Ronald Malfi - Snow

“Waiting here sounds like a good idea, yeah,” Kate agreed.

Tully clumped toward the back of the room, where he knocked against a section of wall. Todd could hear faint murmuring coming from behind it. Then there was a sound like someone uncorking a bottle of champagne and the section of wall cracked open on a set of hinges. White light spilled out, briefly spotlighting Tully before he slipped into the room and shut the door behind him.

With only the lamplight between them, Todd and Kate stepped closer together.

“What if he’s another psychopath, like that kid at the church?” Kate whispered. “What if being trapped like rats in this town all week has turned all the survivors into raving lunatics?”

“What other choice do we have?” he countered.

Behind the wall, someone’s voice rose up in what sounded like concern. It sounded like a woman’s voice. How many had Tully said were with him? Six, including Tully himself? Todd couldn’t remember. Then Tully’s head popped back out of the opening and he motioned Todd and Kate inside.

A woman with a very pregnant belly sat on a cot with a bottle of water in her lap. She looked to be in her early thirties, but the exhaustion and fear that had plagued her over the past week had multiplied her age so that she looked old enough to remember the Kennedy administration. Reddishbrown hair curtained her face, and Todd could make out the vague hint of large, staring dark eyes. Her shoes were off, her feet clad in layers of socks.

Two kids curled together in another corner, an ancient-looking board game with wooden pieces laid out between them. They looked to be twins of the opposite sex, roughly around the ages of nine or ten. Their faces looked slim and sallow, with chapped lips splitting from the cold, but they were wearing so many layers of clothing they looked like two plump cherubs.

Tully pointed at each one as he made the introductions. “That’s Molly Sanderson. The boy here is Charlie Dobbins and that’s his sister, Cody.”

“Hi,” Todd said, feeling like a circus performer, the way Molly and the kids stared at him. “My name’s Todd Curry. I’m from New York.”

“And I’m Kate Jansen.”

“New York’s far away,” the boy—Charlie—said.

“Are you married?” Cody wanted to know.

“Yes, New York’s far away,” Todd said, “and no, we’re not married.”

Cody pointed at them. “You’re holding hands.”

Self-consciously, Todd and Kate released each other. “We’re just good friends,” Kate said.

“Did you check their backs, Tully?” Molly wanted to know. She had pulled her hair back to reveal a heart-shaped face with delicate features. She looked terribly mournful.

“Of course.” Tully set the backpack down on a rickety old desk and the two kids stood up. The room itself was small and cramped, a few cots pushed up against a brick wall. There were a desk and a rolling cart stacked high with blankets, as well as a few towers of paperback novels piled high in one corner. The ceiling was a concavity of exposed joists networked with cables and wires.

“What’d you bring us?” Cody asked, both she and her brother sidling up beside the desk in anticipation of what was inside the Superman backpack.

“This stuff here’s for us grown-ups,” Tully told them, taking out the liquor bottles and setting them on the desk one at a time.

“Is that beer?” Cody wanted to know. Decidedly the more inquisitive of the two children, she pressed her nose against one of the bottle’s labels.

“Not exactly,” Tully said.

“Then what is it?”

“Medication,” he said—another suspiciously dry Tully joke. “Hooch.”

“Hooch,” Cody parroted, pleased with the word.

“What about us?” Charlie said. His jaw was set firmly as he looked up at Tully. “Don’t we get something?”

“Sure do.” Tully reached into his coat pocket and produced two giant Snickers bars, which he held up in a V. The kids cheered and Tully dispensed the candy like a backwoods Santa Claus.

From her cot, Molly Sanderson was still scrutinizing Todd and Kate with uncertainty. “Have they met Bruce yet?” she asked Tully.

“Not yet.”

“You should take them to meet Bruce.”

“They’re fine, Molly.” For the first time, Tully grinned at Todd and Kate. His teeth were atrocious and the grin came across more as a grimace, as if he’d been sucking on lemons. “Ain’t you?”

“Fine as paint,” said Kate.

“Although I suppose I should take you to meet Bruce,” Tully said, pausing to examine the way he’d set up the bottles on the desk. He picked one up, sniffed at the label, then set it down to select another.

Todd asked who Bruce was.

“Big Bruce the Moose. After Joe bit it, he took over.”

“And who’s Joe?” Kate said.

Tully unscrewed the bottle of bourbon and chugged it while the kids watched. A stream of gingery liquid trickled down the corner of his mouth. “I keep forgetting you two don’t know nobody,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He set the bottle back on the desk and the two kids stared at it as if in amazement. “Joe Farnsworth. He was the sheriff up until two days ago.”

“What happened two days ago?” Kate said. Todd gave her a sideways glance that suggested he had a pretty good guess.

“Don’t talk about it in here, Tully,” Molly said, before Tully could open his mouth. “You feel like telling your horrible stories, you go on upstairs.”

“Good idea,” Tully said, turning toward the door and taking the bottle of bourbon with him. He nodded for Todd and Kate to follow him, then turned to the kids. “You two don’t eat all them candy bars in one sitting, you hear? Save some for later.”

Back upstairs in the hallway, Todd and Kate followed Tully and his bottle of hooch while Tully explained what had happened to Sheriff Farnsworth.

“We were trying to get a signal out through the airwaves,” Tully said. “Course, the phone lines are dead and the electricity’s out, so we figured we might be able to rig some sort of broadcast antenna to the roof of the fire hall next door. The fire hall’s taller than the station, so it made sense to go next door. Joe and Bruce—Bruce was one of Joe’s deputies, see—they thought they could rig up their handheld radios to the antenna somehow. The plan was to try to reach Bicklerville, which is the nearest town, about sixty miles west.

“I volunteered to go up on the roof and set up the antenna but Joe trumped me. He said he was still the sheriff and he was going to do it. And he did—he got up there and got it set up.” Tully took another swig of the bourbon, then said, “They came out of nowhere and took him right off the roof.”

Todd imagined what it must have looked like, watching the man being carried off into the night by one of those things. The thought caused him to think back to Nan Wilkinson, who’d come crashing down through the stained-glass windows in the roof of the church.

“That’s horrible,” Kate said.

“Joe was a good son of a bitch. We went to high school together.”

“Did you guys try the radios?” Todd asked. “Did it work?”

“No. Apparently those clouds hanging low over the town are blocking any signals through the air. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. That’s what me and Bruce think, anyway.”

They arrived outside a closed office door with a drawn shade in the glass. A dull blue light, like the light from a television set, radiated through the slats in the shade. Tully knocked twice, then opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.

The office was a zoo of metal shelves cluttered with computer equipment. The bluish television light radiated from a laptop screen on a desktop; a man of sturdy build with a shaved head perched forward in a chair at eye level with the screen, his deputy’s uniform doused in a sickly azure light.