Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

Something creaked in the attic.

“Then the news stopped coming from out west, closer to the eruption zone. Didn’t hear a thing. Everything’s covered in ash. Didn’t stop. I think people got wise after that. Started realizing they depend on food that keeps shipping to the grocery stores, you know? But the thing is, no trucks were shipping nothing no more. Everyone rushed to the stores the day of the eruption and picked it all clean. It filled up again maybe two or three times, but then the deliveries stopped. Ain’t nobody was gonna risk it. What I heard, people took to hijacking grocery store trucks and killing the drivers and taking all the food. You believe that?

“So once there was no more food, people started getting crazy. You ever seen those videos of countries undergoing a coup, something like that? Was like that ‘cept worse. People killing each other over a can of beans. A can of beans. No police. No army. After a few weeks, there was no TV broadcast except on the emergency lines—they kept telling people to stay in their homes.”

Travers put a hand on his forehead. “After a while it wasn’t even about the food no more. I seen with my own eyes these guys pin this one girl down—she was probably twelve or thirteen, I don’t know—taking turns raping her. What’s that tell you, huh? That ain’t about food or water or surviving. It was like the chains came off, you know? As soon as there was nobody to stop them, people started doing whatever they wanted.” He dragged his hand over his mouth and rubbed his lips. “First thing you had to do was get out of the cities. That was for damn sure. That’s what I did.”

“Why?” Elise asked.

“Wasn’t safe. A lot of people started to panic, and when a lot of people start to panic, no good thing comes from it.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Up north. Albany.”

“You have any family?”

“Had a wife. She died a few years ago—cancer—we never had kids.”

“Then how’d you end up here?” Sean asked, his voice coming out of nowhere like a sudden burst of thunder when she hadn’t expected a storm.

“I walked,” Travers said.

“You walked all the way here? From Albany?”

“I mean, it took a while. I started with a car, but it ran out of gas. Everybody wants to go south, you know? Where it might be warm.”

“Then how’d you come across us?”

“I don’t understand,” he said and looked at the others. “I just came across you.”

“You’re right,” Sean said. “You don’t understand.”

Elise tensed.

“I want to know how you’re not dead.”

Travers leveled his eyes on Sean. “Managed it.”

“You said earlier that you haven’t been in front of a fire for weeks. The mercury outside says that it’s almost fifteen below. So how’ve you survived without fire for so long?”

“A little skill, a little luck, I guess.”

“What kind of skill?”

“Sean, please,” Elise said.

He ignored her. “What kind of skills allowed you to survive?”

“Scavenging, mainly. I’ve been in a bunch of people’s houses. All abandoned.”

“They would be just as cold as the outside. You’d freeze to death.”

Travers’s leg shook up and down, though he kept his voice steady. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did, man.”

Elise wasn’t sure what he had done either. Michael said, “Sorry, just ignore him.”

Kelly smacked his chest. Elise wished she could do the same.

“Excuse me?” Sean said.

Michael looked at his wife and bit his tongue. “Nothing.”

“No, he’s right,” Travers said. Everyone looked at him. “Not him,” he said pointing to Michael, “that one. Sean, is it? He’s right. You shouldn’t trust people so easily.”

Something popped in the fireplace followed by a chorus of crackles and hisses. “Every one of you doesn’t get it, because this thing hasn’t hit you. Not really. You sit here in this cozy little home. Barely any ash in here. It’s neat. Sanitized. Cut off from everything that’s going on out there. From the dark and the cold and the pain and the hurt. You haven’t seen it yet, and you don’t get it because of it.”

Michael shook his head.

“You still live in the world like it was a few months back—where there are boundaries and limits stopping what’s really in your heart from being unleashed. You haven’t seen the cold cutting down the people you care about. And if the cold don’t get you, it’s the predators who want to keep living more than anything. More than sparing your sorry asses.”

Sean leaned forward in his seat.

“You haven’t seen someone carrying food when you got a deep ache in your belly so strong you don’t know what you’d do to relieve it. You haven’t looked a man in his eyes and seen he’s got no soul no more. No humanity. Or too much humanity. That ash and snow sucked everything good from the world and left a dirty gray and that’s all there is. The white snow ain’t coming back and no matter how much you want that clean again, it ain’t coming.”

Elise watched Sean’s face grow stormier, more fearful. More determined. God help her, more determined. Like a man being nudged closer to a precipice.

Travers said, “You know I always remember hearing, We live in an important time. This is the most important election or era or whatever. We might be the first people in a while to be witness to something that’s truly changing everything. So, enjoy all this while you can. Enjoy your hot showers and your warm fires and your hot stews. They’re a thing of the past. You just don’t know it yet.”

“Travers,” Elise said, her voice shaking.

He shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare y’all. It’s just surprising, coming here. Getting a warm welcome. There ain’t no place I seen like this no more. With kind folks willing to share. I just want you to be aware. Not everyone’s as kind as me. Or y’all. Not even a little bit. Not by a long shot.”

MICHAEL LAY AWAKE next to Kelly listening to Travers’s snoring as the fire dwindled down to coals. Travers was full of shit. Not entirely, of course. Michael had listened to enough half-truth telling clients to know when he was sniffing bullshit, and right now the scent was strong.

The world he knew was the one where good people helped each other get back on their feet. He had seen it time after time. Some disaster would strike, an earthquake in Haiti or a powerful hurricane that ravaged the Philippines. The aftermath always played out the same: good people reached out and donated time and money to help with the relief. People took care of one another. It’s always the way it happened.

And the same would happen again.

There was no savage land out there like Travers had talked about. Just because he had seen terrible things—if it was even true—didn’t mean that all of humanity was suddenly rotten. Anecdotal evidence was all it was. People were complex. Some good, some bad. If Michael had to pinpoint it, he’d say Travers’s story was a ploy; he was letting them think the outside was the worst hell imaginable so he could stay with them. He would say, You wouldn’t release me back into hell, right? He was playing them. And doing it well.

Because Kelly believed him. Long after everyone was asleep, he had to listen to her insist that there was a real danger outside and they needed to be prepared. He tried to argue with her, but she was inconsolable. “What if someone tries to come in and kill us?” she whispered to him. “What if it happens?”