Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

“It’s open.”

The tall man watched the women, his eyes drilling into Kelly who was trying her best not to make eye contact. He bit his lip with his ghastly teeth and then looked back to Elise. She stared him down but shifted her eyes away after a few seconds. He pursed his lips and kissed in her direction.

The leader turned the safe’s hand, and the sound of the gear cranking emitted a loud crack. Sean jumped. Sean’s guns and ammo lay before them: rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Loads of ammo. “Would you look at this.” The leader picked up one of the scope-mounted rifles, pulled the bolt back and forth, and pressed the stock against his shoulder. He aimed it toward the corner of the room and looked down the scope. “This is beautiful,” he said. “Come look at all this.”

The tall man tore his gaze from the women and looked in the safe. “That’ll even the odds.”

“That’ll even the odds for a long time.” He turned toward Sean. “All right, give me your hand.”

Sean looked incredulous. “I gave you what you wanted.”

Elise held Molly tighter. The leader’s face showed nothing but calm. “I won’t ask again.”

Sean put out his left hand, his non-dominant one, and the leader grabbed it. “You got the handcuffs?” he asked the tall man.

The tall man pulled them from his back pocket, the metal speckled with rust, as dirty as the snow outside. The leader grabbed Sean’s hand, smashing his fingers together, and clasped the metal around his wrist. He then pointed to the white radiator on the wall next to Sean’s side of the bed. “Cuff the other end to it.”

He let him go. Elise saw how tightly the cuff had been cranked, how Sean seethed when the leader put it on. The radiator was only a few feet away, but Elise could barely watch as her proud husband, like a shamed dog, approached it, sat, and cuffed himself to it.

“Show me it’s tight.”

Sean sighed and pulled on the cuffs. It held. The leader returned to the safe. Elise tried to catch her husband’s sight, but he stared off in front of himself. She stroked her daughter’s hair and kissed her forehead.

The minutes dragged on. The leader pulled the weapons out one by one, examining them, pulling back the slides on the pistols, sometimes disassembling, and looking down the barrels through the open ejection ports. “All very clean,” he said. “You took good care of these.”

Sean didn’t reply. Then the leader started on the ammo, removing them cumbersome box by cumbersome box until everything was fanned out across the floor, sorted by caliber. The leader rested on his knees at the center of it. “Were you expecting the apocalypse?” he asked, laughing.

Elise looked at Sean, but he wasn’t staring off any longer. His head was turned toward the nightstand—toward the gun safe that looked like an alarm clock. Sean had conked out in the living room after dinner. Andrew and Michael had helped carry him up to the bedroom, but before they laid him in the bed, she took his pistol and stuck it back in the alarm clock safe. She kept the urgency of that knowledge bottled inside.

She watched Sean shift his weight toward her. He nodded to her, and she returned it, the gesture unmistakable. “It’s there,” she told him without words, “it’s there.”

A spark flashed in the wet of his eyes. He scuttled his butt to the far end of the radiator.

“What’re you doing?” the leader asked, poking his head up. Sean relaxed his limbs as the leader walked around the bed, scanning the area around his captive. “I asked you a question.”

“Trying to get comfortable.”

“You’re handcuffed to a radiator. It’s not meant to be comfortable.”

“These things are digging into my skin. I’m trying to—”

The leader kneeled next to Sean and jammed a pistol into the soft tissue under his chin. With his other hand, he clasped the handcuffs and tightened them even further. Sean’s mouth opened wide as if he wanted to scream. “Do you think I won’t kill you right here?” Sean’s throat rose. “You think I care even one bit whether you die in front of your wife and kids?”

“Boss,” someone called over to him.

Elise hadn’t seen the other man come in through the door. The leader sighed, keeping the pistol jammed into place. “What could you possibly want right now?”

“We’re having an issue downstairs.”

“Then take care of it.”

“We tried. We think your engineering background might—”

The leader waved his hand, and the man stopped. He looked back at Sean and retracted the gun, resting it on his knee. “Mechanical engineering. In a past life. Still a valuable skill.” He leaned in toward Sean. “Don’t go anywhere.”

He sprang up and left, whispering something in the tall man’s ear before leaving with the other man. Elise listened to them sink into the distance, each step rumbling through the floorboards until the sound diminished to nothing.

Silence. Her eyes moved from the door to the tall man standing over the three women. His breathing broke through the quiet. Mouth breathing. Almost panting. She tried not to draw attention to herself, but knew he was staring at them.

As she ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair, he approached the open door and tilted his head to look down the hallway. Her heart raced. If the tall man was stupid enough to leave them alone, there were dozens of guns on the floor. More ammo than they could use. They could fight back. They could—

The tall man didn’t leave.

He eased the door closed with his index finger until it latched. Pressed his thumb against the lock. “Looks like we all have a little more privacy.”

She swallowed hard. The man pivoted on his boot and reached around his back and brandished a pistol, smiling. “The boss don’t want to say what we’re going to do with y’all, but I don’t care.”

Elise pulled Molly to her chest.

“I wish we could stay here with you girls. Pretty things. All that ash out there’s just gonna make y’all dirty. Y’all so clean here.” He squatted down so his butt rested against his haunches, sniffing the air. “Y’all smell so good. The house is nice. But we’re going down south where it ain’t cold as hell, you know? Y’all’ll like that when we get there.”

She darted a glance over to her husband who was scooting inch by inch closer to the gun safe. When she turned back, she caught the glance of the tall man. “Good thing we didn’t take your daughter’s finger. Shame to maim a female for no good reason. Especially one as pretty as your girl here.”

Elise pressed her teeth together and resisted any sound from coming out. He continued, “Just so you know, we’re all really sorry.” He reached out and grabbed a strand of Kelly’s hair and she flinched back, the man smiling. “So when we kill the boys, just know that we’re not trying to hurt y’all. Y’all’re beautiful—females alone are a rare commodity these days. Good looking females though—that’s priceless.”

Her stomach lurched. Thoughts of the horrors awaiting them flooded into her mind. She asked herself how these men could be so cruel, how they could justify themselves. Asked what happened in the cold outside.

He tapped his lips with the top of his gun and looked at each of them, a grin on his face. Those teeth. Those awful teeth. He jolted up and reached around into his back pocket and pulled out another set of handcuffs, hanging one loop on his index finger, rattling it. “I took care of a few cops,” he said. “These’ve been plenty valuable.”

Dinner from a few hours before bubbled in her gut. She tried to control her shaking, but her hand wouldn’t stop.

He knelt in front of them and bit his lip. “So many options, so little time.” His eyes grazed over Molly. Elise felt a lump swell in her throat. She couldn’t pull her any tighter than she already was.