Snowblind

by Michael McBride

“We aren’t getting out of here, are we?” Shore whispered from the doorway. Coburn didn’t know what to say. All he could focus on was the scratch-scratch-scratching of his friend’s severed arm on the door.

The viscera had been removed from the lower abdomen and the brim of the pelvis tipped at such an angle that it functioned like the seat of a chair. And there . . . sitting on that seat . . . was Vigil’s head.

Coburn did everything in his power not to look away from his old friend’s eyes, for they were the only part of his friend that hadn’t been mutilated.

There were holes in the cheeks through which his teeth showed. His ears were gone. His neck was little more than sinew and knobby vertebrae. The muscles had been stripped from the remainder of his body. He had no belly, no organs, just a section of lumbar spine to bridge the torso and the pelvis. The meat had been sloppily torn off, leaving the curled nubs of tendons and an ice-crusted layer of frozen blood on connective tissue.

Baumann’s horrible screams in his head. Shore’s warm blood spattering his face. Vigil’s head screwed into his savaged pelvis.

He became an animal, in his mind and in reality.