Snow

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In a fresh, warm shirt and sweater, Todd tried his best not to let both his shivering and his embarrassment show as they scaled the embankment and climbed back out of the woods. The clawing he’d felt at the back of his head had been from one of the overhanging branches. After Bruce and Brendan had pulled him up onto dry land and peeled off his soaking wet clothes in exchange for dry ones, they had all shared a good laugh and a few more cigarettes. But there was a greater nervousness among them now—unspoken, like a child’s worst fear.

Vermont Street was a ghost town. The houses were dark and there was no movement—thankfully—in any of the windows. Heads down and with a purpose, the three of them trucked up Vermont without pausing. Once, the sounds of tree limbs crackling rose up from a nearby yard, but none of them turned to look in that direction. They kept moving, not once looking back.

Vermont Street ran parallel to Fairmont. With Bruce in the lead now, they crossed through two yards, then hunkered down between two houses while Bruce attempted to survey the street ahead.

“There’s something making noise down over there,” Bruce said, trying to peer around the corner of the house to see what it was.

“I hear it, too,” Todd said. “It’s a downed power line. Probably still kicking up sparks.”

“Where are all the skin-suits?” Brendan asked from the rear of the queue.

“Tully said they go into the houses every once in a while,” Bruce said. “I guess those snow monsters can do whatever they like when they’re floating around on their own, but maybe they can’t stay out all day and night in the skin-suits. Maybe the bodies start to freeze.” He sighed and added, “They’re just people, after all.”

Todd put a hand on Bruce’s back. “Let’s keep going.”

They hurried down the slope of the yard toward the street. The snow was coming down hard now, limiting their visibility. Beyond a veil of pines were the brick storefronts that lined the western edge of the town square. So close. Directly above the square, the swirling eyelet in the clouds pulsed with a sickly green light. Todd thought he could feel a change in the air, like how just before a storm the atmosphere would become charged with electricity. It became more difficult to breathe, too; each inhalation was becoming more and more restrictive.

They followed Bruce across the street, where cars were parked on a slant in the shoulder’s ditch and where others had been turned completely on their sides. Todd could see windshields caked with blood and bloody streaks in the snow as the vehicles’ occupants had been dragged away.

The town square sat in a bowl ridged with trees. Bruce led them through the trees, past the bare branches of deciduous flora to where the evergreens clotted together for better concealment. On their hands and knees, the three men crawled beneath the trees and through the prickling swats of bristly, cold branches. The smell of sap was very strong. They paused only when they’d reached the end of the copse, each of the men pulling aside bristling bows to peer down into the town square.

“Oh,” said Todd, “you gotta be kidding me.”

There were perhaps thirty townspeople gathered in the center of the town square, and perhaps another dozen or so lingering in the shaded alleyways between some storefronts. They all affected the same slump-shouldered, loose-limbed stance, their faces, from what Todd could make out at this distance, a mask of catatonic nonattendance. Despite the skin-suits, there was nothing remotely human about their appearance. That empty, vacuous glaze over their upturned faces made them look like wax dummies.

“What are they doing?” asked Brendan.

“They look like they’re…listening,” Todd said. He pointed at the glowing crater carved into the clouds, the crater’s epicenter a storm of electrical current and brilliant, dazzling lights. “Like they’re getting subliminal instructions from that thing in the sky.”

“Like they’re getting something,” Bruce muttered.

Todd could see the Pack-N-Go across the square, its front windows busted out, the interior dark. The icy sidewalk in front of the store was littered with arrowheads of triangular glass as well as boxes of cereal, packets of Ramen noodles, burst soda bottles, and fluttery rolls of paper towels.

“How the hell are we supposed to get into the Pack-N-Go, then back out again without those things seeing us?” Brendan said. He was drumming his fingers against his knees—a nervous habit.

“Maybe they’re in a trance,” Todd suggested. “Maybe it won’t be as hard as it looks.”

“You willing to bet your life on it?” Bruce jerked his chin farther up the square, where the main street led back up an incline and through the town. It was the direction Todd and the others had come last night as they walked into the square, looking for signs of life. Now, a grayish slurry of snow slowly rotated like a tornado in slow motion. At first glance, it appeared camouflaged by the snowfall itself…but on closer scrutiny, Todd could make out the subtle density to it and the distinction of its shape—the funnel of twisting snowflakes trapped in a vacuum that never touched the ground. It was large enough to block the entire street—the street that led out of town.

This is insane, Todd thought. This is a nightmare. I should just curl up in a ball and sit here until I wake up.

Something akin to a giggle bubbled up from deep within Brendan. Both Todd and Bruce looked at him, matching expressions of puzzlement on their faces. Brendan’s fingers continued to drum restlessly on his knees. “You know,” he said, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth, “I think I’ve got a plan.”

