Snow

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

By the time they reached the entrance of the woods, a light snow had begun to fall. The three men cast wary glances toward the heavens and held their breath, each one wondering if they were about to be attacked. But the snow just fell, covering their tracks and powdering their clothes.

Their gear weighed them down. Walking along the culvert from the sheriff’s station down to the main road hadn’t been too difficult, but by the time they reached the edge of the woods, they were sweating and breathing heavily. Todd’s muscles ached and the wound on his injured leg throbbed with a dullness that was almost nauseating. They paused only once, leaning against trees while Bruce distributed cigarettes to each of them. They smoked and kept their eyes peeled for movement in the road above. They saw nothing, saw no one.

The climb down into the woods was steeper than Todd would have imagined. Bruce untangled a length of rope from his belt and tied one end around the bole of a sturdy tree. “We’ll go down like mountain climbers rappelling down the face of a cliff,” Bruce said.

Brendan went first, inching his way backward down the steep and icy decline, a flag of vapor smoldering from his lips. As cautious as he was, it took him a good seven or eight minutes to reach level ground. Exhausted, he collapsed against a tree to catch his breath.

Todd went next, descending in a similar fashion. Hand over hand, he fed the rope up and out while his booted feet were careful not to trip over each other. Halfway down, his heel struck a partially buried tree stump and he lost his grip on the rope. He fell backward but managed to spin halfway around in the air, so that he struck the sloping ground on his right side. The wind was knocked out of him as he started sliding toward the valley floor. Below, Brendan scrambled to his feet and stood like the goalie of an ice hockey team, his legs far apart and bent at the hips, as if to catch Todd on his way down. Luckily, though, Todd managed to snag a tree root and arrest his descent. His breath whistling from his throat and his nose running into his mouth, he glanced up at Bruce, who stood peering over the precipice seemingly a million miles above him, and smiled weakly.

Bruce must have seen the smile, because he raised a hand in return.

At the bottom of the incline, Todd approached Brendan while making sure all his gear was still secured to himself. Brendan clapped him on the back, his cheeks aflame from the cold. As Todd watched Bruce begin his descent, tears streamed from the corners of his eyes and froze midway down his cheeks.

When Bruce finally joined them on level ground, the sheriff’s deputy was panting like a bloodhound. The top of his head had gone a bright crimson.

They continued into the heart of the woods, crunching through previously undisturbed snow. “Have you noticed?” Brendan said at one point. “Not a single squirrel or bird, not even a deer. Listen.” They all stopped to listen. “Everything is totally quiet. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything this quiet before.”

“Maybe they got to the animals first,” Todd suggested. The thought troubled him in ways he couldn’t quite understand—herds of zombielike deer galloping along a snowy countryside, attacking their brethren in fitful rages, impaling other animals and possibly people with their antlers.

“Haven’t seen any animals,” Bruce said as they continued through the woods. “Maybe they sensed this all coming and they skedaddled before the shit hit the fan. Like how farm animals always know when a tornado’s approaching.”

For some reason, that thought didn’t make Todd feel any better.

Ahead of them, Brendan stopped suddenly. Todd nearly walked into him, catching himself at the last minute. He began to say something but Brendan quickly shushed him. Then Brendan pointed off into the distance, where the trees crowded together like soldiers trying to keep warm on a cold winter’s night.

“What is it?” Todd said, whispering now. “What are you pointing at?”

“There.”

It took a few seconds for Todd’s eyes to adapt and relate to his brain what he was seeing: two children dressed in tattered, soiled clothing, the hair on their heads beaded with frozen clumps of ice.

They had no faces.

“Jesus,” Bruce said from behind Todd. “Jesus, will you look at that?”

Todd’s hands clenched. “What do we do?”

“Just stand tight for a minute,” Bruce told him. “I don’t think they see us.”

“I don’t think they can see us,” Brendan said. “My God, how in the world do you think—”

Behind the two children the trees seemed to disassemble themselves, until Todd realized that much of what he’d thought were trees were really just more faceless children, their skin the color and texture of bark, their clothes muddy and earthen in hue. They seemed to float right out of the trees like battlefield ghosts, each one’s face a blank bulb of flesh-colored putty. Todd counted twelve, thirteen of them…

What if they attack? Todd thought. What if they all charge us at once? Could we possibly defend ourselves against so many of them? And how many more are out there that we haven’t spotted yet?

“They’re rejects,” Bruce said, pushing between Todd and Brendan. “Freaks. When the creatures get inside little children—like preadolescents—they corrupt them and break them and turn them into those things.”

Brendan was trembling. Kate had told Todd that Brendan was the father of Molly’s baby; now, Todd wondered if Brendan was thinking of his unborn child while staring across the forest floor at these sad misfits.

