Snow

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“It’s getting dark again,” Kate said. She was with Todd in the computer room, looking out the single window against the far wall. The glass wasn’t pebbled like the windows out in the front hall, but it was double paned, its center cloudy with condensation. The sun blazed like a greenish bruise behind the nearby trees. Above, the sky looked like tar paper stretched across the face of the planet.

Todd was rapidly hammering away at the keyboard. He’d been sending out instant messages to various police departments’ emergency hotline connections throughout Iowa and Illinois, each one professing the same message:

Please help! We are hostages under attack by terrorists in Woodson, Iowa. Send heavy firepower—the military and national guard. No phones/power/radio/heat. Send help soon!

It had been Kate’s idea to mention a terrorist threat. Had they written the truth—had they mentioned what was truly going on in Woodson—they risked having their messages instantly deleted and probably laughed at by the neighboring police departments.

Not that it mattered: it had been fifteen minutes and no one had responded to a single message.

Kate sat down in one of the rolling chairs by the desk. She, too, had changed her shirt again, anxious to rid herself of the creature’s blood. She watched Todd type frantically in the lamplight. “Maybe none of the messages have gone through,” she suggested after the silence had grown too thick. “Maybe it’s not making a strong enough connection to the Internet to transmit.”

Todd shook his head. “No. We’re getting Web pages without a problem.”

“Then…” But she caught herself.

“What?” Todd said, looking over his shoulder at her. Half his face was blue from the light of the computer screen. “Tell me. It’s probably what I’m thinking, too.”

For whatever reason, it bothered her to hear him say that. “It’s just…what if this thing isn’t isolated to Woodson? What if it spread to the next town? What if they’re dealing with the same crap we are?”

The look on Todd’s face betrayed his thoughts. Kate knew he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

Then something chimed on the computer screen.

Todd and Kate locked eyes for a heartbeat. Then Kate launched herself out of the chair and crowded around the laptop with Todd, staring at the screen. An instant-message box had appeared in the center of the screen, one word blaring up and filling them both with insurmountable hope:

help is on the way

It had worked.

It had worked.

Kate sprang up and threw her arms around Todd’s neck. She kissed him, hard and quick the first time around…then slower and with more passion the second time. On the desk, the laptop began to chime over and over again as similar responses to their SOS came through.

A dark shape flashed by the window. Then two more. Then two more. Kate’s smile drained from her face. Todd turned to see what had frightened her, just as more shapes flitted by outside.

“Christ,” Kate uttered. “They’ve come back.”

“Get the kids,” Todd told her. He grabbed his shotgun off the desk. “We should stay together.”

Holding her own shotgun to her chest, Kate nodded, then took off down the hallway.

In the basement, surrounded by the slowly diminishing light of a single dying lamp, Molly watched as Brendan—the father of her unborn baby—took his last breath before expiring in front of her eyes.

At first she didn’t realize he had died. She stared at him, aware that his chest had stopped rising and falling, aware that the ungodly gurgle of his respiration had ceased deep down in his throat, but the full realization of what she was seeing did not dawn on her until many long minutes had passed.

Then, soundlessly, she wept into her hands.

What was going to happen to her child? She was alone in the world now, pregnant and alone. She had no parents—they’d both died a year ago in an automobile accident out on Highway 28, her old man drunk as a skunk behind the wheel of the family Plymouth, the son of a bitch—and now God had seen fit to take Brendan away from her, too. Brendan, who had always cheered her up with raunchy jokes and funny faces. Brendan, who had shunned her the first few days after she’d told him she was pregnant…but who’d eventually come around, because he was a good guy and was going to be a good father, too. He’d said so—Molly, I’m going to be a good father. Just like that. A promise. Brendan had had a shitty old man, too (although the son of a bitch was still alive and living in Vegas somewhere, allegedly with a showgirl with fake tits, though Molly never completely bought into that one). Brendan was going to make up for his own shitty father and for Molly’s shitty father, too.

The world, it seemed, was full of shitty fathers.

Then, for whatever reason, she felt anger well up inside her. Eyes bleary with tears, she looked back at Brendan’s silent and still body. For the first time, his stillness actually struck her, and the thought ripped through her like lights on a Broadway marquee—HE’S DEAD HE’S DEAD HE’S DEAD. She looked down and found that her hands were immeasurably calm. She turned them over and examined the pink, puffy palms. As she looked, tears spilled from her eyes and landed in her cupped palms. And for whatever reason, this made her angrier.

For a long time, Molly sat with her legs folded beneath her on the cot as the lamplight slowly died all around her.

Armed with a shotgun and pistol, Todd stormed into the secretarial office and crawled to the nearest window—oddly enough, the one Kate had been perched out of earlier that day, although Todd had no way of knowing this. The blinds were cockeyed and partially raised. He slid down beneath the window and reloaded shells into the shotgun. His fingers shook. Above his head, dark shapes moved around outside. He was too terrified to sit up and look out.

But he did anyway.

He counted six of the skin-suits staged at the end of the driveway, standing motionless as mannequins. Two more stood closer, at the far corner of the building. They stood so close together their heads nearly touched. Outside, the strong wind rustled the distant trees and flapped the clothes of the townspeople.

