It’d be nose first. Locked, because Taylor had his duffel in the backseat.
Locked.
Shit, he’d need Taylor to catch-up to even think about getting into it. He hesitated, turned to check, see if Taylor was coming.
A sudden change in the direction of the snow and wind gave him the split second warning he needed to lift the bat, to pull his left side with Mandy back so she wouldn’t be in the way. Then a branch came crashing down, the wood dark and damply stained, its circumference as thick around as Greg’s wrist, the twigs on the end of that arm knotted and curling.
The snowman’s arm struck the bat glancingly, scraping down the aluminum before its fingers tightened around the middle only a short distance from where Greg gripped the bat. Then the snowman’s face lowered into view, appearing as if formed right out of the swirling storm. Suddenly there, right above their heads, the intermixing and constantly shifting snow giving the impression the creature’s body was not stable, about to crumble apart at any moment, blow away.
Coal black eyes. Long, slender nose. Mouth that opened into a gaping, frost-ridden maw with icicles in sharpened points breaking the inside’s smooth curves in a horrible promise of a winter-welcoming death.
Mandy screamed, this time a war cry echoing in Greg’s ear, and her jump rope shot out again, clearing the comforter and smacking into the snowman’s carrot nose. The nose splayed up, all but piercing one of the snowman’s beady coal eyes. The creature recoiled briefly, yet jerked the bat in its locked branchy hand.
Greg staggered forward at the sudden pull, Mandy pitching dangerously in his arms. He yanked back, the wood and metal scraping against each other, but neither breaking.
The snowman regained itself, the tip of a woody finger from its other hand pushing the carrot nose away from its eye. It slowly lowered its gaze, that gaping hole of a mouth with its sharpened, pointed teeth, widening in a false approximation of a smile.
That second arm whipped down, fingers stretched wide. It tugged at the bat with its other hand, yanking Greg toward it, putting him into a precarious position, Mandy tottering in his arm.
Then Taylor was there, slipping between Greg and the snowman. He flung both hands out, gripping the snowman’s branchy wrists, and in a flexible feat Greg would have been hard-pressed to copy, Taylor lifted himself up out of the snow and kicked the snowman’s face. Icicles cracked. The carrot nose went flying off into the dark and swirling storm. One coal eye sank deep into the snowman’s sunken, bulbous head.
As Taylor landed, Greg’s grip on the bat gave out as the pressure switched abruptly toward the ground. With his weight crashing against the snowman’s left arm, Taylor grunted just before a loud crraaack indicated the branch had snapped in half, dropping both it and the bat into the snow.
“That’s right. You leave them be,” said Taylor in a growling voice as he popped back up, now wielding the snowman’s own half of an arm against itself. “You’re a baby compared to what I’ve murdered of your fellows. You’re nothing!”
Taylor slammed the half-arm right across the snowman’s head, this time casting coal through the air in wide arcs through the darkness. He thrashed the snowman, bits of wood and bark and ice chunks sent flying. The cold wind stealing away his heated, angry curses.
Greg stood there, the cold seeping through his pores, his clothing clinging. The chill was a living thing that wormed its way inside, biting at him, clawing at him so that he shivered so violently his teeth began to chatter and his muscles tick, tick, tick like a cooling engine. Like a clock.
Like a countdown.
“Taylor,” he whispered, the unnatural wind laying claim to the syllables, to the just-barely there sounds slipping from his lips. Then louder, hugging the blanket-swaddled Mandy with two arms now, her toes no longer a discomfort as they clutched skin that had gone numb. “Taylor! The keys, Taylor!”
Taylor yelled and brought the now half-shattered arm—its fingers mere splits and splinters—crashing against the snowman’s head. He left it there. Dismissively shoved away the snowman’s haphazardly waving other arm as he backed up.
“Claw out your own brain with that!” Then he spun and gestured wildly, as if he’d been the one waiting for Greg. “What are you waiting for? Get to the car!” Then he bent and scooped up the bat, and did a covering check at their back.
