They Came With The Snow Box Set {Books 1-2]

by Coleman, Christopher

  “I’m not sure we know any of that, but let’s say we do. Let’s say Terry and Stella were telling us the truth about what they knew. What does that mean?”

  “It means we can do something to stop them. It means we have an obligation to stop them.”

  I shake my head, confused. “Stop them? It’s been done. Whatever caused this, whatever brought the snow and the crabs, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s already happened. By all accounts, it’s happened everywhere.”

  “Those radio reports were lies Dominic. You know that. You heard Terry and Stella. Those reports were just part of the experiment.”

  “We don’t know that for sure either. Whatever plan Terry and Stella were a part of was obviously not the real plan, not fully, so we have no idea what’s true or not. It could be that the reports were right after all. It could be the world is, for all intents and purposes, over.” I’ve regained my sense of the moment now and have, at least temporarily, accepted the death of my wife, whose body still lay at my feet, the pool of blood at the base of her neck and shoulders enormous.

  “So what then, Dom? You’re just going to give up? Should I just go ahead and take your head off too?” Danielle raises the gun to her shoulder and stares at me through the sight. “This what you want?”

  In a way, it is what I want, even though I know Danielle’s dramatic display is just for show. But what is there to do now? The world has been changed beyond repair, at least the world that we can see from here, and it’s a world now inhabited by murderous crabs and some demented military force.

  I hear the front door open behind me, and I turn my head to see Tom standing at the threshold. He surveys the scene with a look of sympathy, and then gestures toward Danielle to lower the gun.

  “They’ve been keeping their distance so far,” Tom says, “but they’re closing the perimeter. We have to go soon if we’re gonna. Can’t leave Terry and James out there with no weapon. Are you ready, Dominic?”

  Tom has the demeanor of a grandfather and the gravitas of a general, and all I can do is nod.

  Tom looks to Danielle. “Weren’t gonna shoot Dom were you, Danny?”

  Danielle cocks her head and shrugs. “Guess we’ll never know.”

  Tom snorts a laugh and gives a twitch of his head, gesturing toward the truck. I follow him out to the stoop and instantly see the closing circle of crabs to which Tom just alluded, their alabaster bodies nearly featureless against the backdrop of the snowy landscape. The closest one is still probably thirty yards away, but my former subdivision is a closely packed cul-de-sac of houses and shrubs and trees, and with a blanket of snow covering all of it, it’s hard to know where any one of the white monsters might be hidden. There could be one crouched behind a parked car, or maybe camouflaged next to a downspout, and we would never see it until it was too late.

  And though we’ve been able to observe them periodically over the last several weeks, their movements are still somewhat unknown. We know they have the potential to be violent, of course—I’ve already seen two people killed in front of my eyes—and when they did kill, they were ferocious in the way they devoured the bodies, tearing at the flesh with their teeth and hands, continuing to maul the corpse long after death had come to the victim.

  But exactly when and why they attack is still somewhat unpredictable. It seems proximity plays a critical part, but the exact distance at which they are triggered remains a mystery. And perhaps sound and movement play a role as well. They appear incredibly curious by sounds and actions that don’t follow a regular pattern of behavior.

  I step up into the passenger seat of the truck and move to the middle, allowing Danielle space to move in beside me. Tom reclaims the driver’s seat; the engine is still running. Neither James nor Stella, who are both seated in the back, say a word.

  I look over at the dashboard and note the gas gauge, which is somewhere between a quarter tank and empty.

  Tom doesn’t look at me, but he seems to read my mind. “I guess before we can save the world, we’re gonna have to find some fuel.”

  Danielle closes the passenger door and Tom immediately shifts the truck into reverse, allowing it to roll gently out to the street.

  “There’s a station a couple miles up near Turnberry, just off 2.”

  “Don’t know where that is, but I’ll follow your directions.”

  I nod and point straight ahead.

  Tom shifts the truck into drive and eases us onto the freeway.

  I look up to the clear sky above us and the sun shining brightly.

  Chapter 2

  It hasn’t snowed in days, and as we head north towards the city, with every mile that passes, the accumulated snow on the ground seems to thin. I have no way of knowing if it’s due to the distance were putting between ourselves and College Valley, or if the weather has just improved, but every few minutes I throw a glance towards the odometer, tracking the miles.

  “I need to know that you’ll be able to do this with us,” Danielle says from beside me. Hers are the first words anyone has spoken in twenty minutes, and I turn to see the side of her face pressed against the passenger door window; she seems to be staring up at the clouds in the distance.

  “Do what?” I ask.

  She turns her head toward me slowly. “Whatever it is we’ll need to do to survive. I don’t think I got confirmation from you back at the house, and I need to know you’re with us.”

  I look away from Danielle at back towards the front of the truck. “I’m good. I’ve made peace with...what happened. You made a lot of sense about life or whatever.”

  “I’m not just talking about that. I’m glad you’re feeling better, but you used us. You used us in order to leave the diner so that we could bring you to your house. But you didn’t tell us of your full intentions. I understand why you did it, but it was still a violation of our trust.”

