Iced

“Captain’s quarters. Pretty plush. Get moving. We’ve got things to do.” He walks to the door and heads for the deck.

“Nice pjs, kid.”

He takes me to a church.

Churches crack me up. They’re like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe that not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up altars, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that’d make a coven of witches look not OCD. Then to further complicate it, some folks perform rituals, subset A, and other folks perform rituals, subset B, C, or D, and so on into an infinity of denominations, and call themselves different things then deny everyone else’s right to heaven if they’re not performing the same rituals. Dude. Weird. I figure if there is a God, he or she isn’t paying attention to what we build or if we follow some elaborate rules, but copping a ride on our shoulders, watching what we do every day. Seeing if we took this great big adventure called life and did anything interesting with it. I figure the folks that are the most interesting get to go to heaven. I mean, if I was God, that’s who I’d want there with me. I also figure being eternally happy would be eternally boring so I try not to be too interesting, even though it’s hard for me. I’d rather be a superhero in hell, kicking all kinds of demon ass, than an angel in heaven, wafting around with a beatific smile on my face, playing a pansy harp all day. Dude, give me drums and big cymbals! I like the crash and bang.

So, Ryodan takes me to a church and I stand outside looking in, stymied.

I mentally review the places I’ve seen so far that got iced: Chester’s subclub, a warehouse on the outskirts of town, two small underground pubs, a fitness center, the rural Laundromat-family, and now a small congregation in a church.

I linger at the tall, double-door entrance, absorbing details because I’m in no hurry to rush in. The cold emanating from the interior is brutal, worse than any scene yet. My breath burns all the way down into my lungs, even with a good fifty yards between me and the front of the church where the folks are gathered at the altar in a frosty nativity scene. There are eight men, three women, a priest, a dog standing there, and an old man sitting at the organ. I hear more men than women survived Halloween, and in a lot of rural places women have become a wicked hot commodity with men tripping all over themselves to score one. The pipes of the organ behind the altar are covered with icicles, and the ceiling drips enormous stalactites. There’s a frozen fog hanging around the entire interior. The priest is standing behind the altar, facing the others, his arms raised, like he was in the middle of a sermon.

“It’s colder than any of the rest, which suggests it happened more recently, ambient temperature and all factored in,” I say, and when I talk, my breath crystallizes in little clouds that hang in the air. I jerk with a sudden uncontrollable shiver. “Feck, it’s cold!”

“Too cold for you.”

I look at him. There was nearly a question mark at the end of that one. “Dude, you worried about me? I’m indestructible. When did you find out about this one?”

“Fade found it about forty minutes ago. He’d passed the church ten minutes earlier, and it wasn’t iced. On his way back it was.”

“So it is the freshest one we’ve seen so far.” I notice he’s not pressing into the church in slow-mo like he has at prior scenes. Guess it’s a little cold even for him.

I breathe in and out, fast and hard, bellowing my lungs, priming my adrenaline pump. “Let’s do it.”

I mentally pick myself up, shift gears and freeze-frame in.

There’s cold and then there’s something worse. This cold knifes into me and twists, catching gristle and bone. It slices down through muscle and tendon, razoring my nerves. But this scene is the freshest of them all, and if there’s anyplace I’m going to find clues, it’s here, before the temperature starts to rise and things change. If things do. I just don’t know enough.

I circle the small gathering, shivering. I’ve stuttered with cold at other scenes but never shivered while freeze-framing. I think shivering is cool because it’s the body’s way of freeze-framing on a molecular level. Your cells sense the temperature is too cold for you, and your brain makes you vibrate minutely all over to generate heat. So I’m, like, freeze-framing twice right now, on a cellular level and on my feet. The body is a brilliant thing.

I look at their faces first.

They’re frozen with their mouths open, faces contorted, screaming, same as the outdoor Laundromat-people. These folks saw it coming, too. All except for the priest who’s looking startled at the folks standing there, which tells me whatever it was, it came from behind the priest and it came fast because his head isn’t even turning. He must have been reacting to the looks on their faces. It must have appeared and iced simultaneously, or he’d have had time to begin to look behind him.

I feel a little better about whatever’s happening because twice now people saw it coming. That means I have a chance of getting out of its way if it comes in my direction.

“Save your. Observations and breath,” Ryodan says at my ear. “Gather. Info and. Get out.”

I look at him because of how he just spoke. Soon as I do I understand why he kept stopping and starting. His face is iced solid. It cracks when he adds, “Hurry the. Fuck. Up.”

My face isn’t iced. Why is his? I reach out without thinking, like I’m going to touch him or something, and he knocks my hand away. “Don’t. Fucking touch. Anything. Not. Even me.” Ice shatters and re-forms on his face four times before he completes the sentence.