Chills by Mary Sangiovanni Page A

of amber-white glow, reached into the darkness ahead of her. Occasionally, the overhanging tree branches pulled back and the moon reminded her that she had not fallen off into an endless void. That, and the metallic squeal of the thing gaining on her.
    A tail or leg—Kathy had not seen which—shaved the side of her car, furrowing through paint and metal and jerking her to the left. She nearly lost control of the wheel but compensated quickly, swerving toward the left to put space between her car and the creature.
    Then she hit a patch of ice. The tires slid, tractionless, toward a snow bank ahead and to the right. Panic welled up into her throat, threatening to choke her, but she swallowed it down. She pumped the brakes, cut the wheel into the skid, and regained control, pulling the car back onto the road just seconds before it would have buried its front end into the snow drift.
    The creature behind her wailed into the wind and dove forward.
    A half-obscured sign that swam up in her headlights told her the center of town and the police station were seven miles away. Almost there . . .
    A terrible rending sound, followed by the sudden descent of a leg into her back seat, sent her on another skid. The creature was above her now, on the roof of the car. She could hear the groaning of metal and the scraping sounds of its other legs as it sought a way to hold on. Feelers smacked against the windshield; one took hold of a wiper blade and wrenched it free. Kathy screamed, as much out of anger as fear. She hit the brakes, hoping the sudden stop would throw the thing, but this sent the car spinning in circles. The feelers clamped down on the frame of the car; against her windshield, she could see small suckers like tiny, hungry mouths slurping at the glass.
    She cut the wheel again, trying to stop the spin—hoping, even praying a little, that she could get the car moving forward again.
    The back end of the car hit the post of a sign that said the police station was now only three miles out of reach, and miraculously, the car righted itself, nose pointing in the direction of the town center. Thank the universe, she thought, for small favors. Within seconds, she was moving again, but the thing was still latched on to the roof of her car like a barnacle
    The car was coming up on a bridge over a small pond, not terribly high but high enough to warrant care when crossing. The county had never gotten around to replacing the wooden guardrail with a metal one. It was a lonely bridge on a county back road hardly anyone ever took; that it had even been kept up with as well as it had was enough to let county officials sleep at night.
    It was pitch black over the side of that bridge, and the water cold enough, Kathy imagined, to stop a heart. A glance down at her steering wheel, though, and a scream from above her as another leg tried to puncture the roof made the decision for her. She clicked on her seat belt.
    With its leg firmly embedded into the back seat of her car, Kathy floored it and cut the wheel. The wooden guardrail splintered on impact with her bumper, and as the car sailed off the bridge, it hit a patch of moonlight in midair and then slammed through the first layer of ice on the pond.

Chapter Six
    W hen Teagan found him, Jack was standing stone still amid the bustling of uniformed officers cordoning off Chandler Park, white puffs of breath making tight little clouds in front of his face. Beneath a canvas tent, half-frozen bodies, minimally clothed and illuminated by park street lamps on old-fashioned iron poles, were laid out atop the rows of picnic tables, attended to by Cordwell and Brenner and CSIs who were taking pictures and measurements and poking and prodding. There were a lot of bodies—eight or nine—and Jack stood in the center of them, amid the rows of tables, staring up into the snow-smeared night. Occasionally, flashlight beams arced through the tight circumference of the scene’s darkness,