“Okay,” Kate said, shaking the bottle of aspirin, “this should help with the headache, sweetheart.” She froze in the doorway. “Where’s Charlie?”

“He went to find me my medicine,” Cody intoned, not lifting her head from the pillow.

Kate glared at Molly, who feigned interest in her book. “Why’d you let him go?”

Molly sneered and refolded her legs beneath her. “I’m not that boy’s mother.”

Fuming, Kate dropped to her knees before Cody’s cot. She popped the cap on the aspirin and shook a bunch of tablets into her palm. Then she read the directions on the bottle, realizing she’d never in her life administered medication to a child.

“How old are you, sweetie?”

“Eight and three-quarters,” Cody said.

Kate poured all but one tablet back into the bottle. “This will make you feel better,” she told the girl.

Still cradling the water bottle like a baby doll, Cody raised her head off the pillow. Her hair was damp with sweat and her face looked as red and as hot as a smoked ham.

Kate put the aspirin in Cody’s mouth. At her back, she could feel Molly’s eyes boring into her. “You have to swallow it whole,” Kate told her. “No chewing.”

The girl nodded. She drank from the water bottle and grimaced as the pill went down.

Kate stood and set the aspirin bottle down on the desk next to the collection of liquor bottles. The shotgun still leaned against the desk. “You shouldn’t have let Charlie go,” she said to Molly. Then, without another word, Kate snatched up the shotgun and one of the halogen lamps, and hurried out of the room.

“It just came to me,” Brendan said. He was talking fast, moving his hands a lot. “But I’m gonna need help. Like, Bruce, man—we can do this.”

“Do what?” Bruce asked, skeptical.

Ignoring him, Brendan leaned over and grabbed a fistful of Todd’s sweater. “You just sneak on down there, get as close to the Pack-N-Go as you can without actually setting foot into the square where those things can see you. Just sit tight and wait for the distraction.”

“What distraction?” Todd asked.

Still chuckling like a madman, Brendan sprang to his feet and pushed through the trees.

Todd and Bruce exchanged a look. “Just be careful,” Bruce said before rising and following Brendan through the trees.

Todd turned back to face the square. That spiraling aperture of light was slowly revolving, carving away the brownish, dirty-looking clouds as it turned. Looking at it caused something uncomfortable to turn over in Todd’s stomach. He blew into his gloved hands for warmth. Suddenly, his fingers felt numb, useless.

Then he was up and hustling through the pine boughs. The crust of snow crunched beneath his heavy boots while he toed fallen pinecones out of his way. When he finally came out of the trees, he was facing the rear of the shops along the town square, which sat maybe twenty yards ahead of him and at the bottom of a slight decline. Todd counted the number of shops over from the alleyway until he was certain he was looking at the back of the Pack-N-Go. Whatever Brendan had planned, he’d said for Todd to get as close as possible to the Pack-N-Go. Todd meant to do just that.

He crouched in the snow, adjusting the gear at his belt. The butane torch was at his right hip beside the handheld radio, the handgun wedged into the rear of his waistband. He had the shotgun’s strap slung around his chest, restricting his breathing.

He could sneak down there and cut through the alley between the two closest buildings…

An icy wind chilled his bones and froze tears to the sides of his face. Taking a deep breath, he poised himself…then ran down the slope and ditched into the alley. The butt of the shotgun scraped against the bricks—a sound like the grinding gears of a garbage compactor. He had the pistol in his hand now, though he couldn’t remember drawing it. He held his breath as he scaled the brick alley wall. Snow funneled through the narrow brick canyon; the sky directly above was the color of rotting vegetation.

He paused at the mouth of the alley, hiding in the shadows, his left shoulder against the wall for stability. The pistol weighed a thousand pounds in his hand. Across the darkening town square, he could see a number of Tully’s skin-suits staged around the bronze horse statue at the square’s center. They all had their heads craned up at the eyelet in the sky, their skin cast with an ungodly hue, their eyes black orbs in the pasty dough of their skulls.

What have you got planned, Brendan? Just what exactly am I waiting for?

Hunkering down into the dirty snow of the alley, Todd waited for a sign. For several moments, his heartbeat was all he could hear, somehow amplified in the freight train roar of the wind tunneling down between the buildings.

How long do I sit here? How much time do I give them? What if they get killed? I can’t waste time sitting here until nightfall.

He decided to count silently to one hundred. If nothing happened by then…

He had reached ninety-eight, his grip tightening on the pistol, when he heard a sound like a locomotive squealing into a train station. Leaning his head out the mouth of the alley, he saw something large come creeping down the street at the far end of the square. The street sloped down toward the square and as the thing approached, it began to gather speed. Todd could make out the vague suggestion of a slouching, mouthlike grill and two lantern eyes, dark and defunct and blind.