  “I wasn’t completely honest with you, I’ll admit that, but I didn’t use anyone. We voted to leave the diner. And I seem to recall that you were in my camp from the start.”

  Danielle doesn’t retort, and instead turns back to the window to continue her sky-gazing. “I am sorry about your wife, Dominic. Just in case I never said.”

  I swallow hard and feel the flood form behind my eyes again. “How far have we gone, Tom?”

  I ask the question as a distraction. I already know it’s been thirty-eight miles since we left my house and the wreckage of my former life. We passed the last of the county’s businesses two miles back, and are now beyond the furthest point any of my companions have explored since the blast.

  The two-lane stretch of highway is deserted, and has been for the entire trip, other than the occasional crab crouched low on the side of the road, its shoulders pointing high above its head like a bat. Their gazes always seem to follow the truck as we pass, their eyes somehow never leaving mine, like one of those old posters where the stare of the subject would fixate on you no matter where you walked in the room.

  “About thirty-five miles,” Tom answers. “We’re only ‘bout ten miles from the county line.”

  Whereas Warren County is small and secluded, surrounded on three sides by water, the neighboring county of Maripo is a bustling suburb, a closer representation to the capital city bordering it to the north. It’s also the home of Stella and Terry’s employer, a vaguely labeled chemical engineering firm who, according to Stella, sent the two scientists to Warren to observe what was ostensibly to be only a psychological experiment, but instead turned out to be the disaster we’re faced with now.

  “This is your neck of the woods, right Stella.” I say with a hint of contempt.

  Since the moment Stella first revealed she and Terry were privy to the fatal experiment of Warren County, our interrogation of her has been steady, and Terry’s demise back on the exit ramp at the hands of a mysterious army colonel has only enhanced our questioning. But the few details she’s offered since the diner have been inconsequential. Still though, I feel like there
’s more she’s not telling.

  “I...yes, though not quite. Our laboratory is about fifteen minutes from here. Across the Maripo River Bridge and then just—”

  “Holy Jesus!” It’s James, and his voice is breathy and shocked. “What is that?” He’s looking straight ahead, over my shoulder from his position in the back seat.

  I follow his eyes through the windshield and see it immediately, a blanket of pale gray rising from the ground at the base of the Maripo River Bridge. We’re still almost a mile from the bridge, but there is no mistaking the wall that’s been constructed there; it’s at least ten feet high, rising toward the sky like the façade of a skyscraper.

  Tom continues to drive toward the white wall, no doubt thinking the same thing I am, that he’s not seeing it properly, that it’s some trick of the sky and landscape that’s creating the illusion of a barrier.

  But another hundred yards removes any doubt that the image is real. The wall is there, perhaps even higher than my initial ten-foot estimate, and it spans the entire width of the bridge, extending across the road and buttressing against the reinforced concrete traffic barriers on both sides of the highway.

  Tom stops about a quarter mile short of the bridge and puts the truck in park. “Any suggestions?”

  “Why would they do this?” James asks.

  “It’s like they’ve set up some type of quarantine area,” Stella adds, her voice sounding as genuinely surprised as I would expect from someone not privy to any details.

  “There are no soldiers though. No military or police presence at all. Wouldn’t they have a tank or something, like back at the exit ramp?”

  “What do you think, Stella,” I say, “Where’s the rest of the colonel’s friends.”

  Stella scoffs, and I can feel her frustration behind me. “How long is this type of questioning going to go on?” Her voice is pitched, indignant, but I don’t turn around.

  “I suppose until we get answers,” I reply.

  “Well then I guess it’s going to be for the rest of our time together, because I don’t have any. Not about this anyway. I’ve told you everything I know about what was supposed to happen with the experiment. At least everything that I was told, which was obviously less than Terry.”

  “James is right, though,” Tom says, ignoring the growing spat between Stella and me. “If they was really serious about keeping us from leaving, they’d have done more than throw up this wall. My guess is they ain’t got the manpower to guard every exit road out of here.”

  Warren County is essentially a peninsula, attached to the mainland of the state to the west, and surrounded by water otherwise. And there are only three roads out, two of which are via bridges: the Maripo River Bridge at which we are currently, and the Howard Steeple Bridge at the south end of the county. Both of these bridges span water wide enough that a fit person could never swim them in perfect weather, and certainly not in freezing conditions like these.

  “Then we’ll head west along the river until we reach Hambleton,” James suggests. “From there well take 7 out of town.”

  The other exit is west along the peninsula, the route James just suggested.

  “I’d expect there’d be a roadblock there as well. And I have a feeling that might be the route where they’ve congregated their manpower.”

  “Why do you think that?” Stella asks, and a sense of suspicion activates in me once again.

  “Just a hunch, really, but I’m guessing they figured if they blocked off the bridge with a wall too high to climb and too wide to get around, anyone who still wanted out would be forced to try another route, the most obvious being the one James just talked about. But even if they do block the road out of Hambleton, they can’t block off the whole town, so I expect they’re monitoring the road along the way and we’d meet some company before we ever got that far.”

  “What about south?” Danielle asks.

