Snow(24)

He grunted awake, a moan caught somewhere in his throat. Kate was lying beside him on the floor where they’d spread out pads of foam from egg crates they’d found in the storage room. One of Kate’s arms was draped over his side.

He sat up stiffly and looked around. Fred was awake, the rifle in his lap while he kept guard by the darkened windows. On the floor beside him, Nan was sleeping soundlessly on her own foam bedding, Fred’s coat draped over her. Snoring loudly by the checkout counter, Shawna slept beneath a bundle of dirty dish towels and aprons.

“I can’t believe I actually fell asleep,” Todd whispered. He eased Kate’s arm off him and she rolled over, murmuring in her sleep. “How long have I been out?”

“Only about an hour.”

“Seen any action?”

Still peering out the windows into the pitch-black night, Fred said, “I thought I saw movement between the barbershop and the bank across the square, maybe fifteen minutes ago. But I can’t be sure. And there’s been nothing since.”

Todd looked across the store to where Shawna slept fitfully beneath heaped towels and aprons. “Will she be okay?”

“Unless infection sets in, she should be fine.”

“What do you make of what she told us?”

“I think she was talking real fast and real loopy because I was driving a sewing needle into a hole in her leg.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question. Do you believe her?”

Fred spat a gob of brown saliva into a Pepsi bottle. He must have found a packet of dip somewhere. “I believe she’s scared pretty bad and has been trapped in this town for the better part of the week, fending off people who appear to have…”

“To have what?”

“You saw that man, Todd. I don’t know what to call it, do you?”

“It reminded me of those f*cked-up zombie movies I used to love when I was a kid.”

“Yeah,” Fred said, chuckling. He spat another gob into the Pepsi bottle. In his lap, the steel of the rifle gleamed a ghostly blue. “Maybe something got in the town’s water supply, made ’em all a little bonkers. Some chemical spill or something.”

“What sort of chemical would do that?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Todd sighed and rubbed his face. “So what do we do now?” he said after a few moments of listening to the women breathe.

“We need to get out of here.” Fred jerked his chin toward the window. “I’ve been thinking. All the cars we tried in the street have either died or the keys are nowhere to be found. But those houses we passed along the street to get here? They had garages. There’re probably cars in there, full of gas, and keys hanging from a peg on the wall or something. That’s our way out.”

Todd felt himself nodding in agreement…although the thought of entering one of those dark, soulless houses did not appeal to him.

Fred went on, “I think that if—”

“What?”

Fred was staring out the window. One hand gripped the rifle stock tighter.

Todd turned and looked out the window, too. There was movement halfway across the town square, a shadow hustling among the fires that still burned in the oil barrels. More shadows. A woman emerged from behind the pedestal of the bronze statue, completely naked except for a pair of rubber boots, her hair hanging like a frozen wet mop over her face, the points of her pelvic bones jutting like bullhorns. She staggered through the snow, seeming to sniff at the air, and finally dropped down on all fours when she reached the bloodied slick of entrails that had been sprayed across the snow on the far side of the statue. As Todd and Fred watched, the woman began stuffing bits of flesh into her mouth.

“We’re not seeing this,” Todd whispered. “Tell me we’re not seeing this.”

“Look at her back. What is that?”

Todd looked. He could make out twin slashes in the woman’s flesh, cut diagonally at each shoulder blade. It was as if she were an angel whose wings had been shorn off. Instantly, Todd thought of the slits in Eddie Clement’s flannel jacket.

Fred murmured, “Now what do you suppose that is?”

“Shawna said something about…about those things cutting into people’s shoulders, wearing them like puppets.” His face was so close to the window now, he was fogging up the glass. “Remember?”

Across the square, a second figure emerged. This one was male, dressed in a bathrobe that hung open. He walked with the lumbering gait of a crippled deer. When he bent down to join the woman eating entrails from the snow, Todd could make out similar cuts along the back of the man’s bathrobe, just like those that had been on the back of Eddie Clement’s jacket.

“We can’t go out there,” Todd said.

“They’re just people.”

“No, they’re not. Look at them. How can you say that?”

“What I meant is they can die just like people. That kid sleeping back there took that guy’s head off and he dropped to the street like a wet sack of laundry.”

“But then that thing came out of him,” Todd said. “Who knows what that thing can do?”

As if the two people out in the street could read their thoughts, they perked up and sniffed at the air again. Moving much more swiftly this time, they scrambled to their feet and darted directly toward the convenience store at a steady run.