Still bent over the roiling candy, balanced against the broom handle that buckled slightly under his weight, Greg reached down and yanked the bandolier free from the gargling elf. She reached for him, those little fingers coated with powdered sugar, those eyes blinking with rage and pain as the hard candy oozed into her pointed ears where it hardened mercilessly.
The bandolier ripped, one of the candy candles slipping free at the ferocity of Greg’s yanking. Then he tipped himself backward and staggered away toward Mandy. She stood with angry tears wet on her face, peppermint-smelling ash dotting her hair. He dropped the bandolier with its candy canes and reached up to guide the nail gun’s aim away from his body.
“I hate elves!” she screamed. “I want to kill them all!”
“I want to kill them all too,” he soothed, pulling the tool from her grasp gently, carefully keeping it pointed away. Someone had rigged the safety on the barrel, had yanked it back and lodged it open so the sensor didn’t work. Someone…
“Mandy, how did you know how to use this?” He set it on the ground, away from them both, and scrubbed her wild hair back from her damp cheeks.
She fell into his embrace, those arms going tight around him again. “Taylor showed me,” she said into his neck. “He showed me how to kill the elves.”
Greg tightened his grip on her, a strange intermix of fury and relief flowing through him. The question “What the fuck was Taylor thinking teaching his seven year old how to use a damn nail gun?” warring with “Thank God Taylor taught her how to use a nail gun!” in his mind.
She was shivering again, likely with aftershocks from the adrenaline, but she didn’t sob. She held tight to him, stroking his shoulder in a curious manner, as if reassuring herself that Greg was all right.
A sudden scraping across the concrete drew their attention. Greg sucked in a breath as the paint cans slid, the garage door pulling upward, snow tumbling inside. One of the strings snapped, the can crashing to the floor and rolling away.
“Okay, Mandy. We’ve got to take care of the snowmen too. I need you to stay away from the door.”
“The stuff is still leaking.”
He glanced behind him where the tacky wave still dribbled down the staircase, now coating the crunchy, lumpy mess left behind as the lower layers had hardened around the elf’s violent squirming. The broom rattled, but didn’t bend, the wood pressing against the concrete where the candy folded another wave over the bristles. A few more waves of that and the base would be completely drowned.
Ushering Mandy toward the heater, Greg grabbed the nail gun and set it down near her, with a strict order: “Don’t touch it unless Daddy desperately needs help again. And definitely don’t use it against the snowmen.”
“Why not?”
“Because nails won’t hurt the snowmen too much, sweetheart.”
For them he needed fire.
Ignoring the agony in his feet and the temptation of the heater, Greg snatched up the gun Taylor had given him, upended the duffel to fetch an extra canister of butane, and claimed all the aerosol cans he could find—spray paint, brake cleaner, an air freshener down to its last dredges—and carried it all toward the garage door. The door buckled in at one impressively loud hit, the dent from the snowmen’s blows causing the hinges to lock. Instead, the snowmen rocked the door up and down, up and down. The paint cans jerked and settled repeatedly, a few spilling on their sides, metal stripping untwisting, strings stretching thin.
He dumped his armful, cans rolling across the concrete, one of them heading under the SUV.
“Shit!”
“I’ll get it!” called Mandy, already up and crawling under the car.
“It’s fine. Leave it!”
He shook the butane while reaching for the torch, fumbling them both and almost dropping the blowtorch right on its nozzle. He couldn’t hear Mandy’s response, but a quick glance showed her bottom sticking out next to the wheel.
The garage door shuddered again, more snow crunching down under its weight before a sudden gaping space opened up. Night appeared in a dark band above the snow. Branchy fingers angled sharply around the bottom of the door, lifting, heaving. One, two, three snowmen bases appeared, curved and large and dimpled, gashed where snow had been carved from their bodies.
“Oh, fuck,” whispered Greg.
The butane slipped from his grasp as he hurriedly flipped over the blowtorch and grabbed a random aerosol can—pink paint, used on Mandy’s bike after she’d crash-landed in the rocky ditch near the playground. Then he positioned himself in front of the middle snowmen, kneeling so he could launch the flame forward rather than down. He took a breath, pulse pounding in his ears, louder even than the generator roaring behind him, and pressed the triggers on both the blowtorch and the can.
Flames leapt in an arc of orange and pink. The snow turned to water, pouring like a waterfall down into the garage. The garage door stuttered. One twiggy hand caught fire, the wood blackening, crumbling ash sprinkling across the pristine snow. The crater in the snowman’s base widened, sides spilling inward. Then there was a wet thump as the snowman’s torso collapsed within the hole, right in the path of the spray.
“Daddy, I got it!”
“Stay behind me!”
A whine started, the wood screeching as if in agony as the water hissed from its core, steam rising. The middle torso of the snowman cratered like the base had, spilling into itself. Greg leaned into the flame, the fingers of his offhand slipping before he locked them in place to keep the spray from the paint consistently billowing forward.
A quick breeze rushed in from under the garage door, gliding around the melting, smoking snowman and spraying the flame back toward Greg in a hot, singeing breath. Startled, he released both triggers and flinched away from the flame.
Behind him, Mandy shouted, “Daddy, the snowman’s coming in!”
Blinking the heat from his eyes, Greg rubbed them with his wrist, clearing his vision in time to get a nasty shock. For a snowman’s face poked in under the gap, its coal eyes furious, its carrot nose twisted, its icicle teeth unbroken and sharp.
