Ronald Malfi - Snow

White-knuckled, Todd clenched the steering wheel. Beside him, Kate was running her fingers through her hair and repeating, “Oh, God,” over and over again like a mantra. In the backseat, Fred Wilkinson scrambled to sit up straight, one hand pawing stupidly at the side window.

“Everyone okay?” Todd managed. He sounded like he was talking into an electric fan.

“What the hell happened?” Fred’s voice was equally shaken.

“There was a man in the road,” he told Fred. “I think…I think…”

“No,” Kate said. Her hand had returned to his arm, much more tenderly this time. “You didn’t hit him. He moved.”

“Did you see him move?”

“A man?” Fred sounded incredulous.

“You didn’t hit him,” Kate said again, as if repeating it would make it fact. “We would have…would have felt it if…if you…” Amazingly, she uttered a nervous laugh. A sprig of red curls had come loose from under her wool cap and dangled down her left temple.

“We’re okay,” Nan piped up, speaking for both herself and her husband. “You’re okay, aren’t you, Fred?”

“Sure,” Fred said, calming down. “Wish I would have thought to buy some extra undies at the duty-free shop, though…” He cleared his throat, then said, “A man out there, did you say?”

“Yeah, Fred. Yeah.”

Their nervous, mingled breathing had fogged the windows. Todd could see nothing except the dull tallow glow of the remaining headlamp cutting through the darkness outside. He exchanged a look with Kate, then popped open the driver’s side door.

The cold attacked him mercilessly the second he stepped from the vehicle. He hugged his coat around himself, stuffing his bare hands beneath his armpits. Something was hissing beneath the Cherokee’s hood, causing vapor to billow up in a cloud from the grille where it practically froze into crystals in the freezing night air. Todd afforded it no more than a cursory glance—the right front corner was wedged into the snowdrift, of all luck—before stepping out into the middle of the roadway.

He expected to see a black ribbon of blood snaking through the packed snow, perhaps one of those high forester boots strewn off to one side. Entrails, even. But the road was clear, the snow unblemished except for the double helix carved into it from the Cherokee’s fishtailing tires.

“Hello?” he called out…though he could hardly muster more than a pitiful croak.

“Todd?” Kate said, coming up behind him. Her breath clouded the air like great bursts of magnolia blossoms. She placed a tentative hand on his right shoulder. “Todd?”

“Hello!” he yelled, much louder this time. His voice boomed and echoed down the canyon of snow.

A shape moved in the darkness up ahead, red in the glow of the Cherokee’s taillights.

Kate’s hand became a claw digging into Todd’s shoulder. He thought he could feel her heartbeat vibrating through it.

The shape staggered out into the middle of the snow-covered roadway, bloodred in the taillights’ illumination. He moved like something out of a George Romero film, and although Todd was relieved to see the man unharmed, this relief was instantly followed by an unanchored sense of animal dread. One winter when he was thirteen years old, he’d been skating with some friends on a frozen pond behind the church. Before anyone knew what had happened, one of the kids—a chunky, poorly coordinated boy named Bernie Hambert—had vanished. He’d broken through the ice and plunged straight down into the black, inky water. He’d left only a single glove behind, a five-fingered starfish on the ice. There had been adults nearby who ushered them all off the lake, then risked their own lives creeping out toward the hole in the ice in an effort to save poor Bernie. Amazingly, one of the adults had managed to reach in and simply snag ahold of Bernie’s ski jacket and yank him up through the hole in the ice. The kid was sopping wet, his skin the color of carbon paper, his teeth rattling like maracas in his head. The second he hit the air, frost began to form on his clothes and even, Todd remembered with horror, on his skin. One of the adults draped a coat over the boy’s quaking shoulders. When Bernie Hambert followed the adults off the ice and to the safety of solid ground, he’d walked with an uncertain Frankenstein gait, a sort of lumbering toddler walk that conveyed to all the other kids watching from the snowdrift that this had been serious business. That he could have died down there, for Christ’s sake, under the ice.

Todd thought of Bernie Hambert now as he watched the man in the red and black flannel coat shuffle toward him. He had that same disoriented Frankenstein gait Todd remembered so clearly from that day at the frozen pond.

“Sir?” Despite his unease, Todd approached the man. “Are you hurt?”

The man froze as Todd came up to him. His eyes were as rheumy as a drunkard’s, the lower lids rimmed in red, and his complexion was a mottled cobalt hue, networked with delicate spidery veins. His cheeks were deep divots and the lower portion of his face was covered in a lumberjack’s beard caked with ice.

“Are you hurt?” Todd repeated.

It seemed to take a few seconds for Todd’s words to sink in. Then the man shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “No.”

“You…you came out of nowhere…”

“I’m lost.”

“How’d you get out here?”

The man lifted his head and scanned his surroundings, including the trees high above the road and the blanket of stars above. As if he were searching for something. Todd caught a glimpse of the man’s enormous Adam’s apple, protruding like the knot in the bole of an oak tree.

“Todd,” Kate called. She hadn’t moved from her spot beside the Cherokee. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes.” He turned back to the man. “What’s your name?”

“Eddie Clement.” Then some semblance of coherence seemed to flicker behind his iron-colored eyes. The man reached out and clamped both hands on Todd’s forearms, startling him. “You have to help me.”

“Sure. We’ve got—”

“My daughter.” The man’s breath rushed into Todd’s face, reeking like soured milk. “She’s lost, too.”

“Your daughter is out here?”

“Our car broke down just up the road. Maybe…maybe a mile up the road. I don’t know. I stopped to have a look under the hood. I was looking for no more than two or three minutes, tops. But when I got back inside the car, she was gone.” The man’s hands tightened on Todd’s forearms. “You have to fucking help me!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down.” He turned and waved Kate over.

“I’ve been looking for her, calling out to her,” the man went on, his fingers digging into Todd’s arms. “At first I thought she was playing a game. Sometimes we play those kinds of games. But it’s too cold to play games out here. And she never came out of hiding after I called her name over and over, and after I told her that it was not a game. I started cursing and yelling and telling her to come out. But she never came out.”

“What’s going on?” Kate said, rubbing her gloved hands together.

“His name’s Eddie Clement. He’s got a daughter out here somewhere, too.”

“Jesus.”

“What’s her name?” Todd asked.

“Emily.”

“How old is she?”

“Eight.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kate said, her voice seemingly dropped an octave. “How could she…I mean, how long has she been out here?”

The man—Eddie—narrowed his eyes in concentration. He was a heavy guy, short and stocky, with hands that felt like bear traps on Todd’s arms. “Half hour, I guess. Or maybe an hour.” Frustrated, Eddie shook his woolly, white-powdered head. Chunks of ice dropped off his beard. “I don’t know. I can’t…I can’t really be sure. I can’t remember.”