Snow(35)

But Meg was insolent. She would not answer.

“I think so,” Kate told him, tugging her sweater down over her head. “I…I don’t really remember what happened.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“All right.” Todd turned to Meg, who was watching him with a bored expression. “I want you to take me to your brother, Chris. I want to meet him.”

“He saved your life,” Meg said.

“But Chris said God sent me here to protect you, didn’t he? So let me do my job, kid.”

Conflict flickered behind Meg’s small black eyes. After a moment of quiet deliberation, she turned and marched out of the room. Crossing over the threshold, she once again relit her candle. Casting a look over her shoulder, she said, “Well, come on, then.”

Todd and Kate followed.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN



“What it is? What do you see?” Nan asked, leaning closer to Shawna to peer out of the driver’s side window. Shawna could hear the older woman’s teeth rattling in her head. Sure enough, if they stayed here much longer, they’d both turn into popsicles before morning.

Shawna pressed one finger against the glass. “I keep seeing something out beyond those buildings. A bright light. Flashing.”

“I don’t—” Nan began, but was cut off as the light flashed once again. It was like a camera’s flashbulb going off in a dark alley across the square. “Yes! What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s back there?”

“That’s Fairmont Street. My house is back there.”

“What could be flashing like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it could be help?” Nan’s voice was sadly optimistic.

“I think,” Shawna said, “it could be absolutely anything.” She pulled the rifle up into her lap and proceeded to load it to capacity. “I should probably check it out.”

“Alone?”

Shawna surveyed the woman. She was in fantastic shape, but was she mentally prepared for another trek across town? She’d witnessed her husband turn into a monster, then have his head blown off, less than an hour ago…

“I don’t want to sit in this car by myself, Shawna. I’ll go crazy.”

Try locking yourself in a convenience store with your boyfriend’s headless corpse, she felt like saying, but didn’t.

Shawna nodded. “All right. But we have to be quick and careful.”

“If there’s—oh!” Nan had turned and caught sight of the mess in the backseat. She stared at it, her jaw unhinged. “Dear Jesus.”

“Don’t look at it.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh.”

“Are you with me, Nan?”

Nan took a deep breath, then turned away from the backseat. She sat facing forward, her hands planted firmly in her lap. After a few seconds, she said, “I’m with you.”


Meg led them both up a flight of narrow, atticlike stairs that creaked beneath their collective weight. The flame of her candle caused their shadows to jump and bob along the walls. Despite the drop in temperature and the fact that he’d left his coat back at the Pack-N-Go to fit in the ventilation shaft, Todd was sweating profusely. Something was roiling around in his guts—a warning. Something was very wrong here.

There was a hatch directly above their heads at the top of the stairs. Meg knocked on it twice, then pushed it up to open it. Hinges squealed. Before crawling up, the girl castigated them with a disquieting stare that made her seem much older than her fourteen years. Then she climbed up and out of the hatch.

Todd followed, bracing himself for anything.

Topside, he found himself in a square room with windows on every wall—thick, hand-blown glass panes reinforced with iron piping. The whole town was visible from this vantage. Directly above his head, an ancient copper bell hung from recessed rafters. He caught a whiff of something in the air, something that was not necessarily dangerous but nonetheless did not belong. It took him a moment to place the smell: corn chips.

Meg crept off into the shadows where the silhouette of another person—her brother, Chris?—sat slouched in a folding chair. As Todd helped Kate up out of the hatch, Meg thumped the figure on one shoulder. The silhouette jerked and sat upright, bags of potato chips crunching beneath his shifting feet while he smacked his lips together.

“What?” the boy growled…then saw Todd and Kate standing before him. He sprung up out of the chair and sauntered into the panel of moonlight coming in through the nearest window. He was tall and broad-shouldered but possessed a child’s face, with doughy cheeks, a dimpled chin, and an infant’s squinty eyes. Like a vagabond, he wore several layers of clothing, from beneath which his sizable gut protruded almost comically, and there was a strip of purple satin tied around his forehead like a bandana. Todd was quick to notice his pistol stuffed into the boy’s waistband.

“Are you Chris?” Todd asked.

The boy looked him up and down. Then his piggy little eyes sought out Kate and scrutinized her, as well. Turning to Meg, he said, “Who told you to untie her?”

“I didn’t,” Meg said. She pointed at Todd. “He did.”