The Winter People by Bret Tallent Page A

horrible
sinking feeling about the storm as well.  That it was the predecessor to some
horror yet to come.
    He could feel the
evil in the clouds that had engulfed them.  It was fluid and pulsating like a
living thing, a mass of intertwining tendrils miles long and eons old.  It had
conscious thought.  Nick looked up at the roof of the cab but saw beyond it. 
He looked up into the storm front and saw it looking back at him, laughing. 
And as if to verify this, the wind buffeted the Suburban just then.  Just for
Nick.
     
    ***
    Sarah awoke with a
start, barely stifling a scream.  She sat bolt upright in bed, her hazel eyes
wide opened and wild.  Her long brown hair was matted to her forehead in wet
clumps and tangled in the back.  Her thin face and high cheekbones seemed
distorted in her panic.  The blankets that had been pulled up tight around her
head when she had first gone to bed were now twisted in knots and sweat soaked
at the foot of the bed.  She let out only a whimper and quickly raised her hand
to her mouth.  She didn't want to wake the others over some silly nightmare.
    But, like so many
dreams do, this one faded quickly so that she couldn't even remember what it
was about.  The harder she tried, the further its content slipped away.  All
she could remember were bits and pieces.  Incoherent things that were even now
becoming more and more obscure.  She could remember that she and her brother
were being chased.  She couldn't remember what it was that was chasing them
though, but it was very bad and they were terrified of it.
    Then it was only
her brother that was being chased and she didn't know why.  For some reason,
she thought that it was because she was dead, but she just couldn't remember. 
The next thing she could recall was a feeling rather than a thought, she
remembered extreme cold.  Cold like she had never known before.  A cold that
made her think of the grave.  She trembled, as much from the feeling as from
the fact that she had been sweating and had thrown off her covers.
    Sarah pulled the
blankets back up around her and listened to the house.  It was deathly quiet
inside.  All of the others were sound asleep, she thought.  But it would be a
long while before she would be.  The wind hammered at her bedroom window and
whistled and whined around the eaves.  She lay there in the darkness trying to
recall the dream but its elements were already diffusing.  What she had
recalled only moments ago was already vague and nondescript.  Soon she would
recall nothing, only that she'd had a nightmare.
     
    ***
    Barbara Smith
tossed and turned in her queen size bed.  She still slept, but in her sleep she
thrashed and murmured and gasped and squealed.  She was aware that Hayden had
left, lost somewhere in that state between full sleep and wakefulness.  The
phone, she remembered him answering the phone.  Then he was gone.  She had drifted
back to sleep almost instantly, and had thus begun her dream.  The nightmare in
which she was now embroiled.  The nightmare she would be unable to recall in
the morning.
    Barbara saw a
man.  She knew it was Hayden, even though she did not have a clear image of him. 
He was lost in a world that was completely white.  No ups or downs or
dimensions of any kind.  He was alone there and she wanted to go to him but
couldn’t move.  Behind him there was suddenly a large mass, a dark shape like
that of a man but larger, much larger.  It was emerging from the white that
surrounded Hayden and he didn't see it.  She tried to scream out to him but she
couldn't.  She tried to warn him but he couldn’t hear her.
    Then Hayden turned
around to see the dark form standing before him, towering over him.  She could
feel the dark thing's thoughts coursing through her as if they were her own. 
It was a jumble of emotions, delight, hunger, anger, satisfaction, and pain.  Beneath
all those feelings was something else, an underlying thought, or feeling,