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

by Coleman, Christopher

  “I just told you everything I know. Which is apparently way less than you.”

  Abramowitz—Bram—pauses and then looks at his cohort, giving each member a full second or two, measuring them. “What Mr. Jones said is true. We are soldiers. We were brought in just before the event happened. None of us was ever told what was coming exactly or even what our mission was. Only that we were to guard the perimeter of a cordon and make occasional excursions into the interior. The day before the blast we were inside the cordoned off area, and each of us got separated from our troop at some point.” He pauses. “We know now we were abandoned intentionally.”

  I note the nods from the other three soldiers.

  “We met up with each other at one point or another and here we are. Stuck on the inside just like you.” Abramowitz pauses and says, “Now that’s my story. And I have a feeling what we heard from you was the abridged version of yours. I want to know more about your friends. Who they are exactly and where they came from. I get the suspicion there are a few gaps you left out in that first telling.”

  Abramowitz story rings true, but I’m still reluctant to lay all of my cards on the table. “My friends are people I met at a diner a couple of weeks ago. I don’t exactly know their deepest desires.”

  “No? Well I guess we’ll see then.” Bram stands and nods to the other two soldiers. “Smalley, Stanton, let’s go.” The two soldiers rise immediately and then aim their rifles back on me, motioning with their barrels for me to get up and follow Bram out the door.

  “Okay, listen, maybe I do know a little bit more. But you have to promise me that if I tell you what I know, that you’ll help me find my friends.”

  “Maybe we’ll just hold your head over the sink and waterboard you until you tell us. There’s always that option too.” It’s the outside male, whose name I now know is Stanton.

  “Fuck off, Stanton,” Jones says, apparently outranking the large soldier. “That’s a deal, Dominic.” Jones doesn’t look at Abramowitz as he walks to the front of the restaurant.

  Abramowitz follows Jones with his eyes and then begins walking behind him. “Okay, Dominic, I’ll honor the deal. But first we’re going to take a little ride.

  Chapter 5

  The RV is, as Smalley referenced earlier, quite large, about the size of a small charter bus. But there is nothing military about it at all. Instead of the rugged camo look of an army truck, the vehicle looks like something picked off the lot of an interstate Camping World, the surprise gift of some rich dad who has impulsively decided to take his family on a cross-country summer road trip.

  The RV can’t be more than a year or two old, as the body of it still has that new, shiny factory luster; and the dark, swooshy, boomerang symbols that pop against the white sides and back of it give it the look of speed and transcendence.

  Inside, the layout of the camper is nicer than most of the apartments I lived in for the first thirty years of my life. Leather couches and granite countertops line the interior, and there are at least two flat screen televisions anchored at the ceiling, along with various video game consoles below.

  “You guys heading out to the Grand Canyon once the weather clears?” I ask from my seat at the elbow of two couches; Smalley and Stanton are flanking me on either side.

  Abramowitz is standing at the threshold dividing the driver—who is Jones at the moment—from the living space where I sit currently. “You think your friends would appreciate the smart ass replies right now?” he asks. “Stranded out on that boat as they are?”

  “Probably not,” I concede. And then, “Well, maybe one of them would. So what do you want to know, Bram?”

  Abramowitz scoffs at the familiar nickname and then retaliates with, “Everything you’ve got, Dom.”

  I stare the soldier down for a moment, trying to maintain some air of confidence, hoping to impart the seriousness of my character and the desperation of my plight despite my banter. “Everything I told you was true, but there is more. I know about an experiment.” I pause, “Let me correct that: I was told about an experiment. One that was conducted by some research group. Government contractors, I think.”

  I check the room for any looks of recognition on the soldiers’ faces, but I see none.

  “The way I understood it—they way they told us—was that it was supposed to be some kind of psychological experiment, to see how people would react in the event of some global catastrophe. In this case, some nuclear Armageddon or something. They said didn’t really know the details.”

  “They?”

  “They were two of the people inside the diner, the diner my friend and I fled to after the college.”

  “Your friend. Right.”

  I ignore the jab. “These people, they were part of the team—or maybe they were the team, I can’t really remember—who were tasked with studying the effects of the people in the town once the blast went off. That’s what they told us anyway, but, as you might have guessed, it didn’t happen quite that way.”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” Smalley comments.

  I nod. “It is, but still, they knew about a blast. They just thought it was going to be contained to our little college town. There was going to be a cordon, I guess, and then the army or CIA or whoever these people worked for were going to do the study. Gather the data or whatever. But the blast came a day early, and once that happened, they knew something was wrong.”

  “And you believed them?” Abramowitz asks. “You still believe all of what they told you? You think it was a mistake what happened here? What happened to the people who were out in the snow when it all went down?”

  “I didn’t say it was a mistake.”

  “But you believe they didn’t know?”

