...Brandon took another step back. He was going to leave the clearing and find Katrina. After that he didn’t know what to do, but at least he would be out of here.

Turning to run, he stumbled over the woman’s body. His arms flailed wildly as he tried to retain his balance, but he fell into a small snowdrift that had developed next to her. He also somehow managed to uncover more of her body. Now her right arm was partially exposed, as well as the hand, which was gripping a small bouquet of reddish-brown flowers. They appeared brittle and dead in her frozen hand, but also somehow oddly alive, as if they had been sleeping and his fall had awakened them.

He stared at them and saw they were closed up; the rose-like petals had raised themselves into an impenetrable oval. He thought they looked like an old woman’s lips, wrinkled, faded and barely containing life. The stems were long and smooth, which surprised him. He guessed these were some type of rose and all the roses he knew about had thorns on their stems. Of course, he didn’t know much about botany.

He leaned forward to look at the woman’s hand, noticing something that confused his already spinning mind. Where her fingers touched the roses there were tiny puncture wounds as well as what looked like burns or some type of irritation. Another disturbing observation was the fact that her palm was open, like she had been trying to drop the roses, or perhaps throw them away before she died.

He let his gaze move back to her face, scanning her body as it went. There didn’t seem to be any sign of violence. There was no blood evident except for the puncture wounds in her hands. What had happened here?

Snow had begun to gather on her face around her mouth and nose and he instinctively reached down with a gloved hand to brush it away. He recoiled for the second time in the past ten minutes when he saw what he had uncovered this time.

Her nose appeared to be bleeding, or at least was bleeding, when she had died. Two streaks ran in tiny rivers of red, staining her white skin. The blood should have been frozen; it shouldn’t have been flowing the way it was. It shouldn’t have been sticky either. It shouldn’t have been on his gloves. Absently, he rubbed the back of his neck. It was something he always did when at a loss.

“What the—” he started, looking back at her hand where the bouquet of roses suddenly flared to life before him. Their dull, rust-colored red had turned a fierce bloodred in hue.

He watched in amazement as the petals began to turn flush and open, blooming before him. The puncture wounds on the woman’s hand flared red as well, as fresh blood began dripping out of them. It ran over the stems of the roses and onto the ground, where it stained the cold snow an even colder red. When the blood touched the stems, however, silent sucking sounds came to his ears. He watched in horror as the roses began feeding, drinking her chilled blood. The petals were rapidly opening now, as if each drop of blood was fortifying them more than any fertilizer ever could. He gasped as the body twitched in a spasm.

He had seen enough and struggled to regain his feet, his knees buckling beneath him like jelly. All of the roses in her strange bouquet were now in full bloom, leering up at him with a cruel, alien intelligence that he didn’t think vegetable matter could have. He forced his legs to work, to drive him backward, away from whatever type of flower had just blossomed before him. His eyes, though, were focused directly on the woman’s face. Her mouth, which had been frozen into a grimace of pain, now seemed to be opening even wider, like something were struggling to get out. All of the roses in her bouquet were now in full bloom and had turned their strange red heads to face him. It was like they were watching him, amused by his actions, by his fear.

::What’s the matter Brandon?:: he imagined them saying. ::Never seen a rose bloom in winter before?::

He shook his head as if answering the question his mind had formed. His mind had formed it, hadn’t it? Not something else?

The woman’s mouth stretched into a large “O,” pulling her lips back over her teeth in a way that human lips were never meant to be. He watched as they split violently, spurting blood into the air like a small fountain. Her teeth began bowing outward, as if under a great pressure from the inside. Something forced its way up her throat from her chest. Something climbing its way out of her body.