She turned and thrust out the flare. Two of them were coming at her; one veered away and the other recoiled. She glimpsed grey, etiolated bodies, limbs almost as long as her, with pale translucent fabric wrapped around them, and half-shrouded, eyeless faces, ending in blunt fanged muzzles. When they retreated, she threw the flare after them and wrenched open the door.

She shoved the box into the passenger footwell, scrambling across the seats. Twisted round as she went because she’d left the door ajar. Spindly white fingers reached through it, coiling round her left wrist. Their length could have been some kind of prosthetic, but the arm was impossibly, impossibly thin. Impossibly strong, too, but it was the thinness Ellie noticed first, the absolute impossibility of that arm belonging to anything approaching a normal human being. Pale translucent fabric hung in loose folds from it.

She clutched at the door. The handle. Please let her find the handle. Her fingers closed around it and she yanked the door to, hard, slamming it on the stick-thin wrist – once, then twice. The hand opened – no sound, no cry – and recoiled. Her third slam of the door caught the fingers. They stuck out of the join between door and jamb: thin white sticks. Then they twitched and were pulled back through the join. The car rocked; the door swung open.

Ellie pulled it shut again. A torn piece of pale fabric hung from the join. The keys. The keys. There could only be seconds before another attack. The flares were distracting them, but that one headlight would be so easily shattered and without it she’d be driving as blind as these things apparently were through the snow.

The passenger window splintered as a pellet struck. Ellie got the keys in the ignition, gunned the engine, then threw the X5 into reverse. It slewed backwards, and hit something: Ellie glimpsed a pale blur flung backwards through the dark and snow, limbs flailing. Again, no sound. Never a cry. Utterly silent.

She pulled the car out onto the hill road, threw it into forward gear and floored the accelerator. It surged forward; snow whirled, glowing, in the single headlight. Ellie pulled into the right-hand lane, driving on the wrong side; better to scrape the rock face than veer too far left and go through the crash barrier.

Something flickered in the light up ahead. Something pale and in motion. One of them.

How fast was she driving? Ellie didn’t dare look: faster than she’d gone on the way down, anyway: faster than was safe. But she accelerated anyway, fumbling for her seatbelt and pulling it on. Her hat slipped over her eyes; Ellie knocked it off, into the footwell.

She had to focus on the road ahead. Had to get back to Barsall. Warn everyone. They should be safe with the lights on. The monsters could only break so many lamps. They’d be safe, unless the power failed –