Snow(64)

“Jesus,” Todd panted. Even with the doors closed, the acrid stink of the fiery massacre burned the hairs in his nose. “Did you see? It couldn’t…couldn’t get inside her…because the fire kept…kept it solid…”

“I lost my gun,” Bruce gasped.

“Do you think…more will come?”

“I don’t know.”

A dark shape ambled toward them from the opposite end of the hallway. Todd aimed his gun at the darkness.

It was Brendan, shaking with fear. In all the commotion, Todd had forgotten about Brendan.

“Did you kill it?” Brendan’s voice trembled. “Where’s Tully?”

“Tully’s dead,” said Bruce. “We should probably put the fires out and bury the bodies before any more of those things come sniffing around.”

“Fires?” Brendan warbled. It sounded as though his tongue had grown too big for his mouth.

“Brendan,” Bruce said, still out of breath. “Get a shotgun from the gun locker, will you?”

Stupidly, Brendan nodded, then retreated back into the darkness. Todd listened to his footfalls pad down the floor tiles.

“Come with me,” Bruce said. “There are shovels in the sally port. We’ll have to be quick before those things show up and figure out we’re in here.”

Less than three minutes later, they were back outside. Most of the flames had died, leaving charred and steaming corpses sizzling in gray snow. Tully’s and Meg’s bodies still resembled something vaguely human, but the third corpse—the creature—was unidentifiable. It was large—perhaps twelve to fifteen feet in length—and something about the fibrous twists of its multisectional body suggested something serpentlike. Again, Todd thought of the fleshy, arrow-shaped wings of a stingray. One of the thing’s hooked arms was still buried in the smoldering black flesh of Meg’s corpse.

“I can’t do this,” Todd said, feeling as if someone were tickling the back of his throat with a feather. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Then throw up and let’s get on with it,” Bruce said, his bald pate glistening with sweat.

While Brendan stood guard with a shotgun, Todd and Bruce donned work gloves and tossed handfuls of snow onto the corpses to cool them. When Todd bent and, turning his face to the side, grabbed hold of Tully’s ankles and pulled, he heard a sickening crunch and felt the bones surrender. Tully’s feet came loose in Todd’s hands. Sickened, Todd dropped them and staggered several paces away, where he vomited into the snow. Behind him, he heard Brendan moan.

“Fuck,” Bruce said once Todd returned, feeling hollowed and jittery. “We’ll never be able to move them. Let’s just cover them with snow right here. Give us a hand, Brendan.”

The work was grueling and took longer than Todd would have thought. The men took turns vomiting in the snow while they worked. The worst moment came when Bruce dug the ball of keys from Tully’s belt; they came away with bits of flesh seared to them, and the sound was like ripping up old carpeting.

Once they finished, there were three mounds of snow beneath the awning of the sheriff’s station—one much larger than the other two.


Perched like some predatory bird on her cot, Molly kept stealing glances at Kate when she thought Kate wasn’t looking—but Kate could feel the pregnant woman’s stare like hot embers against her flesh.

They were back down in the basement room, where they counted down the minutes in what felt like eternal silence. Still shaken by what she’d seen outside, Cody clung to Kate, who’d taken up one of the empty cots across the room from Molly. Looking bored, Charlie sat on the floor before the board game, crushing little wooden game pieces beneath his shoe while chewing absently on his Snickers bar.

“Come here, Cody,” Molly called to the girl—the first thing that had been said since Kate had taken Cody down here—though Molly maintained her gaze on Kate.

Cody didn’t move—she had her face buried against Kate’s chest, her spindly little legs folded up under her. In Kate’s arms, the girl felt almost nonexistent.

“When are you due?” Kate asked, once the silence had become overbearing.

“Next month. But Brendan says I should be prepared for the worst. He said the particles or pulses or whatever from those clouds could have caused…maybe caused…” Molly’s voice trailed off.

“Brendan shouldn’t talk about things he knows nothing about,” Kate told her. “He doesn’t know any more about what’s going on than we do. He shouldn’t have scared you.”

“He didn’t scare me.” Molly’s eyes were lucid.

“Do you know the sex?”

“No. We wanted to wait, to be surprised. Brendan says if it’s a girl, the electrical pulses in the air may have, uh, compromised her reproductive capacity. Those were his exact words, just how he said them—‘compromised her reproductive capacity.’ Brendan’s very smart.”

“Sounds like he’s been thinking a lot about things.” Then a notion came to her. “Brendan’s the father?”

“We’re not married,” Molly said defensively. “Not yet, anyway. We will be, though. We agreed the baby needs both parents. It’s important to have both parents be a part of a child’s life.”