Ronald Malfi: Snow

Snow Ronald Malfi

LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

THE NIGHTMARE IN THE SNOW

Eddie stood maybe ten yards ahead of Todd in what appeared to be an open field of snow. Like Todd, Eddie was down on his knees, eye level with the little girl who stood in front of him. She was wearing a pink snow parka with the hood drawn up over her face, the hood itself rimmed in grayish brown faux fur. Mittens hung from the parka’s sleeves by colored string.

Jesus , Todd thought. His daughter.

Both Eddie and the little girl turned and looked at Todd. After a moment, Eddie stood, clumps of fresh snow falling off his knees.

The girl had no face.

A grin broke out across Eddie’s face. “Come with us, Todd.” The grin widened—impossibly wide. “It’ll be warm…”

For Deb, my shelter in the storm.

PROLOGUE

“Mr. Farmer? Is that you?”

But she knew it wasn’t George Farmer. Even if it looked like him, it wasn’t George Farmer.

Wiping strands of sweat-slicked hair from her face, Shawna Dupree crouched below the counter inside the deserted Pack-N-Go. Too frightened to sit up and peer over the countertop, she managed to survey the store in the reflection of the tortoiseshell antitheft mirror above her head. The blood on her hands was starting to freeze to the rifle’s cold steel.

The lights were out and the store itself was a mess. Aisles were cluttered with fallen, rotting goods. Bottles of soda had burst, leaving behind sticky puddles of molasses on the linoleum. Someone—one of the others?—had knocked over a metal shelving unit, driving it into the glass doors of the industrial refrigerator that lined one wall; despite the freezing temperatures outside, the ice cream had begun to melt in the freezer. Worst of all, Jared’s body lay somewhere amid the junk food and girlie magazines. She’d had no choice with Jared.

“George Farmer?” she called again, her voice a pathetic squeal that reminded her of weather vanes twisting noisily in the wind. She winced, held her breath, counted silently to ten. When she spoke again, she tried desperately to sound more in control: “If that’s you, goddamn it, you better answer me! I’ve got a gun!”

Daylight fell through the plate-glass windows, one of which was decorated with a bull’s-eye webbing of cracks. The light was pale, ghostly blue, casting an eerie glow over the otherwise darkened store. Beyond the windows, the town square was blanketed in snow, the roofs of the nearby shops nearly bowing under the weight. She could make out the whole downtown area in distorted miniature in the antitheft mirror above the register. The spire of St. John’s remained a solitary reminder of what the town had been only a short time ago. At the horizon, the sky looked like hammered sheet metal.

Something shifted toward the back of the store.

Shawna drew her legs up closer to her chest, her heart jackhammering. A rivulet of fresh blood, dark as chocolate syrup, oozed from her left pant leg and across the floor. She forced her eyes from the antitheft mirror and glanced at the blood soaking through her jeans. Just looking at it caused the pain—at least subconsciously—to intensify, and almost instantly she could feel the burning, jagged laceration along her calf all over again. On the floor, the runnel of blood was temporarily arrested when it reached a rubber WELCOME mat. Then it grew darker and seeped along the mat’s edge, angling around one corner.

Holding her breath, Shawna listened for the sound again, but the store remained silent. It had been a whooshing, shuffling sound—like someone walking in pantyhose, her thighs rubbing together. Miss Brennan, her middle school math teacher (so many years ago now), had sounded like that when she walked—that shush-shush-shush…

They know I’m here. Somehow, they know I’m here, right here.

Was it possible that this was all a dream? A horrible, hellish dream?

She squeezed her eyes shut…but in doing so, the image of Jared jumped up behind her eyelids, his face frozen in a mask of pure terror, his skin gone a horrible milky white, his eyes covered in a film of tallow mucus. There had been a constellation of blood speckling the right side of his face, and more blood—a lot more—in the nearby snowbank outside, where she’d shot him the first couple of times. But he’d pursued her across the town square, along with George Farmer and several others. She had shot him again in the magazine aisle of the Pack-N-Go. That was finally when he went down. Before he died, he’d managed to lift his head, his voice shredded and nothing more than a croak as he had attempted to speak her name: “Shaw…naah…”

A sharp bang echoed from the opposite end of the convenience store. Shawna braced herself, gripping the rifle tighter. Come on, fucker. Another bang—louder than the first. Then the rushing sound of ghost-feet or batwings or old Miss Brennan’s pantyhose came charging down the aisles. Bags of potato chips and plastic tubs of motor oil exploded up into the air like a shark’s dorsal fin cleaving through water.

It was hunting for her.

Shawna executed one final glance in the spotty mirror above the register and saw—or thought she saw, for it was there and then gone in a single instant if it was even there in the first place—the flickering visage of something large and thin and so pale she could see the burnt umber of the setting sun shining right through its shimmering, translucent flesh—

Soda bottles burst off the shelves directly behind her and loose coins sprayed the linoleum.

Shawna jumped up, swung the rifle around, and screamed as she pulled the trigger.

PART ONE:

THE STORM

CHAPTER ONE

The newscaster with the plastic-looking face and the electric yellow tie spoke of doom. Todd Curry glanced up at the screen just as an HD map of the Midwest replaced the newscaster. A digital white mass blipped across the state, moving in staggered increments across the screen, completely obliterating Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. At gate sixteen of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, a number of people groaned in unison. For a moment, Todd thought it was in response to the digital snowstorm on the flat-screen television set, but then he looked over to the check-in counter and saw that flight 218 to Des Moines—his flight—had been delayed another hour.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself.

“The snowstorm will continue through the evening and well into tomorrow afternoon, which is bad news for a number of commuters who are desperately trying to make it home this Christmas Eve,” the newscaster said, grinning like a ventriloquist’s dummy in high definition despite the bad news. “Downtown Chicago has already been hit with six inches and some of the outlying areas may see as much as fifteen inches before this storm passes. So unfortunately for all you holiday travelers, there appears to be little reprieve in sight. Back to you, Donna.”

“This is bullshit,” grunted an enormous man in a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt and cargo pants that looked like they had been cut from the fabric of a multicolored circus tent. The man was sweating profusely and balancing a triangular Sbarro’s pizza box on his left knee. His small, squinty eyes shot over to Todd, who was seated two chairs away. “You believe this? You just watch, buddy. They’re gonna cancel this flight.”

“Sounds like my luck,” Todd returned. In his lap, his hands wrestled with each other while between his feet his laptop sat in its nylon carrying case. Like someone anticipating a horrible telephone call, Todd’s eyes kept shooting back to the flat-screen TV bolted to one of the rafters above the rows of seats. On the screen, a mildly attractive woman in a burgundy pantsuit was shaking her head at the unfortunate weather conditions.