Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

The man outside knew they were there.

Sean gripped the handle of the pistol and unsheathed it. He brought it in front of himself and pointed it toward the ground, his finger straight across the slide of the gun.

“Please,” the stranger outside howled, “I’m so hungry.”

“Sean,” Michael whispered. “Sean.”

Sean pressed his hand toward the floor to tell him to shut up. It was Sean’s fault they didn’t know what to do. He had never walked them through the scenario of a stranger showing up. A terrible mistake.

He put his hand on Elise’s sternum, to tell her to stay put, and took one step toward the door. A baseboard under his foot creaked so loud it sounded like a gunshot. He winced and took the next step, raising his weapon toward the door and tripping the laser dot sight under the barrel. A tiny red dot shone on the middle of the door, shaking a few inches to the left or right as his hand quivered. His blood coursed with adrenaline and his tremor grew steadier. He had long told himself that he would be ready to kill someone who threatened his family, but he thought, statistically speaking, it would never happen. Now that the situation had come, he was trying to fight every instinct he had to run instead of fight.

Another floorboard creaked. He edged closer to the door, standing off to the side at a forty-five-degree angle in case the man started shooting through the door.

“I know that someone’s in there. There’s smoke—” the man outside yelled.

Shit.

“There’s smoke in your chimney. Please.”

The fireplace, its crackling red flames pouring smoke up the flue. He snarled. People could smell smoke from miles away, follow it right to them. Elise waved in his peripheral, trying to get his attention. She was silent, but her eyes explained everything.

“No,” Sean mouthed to her.

He wouldn’t do it. That kind of risk could not stand. There was no way he would open his doors to some starving person they didn’t know. No way. He shook his head.

His gun remained trained on the door. “Get off my property,” Sean yelled. “There’s nothing for you here.”

Seconds dragged on with no reply. The wind gusted. “Come on, man. You’re gonna kill me.”

That was a lie. Sean had no obligation to help this man, and he wouldn’t listen to some half-baked rationale that tried to paint him as the bad guy.

“Please. I haven’t eaten in days.”

“I said, Get lost. Leave.”

A hand grabbed his shoulder, startling him, Sean wrenching his body free. Elise. He looked back at the laser dot. “What’re you doing?”

“We can’t leave that man outside,” she whispered.

“We can, and we will.”

“He’s going to die out there if we don’t do something.”

Michael piped in with hushed words, “Sean, she’s right.”

No, she wasn’t. If this man came into the house, they were accepting a completely preventable risk. He could be anyone, a child molester or a rapist. Maybe he murdered the last family he encountered. He shuddered. “We are not discussing this,” he said.

“We have to discuss this,” Michael said. “There’s a man outside and we can help him.”

“We don’t know anything about him.”

“We know he’ll die without us,” Elise said. “Please, we can just feed him a meal and give him a warm place to sleep for the night.”

“What about after that? We can’t just let him stay here.”

“We’ll send him on his way.”

“You can’t ask me to do this, Elise. No.”

She leaned the axe against the couch and cupped his face with her hands and pulled his gaze onto her. “We can’t turn this man away. He’s just one person and we can help him. If we don’t—we can’t let a man die.”

“This is dangerous.”

“You’ll protect us, babe. You always have.” She leaned in and kissed his stubbled cheek. “We can’t judge whether a man lives or dies.”

They could. They did it every day when they hunkered down instead of opening their home to everyone else. They didn’t see it like that. It was barbaric to think that way, but someone had to do it. “We can’t take the risk.”

“We have to.”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“Sean, please. Just one meal.”

He zeroed in on the red laser dot, his stomach churning with a sick heaviness. It would have been easy to just squeeze off a few shots into the door. The man outside would run. No more problem. But he’d be the bad guy. His wife—she might never forgive him. So easy to shoot off a few rounds…

He lowered his weapon. Shit, he thought, what am I doing? “I’ll bring him in through the garage. Nobody else move, okay?”

Silence. He approached the door, still just off to the side, rapped his knuckles on it, and waited. The man outside smacked the door. “Hello?”

He tried to speak but couldn’t get his vocal chords to work. All his thoughts told him to stop, except one—the one that sounded like Elise. He cleared his throat. “Hey,” he yelled.

“Yes, yes. Please. Is someone in there?”

Goddamn it. “There is a doorway in the back of the garage. Go there.”

The words echoed in his head.

“Oh, thank you,” the man yelled.

His footsteps padded down the deck, and Sean turned back to Elise. “We did the right thing,” she said.

He said nothing.

“We couldn’t just leave him out there to die,” Michael said.

“Worse things could happen,” Sean said.

“Worse things could—? We’re helping him.”

“You don’t see how stupid this is.”

“We’re saving his life.”

“We’re delaying his death a few days. Hardly qualifies as saving.”

He motioned for everyone to make room, and they cleared his path. Throwing on his thick wool coat and fingerless gloves, he grabbed a small LED flashlight and his gun and went into the garage.

The air was stagnant and well below freezing there. He trained his gun and flashlight upward in front of himself. His heart beat so hard the pulse shook his eyeballs. The mixture of adrenaline and cold sent opposite signals in his body so his skin simultaneously crawled with chill and flushed with heat.

He rounded the corner, and the backdoor came into view. He nudged closer. His impulses called for him to turn around, to back away and leave the man to die. Yet, he inched forward. A new contradictory thought arose every few seconds. Keep going. What are you doing? Listen to your wife. Listen to reason. Stop. Keep going.

The door grew closer and closer until he found himself just a foot away, almost like it had snuck up on him. He curled his finger onto the trigger. He withdrew a foggy breath into the light, half-expecting to get shot the moment he opened the door. Desperate men did desperate things.

He reached out and grabbed the bolt lock, ensuring he made no sound. The wind hissed outside and then he heard a crunch of snow. His chest thumped. Don’t do it. Do it. Are you crazy? Have some decency, man. This is suicide.

He wrenched the lock, the sound echoing around the garage, and pulled the door open. The man stood in the doorway, not five feet from him. Sean flashed the bright light in his face, and the man held up his hands to block the light. No way would someone get the drop on him if he could help it.

Layers of ratty cloth covered all but a small slit for the man’s eyes. The color of the fabric, unwashed for months, was only a mixture of gray and black shades from the ash. His body, probably skinnier than he appeared, was padded with layers of mismatched garments filled with holes and unwound thread.

“Hey, I don’t know what the deal is, man,” he said.

“You shut the hell up right now, you hear?” Sean said.