  I drop my eyes from Abramowitz and look out the window at the passing landscape. Jones seems to be navigating the road with little problem, which makes sense, since the snow is melting and the interstates should be mostly clear of traffic. Nobody would have stopped at this point in the highway when the snows came, not in the middle of nowhere. The few cars that we do pass are either smashed against each other or have drifted off to the side of the freeway. I assume this latter category is made up of drivers who left from some place close to the local exits shortly after the storm started and then changed into ghosts somewhere along the way.

  “You got something to say there, Dom?”

  I return my gaze to the soldier. “After we left the diner, on the way back to my house, one of the members of this research team—the man—had me pull off on one of the exits along the interstate. He said he had an emergency—a bathroom thing—but it wasn’t...”

  Abramowitz doesn’t speak, allowing me to gather my thoughts.

  “Against my better judgement, I pulled off, and then we got stuck in a snow bank just at the base of the exit. And then this guy, the research doctor, he starts to walk up to the gas station.”

  “Not a bathroom break though,” Abramowitz says, shaking his head.

  “Not quite. I followed him part of the way up the ramp, and then, at the top of the hill, this huge tank appears out of nowhere.”

  Instinctively, Abramowitz looks toward the two soldiers beside me, and I catch Jones’ glimpse toward the back in the rearview mirror.

  “Did I say something interesting, soldier?” I ask Abramowitz.

  “What else?”

  “It was an experiment the whole time, but not in the way we were told. It had nothing to do with our reaction to a blast.”

  “So what then?”

  “I need to hear more about your story before I go on about what I know,” I demand. “That’s my deal.”

  Abramowitz gives a sideways glance toward the front, but his back is almost completely to Jones and the look never reaches the driver.

  “Did you guys think this was some kind of psych ops thing? Like my friends were told. You must have had some questions about your mission, right? I mean, a whole county and more was being blocked off from the world and you gu
ys never questioned why you were there?”

  “We don’t get paid to ask questions,” Stanton says, as if reading a line from a bad action movie.

  “Oh, please. Give me a break. Did you ever talk to colonel directly?”

  “Who?” Stanton asks, and I see a similar look of confusion on Abramowitz’s face. But Smalley looks away instantly at the mention of the colonel, as if she’s been slapped in the face.

  “No?” I ask, ignoring Smalley’s reaction. “Not friends with the colonel then?”

  No one answers, and I can see the conversation is deteriorating. I look away, back out the side window of the RV and ask “So how far can you go?”

  Abramowitz narrows his stare in confusion and shakes his head. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I mean on the open road. How far can you go before you come to a blockade like the one on the Maripo River Bridge?”

  “They didn’t bother with blockades on this side of the river. At least not that I’ve seen. It’s one thing to block off a couple of bridges in Warren County, but there’s too much road out of this county. So they did something worse to keep us in.”

  “Worse than a blockade? What does that mean?”

  Abramowitz stands still for a moment and then raises his head and stares at the ceiling. He then turns his back and walks slowly to the front of the RV and sits in the passenger seat next to Jones. He slumps low and stares out the side window.

  I stare at him for a moment, waiting, and then I look back and forth to the soldiers beside me. “What just happened?”

  The woman—Smalley—sighs and then stands up, seeming to be gathering her thoughts before taking one long stride to a captain’s chair opposite of the couch on which Stanton and I continue to sit. She puts her hands over her face and then slides them up her forehead, straining her fingers through her hair. She sighs again and then takes a peek back to the front before starting the tale. “There was a larger group of us when this first started. Ten of us to be exact. Soldiers who were abandoned and used as guinea pigs in this new snowy world.”

  “Ten? Wow. What happened to the rest?”

  “Ten is too many people for one car. There’s no sedan or SUV that can carry ten people—at least not comfortably. So we would travel in two separate cars. Always together, but separate, kind of caravan style.”

  “Okay.”

  Smalley frowns. “Well, of course, like I assume everyone did in the beginning, we started looking for the perimeter of this thing. Where did this nightmare finally end and the old world begin, right?”

  I nod. It was the million-dollar question.

  “It was the second day after the explosion, do you remember that day, the day the first round of snow stopped falling?”

  I did remember. Of course. The day after. It’s a day I would remember for the rest of my life. All that snow that fell that first day and night finally stopped. There must have been three feet on the ground. The group at the diner had quickly come to the conclusion that it was only that first day, that first snowfall just after the blast, that caused the changes. The people who went out in the snow that day were screwed, but the snows that followed—the ones that began again on the third day, were benign. At least so far.

  I didn’t know any of this when I was at the college, of course; Naia and I didn’t see the crabs for several days after the blast. But Tom and Stella and Danielle saw them right away, and they figured out quickly how it worked. And Terry must have known the whole time.

  “We ventured out to see what had happened,” Smalley continues. “We were told about an experiment too—”

  “Hey!” Abramowitz calls from the front, but his body language doesn’t demonstrate the same force. He sits slumped, his fist screwed into his cheek as he continues to stare out the passenger window.

  “Screw it, Bram,” Smalley says calmly. “You’re still holding on to some kind of honor for the people who left you? Or do you think if the world ever gets back to normal you’re going to be hit with violating your clearance obligations?

