Ronald Malfi - Snow

The world, it seemed, was full of shitty fathers.

Then, for whatever reason, she felt anger well up inside her. Eyes bleary with tears, she looked back at Brendan’s silent and still body. For the first time, his stillness actually struck her, and the thought ripped through her like lights on a Broadway marquee—HE’S DEAD HE’S DEAD HE’S DEAD. She looked down and found that her hands were immeasurably calm. She turned them over and examined the pink, puffy palms. As she looked, tears spilled from her eyes and landed in her cupped palms. And for whatever reason, this made her angrier.

For a long time, Molly sat with her legs folded beneath her on the cot as the lamplight slowly died all around her.

Armed with a shotgun and pistol, Todd stormed into the secretarial office and crawled to the nearest window—oddly enough, the one Kate had been perched out of earlier that day, although Todd had no way of knowing this. The blinds were cockeyed and partially raised. He slid down beneath the window and reloaded shells into the shotgun. His fingers shook. Above his head, dark shapes moved around outside. He was too terrified to sit up and look out.

But he did anyway.

He counted six of the skin-suits staged at the end of the driveway, standing motionless as mannequins. Two more stood closer, at the far corner of the building. They stood so close together their heads nearly touched. Outside, the strong wind rustled the distant trees and flapped the clothes of the townspeople.

Also, something was breathing beneath the snow. Todd thought of the massive creature that had lunged at him back on Fairmont Street—the way it had shuttled up from the ground and towered over him, as unfathomable as an Egyptian god. How many more of those things were out there? And how many other things, stranger and each more dangerous than the next, waiting to attack?

Todd thought of the old H. G. Wells story, The War of the Worlds, and how he’d read it a long time ago to Justin. The boy had grown tired of the standard children’s storybooks and professed an interest in things beyond the appropriateness of his age—aliens and monsters being the two frontrunners. Of course, Brianna had objected. She didn’t want the kid sitting up in bed all night because of scary bedtime stories. Moreover, she said it wasn’t appropriate to tell stories to a boy of Justin’s age if they dealt with ghouls and goblins and strange fruitlike creatures from outer space that descended on the unsuspecting populace to terrorize, torture, and inevitably kill. Yet despite Bree’s protestations, Todd had snagged a handful of books from the local library—books he, too, had enjoyed as a child (although he’d had no father around to read them to him)—and every night before Justin went to bed, they would read a chapter. Or sometimes two or three chapters, if the story was really cooking. If the creatures from those books ever gave Justin nightmares, the boy never let on. And although Brianna, who was no dummy, eventually learned that Todd had ignored her wishes, she never said anything more about it. Todd thought that had probably been one of Brianna’s best moments.

She put up with a lot from me, he thought. A pang resonated in his heart, and his mind added, They both did.

Bleakly, he wondered if he would die here, right here, right in this spot. Crouched on the floor beneath a window in a sheriff’s station in the middle of godforsaken nowhere…

I wonder if Justin asked for me. When I didn’t show up at the house, I wonder if he asked Bree where I was.

But the idea that he had let his son down again was more torture than Todd could handle. He swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, then sat up and looked back out the window.

He counted twelve this time.

Kate opened the door to the sally port, once again struck by how bitterly cold it was. Across the garage, she could see the twin nubs of the children’s heads in the backseat of the first police car. She raised the lamp and waved at them. Then she climbed down the steps and went over to the car.

“Hey,” she said, opening the car door.

The children turned their heads in Kate’s direction.

Their faces were creaseless bulges of flesh—featureless.

Kate screamed and threw herself backward against the wall. Behind her, a shelf collapsed, raining empty paint cans and sheaves of paper down on her.

The two faceless children began climbing out of the back of the police car. They moved with the slow uncertainty of someone negotiating a room in absolute darkness.

Kate set the lamp down, then leveled the shotgun at the first child—the one that had been Charlie. Her finger lingered on the trigger. Pulled it back slightly…pulled it…

She lowered the gun. “Fuck,” she groaned, trembling. Across the room and midway up the wall, Kate caught sight of what appeared to be some sort of exhaust vent. Sparkling snow breathed out of the vent slats like confetti, swirling down to the floor.

Kate turned and ran out of the room, slamming the sally port’s door shut behind her. There was a series of deadbolts on this side of the door. Kate turned them all.

There were so many out there now, Todd could not keep count. They all seemed planted at strategic spots, all awaiting some sort of instruction, or so it appeared. That thing beneath the snow continued to breathe—the snow itself rising and falling, rising and falling—and Todd found himself thinking of hospital respirators.

Something moved out in the hallway, collecting his attention. Todd swung the shotgun at the office door as a figure rushed into the half light. The figure moaned and called Todd’s name.

He lowered the shotgun. “Kate? I’m here.”

She rushed to him, her own gun held away from her body as if she wished nothing more than to be done with it, the lighted lantern swinging from her crooked elbow.

“The light.” He beckoned to her. “Put it out.”

She quickly doused it, then crept up next to him against the wall. She was shaking.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where are the kids?”

She just shook her head very fast, not looking at him.

“Kate, what happened to the kids?”

“They’re…they changed .” She stared at him, her eyes frighteningly lucid. “No faces.”

Todd felt his muscles clench. He turned back to the window. “They’re all out there now.”

Kate ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “God, what are they waiting for? Just let it happen already.”

He squeezed her shoulder.

Her smile warmed him, though there was little effort in it. Then her eyes widened and she looked past him and out the window. “Todd, they’re running.”

He looked and saw them—all of them—charging toward the building at breakneck speed, their feet kicking up clouds of snow, their arms pumping like machine pistons.

“What—” he began, just as they simultaneously pummeled the side of the building. Blood went everywhere. Some of them fell backward into the snow. But the ones who remained standing, which were most of them, slowly backed away from the building…only to rush at it again. This time, Todd heard a distant window shatter. Beneath the awning, the station’s front doors appeared to buckle.

“They’re smashing their way in,” Kate said.

Todd pulled open the window, the cold quickly sinking its teeth into his flesh, and shoved the nose of the shotgun out. He fired at the closest townsperson, who went down in a gaudy display of radiating innards. One of the snow-beasts whirled out of him and spiraled off into the night.

Kate scrambled over to the next window and followed suit, poking the barrel of her shotgun out, charging a round, and firing.

On the floor between them lay a pile of shells. Not enough to fend them all off, but maybe enough to lessen the numbers.