They fumbled together, Greg smacking directly into the Camry, making Mandy release a small “oof, Daddy” as she began to slide out of his grip. Then Taylor wrestled the door open, the frost clinging the rubber stripping cracking and peeling. They bundled a burrito Mandy into the backseat, one of her arms through Greg’s coat, her legs tangled in a million folds of wet blanket.
“In the car,” urged Taylor, “In the car.”
He repeated himself a few more times, his voice growing deeper and more urgent as Greg crawled over the driver seat and into the passenger. Taylor tossed the bat across Greg’s lap and shoved himself in behind. The door slammed shut, locking them into a welcoming pocket of stillness, the wind rocking the car, but unable to do more than hiss at them outside the windows.
The keys rattled, shuddering in a visceral echo of the cold stinging through Greg’s socks, the pain radiating across his soles and up his ankles. He righted himself, checked on Mandy, who was thrashing around, caught in a fight against layers of blanket and peacoat, the latter of which he stole.
“Get the car started,” said Taylor. “Get the fucking car started.”
Greg turned to answer, to tell Taylor that he didn’t have the damn keys, that he wasn’t in the damn driver’s seat, that he couldn’t start the damn car, and that he fucking needed to stop cussing because Mandy was in the back seat and could hear.
He turned to say all that, but it all stalled at his lips when he saw what had spooked Taylor.
“Get the car started,” muttered Taylor again. He wasn’t talking to Greg though; he was flipping through the keys, searching for the ignition, for the one with the Toyota symbol, encouraging himself to find it.
Beyond Taylor, the storm surged and then waned, wrapping about the large figure emerging from the dark. Arms as large around as Greg’s legs. Tree-trunks, easily. Fingers fat and knobby, lacking in grace, yet undoubtedly making it up with strength.
In the backseat, Mandy rolled about, flailing, her frustrated grunts interspersed with “I can’t sees! I can’t sees!”
“Oh, that’s okay, sweetheart,” murmured Greg under his breath. “You don’t want to see.”
Or rather, he didn’t want her to see. Didn’t want her to see the snowman as tall as their house nudging through the snow, its coal-black eyes made up of many, many chunks that had sunk deep into its face, its branchy hands knotted and reaching, its carrot nose a misshapen growth hanging crooked over a maw lined with sharpened black icicles as long as her arm.
A jangle of keys dropping against the floorboard jerked Greg from his staring.
“Taylor!”
“I’m trying!”
But Greg could see the stiffened movements of Taylor’s fingers, how they jerked and shook as he snatched the keys, how they brokered no grace from the dredges of Taylor’s soul. Greg reached over and clasped his own hand over Taylor’s. Cold on cold, they drove the key into the ignition.
“There’s a snowwoman, Daddy! A snowwoman! A snowwoman!” And Mandy screamed and threw herself across the bench to get away from another leaning creation.
Shadows fell across the car. These ones coming from the opposite direction of the giant Greg had seen. The three of them were cast into an inky blackness, swept into the heart of the howling of the storm, the pinpricks of snow flashing outside when the scant light from neighbors’ Christmas lights strained through. That face Greg had stared into earlier when he’d stood on the porch—its single remaining eye a crumbling mass of specks and bits running ragged down its cheek—loomed in the windshield.
There came a tapping of knotted wood on glass—on the passenger door, at the rear window, then by
Taylor’s head. There came an eerie scratching across the metal of the roof. There came ringing of coal-blackened icicle teeth gnashing together and the soft thump of whitened, shaped snow coming to rest by the wheel-wells.
Together, they twisted the key and held it.
The engine turned over. Once.
It puttered. Then stuttered.
Then died.
Chapter Nine
The engine didn’t even attempt to roll over again. It ticked every time Taylor twisted the ignition. Ticked, like a slap in the face. Like mocking, high-pitched elf laughter. Like the last seconds of a clock winding down.
Tick-tock.
Time’s up.
We’ve come for you, Taylor. And that little family you tried to call your own too.
“Mands!” he shouted, shoving Greg and his stricken expression away. “I need the bag, Mands! We’ve got to burn these snow monsters to water.”