It was a car—a muddy brown Oldsmobile with a dented hood and a windshield networked with cracks. It came streaming down the street, collecting momentum, its hubcaps blurring with speed.

Todd’s heartbeat quickened.

“Charlie?”

Kate came to a stop in a storage room at the far end of the sheriff’s station. She held the shotgun in both hands, its barrel angled toward the floor. The halogen lamp hooked onto her belt thumped against her thigh with every step. She’d searched the other rooms and offices for the boy, as well as the chemical-smelling sally port, with no luck. Now, the storage room stretched out before her like a cave, its walls surrendering shelving, its floor littered with heaping boxes and wooden crates. The light fixtures in the ceiling were a column of sightless eyes dangling from thin metal stalks.

A slight shape stood out in the darkness at the far end of the room. Kate brought up the shotgun.

“Charlie?”

The shape shifted, melding with the shadows.

Kate approached, wending around the land mines of boxes and crates, her feet hardly coming up off the floor. The shotgun rattled and shook in her hands. There was a smell—a severe decaying smell—that seemed to permeate her senses and infiltrate every nuance of her body. When she was a young girl she had played hide-and-seek with some of the neighborhood kids. Tired of getting caught all the time, she’d decided to outwit them all by climbing inside a Dumpster behind the supermarket. Five minutes later, alerted by the sound of her cries when she couldn’t open the hatch to climb out, her friends had found her at the bottom of the Dumpster—filthy, reeking, petrified, and painted with greasy swill.

All that rushed back to her now in a wave of memories. The smell, the claustrophobia…

The dark.

“Charlie,” she said, lowering the shotgun. Startled, the boy spun around, his eyes wide, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap. She rushed to him, the lamp banging against her thigh and causing the shadows to jounce and dance as if in firelight. She gripped him by his shoulder, shook him. “Didn’t you hear me calling you? What are you doing back here?”

“I was…uh, Cody was sick…I was trying to find her medicine…” Then he turned his head to look back at whatever had been so attractive to him while Kate had been calling out his name only a moment ago: the circular opening of a pipe jutting from the wall.

Kate unhooked the lamp from her belt and brought the light closer to the pipe’s opening. She sucked in her breath, the light shaking in her grasp.

Snow was billowing out of the pipe and sprinkling to the cement floor.

Kate pulled Charlie behind her. “Get away from it.” There was an oil rag on top of a stack of boxes to her right. She snatched up the rag and stuffed it into the mouth of the pipe.

“Is that…” Charlie began, his voice small. He couldn’t finish the question.

Kate held her breath. She took a single step away from the pipe, bumping against Charlie in the process. She was thinking of those five people-shapes she’d glimpsed across the street from the station, watching the building. Had they been discovered?

Bending to one knee, Kate brought the halogen lamp to the spot on the floor where the snowflakes had fallen. Sour breath escaped her. Instead of melting to water, there were now ink-colored droplets of a bloodlike substance on the concrete floor where the snowflakes had fallen. There was almost a functional formation to the spatter…and the longer Kate stared at it, the more it reminded her of celestial bodies sparkling brightly in a country sky.

“We need to get back with your sister and Molly,” Kate said, jumping back up to her feet.

Out in the hallway, Molly screamed.

The Oldsmobile came careening down the street toward the town square, chunks of ice snapping under its tires. There was no driver behind the wheel and, of course, the car wasn’t actually running—it had been pushed from the top of the hill and was now beginning to swerve out of control.

Any doubt as to the consciousness of the townspeople scattered about the square was instantly eradicated as, in unison, they all swung their heads in the direction of the speeding automobile. Todd’s grip tightened on the handgun. He watched as the vehicle entered the square, moving at a quick clip, jouncing over the rutted snow packed hard as cement atop the street. With no one behind the car’s steering wheel to control it, the vehicle struck a sizeable chunk of snow and hopped a curb. The undercarriage shuddered. Sparks flew from beneath it and one of its hubcaps took off in a different direction. The passenger door flung open, struck a parking meter, and instantly slammed shut again.

With sharklike eyes, the townspeople followed the course of the runaway Oldsmobile, their heads turning on their necks like wooden puppets.

Todd saw it coming before it actually happened: the Oldsmobile smashed into the front of the hardware store, sending a shock wave across the square and a display of shimmering fragments of glass into the air. An exhalation of debris wrapped in black dust showered the sidewalk.

A deep-octave moan rose up among the townspeople. Like robots programmed to do so, they pivoted in unison and faced the destroyed facade of the hardware store. The front windows were still smoking, the tail end of the Olds cocked at an angle in the center of the store like a sneer.

Then, as if someone had fired a starter’s pistol, the townspeople took off toward the hardware store. They didn’t shamble or stagger like the puppeted skin-suits they were—rather, they loped like gazelles, the width of their strides astounding. Their fierce agility and speed shocked Todd into temporary immobility; even his mind seemed to shut down. He could only watch as they attacked the hardware store, spilling into the busted front windows and swarming over the Oldsmobile like ants.

