Oh well, I didn't win the Flash Fiction Contest I entered the other day. I'm sure the winning entries were written by bastards very talented writers. ;)
Well here's my entry, and tell me what you think. Be kind, I wrote the whole thing in under 3 hours.
Frostbitten by Duncan R. MacMaster
A ray of sunlight slipped through the boarded up window and glinted off the edge of the metal spade that Jack had spent half the night filing into a razor's edge.
It was time.
Jack gave the spade another swipe with the file. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it should be enough.
Jack looked out the window. The sky was a dull battleship grey, the woods would have been a single black shape if it weren't for the dots of snow clinging to the branches, and the ground below was a solid thick blanket of white. Jack checked the thermometer; it was forty below zero outside. It was freezing out there, and that meant that it would be freezing too.
Jack dressed carefully, adding enough layers to fight off the cold, but not too much, he needed to be able to move freely out there, just in case. It had been unseasonably warm the night before, the sky was clear, and Jack and Haley were going to take advantage of it to see the meteor shower. Then it showed up, Jack could still hear the howling, Haley's scream, and the smell of blood still clung to his nostrils.
Jack ran; there was nothing he could do to save Haley. He had to save himself.
Jack pulled aside the old couch that served as a makeshift barricade and pushed open the front door. The snow was past his ankles, and his breath came out in little white puffs.
The snow crunched beneath his feet as he walked toward the tree-line, the sharpened spade in hand. He didn't want to do it, but he had to. The law was clear about what to do when you found one of them.
The blizzard came suddenly during the night while Jack was barring the doors and windows of the cabin. The icy wind roared in, burying Haley's final scream, as the snow buried everything else.
The snow around the half-concealed telescope was dotted with red. Jack took a deep breath and trudged on until he reached the tree-line.
He smelled what was left of Haley before he saw that it was not much more than bones and shredded clothes, poking from beneath a mound of blood spattered snow. Jack's stomach clenched and he fought the urge to gag.
Then he heard it.
Jack turned and saw the thing crawling away on its distended belly. Congealed blood caked the thing's mouth, and it was breathing hard. It couldn't move well in the cold, and Jack could see in its black eyes that it knew what was coming.
"You're not so scary now," asked Jack as he raised the spade into the air, "aren't you?"
Then Jack brought down the spade with a hard satisfying crunch.
THE END
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