Ronald Malfi - Snow

Kate charged forward and drove the torch into the wall of snow. She had expected the flame to immediately extinguish upon impact, but instead the snow solidified and turned the color of a catfish. Kate could make out the vague suggestion of a rib cage and, beneath the translucent scurf, the throb of a white light at the center of the being. The flame ignited its flesh and the creature emitted a bone-numbing shriek that shook the tops of the nearby pines. Then it folded in on itself and scattered in a cloud of sparkling mist across the snowy ground.

Todd could only stare at the space where the creature had been just a moment ago. It looked like he was holding his breath.

Kate put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said, though she thought her voice sounded too nervous and uncertain. “We’re okay.”

“Right,” he said, nodding without really hearing her. “Right…”

She pushed him forward. “I’m right behind you,” she told him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Crouching behind a veil of holly bushes, Shawna peered at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Shaking from a mixture of cold and fear, Shawna counted to fifty, until she could feel her heartbeat regain its normal rhythm again. The rifle clinging to her side, she surveyed Rita Tubalow’s backyard, now blanketed in an undulating carpet of snow. The moonlight made the snow radiate with nacreous light.

A doghouse sat at an angle beneath the deck, and a concrete sundial, the top of which held about eight inches of compacted white powder, rose up out of the center of the yard like a lighthouse on rocky shores. The house itself looked deserted, all its windows black, like a mountainside pocked with caverns.

What she had told Nan Wilkinson had been true—that while many of these houses appeared empty, that was far from the truth. She’d seen the worst of what had come to Woodson over the past week, and it was all too horrible to attempt to relay to any outsider who hadn’t witnessed it all firsthand. As Shawna had.

It had started quietly in the night, without anyone’s knowledge. Like a sneak attack from an advancing army, they had entered the town under everyone’s radar. And maybe that analogy wasn’t too far off—after all, what were those things and where had they come from? It was anyone’s guess. It was a sneak attack from an advancing army; the only difference was that their attackers hadn’t been human.

The snow had been falling steadily since the middle of November, so it was impossible to pinpoint exactly when things had changed. If they had come in on some special storm, or if they were actually the storm itself, Shawna had no clue. For all she knew, they could have been here since November, unobserved and biding their time until the right moment. But what Shawna did know was that the horror hadn’t begun until earlier that week. And it had started with Jared.

She’d known Jared from high school, although they hadn’t dated until after they’d graduated and took full-time jobs together—merely by chance—at the local Ben Franklin. He was a bird-chested, narrow-faced lover of classic rock who couldn’t grow a full beard if someone said they’d pay him a million dollars, and in truth, Shawna hadn’t even liked him at first. She knew of him from school—it was a small town, needless to say—but they hadn’t been what you’d call friends. While she’d hung out primarily with girls from the soccer team, Jared Calabrese had smoked dope behind St. John’s with the motorheads from Mr. Barnholdt’s shop class. So when Jared had asked her out after two weeks working in adjacent checkout lanes at the Ben Franklin, she was taken aback. She’d merely smiled and told him she had a boyfriend—an utterly ridiculous and easily refutable lie, since everyone knew everyone else’s business in Woodson. Yet Jared hadn’t called her out on it; he’d only grinned his goofy grin and given her what approximated a two-fingered salute, which had coaxed a surprised laugh from her before he returned to work.

Eventually, though, he’d cornered her in the stockroom, where they’d shared a cigarette and where she’d finally succumbed to his persistence. (Shawna had taken up smoking after her father, a health-conscious marathon runner, had died from lung cancer, which was when Shawna figured fuck it, there were no guarantees in life, bottoms up and smoke ’em if ya got ’em and all that.) She hadn’t even been attracted to him but, in the face of total honesty, there really weren’t a whole lot of prospects around Woodson. So they’d gone on a number of dates, Jared keeping his hands astoundingly to himself in a display of self-control worthy of some award, and before she knew it she’d found herself falling for the son of a bitch.

They’d spent the next few months rutting like feral cats. Twice she feared pregnancy and sweated her period, wondering what her mother would say, until it eventually arrived and she was able to breathe normally again. Jared had been clumsy in bed but Shawna found the trait surprisingly endearing, and it soon erased all doubt about whether the stories she’d heard about him back in high school—about his sexual deviance—were true. He’d gotten her flowers and candy for her birthday—rather uninspired, but appreciated nonetheless—and this Christmas would have marked their one-year anniversary. She had been looking forward to it. (Back in her bedroom on Fairmont Street, in the top drawer of her dresser and wrapped in a tube sock, was a Timex watch with a silver band and their initials engraved on the back—a Christmas gift that had cost her four months’ salary, meticulously saved.)

But then earlier this week, all that had changed.

It started at the high school. During a fresh snowfall, a group of kids sledding down the steep hill behind the school had never returned home. Frantic parents had donned hats and gloves and poured out into the streets. At this time, Jared had come to pick Shawna up after her shift at the Ben Franklin—it was his day off, something they were unable to coordinate because of a lack of employees at the store—and he’d filled her in on the mystery of the disappearing children with the excitement of someone who’d just come from seeing a kick-ass rock concert.

“Where’d they all go?” she’d asked.

“Don’t know,” he’d said simply, jerking his shoulders up to his ears. “But that’s not the weird part. Just as I was leaving, I heard from Mr. Dormer across the street, who was outside talking with some of the neighbors. They were talking about the sheriff being called out to the school, too, and that some of the parents had come running back into town, saying stuff about the snow rising up off the ground and covering people.” His grin had looked fiendish in the glow of the Subaru’s dashboard lights. “Like, the snow fucking came up in a wave and swallowed them whole.”

“Are they okay?”

“You don’t get it, ’Na. They’re fucking gone.”

She scowled, searching through her purse for her lipstick. “What do you mean, they’re gone?”

“Gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Snow swallowed ’em up. They can’t find them.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s Dormer fucking with your head.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were there. Mr. Dormer looked scared enough to shit bricks. I could hear the cop cars racing through the snow from the house.”

“They’re probably just out looking for the kids.”

“They won’t find them, either.”

“Why’s that?”

“Snow got ’em,” he’d said, as if this were the most logical thing in the world. “Swallowed ’em up like popcorn.”

Upon arriving back at her house, her mother was quick to usher her inside. As she watched Jared drive off through the snowy streets, Shawna felt an awful premonitory pang resonate in the center of her chest. Her mother, a frail woman encumbered with a perpetual scowl, rushed her to the kitchen before Shawna could even take her coat off, her sneakers squeaking wetly on the linoleum.