Freeze by Daniel Pyle

the room to the firewood. Her chest throbbed where the thing had hit her, and she was having trouble breathing, but she supposed it could have been a lot worse. At least the thing hadn’t given her a heart attack, and it didn’t seem to have jarred lose the shards of glass in her lungs (or throat or stomach or wherever else they might have lodged).
    Something hit the floor behind her. Cold water splashed her ankles and lower legs, and she looked back to see the tip of the thing’s tentacle wiggling across the floor between her feet, its stiff fingers clacking together. She jerked her legs away before the creature could grab hold of her and scurried the rest of the way to the utility room door.
    In the hallway, Bub squealed again, and a series of thumping sounds followed. She tried not to think about it, not to let her heart break. She’d help him when she could, if she could. 
    On the other side of the house, the first creature smacked the door again. She guessed it had probably been doing it all along, but she’d stopped noticing, had tuned out the sound, had focused her attention on the problem at hand. She noticed it now, however. The sound of cracking wood this time lasted much longer. She imagined the thing squeezing through the splintered doorway, dragging its tentacles along behind and leaving a wet, sluggish streak on the floor as it came after her. She might still have some time before any of that happened. Or she might not.
    You have to do this now. Right now. Get the fire. Fight back.
    She opened the tongs, gripped the burning wood, and squeezed the handles to pinch the log in place. When she was sure she wouldn’t drop it, she spun around and lunged toward the creature.
    She had expected it to swing at her, to try to knock the wood loose again. Instead, it flipped a pair of tentacles behind her back and drew her closer to itself. Her thin shirt did little to insulate her from the freezing limbs. Where they touched her, her skin tightened and her muscles flexed. She thought she would surely drop the fire, and, in fact, the tongs did start to slip out of her grasp, but she managed to hold on to them and lifted the log to the creature’s head. Doing it took every last bit of her strength, although she doubted the firewood weighed more than a few pounds. Her arm muscles had loosened, turned to worthless jelly around her bones. But she did it in the end, raised the tongs up over her head and forced the wood into the creature’s growling mouth.
    The monster reacted in two ways: first, it squeezed her against itself, cutting off her oxygen and forcing her face to within inches of the burning log. She tried to turn her head away, but the fire burned the skin on the side of her face. The smell of smoldering hair filled the room, and she screamed. The other thing the monster did was bite down. It hissed and squealed all the while, but it chewed into the flaming log and broke it in half. One half of the wood slid down the thing’s body, leaving a wet streak in its frosty hide, but the other half lodged between the creature’s teeth. It opened its mouth wider, probably meaning to spit out the wood before it melted off its face, but Tess saw a chance and took it: she balled up her fist, swung it, and knocked the chunk of wood into the creature’s gullet.
    She felt heat on her knuckles and guessed she’d burned the skin there, too, but that was nothing compared to what happened to the monster: the wood burned its way down the thing’s throat. The creature’s body distorted the light, refracted it in a way that made its head look like some kind of misshapen disco ball. Tess watched the flame slide down into the monster’s innards, sure the melting water would put it out soon enough but hoping it would do plenty of damage to the creature first.
    The tentacles around her squeezed harder for a second, and Tess was sure they were going to crack her ribs. Or worse. Maybe snap her right in half. But when it seemed like