Ronald Malfi - Snow

“They’re outside,” Molly cried. “There’s so many of them! They know we’re here!”

Kate ran past her and into the secretarial office. Peering through the blinds on the windows, she could see the shapes had crept closer to the building. There were at least a dozen of them now, all staring at the police station. Skin-suits, as Tully had termed them. Their clothing matted with blood, their eyes as vacuous as muddy pools, they were like creatures that had shuffled right out of a nightmare.

Trembling, Molly appeared in the office doorway. “They know we’re here, don’t they?”

Kate examined the empty faces of the townspeople. “I can’t tell.”

“Of course they do!” Molly shouted. “You brought them here! And now we’re going to die!”

“Shut up,” Kate barked. She doused the halogen lamp, bathing them in darkness. “No one’s going to die. Get back downstairs with Cody.”

“She’s asleep.”

“I said go!”

Startled, beginning to cry again, Molly retreated down the hallway. Charlie now occupied the doorway in her place, a terrified expression on his pale face. He was visibly quaking.

Kate turned back to the window. Something beneath the snow moved and caught her attention—a mound rose and then sank, rose, then sank, as if the snow itself were breathing. The surface of the snow began to ripple, as if something were vibrating underground. Then, like one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs tunnels under the ground on his way to Pismo Beach, something beneath the snow—or perhaps the snow itself—began tunneling across the front lawn of the police station, leaving in its wake disturbed mounds of upturned powdery snow.

Whatever it was, it was snaking closer to the building, heading for the front doors.

Whatever it was, it was big.

They’re surrounding us, like the fucking cavalry, Kate thought, terrified.

One of the skin-suits—a middle-aged balding man with a beer gut, wearing sweatpants and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt—began walking up to the front doors of the station. He had that same off-kilter look in his eyes that strange Eddie Clement had had when they’d stopped to pick him up last night on the side of the road.

“What do we do?” Charlie said from the doorway.

Kate racked the shotgun and discharged a shell. She held it up to the boy so that he could see what it looked like. “I need you to go to the room with all the guns, Charlie, and bring me more of these. They’re in boxes on the shelves. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Without expression, Charlie nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Now go. Hurry.”

The interior of the Pack-N-Go smelled like death. Todd hurried inside, crunching shattered glass and bits of cereal. The damage was unfathomable, the sights atrocious. The plastic trash bags he had used to cover the two dead bodies had blown away, revealing purpled, crystallized mummies in the aisles of the convenience store. The parts of them that still looked human—a twisted and frozen hand or the teepee bend of a leg—were somehow the hardest things to look at.

Also, there was now a third body, fresher than the other two but more horribly disfigured in death, draped over a section of fallen shelving. The head was opened up like a piñata, trailing ropy crimson goop over cereal boxes, rendering the person unidentifiable. Yet Todd recognized the clothing and knew without doubt that this was what remained of Fred Wilkinson.

As the townspeople tore into the hardware store across the square, Todd ran over to the refrigerated section of the convenience store, where the ventilation grate lay on the floor beside the stepladder he and Kate had used to climb through the ductwork and into the gun shop next door. Blood had been sprayed along one of the glass freezer doors, now frozen to gelatinous syrup. Spilled cola had made the floor tacky.

Todd spied his duffel bag on the floor and dove for it. Unzipping it, he rifled through the items inside until he located the laptop’s nylon carrying case. Relief coursed through him. With trembling hands, he fumbled the walkie-talkie off his belt.

“It’s Todd,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got the laptop and now I’m getting the fuck outta here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Brendan and Bruce ran down Fairmont, parallel to the town square. They planted themselves against the side of a pickup truck parked askew along the shoulder, both of them breathing heavily. On the next street over, they could hear the commotion of the skin-suits tearing the Oldsmobile apart.

Bruce’s walkie-talkie squawked to life: “It’s Todd. I’ve got the laptop and now I’m getting the fuck outta here.”

“He’s got it,” Bruce said, turning to Brendan.

But Brendan hadn’t heard him. He was busy removing the gas cap from the side of the pickup truck.

Kate peeled the blind away from the windowpane and reached up, unlocking the window. She slid the window open just enough so that she could address it with the business end of the shotgun. Cold, blustery air filtered in, freezing the sweat on her brow. The man in the Chicago Bears sweatshirt was standing directly beneath the station’s awning now, looking at the front doors. Kate charged the shotgun, the sound of which caused the man in the Bears sweatshirt to whirl his head around in her direction. His head sat cocked at an unnatural angle. Fresh perspiration burst from Kate’s pores.

She aimed in.

Pulled the trigger.

The sound was deafening.

The man in the Bears sweatshirt slammed against the double doors as his right leg vanished into a spray of buckshot and misted black blood. He howled—as inhuman a sound as the distant, haunting moan of a sperm whale—and propped himself up against the door with one hand. Around him, the snow rippled in half a dozen places, as if alive. Overhead, the sky was briefly blotted out by a swiftly passing shadow.

Kate charged the shotgun again and pulled the trigger.

A large swipe of the Bears sweatshirt was eradicated. Blood spattered the double doors. The man shrieked and shuddered as something large and the color of smoke withdrew from his body; the smoke-colored thing spiraled up, where it got caught in the net of the awning. The man’s body dropped lifelessly to the ground. Trapped beneath the awning, the swirling mass of vapor and snow briefly glowed at its center with a brilliant silver light.

Again, Kate racked the shotgun and aimed this time for the awning. She fired, the butt of the gun slamming against her shoulder, and blew a hole in the top of the awning. The vaporous phantom swirled toward the hole and escaped.

She turned, startled by Charlie, who stood at her side. He was holding several boxes of shotgun shells.

Just as Todd was about to slip out of the Pack-N-Go and back out onto the street, the laptop case over one shoulder, a brilliant flash of light mushroomed up over the storefronts at the opposite end of the square. Shocked into immobility, Todd stared at the rising inferno that blossomed up into the clouds.

Something had exploded.

The townspeople poured back out of the hardware store as fiery debris rained down around them. Some caught fire and began shrieking and flailing their arms. When the entities inside them vacated their bodies, the skin-suits slumped lifelessly to the sidewalk, where they burned like funeral pyres.

Clutching the laptop case to his chest, Todd ran.

The explosion shook the sheriff’s station. Kate dropped a shotgun shell as she sat reloading the weapon in her lap. She twisted around toward the window in time to see a fireball rise up over the distant trees.

“Jesus,” she breathed.

“What was that?” Charlie said, sitting down beside her.