  Abramowitz throws up a dismissive hand, defeated.

  Smalley continues. “So yeah, we knew something was coming, and like your friends, we got a different version of what was supposed to happen. And then it all went to hell. At the time, we thought we’d genuinely gotten lost inside, that it was all an accident and a search was happening. We thought we’d be found within a day or two, so the group that had formed in the meantime went to investigate. To try to find out what went wrong and how we could help.”

  I have so many questions already that it’s burning a hole in my chest. What was their version of what was supposed to happen? the most pressing of all. But I keep the questions to myself for the moment, not wanting to spook the storyteller.

  “So we’re driving the interstate, our caravan cruising, hauling ass, and eventually we come to a point, oh, I don’t know, sixty miles or so west of where we are now, out where it’s mostly country, and we start to see that the landscape is really beginning to change. Like really change. The snow suddenly was gone. There was none on the roads or trees. And we could see a whole mountain of foliage in the distance. Mountains that looked so green and alive against a blue sky. It was amazing the change, how stark and sudden it happened.”

  “Oh my god,” I mutter. “I can barely remember what leaves look like.”

  Smalley nods. “I know. There were four of us at the time: Jones, Bram and I, and another guy Woodson. We hadn’t met up with Stanton here yet. Anyway, we were in the trailing car, some piece of crap Toyota sedan, and the rest of the group was in the lead in an SUV. It could have easily been the other way around. There was no rhyme or reason to who was in the front when we went out, it was just kind of who left first, you know?”

  I nod again, beginning to get the idea of how this story was going to end.

  “The shell came from our right. We never even saw the tank or anything, just heard the pop of the main gun.” Smalley swallows and closes her eyes for a moment and then opens them in a flash and continues. “And then we saw that fucking Durango just disintegrate. I mean, it was one of those moments, you know? Like you see in movies? Everything is going perfectly; some guy is having the perfect day, got the promotion at work or the girl’s phone number or whatever, and then the dreaded news that’s going to change everything comes from nowhere and lands like an anchor. Just yanks the freaking rug out from under him. And then his whole life is suddenly shit. That was us. Smiling and laughing, feeling good about our prospects ahead, and then boom.” Smalley pauses again, this time seemingly for effect, before saying, “And then the machine guns started on us. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!”

  “Holy crap,” I whisper.

  “Bram got us out. Me and Jonesy anyway. Woodson took a round in the neck. Nearly blew his head completely from his shoulders.”

  “Damn.”

  “Ever since then, we travel together. One car. And we got a ride big enough in case we pick up others along the way.”

  “So then you’re not working with the colonel?” It’s all I can think to say; I’m still mesmerized by the revelation of the story.

  “What colonel?” Stanton asks.

  I see ahead of me Abramowitz rise again and he’s now walking back towards me with purpose. His face is stern, focused. “I think you must be ready to continue with your story, huh?” he asks rhetorically. “Now that you know all about our little family tragedy, I think it’s time for your tit to our tat?”

  I nod. “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry about your friends.”

  Abramowitz nods once to acknowledge my condolences. “So what about this plan you heard? The colonel’s plan you heard on the road?”

  “It was always about the crabs,” I start, “the ghosts. Whatever. I don’t know what you guys were told about the experiment, but according to the conversation I heard with the colonel, this whole thing was intentional. They knew the people would change. They knew it all along. And they wanted to see how they would behave
afterwards. After the blast. They wanted to see if they would become violent, aggressive. But make no mistake: they knew these changes would happen. They just didn’t know how they would behave over time, and this experiment, this destruction, was all a test to find out.”

  “How could you know about all this?” Smalley asks. “How could you know all of this unless you were a part of it?”

  “I wasn’t a part of it. For Christ’s sake. I told you about the research doctor on the exit ramp. The one from the diner who wanted me to stop.” I pause a minute and look back and forth between Abramowitz and Smalley.

  “It’s still your turn, professor,” Abramowitz replies. “How do you know what you know?”

  I frown. “I overheard this guy—Terry, the doctor—I heard his report to the colonel. At least I think he was a colonel, if my reading of his insignia was correct.”

  “And the colonel, he said this? He said the plan was about turning people into these things?”

  “The research doctor said it. He said he had collected the data and that the theories were correct, that they became violent. That might not be the exact verbatim, but it’s close enough.”

  “So what happened to him? This Terry person?”

  I frown and think back to a couple of days ago and the violent end that Terry met. He wasn’t my favorite member of the group, but his death still lingers in my mind, as does Naia’s and Alvaro’s. “He made contact too early, by several weeks apparently, and the colonel killed him for it. It sounded like an excuse to me; it sounded like Terry’s death was always the plan.”

  Abramowitz nods slowly, his face showing signs of recognition, that this is the type of thing black ops folks would do.

  “And that was when we had our encounter with the tank.”

  Abramowitz just stands in place for a moment, staring at me hard, as if processing all of the information I’ve just unloaded. “You were lucky to make it out, I guess.”