Also, something was breathing beneath the snow. Todd thought of the massive creature that had lunged at him back on Fairmont Street—the way it had shuttled up from the ground and towered over him, as unfathomable as an Egyptian god. How many more of those things were out there? And how many other things, stranger and each more dangerous than the next, waiting to attack?

Todd thought of the old H. G. Wells story, The War of the Worlds, and how he’d read it a long time ago to Justin. The boy had grown tired of the standard children’s storybooks and professed an interest in things beyond the appropriateness of his age—aliens and monsters being the two frontrunners. Of course, Brianna had objected. She didn’t want the kid sitting up in bed all night because of scary bedtime stories. Moreover, she said it wasn’t appropriate to tell stories to a boy of Justin’s age if they dealt with ghouls and goblins and strange fruitlike creatures from outer space that descended on the unsuspecting populace to terrorize, torture, and inevitably kill. Yet despite Bree’s protestations, Todd had snagged a handful of books from the local library—books he, too, had enjoyed as a child (although he’d had no father around to read them to him)—and every night before Justin went to bed, they would read a chapter. Or sometimes two or three chapters, if the story was really cooking. If the creatures from those books ever gave Justin nightmares, the boy never let on. And although Brianna, who was no dummy, eventually learned that Todd had ignored her wishes, she never said anything more about it. Todd thought that had probably been one of Brianna’s best moments.

She put up with a lot from me, he thought. A pang resonated in his heart, and his mind added, They both did.

Bleakly, he wondered if he would die here, right here, right in this spot. Crouched on the floor beneath a window in a sheriff’s station in the middle of godforsaken nowhere…

I wonder if Justin asked for me. When I didn’t show up at the house, I wonder if he asked Bree where I was.

But the idea that he had let his son down again was more torture than Todd could handle. He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, then sat up and looked back out the window.

He counted twelve this time.

Kate opened the door to the sally port, once again struck by how bitterly cold it was. Across the garage, she could see the twin nubs of the children’s heads in the backseat of the first police car. She raised the lamp and waved at them. Then she climbed down the steps and went over to the car.

“Hey,” she said, opening the car door.

The children turned their heads in Kate’s direction.

Their faces were creaseless bulges of flesh—featureless.

Kate screamed and threw herself backward against the wall. Behind her, a shelf collapsed, raining empty paint cans and sheaves of paper down on her.

The two faceless children began climbing out of the back of the police car. They moved with the slow uncertainty of someone negotiating a room in absolute darkness.

Kate set the lamp down, then leveled the shotgun at the first child—the one that had been Charlie. Her finger lingered on the trigger. Pulled it back slightly…pulled it…

She lowered the gun. “Fuck,” she groaned, trembling. Across the room and midway up the wall, Kate caught sight of what appeared to be some sort of exhaust vent. Sparkling snow breathed out of the vent slats like confetti, swirling down to the floor.

Kate turned and ran out of the room, slamming the sally port’s door shut behind her. There was a series of deadbolts on this side of the door. Kate turned them all.

There were so many out there now, Todd could not keep count. They all seemed planted at strategic spots, all awaiting some sort of instruction, or so it appeared. That thing beneath the snow continued to breathe—the snow itself rising and falling, rising and falling—and Todd found himself thinking of hospital respirators.

Something moved out in the hallway, collecting his attention. Todd swung the shotgun at the office door as a figure rushed into the half light. The figure moaned and called Todd’s name.

He lowered the shotgun. “Kate? I’m here.”

She rushed to him, her own gun held away from her body as if she wished nothing more than to be done with it, the lighted lantern swinging from her crooked elbow.

“The light.” He beckoned to her. “Put it out.”

She quickly doused it, then crept up next to him against the wall. She was shaking.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where are the kids?”

She just shook her head very fast, not looking at him.

“Kate, what happened to the kids?”

“They’re…they changed.” She stared at him, her eyes frighteningly lucid. “No faces.”

Todd felt his muscles clench. He turned back to the window. “They’re all out there now.”

Kate ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “God, what are they waiting for? Just let it happen already.”

He squeezed her shoulder.

Her smile warmed him, though there was little effort in it. Then her eyes widened and she looked past him and out the window. “Todd, they’re running.”

He looked and saw them—all of them—charging toward the building at breakneck speed, their feet kicking up clouds of snow, their arms pumping like machine pistons.

“What—” he began, just as they simultaneously pummeled the side of the building. Blood went everywhere. Some of them fell backward into the snow. But the ones who remained standing, which were most of them, slowly backed away from the building…only to rush at it again. This time, Todd heard a distant window shatter. Beneath the awning, the station’s front doors appeared to buckle.

“They’re smashing their way in,” Kate said.

Todd pulled open the window, the cold quickly sinking its teeth into his flesh, and shoved the nose of the shotgun out. He fired at the closest townsperson, who went down in a gaudy display of radiating innards. One of the snow-beasts whirled out of him and spiraled off into the night.

Kate scrambled over to the next window and followed suit, poking the barrel of her shotgun out, charging a round, and firing.

