Ronald Malfi - Snow

How long do I sit here? How much time do I give them? What if they get killed? I can’t waste time sitting here until nightfall.

He decided to count silently to one hundred. If nothing happened by then…

He had reached ninety-eight, his grip tightening on the pistol, when he heard a sound like a locomotive squealing into a train station. Leaning his head out the mouth of the alley, he saw something large come creeping down the street at the far end of the square. The street sloped down toward the square and as the thing approached, it began to gather speed. Todd could make out the vague suggestion of a slouching, mouthlike grill and two lantern eyes, dark and defunct and blind.

It was a car—a muddy brown Oldsmobile with a dented hood and a windshield networked with cracks. It came streaming down the street, collecting momentum, its hubcaps blurring with speed.

Todd’s heartbeat quickened.

“Charlie?”

Kate came to a stop in a storage room at the far end of the sheriff’s station. She held the shotgun in both hands, its barrel angled toward the floor. The halogen lamp hooked onto her belt thumped against her thigh with every step. She’d searched the other rooms and offices for the boy, as well as the chemical-smelling sally port, with no luck. Now, the storage room stretched out before her like a cave, its walls surrendering shelving, its floor littered with heaping boxes and wooden crates. The light fixtures in the ceiling were a column of sightless eyes dangling from thin metal stalks.

A slight shape stood out in the darkness at the far end of the room. Kate brought up the shotgun.

“Charlie?”

The shape shifted, melding with the shadows.

Kate approached, wending around the land mines of boxes and crates, her feet hardly coming up off the floor. The shotgun rattled and shook in her hands. There was a smell—a severe decaying smell—that seemed to permeate her senses and infiltrate every nuance of her body. When she was a young girl she had played hide-and-seek with some of the neighborhood kids. Tired of getting caught all the time, she’d decided to outwit them all by climbing inside a Dumpster behind the supermarket. Five minutes later, alerted by the sound of her cries when she couldn’t open the hatch to climb out, her friends had found her at the bottom of the Dumpster—filthy, reeking, petrified, and painted with greasy swill.

All that rushed back to her now in a wave of memories. The smell, the claustrophobia…

The dark.

“Charlie,” she said, lowering the shotgun. Startled, the boy spun around, his eyes wide, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap. She rushed to him, the lamp banging against her thigh and causing the shadows to jounce and dance as if in firelight. She gripped him by his shoulder, shook him. “Didn’t you hear me calling you? What are you doing back here?”

“I was…uh, Cody was sick…I was trying to find her medicine…” Then he turned his head to look back at whatever had been so attractive to him while Kate had been calling out his name only a moment ago: the circular opening of a pipe jutting from the wall.

Kate unhooked the lamp from her belt and brought the light closer to the pipe’s opening. She sucked in her breath, the light shaking in her grasp.

Snow was billowing out of the pipe and sprinkling to the cement floor.

Kate pulled Charlie behind her. “Get away from it.” There was an oil rag on top of a stack of boxes to her right. She snatched up the rag and stuffed it into the mouth of the pipe.

“Is that…” Charlie began, his voice small. He couldn’t finish the question.

Kate held her breath. She took a single step away from the pipe, bumping against Charlie in the process. She was thinking of those five people-shapes she’d glimpsed across the street from the station, watching the building. Had they been discovered?

Bending to one knee, Kate brought the halogen lamp to the spot on the floor where the snowflakes had fallen. Sour breath escaped her. Instead of melting to water, there were now ink-colored droplets of a bloodlike substance on the concrete floor where the snowflakes had fallen. There was almost a functional formation to the spatter…and the longer Kate stared at it, the more it reminded her of celestial bodies sparkling brightly in a country sky.

“We need to get back with your sister and Molly,” Kate said, jumping back up to her feet.

Out in the hallway, Molly screamed.

The Oldsmobile came careening down the street toward the town square, chunks of ice snapping under its tires. There was no driver behind the wheel and, of course, the car wasn’t actually running —it had been pushed from the top of the hill and was now beginning to swerve out of control.

Any doubt as to the consciousness of the townspeople scattered about the square was instantly eradicated as, in unison, they all swung their heads in the direction of the speeding automobile. Todd’s grip tightened on the handgun. He watched as the vehicle entered the square, moving at a quick clip, jouncing over the rutted snow packed hard as cement atop the street. With no one behind the car’s steering wheel to control it, the vehicle struck a sizeable chunk of snow and hopped a curb. The undercarriage shuddered. Sparks flew from beneath it and one of its hubcaps took off in a different direction. The passenger door flung open, struck a parking meter, and instantly slammed shut again.

With sharklike eyes, the townspeople followed the course of the runaway Oldsmobile, their heads turning on their necks like wooden puppets.

Todd saw it coming before it actually happened: the Oldsmobile smashed into the front of the hardware store, sending a shock wave across the square and a display of shimmering fragments of glass into the air. An exhalation of debris wrapped in black dust showered the sidewalk.

A deep-octave moan rose up among the townspeople. Like robots programmed to do so, they pivoted in unison and faced the destroyed facade of the hardware store. The front windows were still smoking, the tail end of the Olds cocked at an angle in the center of the store like a sneer.

Then, as if someone had fired a starter’s pistol, the townspeople took off toward the hardware store. They didn’t shamble or stagger like the puppeted skin-suits they were—rather, they loped like gazelles, the width of their strides astounding. Their fierce agility and speed shocked Todd into temporary immobility; even his mind seemed to shut down. He could only watch as they attacked the hardware store, spilling into the busted front windows and swarming over the Oldsmobile like ants.

Great bursts of snow exploded from the ground as vaporous tornados of shimmering snow dust corkscrewed up into the air. Todd counted four…five of them. They rippled through the air as they soared toward the hardware store.

Taking a deep breath, Todd dashed out onto the sidewalk and ran toward the Pack-N-Go.

From the top of the hill, Brendan cheered as he watched the Oldsmobile smash through the front of the hardware store. Without someone inside the car to steer it, he’d had his doubts as to how far the car would actually get before it ran off the road, expecting it to most likely collide with a tree. As it turned out, he couldn’t have planned a better outcome.

“I was fired from that hardware store when I was in high school,” Brendan said, grinning. “Fuck ’em, I say.”

They watched as the skin-suits turned their heads and emitted a resounding wail. It sounded like an orchestra warming up. When the skin-suits began loping toward the hardware store, Brendan clapped his hands, then clapped Bruce on the back.

“Come on,” Brendan said, beaming. “We’re not done yet, compadre.”

Charlie in tow, Kate skidded to a halt halfway down the hallway. Molly stood facing Kate, the pregnant woman’s face a testament to some indescribable horror.