be staring at him all the same. It had no neck—its jagged protrusion of a head rested directly on top of its center mass—but it sure as hell had a mouth: it opened and closed the hole once, twice, revealing multiple rows of shark-like teeth, and a frosty, wriggling tongue.
    Seriously, wake up. For the love of God, please wake up!
    He sucked breath after breath through his musty scarf, afraid he’d start to hyperventilate but unable to do anything about it.
    The thing slid off the top of the drift and closer to Warren. Warren had never seen anything like it and still couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing despite looking right at it. He tried to turn away, to run, although he knew he had no chance of escaping, but he couldn’t move his legs. It felt as if his boots had gotten snagged on something under the snow. He jerked his legs up as hard as he could, but they didn’t move. The creature came closer still—it was composed entirely of ice and snow, Warren could see that now, in places it was see-through—and with nothing else to do, Warren covered his torso and face with his arms, cowering.
    The thing chomped its teeth. Bits of ice, tips of jagged fangs, broke off and fell to the snow below. New teeth, sharp and glistening, formed to replace the broken ones. It made a sound (Warren guessed you’d call it a growl, although it really sounded more like a low, reverberating whistle) and swung a tentacle at Warren’s head.
    Duck!
    But even as he thought it, he brought his arm up instead, shielding his face. The icy limb struck him somewhere between his wrist and his elbow, breaking his arm with a loud, gunfire-like crack . The creature’s arm broke, too—the tip of it flew into the snow and lay there slithering for a second before burrowing under the snow and out of sight—but another coil of snow and ice was already snaking its way down the limb to replace the missing bit. It melded into place and curled into the air like a cat’s tail.
    His arm drooped and throbbed. Hot white pangs pulsed through his forearm and into his chest, belly, and head. He screamed. A