“Pay them no mind,” Bruce told them, walking ahead of them. “Just keep moving.”

They continued deeper into the woods. At one point, Todd looked over his shoulder to where the children had been standing, and was surprised and a bit unnerved to find that they had vanished. He imagined packs of feral children, disfigured in their featurelessness, roaming the forested hillsides of the state for years and years to come.

In the basement of the sheriff’s station, Kate attempted to keep Charlie and Cody occupied by playing board games with them. They’d gotten through one full game of Monopoly and were halfway through Life when Cody began to whimper. The little girl climbed up onto one of the empty cots and curled into a fetal position. Worried, Kate got up and sat down on the edge of the girl’s cot.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

Cody just rubbed her eyes with her fist.

Kate pressed the back of her hand to the girl’s forehead. “She’s warm.”

Seated cross-legged on her own cot across the room, Molly grunted and began stacking pillows around her. “Are you a nurse or something?”

Kate ignored her. She stood and searched randomly around the desktop for anything that was not a bottle of liquor. In one of the desk drawers she located some bottled water. She opened one of the bottles and gave it to Cody. The girl took a few hesitant sips, then lay back down on the cot.

“I think your sister’s got a fever,” she said to Charlie.

“She gets headaches,” Charlie informed her.

“Does she? What kind?”

Charlie shrugged. He was picking at the rubber sole of one of his sneakers. “I don’t know. She used to take medicine.”

Oh please, you’re fucking with me, kid, Kate thought. “What kind of medicine, Charlie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it special medicine or just aspirin?”

“What’s a ass-prin?” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”

Molly snickered.

“Something funny?” Kate said, looking at Molly from the corner of her eye while she unfolded a blanket and placed it over Cody. The little girl was shivering now.

“You’re trying to be that little girl’s mother,” Molly said.

“No,” Kate corrected, “I’m trying to take care of her because no one else is here to do that.”

“Do you have any kids of your own?”

“No.” She hated answering Molly’s questions, humoring the bitch like that, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Are you unable?”

“Excuse me?” She felt some of the old Kate Jansen return to her—the Kate Jansen who would have gotten up, swaggered over to snide little potbellied Molly, and cracked her across the jaw. Lord knew she’d done similar things to nicer people in the past.

“I’m just saying,” Molly crooned, continuing to fluff her pillows. “It’s just, you’ve been fawning all over those two ever since you got here. It’s like you’re trying to make up for something.”

“Are we seriously having this conversation?”

“It’s just talk,” Molly said, as if her comments thus far had been completely innocent. “I’m just passing the time.”

“Well, you can pass it by telling me where I could find some aspirin.”

Molly shrugged and looked bored. She picked up one of the paperback novels stacked beside her cot and absently thumbed through the pages. “This is a police station,” she intoned, no longer looking up at Kate. “I’m sure there’s Tylenol or something around here somewhere.”

Kate tucked the blanket up under Cody’s arms and legs, then stood, running her fingers through her hair. Part of her was holding on to Gerald, and how worried he must be by now that he hadn’t heard from her…but a larger part was out there with Todd. Standing in the doorway of the sheriff’s station as they headed down to the road, she’d had the sinking feeling that she would never see him again.

“I’m going to find some aspirin,” Kate announced, and left.

They reached the river and found it frozen. It was about twenty feet wide and couldn’t possibly be very deep; nonetheless, Todd did not like the idea of plowing through the ice even up to his shins. It was cold enough out here that his feet would freeze instantly. And there would be no turning back until after they’d completed their task. He would just have to be careful.

“You can use these overhangs for handholds,” Brendan said, inching his way out onto the ice while he gripped overhanging tree limbs like monkey bars. “They don’t go all the way across but it’s better than nothing.”

“We should probably go one at a time,” Todd said, bending down to survey the thickness of the ice. He thumped a gloved knuckle against it and it seemed sturdy enough.

When his handholds ran out, Brendan stretched his arms out like airplane wings. He took minuscule steps and looked like a tightrope walker overcautious of his balance. On the other side of the streambed, the scraggly twists of overhanging limbs dropped back down; Brendan’s long arms rose and he gripped the limbs. A number of branches snapped away and shattered like glass on the surface of the frozen stream.

With two ungraceful bounds, Brendan made it to the other side of the stream. He executed an awkward bow that nearly sent him tumbling back onto the ice, before seating himself in the Y of a nearby tree. He lit a cigarette, looking like someone waiting for a bus.

Bruce eased himself out onto the ice next. As Brendan had done before him, he utilized the overhanging limbs to facilitate his way out to the center of the frozen stream. Releasing the last of the limbs, the deputy sheriff crossed the center of the stream much quicker than Brendan, his balance more aligned and steady. He didn’t even bother grabbing for the overhanging branches on the far end of the streambed; he simply continued across at a steady pace, half sliding, half galloping.

