Ronald Malfi - Snow

“I said leave him alone!” Molly screamed. She looked instantly like a spoiled child, balled fists and all. “You’re killing him!”

“We’re trying to save him,” Todd said. He tightened the bandage around Brendan’s neck, and that seemed to slow the flow of blood. Some semblance of normalcy returned to Brendan’s eyes.

“They…cut me,” Brendan managed. His voice still sounded wet, gurgling.

“We just need to stop the bleeding,” Todd told him. He kept looking from Brendan to the laptop. A message box was in the center of the screen. Looking back to Brendan, Todd asked about Bruce.

“He was…right behind me…setting fires,” Brendan wheezed. “Whole town…burning.”

“I want to take him downstairs,” Molly said. There was a pleading quality to her voice now that sounded very unlike her. “It’s not safe to be up here, and he should have never gone out with you two.” She glared at Todd. “Help me take him down. He should rest.”

Todd nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.” He looked at Kate. “Help me lift him, will you?”

They stood and each slung one of Brendan’s arms over their shoulders. As Molly looked on, Kate and Todd carried Brendan back out into the hall and down the basement steps. Going down the stairs elicited soft little cries from Brendan as he struggled to combat the pain. In the backroom, they set him down on the cot beside Molly’s, and Todd rechecked the bandage at Brendan’s neck. Blood was still seeping through and the bandage was coming loose from jostling him down the stairs.

“Goddamn it,” Todd said. He unwound the bandage while Kate brought the halogen lamp closer. The wound was a gaping black maw in the left side of Brendan’s neck. To Kate, it looked grotesquely vaginal, and she fought hard not to lose it and throw up all over the place again. “One of those hooked claws?” Todd asked Brendan, curling two fingers in a pantomime of the creatures’ scythe-blades.

Weakly, Brendan said, “Yeah…”

Todd spun around and snatched a bottle of whiskey off the desk behind him. He unscrewed the cap and hovered over Brendan again like a guardian angel. “This is probably gonna sting like hell.”

“Already stings like hell,” Brendan offered, and there was a second appearance of that wan smile. His lips frothed blood.

Todd doused the wound in whiskey and Brendan screamed at the ceiling. Thick cords stood out on the poor man’s neck. Todd used up a third of the bottle cleaning the wound, soaking the cot and the nearby blankets in the process, then redressed it with the torn-away sleeves of a fresh shirt.

Eyes wide as Ping-Pong balls, Molly stepped across the room and eased herself down on her own cot. She looked as if she wanted to touch Brendan—either to comfort him or just confirm his existence—but she forced her hands to remain in her lap beneath the push of her pregnant stomach. Her fuzzy pink socks were black with blood; she’d left footprints on the floor.

Todd pulled on a fresh shirt from the pile on the rolling cart. As he buttoned it, he surveyed Brendan, who stared at the ceiling with a disquieting serenity. Todd looked to Molly. “You’ll keep an eye on him?”

Scowling, Molly turned away and stared at the liquor bottles lining the desktop. She didn’t give him an answer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“It’s getting dark again,” Kate said. She was with Todd in the computer room, looking out the single window against the far wall. The glass wasn’t pebbled like the windows out in the front hall, but it was double paned, its center cloudy with condensation. The sun blazed like a greenish bruise behind the nearby trees. Above, the sky looked like tar paper stretched across the face of the planet.

Todd was rapidly hammering away at the keyboard. He’d been sending out instant messages to various police departments’ emergency hotline connections throughout Iowa and Illinois, each one professing the same message:

Please help! We are hostages under attack by terrorists in Woodson, Iowa. Send heavy firepower—the military and national guard. No phones/power/radio/heat. Send help soon!

It had been Kate’s idea to mention a terrorist threat. Had they written the truth—had they mentioned what was truly going on in Woodson—they risked having their messages instantly deleted and probably laughed at by the neighboring police departments.

Not that it mattered: it had been fifteen minutes and no one had responded to a single message.

Kate sat down in one of the rolling chairs by the desk. She, too, had changed her shirt again, anxious to rid herself of the creature’s blood. She watched Todd type frantically in the lamplight. “Maybe none of the messages have gone through,” she suggested after the silence had grown too thick. “Maybe it’s not making a strong enough connection to the Internet to transmit.”

Todd shook his head. “No. We’re getting Web pages without a problem.”

“Then…” But she caught herself.

“What?” Todd said, looking over his shoulder at her. Half his face was blue from the light of the computer screen. “Tell me. It’s probably what I’m thinking, too.”

For whatever reason, it bothered her to hear him say that. “It’s just…what if this thing isn’t isolated to Woodson? What if it spread to the next town? What if they’re dealing with the same crap we are?”

The look on Todd’s face betrayed his thoughts. Kate knew he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

Then something chimed on the computer screen.

Todd and Kate locked eyes for a heartbeat. Then Kate launched herself out of the chair and crowded around the laptop with Todd, staring at the screen. An instant-message box had appeared in the center of the screen, one word blaring up and filling them both with insurmountable hope:

help is on the way

It had worked.

It had worked.

Kate sprang up and threw her arms around Todd’s neck. She kissed him, hard and quick the first time around…then slower and with more passion the second time. On the desk, the laptop began to chime over and over again as similar responses to their SOS came through.

A dark shape flashed by the window. Then two more. Then two more. Kate’s smile drained from her face. Todd turned to see what had frightened her, just as more shapes flitted by outside.

“Christ,” Kate uttered. “They’ve come back.”

“Get the kids,” Todd told her. He grabbed his shotgun off the desk. “We should stay together.”

Holding her own shotgun to her chest, Kate nodded, then took off down the hallway.

In the basement, surrounded by the slowly diminishing light of a single dying lamp, Molly watched as Brendan—the father of her unborn baby—took his last breath before expiring in front of her eyes.

At first she didn’t realize he had died. She stared at him, aware that his chest had stopped rising and falling, aware that the ungodly gurgle of his respiration had ceased deep down in his throat, but the full realization of what she was seeing did not dawn on her until many long minutes had passed.

Then, soundlessly, she wept into her hands.

What was going to happen to her child? She was alone in the world now, pregnant and alone. She had no parents—they’d both died a year ago in an automobile accident out on Highway 28, her old man drunk as a skunk behind the wheel of the family Plymouth, the son of a bitch—and now God had seen fit to take Brendan away from her, too. Brendan, who had always cheered her up with raunchy jokes and funny faces. Brendan, who had shunned her the first few days after she’d told him she was pregnant…but who’d eventually come around, because he was a good guy and was going to be a good father, too. He’d said so— Molly, I’m going to be a good father. Just like that. A promise. Brendan had had a shitty old man, too (although the son of a bitch was still alive and living in Vegas somewhere, allegedly with a showgirl with fake tits, though Molly never completely bought into that one). Brendan was going to make up for his own shitty father and for Molly’s shitty father, too.