He twisted all the way around in the driver’s seat to find Mandy staring out the window in pointed terror.
“Mands!” With a snap of his fingers and tug on the comforter that still twined around her body, one little foot with its too-big sock poking free from its folds, he managed to distract her enough to get her attention. “The blowtorch. Remember when I showed you?”
Greg turned in a jerky, marionette-manner. “You what?”
But Taylor didn’t get a chance to pretend he hadn’t shown Mandy how to work a blowtorch because the car lurched, throwing them all sideways. Mandy was flung into the door behind Greg as Taylor’s side lifted into the air. Because he’d already been twisted around in his seat, Taylor slid across the center console and smacked his face against Greg’s shoulder before falling.
“Oh my God,” choked out Greg as Taylor pushed himself off the man’s lap. “What the hell are they doing?”
Taylor grabbed at the steering wheel to keep himself from sliding all the way into the passenger side as the car tilted higher and higher, the angle steepening. Outside the windshield, dark branches, whorls and knots on their lengths, hefted the car from its undercarriage until they were near perpendicular to the ground.
The snowman itself, the one Taylor had sensed standing out there and obviously shaped by elves with skill dancing off their fingers, stood easily as tall as Greg’s house. Easily as wide as the length of Taylor’s car. Easily strong enough to break any of them in half with those thick fingers.
Could tear through their necks with those icicle teeth, blades slicing through muscle and tendons, ripping Greg apart, Mandy’s tiny body crumpling—
He bent into the back of the car, wedging himself between the seats. The duffel had lumped and clattered to a stuck position between the two foot wells, the zipper straining, the sopping wet ends of the comforter holding down half the bag.
“Mands, can you tug the blanket up?”
He lifted the side of the comforter, attempting to shove it toward Mandy, but she wiggled and flailed and then threw her arms about his neck, her feet braced against the side window that now pointed more down than sideways, its entire view a pressed close-up of the smaller, wounded snowman’s—snowwoman’s—bottom half.
“You have to kill them!” she screamed. “You have to kill them! I hate them!”
“Greg, a little help!”
“Mandy, sweetie, come here.”
Greg’s forearm pressed against Taylor’s back, and then Mandy was crawling over his head, knees and coat and thick blanket all a chaotic mess, slapping, ruffling, folding. The chaos made more so with the jerking, rough handling of the snowmen. The car rocked harshly, Taylor’s ribs digging painfully into the console. Something slammed against the roof of the car. Something else against the hood. Clawed branches at the rear window.
“It’s okay sweetheart. It’s going to be okay.”
Platitudes. Like Christmas holiday cheer. Parental lies.
Taylor ground his teeth, ignored the wet blanket dripping against his cheek and angled his hand so he could tug the zipper open. He heard two magazines fall out, but he let them tumble away, one of them clattering against the door. Inside the duffel, the rope had gotten tangled with the blowtorch. The extra butane weighed the whole bag down, the constant shifts in gravity as the snowman rocked them up and down jerkily making the bag tug in Taylor’s grasp.
He grabbed the blowtorch and began to untangle the rope wrapped about its nozzle, his fingers still stiff and cold and disobedient.
“I need my jump rope. I need my jump rope. Daddy, where’s my jump rope?”
“Shh, shh, it’s okay.” Though Greg’s voice told an entirely different story.
The blanket shifted and jerked over Taylor’s head, a loop of it pulled off the backseat and into his arms before being shoved directly into his face.
“Greg, stop!” But Taylor’s shout was muffled behind the comforter, then was turned into a grunt as the car lurched.
Mandy rolled against Taylor’s back as the passenger side of the car lifted free of the snow. They hovered in the air, Taylor’s stomach dropping and weaving. The car groaned, screeching as if the snowmen attempted to rip it in two. The world grew dizzy, a mess of Mandy’s cries and Greg’s soft, terrified reassurances. A chaos of tapping, metallic scraping, creaking of branches and the brushing of fir needles reigned. The blanket swallowed him into a limited space, turning the air hot and unbreathable, turning his hearing into a roar.
Then the nozzle came free of the rope.
