Ronald Malfi - Snow

“I’m a tough gal,” she said, shrugging. Suddenly she looked very pretty. “It takes a lot to scare me.”

Todd’s smile faltered. He was thinking of the little girl with no face.

“Shit,” Kate said, looking at Todd’s cell phone. “Take one guess what will make this evening even better.”

“No signal?”

“No signal.”

“Terrific.”

She handed him back the phone. “Right at this very moment, my fiancé’s parents are probably catching him up to speed on all the medication they’ve been on for the past year, and how my soon-to-be father-in-law has been wearing the same pair of socks all week to cut down on laundry. Miserable lot.”

“When’s the wedding?”

“We haven’t set a date yet.”

“How long have you been engaged?”

Kate laughed. “See, you’re hungry to do the math, right? If I say we got formally engaged over two years ago, you’ll smile and say something nice and benign, but inside you’ll be thinking, ‘Man, this chick’s crazy if she thinks this guy is ever going to seal the deal.’”

“Is that true? You’ve been engaged for two years now?”

“Three. We got engaged on our second date.”

“Hmmmm,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“I’m still trying to think of something nice and benign.”

“Forget it. If you’d seen the winners I’ve gone out with in the past, you’d be all about Gerald.”

“So that’s his name? Gerald?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So he sounds like someone’s butler.”

They both laughed.

“Thank you,” she said, “for taking my mind off things. I kept getting a weird feeling.”

“Like what?”

She looked at the rows of houses they were passing, silent and dark and brooding. “Like there are people in there watching us.”

The town square was like a Norman Rockwell painting gone horribly awry. At the center of the square was a bronze statue of a man on a horse, the horse’s front legs pawing at the air. Surrounding the statue and scattered about in the snow like stuffing torn from an old mattress were strips of tattered clothing—shirts, pants, underwear, even a baseball hat. Fires burned in old oil drums that had been erected along the street, the great flames reflected in the blackened windows of the shops that circled the square. Cars had been evacuated seemingly without heed, many of them in the middle of the street with their doors ajar and their batteries dead. A bicycle lay on its side, its frame bent in the middle at a firm 90-degree angle.

“What the hell happened here?” Kate said. She surveyed the damage, then looked up past the shops where the spire of a darkened church punctured the sky like a syringe.

“Looks like a battlefield,” Nan commented as she slowly made her way around the bronze statue at the center of the square. “Who set these fires? Looters?”

Lowering his voice so the women wouldn’t hear, Todd leaned over to Fred and whispered, “Where the fuck is everyone?”

“For their sakes, I hope they left long before whatever happened here.”

“And what exactly did—”

Nan screamed.

CHAPTER SIX

They all hurried over to Nan, who was trembling on the other side of the bronze statue, staring with horrified eyes at something in the snow.

“What is it?” Fred said quickly, dropping Todd’s duffel bag and coming up behind her. He grabbed Nan firmly by the shoulders. In her fright, the woman had dropped the teddy bear; it lay now in the snow.

“Jesus,” Todd said, coming up beside them.

Here, the snow was black with what looked enough like blood to cause a tremor of fear to rise up in the back of Todd’s throat. The firelight reflected in it, giving it a muddy copper hue, and there were bits of twisted, fibrous ropes trailing through the snow in every immediate direction away from the blood.

“Is that blood?” Kate said, suddenly right at Todd’s back. “Jesus Christ, it is, isn’t it?”

Fred pulled Nan against his chest. Todd heard the woman’s muffled sob.

Kate pointed to the strands of ropy material strewn about the snow. “What are those things?”

“From an animal,” Fred said. One of his giant hands was cradling his wife’s head. “Something happened to an animal here.”

“So those are guts?” Kate said. “Those are fucking innards?”

“Shhh,” Todd told her, and jerked his head in Nan’s direction. “Calm down, okay?”

“Todd, what the fuck happened here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something bad happened here.”

“We’ll call the police, tell them—”

“No,” Kate said. “We need to get out of here.”

“We’ve got no car. We need to call the cops—”

“The cell phones don’t work!”

“—and wait for the cops,” he finished calmly. Yet his heart was strumming like a fiddle in his chest.

“We need to leave, ” Kate insisted. She gripped him at the shoulders and stared at him hard. Todd expected to see tears welling up in her eyes, but her gaze was surprisingly sober. “Fair enough. I lied before. I’m scared now, all right?”

“We’ll be okay.” Todd exchanged a look with Fred, who walked back around to the other side of the statue, with his wife still clinging to his chest. Todd bent down and scooped the stuffed bear up off the ground. Then he took Kate’s hand and tugged her over to where Fred stood with Nan.

“There’s no one here,” Fred said over Nan’s silvery hair. His eyes looked hard as steel and yellow in the firelight.

“Someone set these fires,” Todd suggested.

Fred lifted one shoulder. He looked astoundingly calm. “If they’re the same folks who left those entrails out on the snow, we probably don’t want to go looking for them.”

“Entrails,” Kate repeated, as if saying it aloud would prove just how ridiculous this all was. “Fantastic.”

Nan lifted her head off her husband’s chest. Her eyes were glassy, but she looked more composed than Todd would have suspected. “Kate’s right. We can’t stay here. This place feels…it feels—”

“Wrong,” Kate finished. “The whole place feels wrong. Like there’s a giant electric cable running under the earth, and we’re all just vibrating up here on the surface.”

Todd looked around. He didn’t like the empty shop windows any more than he liked the dark houses along the outer street. The cars were worse—parked at crazy angles indiscriminately around the square, they conveyed a sense of panic and hasty evacuation. He remembered reading a book about Chernobyl a few years ago, and how thousands of people had abandoned their cars and their homes and had taken to the highway just to get the hell out of town. Yet if these people hadn’t taken their cars, how had they evacuated? Surely not by foot—not in this weather.

“Okay,” Todd said finally, scooping up his duffel bag and slinging it back over one shoulder, “I’ve got an idea. I’m going to try to find a telephone. In the meantime, you guys check these cars, see if anyone left the keys inside.”

“Forget the phone,” Kate said. “Let’s just take a car and go.”

“If none of these cars start, you’ll be happy I found a phone.”

Fred nodded. “All right. Just be careful, Todd.”

Todd nodded. He bent down and tucked his pant legs into his boots. He was bleeding through his jeans and his leg was throbbing but they didn’t have the time to spare. He’d worry about his leg later.

“I’m coming with you,” Kate said, putting a hand on Todd’s shoulder.

“No. Help Fred and Nan look for cars.”

“They don’t need my help. And none of us should be running off alone.” Then she offered him a crooked smile. Suddenly she was more than just pretty—she was beautiful. Vaguely, Todd wondered if good old Gerald was worried about her. “Besides,” she added, “I’ve got the flashlight, remember?”