Ronald Malfi - Snow

Kate took Cody’s hand. The little girl looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you downstairs with your brother.”

“I see someone,” Bruce said. He was leaning against the wall, his back flat against it. He held his service weapon down at his waist and gripped with two hands. He craned his neck to see out the pebbled windowpane, the milky issuance of daylight spilling across his features. Todd noted an angry-looking scar like a cleft in his chin. “Or something.”

Breathing heavily and sweating through his clothes, Todd squeezed the hilt of his own weapon tighter. He kept leaning over to peer out one of the front windows, but everything outside was blurred by the pebbled glass and wire meshing. “I can’t make anything out,” he told Bruce.

“A shape,” said Bruce in a low voice, “just beyond the alcove.”

“Are you sure there’s only one?”

“Can’t be positive, but it looks that way.”

“Any chance it’s someone from town? A survivor?”

The look Bruce gave him suggested such a thing was next to impossible.

His flamethrower in hand, Tully pressed himself against the wall beside Todd. Raising his voice just a bit so that Bruce could hear him on the other side of the window, Tully said, “I’ve got the keys to the doors. I can unlock them and on the count of three, you two yank them open. I’ll light up whatever’s on the other side with the ’thrower.”

Bruce appeared to chew this over. He kept trying to sneak a peek through the glass but was having difficulty making out any details. “Whatever it is, it’s just standing there.”

“Cody said it was a girl,” Todd reminded them. “She must have gotten a better look.”

“From where?” Tully said.

Bruce thought for a moment. He jerked his chin toward a glass-enclosed secretarial office behind Todd and Tully. “She goes in there sometimes and plays secretary. There’s windows.”

Todd and Tully went in. Slivers of light beamed through the blinds over the windows. The light held a greenish tint. Together, Todd and Tully squatted down before one of the windows. With the barrel of his gun, Todd lowered a section of blinds and they both peered out.

“It is a girl,” Tully said.

Todd could say nothing. It was Meg, the girl from the church, who’d somehow followed them from the ambulance and stood now in her dirty blouse in the shade of the alcove, a look of disorientation on her face.

“She could be…” Tully began.

“No,” Todd said. “I know this girl. She’s one of them now.”

“I wonder what scared Cody so much,” Tully said. “She looks normal enough. I mean, what do you think—”

He cut himself off just as Meg turned her head and stared straight at their window. The girl’s eyes looked muddy in her skull, as if they’d been painted on by a careless artist. As they watched, Meg’s mouth came unhinged, as grotesquely wide as a python’s, and a shrill but distant keening vibrated the bones in Todd’s ears. Around them, the windows rattled in their frames.

Tully shuddered and jammed a finger into one of his ears. “What is she doing?”

“Calling for the others,” Todd said, rushing to his feet and back out into the hallway. By the front door, Bruce was wiping condensation off one of the windows. “It’s one girl,” Todd said. “She’s one of them now. That noise we’re hearing—I think she’s trying to tell the others that we’re here.”

“Fuck this,” Tully said, zipping around Todd and nearly throwing himself into the double doors. He fumbled with the wreath of keys at his waist. After selecting the appropriate key, he jammed it into the padlock and turned it. The chain fell away to the floor.

Bruce came over and grabbed one of the door handles while Todd reached out and snatched the other. Out in the cold, queer afternoon, the high-pitched wailing stopped suddenly.

“Do it now!” Bruce shouted, and he and Todd yanked the doors open.

Tully charged out into the snow, a tongue of fire already spouting from the nozzle of the flamethrower. Guns at the ready, Todd and Bruce rushed out after him.

“She’s gone,” Tully said, looking around.

Bruce sniffed at the air. “Careful, gentlemen…”

“No footprints in the snow,” Todd said. “How could—”

In a blur, the girl dropped down from the roof of the awning and landed squarely on Tully’s shoulders. Her mouth so wide she nearly split her head in two, the Meg-thing drove her teeth into the soft flesh of Tully’s neck. Tully screamed—a horrible gurgling wail—and sent an arc of flame spouting toward the underside of the awning.

Todd was elbowed aside by Bruce, who fired a shot at the thing on Tully’s back. The round tore a chunk of grayish flesh from Meg’s exposed forearm. Snow blew out as if by compressed air and trailed from the arm like smoke from a burning car racing down a hillside. It reminded Todd of the time he’d helped move Brianna’s stuff across town to his apartment in a friend’s borrowed pickup truck; unbeknownst to both of them at the time, Bree’s beanbag chair had sprung a leak, and when Todd had glanced up at the rearview mirror, the bed of the pickup had been domed in a blizzard of white Styrofoam balls…

Tully dropped the flamethrower in the snow, its cable still hitched to one of the canisters at Tully’s hip. Blood gushed from Tully’s mouth as the Meg-thing tore deeper into his neck.

Todd snapped from his stupor. He ran up behind Tully and grabbed a fistful of the Meg-thing’s hair. With a solid tug, he wrenched the girl’s teeth out of Tully’s neck. The Megthing made a sound like truck brakes squealing. Todd pressed the pistol against the girl’s temple and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand.

The Meg-thing’s head rocked and went unnaturally back on its neck. She sloughed off Tully’s back just as Tully dropped to his knees in the snow.

Todd staggered backward, the pistol smoking in his hand. At his feet, Meg’s lifeless body began shuddering, one leg kicking out and carving a swath in the snow.

Bruce ran over to Tully and clamped a hand to the jagged tear in Tully’s neck. Tully uttered something wet and unintelligible, then slumped forward against Bruce, frighteningly still. “Todd!” Bruce yelled, but Todd could barely hear him. Bruce could have been calling to him from underwater, from a distant planet…

Still staring down at Meg’s body, Todd watched as a slurry of snow came funneling out of the exit wound at the side of Meg’s head.

Reality rushed back to slap him in the face.

“Better get him inside quick!” Todd shouted, rushing over to help Bruce drag Tully inside. The front of Tully’s coat was black with blood and more came spurting between the fingers Bruce had pressed over the neck wound.

“No,” Bruce said. “The legs, the legs! Grab his legs!”

Todd fumbled with Tully’s legs while Bruce grabbed Tully and hoisted him from beneath his armpits.

A blast of icy wind struck Todd’s back. He whirled around in time to see a massive clot of snow rising up like a pillar before him. Twin winglike appendages unfolded from the mass just as a thread of steel-colored light intensified at the center of the thing.

Todd cried out, rolling over on his side in the snow. The pistol went sliding out of his hands. Above Todd, the winglike appendages crystallized into twin blades of curved ice the color of smoke. The creature reared up like a horse, the blades cleaving the air. It emitted an ear-piercing whine. Todd scrambled away on his buttocks, his boots struggling for purchase in the snow.

The scythes chopped down, slicing through the air with a sound like a passing jetliner. The scythes knifed into Tully’s slumped shoulders. Tully shook as if he’d been zapped with an electrical current. The glowing silver thread suspended at the center of the clot of snow dulled and turned the color of bronze as it passed through Tully’s camouflage coat. Blackish blood was already saturating the coat, and rivulets as dark as India ink ran from the serrations at his shoulders.