Great bursts of snow exploded from the ground as vaporous tornados of shimmering snow dust corkscrewed up into the air. Todd counted four…five of them. They rippled through the air as they soared toward the hardware store.

Taking a deep breath, Todd dashed out onto the sidewalk and ran toward the Pack-N-Go.

From the top of the hill, Brendan cheered as he watched the Oldsmobile smash through the front of the hardware store. Without someone inside the car to steer it, he’d had his doubts as to how far the car would actually get before it ran off the road, expecting it to most likely collide with a tree. As it turned out, he couldn’t have planned a better outcome.

“I was fired from that hardware store when I was in high school,” Brendan said, grinning. “Fuck ’em, I say.”

They watched as the skin-suits turned their heads and emitted a resounding wail. It sounded like an orchestra warming up. When the skin-suits began loping toward the hardware store, Brendan clapped his hands, then clapped Bruce on the back.

“Come on,” Brendan said, beaming. “We’re not done yet, compadre.”

Charlie in tow, Kate skidded to a halt halfway down the hallway. Molly stood facing Kate, the pregnant woman’s face a testament to some indescribable horror.

“They’re outside,” Molly cried. “There’s so many of them! They know we’re here!”

Kate ran past her and into the secretarial office. Peering through the blinds on the windows, she could see the shapes had crept closer to the building. There were at least a dozen of them now, all staring at the police station. Skin-suits, as Tully had termed them. Their clothing matted with blood, their eyes as vacuous as muddy pools, they were like creatures that had shuffled right out of a nightmare.

Trembling, Molly appeared in the office doorway. “They know we’re here, don’t they?”

Kate examined the empty faces of the townspeople. “I can’t tell.”

“Of course they do!” Molly shouted. “You brought them here! And now we’re going to die!”

“Shut up,” Kate barked. She doused the halogen lamp, bathing them in darkness. “No one’s going to die. Get back downstairs with Cody.”

“She’s asleep.”

“I said go!”

Startled, beginning to cry again, Molly retreated down the hallway. Charlie now occupied the doorway in her place, a terrified expression on his pale face. He was visibly quaking.

Kate turned back to the window. Something beneath the snow moved and caught her attention—a mound rose and then sank, rose, then sank, as if the snow itself were breathing. The surface of the snow began to ripple, as if something were vibrating underground. Then, like one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs tunnels under the ground on his way to Pismo Beach, something beneath the snow—or perhaps the snow itself—began tunneling across the front lawn of the police station, leaving in its wake disturbed mounds of upturned powdery snow.

Whatever it was, it was snaking closer to the building, heading for the front doors.

Whatever it was, it was big.

They’re surrounding us, like the fucking cavalry, Kate thought, terrified.

One of the skin-suits—a middle-aged balding man with a beer gut, wearing sweatpants and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt—began walking up to the front doors of the station. He had that same off-kilter look in his eyes that strange Eddie Clement had had when they’d stopped to pick him up last night on the side of the road.

“What do we do?” Charlie said from the doorway.

Kate racked the shotgun and discharged a shell. She held it up to the boy so that he could see what it looked like. “I need you to go to the room with all the guns, Charlie, and bring me more of these. They’re in boxes on the shelves. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Without expression, Charlie nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Now go. Hurry.”

The interior of the Pack-N-Go smelled like death. Todd hurried inside, crunching shattered glass and bits of cereal. The damage was unfathomable, the sights atrocious. The plastic trash bags he had used to cover the two dead bodies had blown away, revealing purpled, crystallized mummies in the aisles of the convenience store. The parts of them that still looked human—a twisted and frozen hand or the teepee bend of a leg—were somehow the hardest things to look at.

Also, there was now a third body, fresher than the other two but more horribly disfigured in death, draped over a section of fallen shelving. The head was opened up like a piñata, trailing ropy crimson goop over cereal boxes, rendering the person unidentifiable. Yet Todd recognized the clothing and knew without doubt that this was what remained of Fred Wilkinson.

As the townspeople tore into the hardware store across the square, Todd ran over to the refrigerated section of the convenience store, where the ventilation grate lay on the floor beside the stepladder he and Kate had used to climb through the ductwork and into the gun shop next door. Blood had been sprayed along one of the glass freezer doors, now frozen to gelatinous syrup. Spilled cola had made the floor tacky.

Todd spied his duffel bag on the floor and dove for it. Unzipping it, he rifled through the items inside until he located the laptop’s nylon carrying case. Relief coursed through him. With trembling hands, he fumbled the walkie-talkie off his belt.

“It’s Todd,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got the laptop and now I’m getting the fuck outta here.”