Ronald Malfi - Snow

“Shit.” Kate’s head poked out of the shaft. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He sat up, rubbing the side of his face and jaw. He’d managed to catch himself midfall, and had landed mostly on his left shoulder.

Standing, he held up his hands to assist Kate. She took his hands and he pulled her out with little difficulty, the blade of her knife scraping along the aluminum as she went. He caught her awkwardly in his arms, almost like a groom about to carry his bride across the threshold, and their eyes lingered on one another for perhaps a second longer than necessary. Then he swung her legs down to the floor as she began slapping the drywall dust from her clothes.

“Do you know anything about guns?” he asked.

“You pull the trigger and it kills someone,” she replied. The shop was cold enough so that they could see their breath.

“That’s about the bulk of it. I say we stick to simple handguns—nothing too complex. I wouldn’t know what to do with anything too fancy.”

Kate was already digging around behind a glass counter. Setting boxes of ammo into stacks, she worked quickly and diligently.

Todd went to the display wall, which was decorated with countless rifles and semiautomatic pistols. He’d fired guns before and had even kept one in the apartment for a while, particularly after the Atlantic City incident, when he thought every creak and groan of the apartment was one of Andre Kantos’s men coming to cut his throat. But anything beyond a typical six-shot revolver was a bit out of his league.

The little he knew about guns he’d learned on his own. His father hadn’t been the type of man to take him hunting, fishing, canoeing. Todd’s old man had spent much of his time carousing and getting drunk, until one spring afternoon Todd’s mother, a typically meager and browbeaten woman with a charitable heart, was struck by an uncharacteristic streak of boldness and spoke the one word that would regain her misplaced sense of self-worth and grant his father the freedom he so obviously desired: divorce. Often, Todd wondered if his old man had been a different person, if he would have turned out to be a different person, too—if things would have been different with Brianna and if he would have been able to see Justin grow up.

You’re an adult now, came a voice in the back of his head—a voice very much like Bree’s. You can’t hand over your blame to other people anymore.

“So, back in the convenience store,” Kate said from behind the counter, “you said you put yourself through law school in two ways. You said the honest way was working construction. What was the dishonest way?”

“Gambling,” he said, selecting various guns from the display wall. He examined each one in the moonlight coming through the front windows.

“You made a lot of money gambling?”

“In the beginning, yeah.”

“But not in the end?”

He looked over at her, but she was busy examining rounds of ammunition. “No one does in the end,” he said.

“That was a racing form in your wallet, wasn’t it? The slip of paper with blood all over it? I recognized it because my dad used to take me to the track when I was a little girl.”

He hefted a nine-millimeter in one hand, surprised by how light it was. “That’s right.”

“You said it was a reminder. A reminder of what?”

“Do we really need to talk about this?”

“No. Not at all. Forget it.”

He tucked the handgun into his waistband and began searching for more like it. After a few moments of silence, he said, “It’s a reminder of how I fucked up. Brianna—she’s my ex—she left me because I had a problem, got in over my head. There was a time when I owed a lot of people a lot of money. It wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to our son. After she left, I just kept digging myself a deeper hole. I got involved with some not-so-nice guys in Atlantic City, a fella named Andre Kantos and some of his goons, and they showed me the brutal reality of what it meant to owe someone like Kantos a lot of money. That’s my blood on the racing form. They took it out on me pretty good that day, and I spent a lot of time recovering. I was supposed to spend time with my son soon after, but I couldn’t have him see me like that. And I haven’t seen him since.”

The memories burned. Looking down, he saw that his hands were trembling.

Kate came around from behind the counter, her arms burdened with boxes of ammunition. She set them down on a tabletop display, then, much to Todd’s surprise, she hugged him around the shoulders. He smelled the top of her head, a scent that reminded him of waking up in bed with Brianna, and he felt his heart flutter.

“You’ll see your son again soon, Todd,” she told him, finally letting him go. “Real soon.”

He smiled at her, half her face shadowed in darkness, the other half a brilliant white from the moonlight coming in at his back. They were close enough that he could have kissed her without awkwardness, but he let the moment slip by and hated himself an instant later.

“What do you have?” Kate asked, examining the guns Todd had selected. “I want to make sure we’ve got the right bullets.”

“Here.” He handed her one of the handguns. “Do you know how to use this?”

She popped out the magazine, then snapped it back into place. Gripping the slide, she went through the motions of charging the weapon, then pulled the spring-loaded trigger. It clicked dully. “Piece of cake, right?”

“Piece of cake,” he said.

“Todd…”

He was going through the motions with his own weapon now. “Yeah?”

“Todd…” There was slightly more urgency to her voice now.

Todd looked up and saw the frozen expression on Kate’s face as she stared past him and out the front windows. He whipped around, taking an instinctive step backward at the same time. His left shoulder thumped against Kate’s chest.

At first he couldn’t see what Kate saw—just a pitch-black night choked with a heavy snowfall. But then a moment later his mind grasped the wrongness of it. Like a puzzle piece sliding out of position, a section of the snow seemed to unhinge itself from the rest, a compact little vacuum of twirling white filaments sliding into the wind. It passed in front of the windows and paused just at the door, where it seemed to take on a gradual density. The snow began to congeal, the flakes adhering to one another to form a physical shape.

“Oh, Jesus,” Todd breathed. Kate clinging to his back, they proceeded to back farther away from the windows.

A silvery tendril of light briefly ignited at the center of the whirling snow, shimmering like Christmas tinsel. For one horrible moment, Todd was certain he could make out the insinuation of a head taking shape. The thing approached solidity, then wavered back into nothingness, over and over again, as if pulsing with some living current.

“It’s got arms,” Kate said. Her lips brushed against his ear. He could feel her entire body trembling against his. “Does it see us?”

“I don’t think so.”

Suddenly, one of the creature’s limbs became a solid, hooked blade, which it raised above its partially formed head. Kate screamed. Its arm was pale like a corpse’s, its forearm tapering not to a wrist and hand but to a crescent-shaped claw that made Todd think of scythes used to hack down fields of wheat. The arm held solid form long enough for the creature to drive it down into the plate glass. The sound was like an explosion. The entire wall of windows shook. At the point of impact, a bullet-hole opening appeared, a thousand spidery cracks networking like tributaries in every direction.

“Todd!”

A second swipe of that massive, bladed arm turned the window into a shower of ice.