Ronald Malfi - Snow

Something was moving across the floor.

Her hand vibrating like a seismograph, she lifted the halogen lamp to better illuminate the room.

At first she didn’t see it—a dark patch in a world of dark patches; a slick of spilled oil on the concrete—but then it moved, betraying all sense of the inanimate, and Kate uttered a sharp cry. The halogen lamp fell from her hand and struck the floor. There was a shattering sound and the room went pitch black.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God what was that thing?

She’d caught only the vaguest glimpse of it, yet its image resonated like the afterimage of a flashbulb in her mind—a meaty twist of fibrous tissue, perhaps as long and as thick as an infant’s arm, that arched like an overgrown inchworm along the floor while trailing a slick of glistening mucus behind it…

And now it was somewhere in here with her.

In the dark.

Oh my God oh my God oh my God what was that THING?

Trying not to panic, she began patting down her pockets until she felt the bulge of the Zippo lighter in her hip pocket. She tweezed it out with two fingers, flipped open the lid, and rolled the flint wheel. A narrow white flame issued out of the lighter, illuminating a circle roughly three feet in diameter around her.

Then she heard it—a sandpapery shhhh as it dragged itself across the floor, followed by the tacky peel of the sticky mucus. The sound was like an old man smacking his lips in his sleep.

Kate squatted and brought the flame closer to the floor. She could see it, less than a foot away from her, coming toward her. Disgusted, she thought of dried meats hanging from deli ceilings, the phallic protrusion of cured, uncut salami. Acid burned at the back of her throat.

It was heading toward her, yes, but it was also moving away from its spot of origin: the place on the floor directly beneath the jutting pipe, which was now clogged with a balled-up oil rag. The inky drops of syrup were no longer patterned on the floor. With mounting horror, Kate realized that the thing before her was what had become of those gooey drops of bloodlike milk—that they had melded together to form this eel-like obscenity, this creeping phallus.

She realized she still held the hammer in her left hand. Steeling herself, she drew the hammer down on top of the atrocity. Its head was flattened and emitted a yellow puslike substance that stank like sulfur. Its rear still wriggled, side to side now as if in pain, and she brought the hammer down again and again and again until the thing stopped moving. When she’d finished, on the floor before her was a gnarled fibrous abortion in a puddle of yellowish glue.

Kate leaned over and vomited on the floor. And she might have even passed out, had she not been pulled from her half swoon by sudden pounding at the far end of the station.

At the front doors.

She dropped the hammer and wended her way through the darkness while holding the shotgun in both hands. She hit the hallway like a bullet and paused, wondering if the banging she’d heard had come from someplace else. Listening, all seemed quiet. Perhaps one of the—

The banging echoed again down the long, hollow corridor…and this time it came with such ferocity that the doors were shaking in their frames. The chains through the door handles rattled, and the desk she’d moved in front of the doors squealed across the tiled floor as it was, inch by inch, pushed away from the doors.

Kate charged a fresh round into the shotgun and held it up at eye level. She proceeded to march down the hallway, one eye closed, aiming the barrel of the gun straight at the center part of the two doors. If anything came bursting through there, it was going to get one motherfucker of a surprise.

Then a voice: “Kate! Kate, open the fucking doors!”

Confusion shook her. Then reality reached out and cracked her across the face. She lowered the shotgun and closed the distance to the double doors in a sprint. Before he left, Bruce had given her the key to the deadbolt. For one traumatizing moment, she forgot where she’d put it.

Oh God oh God oh—

But then she remembered, and dug it out of the rear pocket of her pants. It suddenly seemed so tiny, so useless, in her overlarge hand.

“Kate!”

“I hear you!” she shouted back, though the pounding of his fists was louder than her voice. She managed to shove the desk out of the way and, after three or four nervous jabs that missed the keyhole completely, she lucked out and jammed the key into the lock and turned it. The rolling of the tumblers was as loud as a truck starting in the dead of night.

Todd burst through the door, clutching a black nylon case to his chest. His hair was matted with snow and his skin looked an unhealthy shade of light blue. Blood trailed from one nostril. “Shut it! Shut it!”

Kate had been holding the door open in anticipation of Bruce and Brendan coming through…but when she saw no one else outside, she slammed the double doors and refastened the chain and padlock. Behind her, she could hear Todd’s boots squelching wetly down the hallway as he took off toward the computer room. Kate gripped the shotgun in both hands and raced after him. By the time she reached the computer room, he was fumbling around in the dark with the cables on the desk.

“Here,” Kate said, and clicked on the Zippo.

Todd nodded his appreciation and began digging the laptop out of its carrying case.

“What happened to the others? Are they dead?”

“I don’t know. They’re still out there.”

“Stop.” She touched his right forearm lightly, the shotgun inching up at him. “Let me see your back.”

He paused, the laptop halfway out of its case. He set it on the desk, then pulled his sweater and the shirt underneath over his head. His skin was pale, goose pimpled, his frame wiry. But his shoulders were clean.

Kate lowered the shotgun. “Those aren’t the clothes you went out in.”

“There was an accident. Hold the light closer.”

She brought the flame down close to the laptop as Todd plugged in the battery source, then ran a cable from the back of the laptop to the modem. He plugged the modem into the battery source, too, and watched as the row of green lights blinked in succession on the face of the rectangular black box—just as Bruce had demonstrated.

“Where’s everyone else?” he asked, still breathing heavily from his trek back and forth across the town.

“Molly’s still downstairs, but I put the kids in one of the police cars in the garage. After you guys left, those things started surrounding the station. They knew we were in here. I didn’t want them to get trapped downstairs without a way out.”

Todd flipped open the laptop, then squatted down to get a better view of it. Kate held the lighter’s flame closer.

“Oh,” Todd said. “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong?” Panic rang in her ears.

“Shit.” He sounded dejected. “The fucking screen’s cracked.”

Bending down beside him, Kate could see it: the crack from the upper right corner to the lower left, bisecting the screen. “Will it still work?”

“It better.” He depressed the power button and held his breath.

The laptop lay motionless.

Then it beeped and the tiny lights along the front panel illuminated. The screen blinked and then came on—the crack a disturbance, but not one that would hinder the laptop’s ability to perform.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered, very close to Todd’s face. Her cheek brushed his bare forearm; he hadn’t put his shirts back on. “This could really work, couldn’t it?”

“Let’s hope so.” The Windows prompt appeared, requesting his password. Todd typed in TURBODOGS and hit Enter. The screen faded black, then opened to his desktop—the wallpaper depicting a remote island in the middle of some undisturbed Caribbean waters, clear as lucid thought, the skies unmarred by clouds and about as blue as a newborn baby’s dreams of the womb.