Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

“Bernie, put out the fire,” George said. “Sorry, Toivo, but we have to get out of here. I’m telling you, they’ll come for this cabin. They crashed, they’ll want to secure the area.”

Toivo snorted. “ Secure the area. What da hell are you, Georgie, some Delta Force guy or something? Chuck Norris?”

George didn’t have any military experience. None of them did. Just four men in middle-age—and one well past it—who knew nothing more about soldiering than what they’d seen in the movies.

Toivo pointed to the cabin’s warped wooden floor. “We’re staying here. They come? We’ve got guns.”

“If we stay, we put out the fire,” Bernie said. “I agree with George. Infrared.”

Jaco shook his head. “Don’t put it out, you idiots. Whatever is in that ship probably has its hands full. We leave it burning, but we get on the road. I’m with George—I’ve got to get to my daughters.”

Two men—George and Jaco—with little kids. Two men—Bernie and Toivo—with none. And Arnold, whose grown son was standing right next to him. Three sets of needs, three sets of perspectives.

Arnold coughed up some phlegm, then swallowed it in that abstract way old men do. “George is right,” he said. “You boys get out of the cabin.”

George felt a sense of relief that Arnold, the man who’d practically raised him, the best man George knew, was with him on that decision.

“Okay,” George said. “So we hit the road, we stay together and hope for the best.”

Arnold shook his head. “I said you boys get out of the cabin. I’ll keep an eye on the ship, make sure nothing comes after you.”

Bernie rolled his eyes, as if his father’s sudden act of bravery was not only expected, but annoying as well.

“Dad, we don’t have time for that shit,” he said. “We’re all going.”

“I’m seventy-two goddamn years old,” Arnold said. “I’ve been faking it just fine, but there’s only so much left in my tank. My bum hip is killing me. No way I’ll make it in this cold, son. So you do what your father tells you, and—”

“Shut up,” Jaco hissed. “You guys hear that?”

They didn’t at first, but the noise grew; over the whine of the wind through the trees outside, they heard faint snaps and cracks.

Something was coming through the woods.

Something big.

“We move, now,” Arnold said. “You boys come with me.”

They rushed from the house, bumping into each other, stumbling off the rickety, two-step porch. Toivo fell sideways as he ran; the snow bank rising up from the thin path caught him at a forty-five-degree angle, so he didn’t fall far.

George had assumed Arnold would run for the road, but he didn’t—he turned right and stumbled through the snow toward the cabin’s corner.

“Arnold! Where are you going!”

George stopped, but the others didn’t. They followed Arnold, three men carrying hunting rifles, stutter-stumbling through snow that came up to their crotches, moving too fast to walk in each other’s footsteps.

Jesus H., was the old man attacking ? They vanished around the corner, not running away from the oncoming sound, but toward it.

George found himself alone.

The cold pressed in on him, on his face, tried to drive through his snowsuit as if it were armor that would slowly, inexorably dent and crumble under the pressure. Out of the cabin for all of ten seconds, he already felt it.

The porch light cast a dim glow onto the path, the blanket of white on the driveway, and the walls of the same stuff that made the truck nothing more than a vehicle-shaped snow bank.

He looked at the snowmobile, or rather the curved hump of white burying it. The keys were inside the cabin. He could grab them—the others had left him alone—he had to get back to his family. He could dig down to the snowmobile . . . no, that would take twenty minutes all by itself, then the thing probably wouldn’t start. He had to run, get as far down the road as he could.

Little Jaco . . . Bernie . . . Toivo . . . Mister Ekola.

The people who had made him who he was: go after them, or head down the road alone and start a three-hundred-sixty-mile trek to Milwaukee.

From the other side of the cabin, he heard the crack of a tree giving way, a brittle sound quickly swallowed by the snowy night.

George couldn’t do it; he couldn’t leave his friends.

I’ll get home as soon as I can, I will . . .

He held his rifle tight in both gloved hands and ran to the corner of the cabin, stumbling through the snow just as the others had done.

Most people don’t know real cold. Sure, they’ve been cold before; they’ve sat through a football game in below-freezing temps; they’ve experienced winter here or there, perhaps even been dumb enough to take a vacation to Chicago in December. All of those things are cold, but real cold? Don’t-fuck-with-forty-below cold?

That can kick your ass. That can kill you.

George tried to stop shivering, but he couldn’t. Wind slid through the trees, drove the cold into him as if he wasn’t even wearing a snowsuit with the hood up over a hat, three sweaters, jeans over long johns, three pairs of socks, gloves and even a scarf wrapped tight around his nose and mouth. His hands felt like there was a steel vice on each knuckle of each finger, and the fingertips themselves stung like he’d sliced off the ends and dipped the raw stubs in battery acid.

And he’d only been outside for five minutes.

Forty below? Maybe worse than that, maybe far worse with the wind-chill factored in.

He followed the footsteps of his friends, mostly by feel because it was so dark. No porch light here, no stars; he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all if not for the barest glimmer from the covered moon turning the snow gray. He had a flashlight in a snowsuit pocket, but knew better than to use it.

Most people don’t know real cold, and most people also don’t know real snow. The kind of snow that piles up week after week, a crispy layer near the bottom with the hidden logs and sticks, a layer so firm that when you break through it and stagger on, sometimes your foot slides right out of your boot. Above that, the dense snowpack, then finally, on top, several inches of the fluffy stuff. Every step sank so deep he couldn’t quite raise his boot all the way out to take the next one. He was wading more than walking.

So dark. The woods were nothing but shadows holding aliens; they had to be out here somewhere, probably had already come out of the ship and were closing in. He should have stayed on the road, gotten out of there while he could, he—

“Georgie! Get over here!”

Bernie—the voice was so close. Shadows moved . . . just to the left, heads peeking up from behind a fallen tree, the trunk smooth and softened by snow.

George stumbled toward it, each step breaking through the crust and driving in with that Styrofoam-sounding crunch. He fell more than walked the last three feet. His friends caught him, pulled him down. His chest heaved, drawing icy knives deep into his lungs.

They huddled together out of a need for warmth, or maybe from pure fear.

Another crack, that thing coming through the woods.

George wiped his glove across his eyes, clearing away flakes that clung to his lashes. He rose up on his knees, peeked over the log. The cabin . . . it was so close. How could it be that close? It seemed like he’d been walking forever, each step a battle, but he hadn’t made it more than thirty or forty feet. He was close enough to see smoke slipping out of the thin stove-pipe, instantly ripped into the night by the unforgiving wind.