When Bruce made it to the other side, Brendan handed him his cigarette and Bruce sucked the life out of it.

Todd slid out onto the ice, one hand groping for the branches above his head. He grabbed a sturdy one and inched out farther onto the ice. Beneath him, the ice felt solid. Thankfully, blessedly solid. As Brendan and Bruce had done, he used the overhead branches as support until he got to the center of the stream. But then he took an overzealous step and heard something that sounded like a bone breaking.

He looked down and saw a hairline fracture in the ice. It ran perpendicular underneath his right foot. Holding his breath, he lifted his boot and took one easy step backward. His heart was suddenly racing.

Something clutched at his hair.

Todd uttered a cry and jerked down, feeling something clawlike scrape his scalp. His knees gave out, sending him backward toward the ice. The world spun.

“Shit—”

He struck the ice with the center of his back—a solid punch that knocked the wind from his lungs. Instantly, he became aware of a bizarre sense of give, of surrender, and freezing water was suddenly infiltrating his clothes. He struggled to sit up but couldn’t; the small of his back had crashed through the ice, trapping him like a turtle that has been turned on its back.

Bruce and Brendan snapped to their feet on the far side of the stream. “Rope!” Bruce yelled. “Todd! Hey, Todd!”

Todd’s legs pumped at the air. The heavy police coat was becoming saturated and heavy. The back of his head was against a shelf of ice…but he soon heard that beginning to crack and break, too.

If that goes, he thought, I’m going under. For all I know, this little stream could be twenty feet deep…

Something flitted in front of his eyes. He felt something sting the side of his face: Bruce’s rope whipping across his cheek. Blindly, Todd groped for it. He found it and wrapped the rope around both his hands just as the shelf of ice at the back of his head broke apart. He felt his head snap back on his neck, followed by the heart-stopping sting of the freezing waters that engulfed him. His whole face went under, his arms pinwheeling, his legs bicycling in the air.

The rope tightened around his hands. He felt his arms nearly pop out of their sockets at the force of the pull. He was still holding his breath, his eyes clenched shut, when he realized he had been pulled clear of the water. He gasped, the force of which hurt his lungs, and he lunged forward until he was flat on his stomach atop the ice. On the other side of the stream, Bruce and Brendan were tugging the rope, dragging Todd toward them.

They managed to drag him up into the snowy embankment. Gasping, his skin stinging from the cold waters, Todd lay on his back, shaking violently.

“Help me get the coat off him,” Bruce instructed, and Todd was quickly manhandled like a rag doll. They stripped him of the police coat and then his shirt, too. His skin began to harden and crystallize. “Here.” Bruce thrust a fresh shirt at him, which he’d dug out of the backpack he had slung over his shoulders. “Lift your arms and we’ll help you put this on.”

Teeth chattering like typewriter keys, Todd obeyed.

Upstairs, the hallway looked slanted in the darkness. Gloomy half light bled through the pebbled windows at the end of the hall, where it pooled in murky white puddles on the tiled floor. Rubbing her forearms for warmth, Kate raced down the hall, stopping in every office she passed on the way. She searched the desks, the shelves, the file cabinets. There was no aspirin anywhere.

Opening a set of massive metal doors, she peered into the sally port. Her breath was visible right before her eyes. She saw the dark, hulking shapes of two police cruisers. The air smelled like radiator fluid.

Continuing farther down the hall, she became overly conscious of every noise that surrounded her—the ticking of a battery-powered wall clock, the rattle of old pipes deep in the walls, the sudden arrival of wind bellowing through the eaves. At the end of the hall she saw a secretarial office enclosed in stenciled glass. The door was unlocked. She entered and tiptoed around a desk, knowing with near certainty that every secretary in the good old U.S. of A. kept a bottle of aspirin in her desk drawer.

She pulled out a chair and began sifting through the drawers. It didn’t take her long to locate the pills.

“Bingo.”

She stuffed them into her pocket and, shaking like a maraca, darted back around the desk toward the office door.

However, she paused as she passed before one of the shaded windows. Peeling away the shade, she looked out into a milky haze of greenish daylight…and at the heavy snow that was falling.

Fear gripped her.

Down by the edge of the road, humanlike shapes shuffled into view. Kate could make out no details but held her breath, hoping it was Todd and the others. Had something gone wrong? Were they coming back so soon?

But no—it wasn’t Todd and the others. She counted five distinct shapes in the shadows of the looming trees. The snow refracted the greenish light from the sky, forcing her to question what exactly she was seeing. It was a trick of the light reflected off the snow.

“I hope,” she whispered, and hurried back downstairs.