Snow(49)

“Sleep well?” he said.

“The best. We’re on vacation, right? In the Bahamas?”

“Of course. Would you like a mimosa with your breakfast?”

“Ooh,” she chided, playfully grimacing. “Don’t say breakfast. I could eat a whole cow right now.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking back through the sliding panel and out the windshield beyond. “I’m starving, too.”

Kate crept up next to him and looked out the window. She smelled of sleep and dried perspiration, the combination of which caused something to stir within Todd. Upon their first meeting back at the bar at O’Hare, he’d found her attractive…but something overwhelming was working on him now and he realized, with bittersweet embarrassment, that he was trying to fight off an erection.

“My God, the sky’s funny,” she said. “I’ve never seen clouds like that in my life.”

“Maybe they’re not actually clouds,” he suggested. “Just like those things out there aren’t actually snow.”

The thought caused Kate’s face to draw into a frown. He suddenly wanted to hug her, to cradle her.

“There’s smoke, too,” she said.

“It’s the church.” He’d seen the column of thick black smoke spiraling up into the atmosphere, where it flattened out and spread like oil against the low clouds.

“It burned all through the night?”

“Seems that way.”

“Do you think it’s completely gone?”

“I don’t know.” His stomach growled, and he blushed when Kate turned and smiled at him.

Then her smile faded. She was looking at Meg.

Todd looked at the sleeping teenager, who had her back turned to them as she lay curled on a gurney. She wore a threadbare blouse of thin material smudged with dirt, the collar of which had been torn away at some point during their escape from the church. What was exposed was a narrow serration in the soft flesh of her shoulder, nearly mouthlike, that ran midway down her back and disappeared beneath the fabric of her blouse. The lips of the gash appeared to respire.

“She wasn’t like that before,” Kate said, backing up against the opposite wall of the ambulance. “I checked her back at the church. It must have happened while we were escaping. One of those things must have…must have gotten inside her somehow…”

Todd pointed the gun at the back of Meg’s head.

“Oh.” Kate began to cry. “Oh f*ck, Todd…”

His hand shook. He watched the girl’s chest rise and fall as she slept. No, he tried to convince himself, she’s not a little girl. She’s different now. But that did little to assuage his guilt.

He lowered the gun. He felt Kate’s eyes hanging on him, burning through him. Instead of looking at her he just nodded toward the ambulance’s rear doors and mouthed the words, Get out. Comprehending, Kate peeled herself off the wall and practically glided past the sleeping teenage girl. Kate picked up her sconce and somehow managed to unlatch the ambulance doors without making a sound. Todd crept out after her, the freezing temperatures a sudden shock to his system the second he dropped down to the slushy road.

He stood for a long time staring into the open doors of the ambulance. If this were a movie, he’d be cursing the hero, telling him to go back in there and pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull the f*cking trigger. But this was real life, and sometimes people were just as foolish as the fake people on-screen.

Let’s be honest, he thought then, his hand holding the gun trembling. I’m not even sure shooting this girl would kill the thing inside it. The one Shawna shot outside the Pack-N-Go just seemed to flit away. Maybe they’re injured and weakened when they come rushing out of people like that, but I don’t think shooting them kills them.

Fire, on the other hand…

The thought caused him to turn and watch the conical black smoke rising up from the trees. The church. It was a goddamn funeral pyre, all right, smoldering straight through the night. He wondered what was left of the building and, moreover, what remained of the creatures inside.

Kate was staring at him by the side of the road. She looked cold and wet and uncomfortable. “Are we going?” she said, her voice just barely audible.

He nodded, and they began walking down in the culvert, out of sight from the road.

In the light of day, the massacre that had come to Woodson was horrifically apparent. Blood stained the snowy hillsides and froze in red rivulets in the ravines and gutters along the roadways. Shredded bits of clothing were strung up in trees like discarded party favors. Worse still, human bones were strewn about at random as if they’d fallen off the back of a passing truck; many of the bones still had chunks of meat on them that glittered with frost. A human head caught in midscream was propped in the Y of a yew tree, its eyes frozen into black marbles, its skin a nightmarish blue-green. At one point Kate asked if she should light the torch, just in case one of those things burst out of the snow again, but Todd said it was probably best to keep a low profile. “Besides,” he said, “it seems like they’re hiding now that it’s daylight.”

“Shawna said daylight didn’t matter, that they’re not vampires.”

Todd shrugged. “Maybe they are. Maybe these things are what we’ve come to know as vampires.”