  Tom shrugs. “That’s the Steeple Bridge. Assume it would be like this ‘un. Choked off at the source. And I don’t think we got the gas to get there anyhow.”

  The gas station where we stopped on the way from my house had no working pumps, but we were lucky to find a couple of full containers in the garage. It’s not a scenario we could necessarily depend on again.

  “So maybe Dominic had the right idea after all,” Danielle says, her voice loud and slightly panicked. “Maybe we should just throw ourselves at the feet of these crab things. Or shoot ourselves in the head and get it over with.”

  “Not saying that, Danielle,” Tom assures, “just being honest about the situation.”

  “Let’s take a look,” I say, nodding toward the passenger door, encouraging Danielle to open it. She frowns and pushes open the door, and I follow her down to the thin layer of snow that now covers the asphalt. It’s still pretty cold outside, but not anything like it was just a few weeks earlier when Naia and I were still holed up in the student union of the college. It seems like three lifetimes ago that I was there, bickering with her about whether or not to leave, about whether to brave the weather and the white beasts that lingered outside.

  The crabs.

  They had come only sporadically back then, showing up every couple of days, two or three at a time. That was until that last day when the sun returned and we made the decision to leave. Then there had been dozens. Attacking us like the cannibalistic monsters they turned out to be. It was that day that I knew the world had truly ended.

  But we had managed to escape, fleeing the snow-covered campus of Warren Community College, sprinting across the quad until we were outside the college grounds and in the parking lot of Balmore Plaza, the shopping center that bordered the school to the east.

  But that was the final stop for Naia. Before she ever had the chance to start again, to begin a new existence with the group in the diner, the crabs that had been waiting at the entrance of the Thai restaurant were on top of her, tearing out her insides with their bare hands.

  It should have been me, of course, who went to investigate the Thai restaurant, the one who opened the door unexpectedly, only to be disembowelled by the proprietors inside who had turned with the snow.

  But, once again, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at the restaurant and it wasn’t me at home with my wife on that Sunday afternoon in May when the snow began to fall. My flaws have saved my life. My improprieties and cowardice and lack of principle are the only reason I’m still alive today.

  And the truth is, despite my concessions to Danielle in my own foyer a couple of hours earlier, I don’t really want to live anymore, and the guilt and loneliness that are promised in my future continue to rage. But I’m going to live anyway. I’m going to give it the effort at least, if only for the sake of the two women I’ve murdered.

  I walk to the base of the bridge and stare up at the absolute unscalability of the wall in front of me. It’s concrete in construction and looks similar to the noise barriers often seen along the highway, the ones backing against housing subdivisions to spare them the constant blare of passing traffic. The sides of the wall extend beyond the width of the road, blocking the entire view of the bridge from this distance and making it impossible to walk around and onto the bridge from the street.

  I walk over to one of the guardrails that meets the base of the wall, and I can see beyond it the drop off to a steep hill that slopes down to a row of houses on the water. It looks to be at least a fifteen-foot rise from the bottom of the hill to the street, which means there will be no walking to the side of the bridge from the bottom and then climbing onto it from an angle.

  The only way out of Warren County in this direction is on the water.

  “That don’t look too promising,” Tom says, now standing beside me, following my gaze down the hill. “If you was thinking what I was.”

  “Yeah, it’s what I was thinking.”

  “What are we going to do down there? We won’t be able to get on the bridge from there.” It’s Stella, and beside her is James. Danielle walks
up seconds later to complete the huddle at the base of the bridge.

  “The way I see it,” I say, “we have two options, and neither of them seems all that great.”

  Everyone stays silent, waiting for me to complete the idea.

  “And I guess the option we decide to go with really depends on what our goals are.”

  “What does that mean?” Stella asks. “Goals?”

  “Well, I mean, is our goal just to survive as long as we can? Hang out in this wasteland and hope someone from outside of this nightmare eventually comes to our rescue? A miracle helicopter or something. Or is our goal to keep going? To try and get as far as we can from this place, even if that means taking some big risks?”

  The group is quiet again, this time pondering the options.

  “What do you think, Dom?” It’s Tom, and his eyes are soft, genuine, earnestly interested in my guidance.

  “Of course I want to survive,” I say without hesitating.

  “Really?” Danielle asks, “Should that be obvious to us?”

  The jab is fair, and I let it stand without responding. “But I also want to find out what happened. And to do that, in my opinion, we need to get out of here. And the closest exit out of here is the other side of the river.”

  Stella closes her eyes and begins to shake her head.

  “What?” I ask. “Why the dismissive head shake?”

  “Getting to the other side of the river doesn’t guarantee you’ll get answers.”

  “No? Isn’t that where Dramatech is or whatever your company is called?”

  “The name of the company is Drumbard and Wallace Technologies, and it’s several miles past the bridge, which, I’ll remind you, is blocked at the moment by the Great Wall of Warren. And even if you were somehow able to get us there, across the bridge and then to D&W, do you really think that you’ll be able to just saunter right up and speak to the principles there? Especially if they are the ones behind all of this?”

  I give Stella’s concerns the proper consideration before replying. “No, probably not. But you might be able to.”