Taylor ducked backwards under the blanket, holding the blowtorch aloft so it wouldn’t get trapped in the folds. He settled in his seat, ignoring the pounding in his head or the way the blanket bunched under his arm.
Outside, the snowmen had begun to move in tandem. The car swayed, back and forth, back and forth, small motions growing, growing.
“They’re going to toss us,” said Greg. He had Mandy pressed into his chest, her face turned inward, her hair a wild, tangled mess around his fingers.
Past Greg’s head, Mandy’s snowwoman grinned with ferocity. The streaked coal where her eye had been looked like the eyelashes Mandy would color on her pictures.
Heh. Snowwoman.
As Taylor twisted the gas open on the blowtorch, that snowwoman breathed a hissing, howling roar. The cloud mushroomed outward, then a hard frost thickened in fat, jumpy lines across the passenger window, obscuring the snowwoman’s face but for the general sense of her shape and size.
And the occasional glint of her sharpened teeth.
“No, they’re not going to toss us. They’re going to burn,” said Taylor. “I’m rolling down my window.”
“You’re what?”
The car swung backwards, the both of them swaying, Taylor almost smacking against the steering wheel.
“My window. I need you to hold on. Get my duffel if you can. Get ready to get out of here.”
“Taylor, that thing is as big as an elephant!”
“An elephant...”
Taylor barked out a laugh, the coarse sound erupting from his belly in a bevy of emotion. An elephant would have been easier to handle. Much easier. He jerked at the window handle, hearing the frost crack and crinkle resistingly and then finally give way with an agonized rip.
The snowman’s face began to slot into view. A sliver. A band.
“We should do this side, this one,” insisted Greg. “The one you’ve already hurt. I’m not taking Mandy out past that thing!”
“Oh, you will,” muttered Taylor.
The wind swept in, howling, slipping between the snowman and the car and scouring Taylor’s hair. The icicle teeth ground against one another in a cacophony of disharmony. Tinging. Singing. High-pitched agony to his cold ears.
Those coal eyes turned revolutions against that snowy face. And then the car tipped further up, the snowman’s mouth opening wide, wider over the partially-opened window.
With an angry shout, Taylor lifted the blowtorch and pulled tight the trigger to spark and spray. The flame erupted blue and tiny. Too tiny.
A gust of arctic wind cut through the car, tiny spikes of snow and ice flinging into Taylor’s face and cutting off his ability to breathe properly. He ducked under the open half of the window and glancingly saw Greg holding a stretch of the comforter up to protect him and Mandy, the blanket gone white, sparkling with an almost iridescent shimmer in the dim light.
Taylor released the trigger on the blowtorch, flipped it around, and then, when the snowman paused, he smashed the base of it out the open top half of the window in a blind thrust. There came a crunch and a satisfying tinkling of icicles breaking. Then he was flipping the torch back around and restarting the flame. Bracing himself against the floorboards, he stretched out the window with both arms, pushing the flame as close as he could get, as close as he dared.
“Need a fucking aerosol can!” he yelled. “Bastard, piece of shit! Fucking burn you then!”
The snow above the snowman’s coal-lips poured a stream of water into its mouth that splashed outward, icy drops splattering across Taylor’s wrists and jacket. Steam intermixed with the blowing snow, flashes of terrible burning swept away instantly.
Those eyes rove back toward him, the coals revolving, jumbling like rocks in a tumbler. For just a second, the snowman lifted its head out of reach of the blowtorch, the hissing blue flame casting an ugly shadow up from the bottom of that giant face. A misshapen stretch of black crossed between its eyes from its carrot nose, giving the impression of furious eyebrows slanted down harshly in exaggeration.
“Oh, fu—”
Taylor jerked his hands back inside the window as the snowman lurched forward and gnashed its partially-melted mouth, jagged teeth chomping, scratching against the window. Mandy shrieked as the car weaved awfully, dropping their bellies out. The blowtorch cut a burning swatch through the steering wheel, melting the plastic, as ice shards rained down across Taylor’s exposed neck.
Rise of the Snowmen Page 8