On the floor between them lay a pile of shells. Not enough to fend them all off, but maybe enough to lessen the numbers.

There’s no use in lessening numbers, Todd thought, continuing to fire the shotgun out the station’s window; he was going deafer with each blast, his entire body vibrating from the recoil. There’s no use in doing any of this. There’s a whole town’s worth of things out there, ready to rip and tear and bite into us…not to mention that thing in the snow and whatever else awaits us…

He chose to think of his son while he shot. The good times, like the Christmases and birthdays, the times they’d gone to Prospect Park or the Jersey Shore. He’d taught the boy to fly a kite in an open field where wildflowers burst like supernovas from the green grass, and the boy had cheered and shouted and beamed as the kite climbed higher and higher and higher. As a tiny baby, eyes all squinty and fists clenched and pink, he’d been nothing more than a mushy hump in his mother’s arms. The way the sunlight coming in through the side windows bleached the nursery, and the one time the hornets’ nest fell and got caught behind the shutter. All the hornets rasping against the windowpane. Laughing. That’s not scary, is it? No, Daddy, it’s not. I’m a big boy. Yes, you are. Yes! Yes! Fishing off Luck’s Pier, hooking bass and, holy Jesus, a snapping turtle, would you look at that? Yes! I’m a big boy. I’m a big boy and I love you, Daddy.

I love you, Daddy.

The front doors caved in and the front awning collapsed. One of the creatures was shambling through an open window. The snow around the building pulsed with a lifelike current.

“Todd!” Kate shouted at his ear. She grabbed hold of his hair, shook his head. “Todd! Look!”

He looked…just as an arc of white flame shot out of the darkness. He couldn’t tell what the hell he was looking at. As he watched, one of the skin-suits went up in a blazing inferno. A second skin-suit leapt at the quick-moving figure but was ignited just like his brethren.

It was Bruce. Bloodied and battered, but it was Bruce.

“Holy shit,” Todd mouthed.

Bruce charged across the lawn, igniting every single one of the bastards that hazarded to block his path. Within seconds, the snowy front lawn of the sheriff’s station was alight with burning people, screaming and running and falling on their faces in the snow. Some of the snow-beasts escaped in a whirl of white smoke, but this time they didn’t dissipate into the ether: they swooped toward Bruce now, coming down low as he launched fire from his flamethrower.

“Jesus,” Kate said, “they’re trying to extinguish the flame.”

Todd nodded. “Just like Tully said.”

“Where’s he going?”

Bruce continued across the lawn, his big booted feet leaving behind craters in the snow. He was heading for a thin fence of trees. And beyond the trees stood the decrepit little gas station.

“They’re following him,” Todd said. “I don’t believe it.”

The thing beneath the snow swirled like a whirlpool, then began tunneling toward Bruce. It was moving too fast; Bruce would never reach cover before the thing was on him.

No, Todd thought suddenly. I don’t think Bruce has any intention of reaching cover. I think Bruce is here to end this thing, one way or the other.

The skin-suit that had been squirming through the broken window dropped back out onto the snow. It was a heavyset female with a face like sagging dough. She began running after Bruce—just as they all did.

Todd grabbed Kate’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. “It’s not safe in here anymore.”

Together they ran back to the computer room, Todd slamming the door shut behind them. On the desk, the computer continued to ding as all of Todd’s messages were returned.

Kate hurried to the window, stared out. “He’s luring them to…”

“To the gas station,” Todd finished, coming up behind her.

Bruce had a sizeable lead on the pursuing skin-suits, but the thing tunneling through the snow was coming up on him fast. Moreover, the sky was alive with twisting tornados of snow, each one glowing sliver at its center. As they watched, Bruce burst through the spindly trees and crossed the tarmac of the gas station. The pumps slouched like tired old men. Bruce turned and fired another blast from his flamethrower at the encroaching townspeople.

“There must be a hundred of them,” Kate marveled.

The thing beneath the snow cut sharply to the right and ran the length of the gas station tarmac. The tarmac itself was shaded by a partial steel awning, which kept much of the snow from falling on the blacktop. It seemed the creature did not want to climb up out of the snow. Or maybe it couldn’t.

Bruce dropped to his knees and began fiddling with something on the ground.

“Oh, shit,” Kate said. “Did he drop the flamethrower?”

“It’s hooked to a cable…”

“Is he…he fucking tying his shoe?”

But no—he wasn’t tying his shoe and he hadn’t dropped the flamethrower.

“He’s unscrewing the fuel door,” Todd said. “Where the trucks come and pump full under the gas station…”

“Oh,” Kate said—almost childishly simple.

The townspeople swarmed onto the tarmac. Several of them struck the support beam of the steel awning, knocking the beam askew. The awning wavered from side to side, as if in contemplation, then crashed down onto a tow truck parked on the far side of the gas station.

Bruce stood, looking like a ghost among phantoms.

Just before the townspeople clawed into him and tore him apart, Bruce fired one final blast from the flamethrower: directly down the mouth of the fuel door.

An instant later, it was as though the apocalypse had come.