He didn’t even take the time to gasp, merely unleashed the torch and the aerosol can at once, the flame leaping to engulf that carrot nose, to light those coal eyes, to melt those icicle teeth to nubs. The snowman’s head tilted, a roar beginning and then cutting off as it abruptly rolled down the piled snow through a wet waterfall.
Greg leapt up and away, the flame dying as he dodged the snowman’s collapsing head. But the head merely sagged into a messy pile, trailing ice chunks, blackened roasted carrot, those two coal eyes burning watery pools into the pitiful leftovers of that snowy face. He took a deep breath of air heavily tainted with paint and gas and then turned a smile in Mandy’s direction.
She had crouched behind the aerosol cans, each of them now standing, lined up in somewhat order from smallest to largest. Outside, another snowman roared and smacked against the garage door, but when Mandy looked up, it was with a wicked smile.
“You killed the snowman!”
Yes, yes he had killed the snowman. One down. Maybe two more to go. Maybe numerous others behind them still.
He shook the paint can, spared a glance toward the closed door to the house to be sure whatever lurked on the other side hadn’t busted through, then turned his attention back toward the garage door.
“Merry Christmas,” he muttered. Then he lifted his makeshift flamethrower at the next bulbous snowy base and let the water run.
Chapter Eleven
Greg’s lips had been cold. He’d been limping throughout the garage, shop towels flopping in some false approximation of slippers. The fight in him gone weak. His last stare, as Taylor ducked under the garage door, not a concession, but rather a desertion of the battle. A disassociation from this war.
And it wasn’t the war with the elves Taylor referred to, but the one with Taylor, the one indicating Greg would fight for them, continue convincing Taylor he should remain in this fal
se approximation of a happy family that they had built up so perfectly over the year.
Taylor couldn’t well blame him. That happy, perfect future Greg had built in his mind torn to shreds in one miserable night.
He released the garage door, fastening his gaze on where the handle came down so he could find it by feel as the light abruptly faded to black. The metal was frosty rather than icy and his rope was stiffened slightly from the cold as he double-wrapped the center about the handle.
Snow fell into his sneakers and snuck up his jeans. Wind snapped at his leather jacket, cutting through as if the layers of fabric weren’t even there, like he’d worn nothing but pajamas in this winter fucking wonderland. But on the other side of this door was a man and a little girl Taylor was damn sure he didn’t want out here. Nor anything from out here getting in there.
Not if he could help it.
He jogged through the snow, in the direction of his wrecked car. Toward weight he could add to the garage door to keep it closed, keep them protected. The dark and the storm conspired against him such that he couldn’t quite see but for the impression of shapes. The ever-changing rush of wind provided the slimmest of benefits, for when it abruptly altered directions he could almost sense it indicating a larger body or, conversely, an open expanse.
The shrill, tired screaming of the storm sounded more like the angels he remembered. The high-pitched discordant chiming of the distant bells like the harnesses he’d brushed clean. The creaking and scratching of the branches like the snowmen who’d tapped those long, woodsy arms against one another as they passed during their guard patterns outside Santa’s palace.
Outside the frosted panes he’d glance through when hurrying down stone corridors cold under his bare feet.
Like the world rewound, he fell into old habits from his childhood, stepping half-way at first to see if the snow was packed tightly into itself as an angel would be. Only then would he step full and start the process all over again. The walk pattern barreled back into his system as if he’d never escaped, as if he still wandered in forests outside Santa’s village, shivering in the powdered sugar winds under drooping spearmint boughs.
In worry of snowmen—their bark-clad arms swinging, coal lips smearing, crystallized teeth harmonizing as they ground in ferocious insistence—he moved with one hand before him, weaving a figure eight that he might graze a torso or a base within the swirling snow rather than smack right into their clutches.
There might be elves out traversing the snowy ground as well, yet he doubted it. No, the snarky little bastards would be high, high on their reindeer, tucked safely out of sight, out of reach of the storm they kept summoned, drawn forth from their own ice-ridden hearts and clawed fingernails.
Tempered glass crunched under his sneaker, a faint noise within the blizzard, more pressure and cracking against his sole than it was sound that reached his ears. The Camry would be right ahead. Just another few steps. Two snowmen possibly lingering nearby.
He hunkered down, feeling for the fender, the freezing metal making him gasp when he finally caught hold of it. And there he settled, waiting for his eyes to adjust more completely to the darkened shapes that seemed to hover about him. An immensity of presence surrounded him: huffing grumbles that sounded like coals fumbling, the squeaking of heavy pressure within the snow, the tapping of sticks beating against one another, like a thumb rubbing across its knotty knuckles.
Distant roars—like the mourning howls that would sail across the pealing, spearmint-flavored evergreen forests from the North Pole—blended with the storm. Those were sounds he heard in his nightmares, echoes from a time when they would interrupt his dreams in the sugared cages of the dormitories.
With painstaking slowness, caused from an eclectic mix of fear and caution and cold, Taylor wove one half of the rope through the back of the fender. Then, dragging the small paint can behind him, he made his way to the passenger side, settling into the curved divot where the snowwoman had sat with her rounded base. There he felt with one hand along the dents and mountains that now made up his car.
The wheel well had been crushed, the metal piercing into the rubber of the tire. Ragged edges drew patterns under his fingers as he worked his way lower, finding the gaps in the rusted hubcap. Abandoning the paint can for just a few moments, he quickly wove the two ends of the rope back and forth through the hubcap and then crawled onward through the tortuous gusts.
Dampness seeped in through his knees and shins, chilling his legs. His breath, he kept slow and steady by will alone as he made his way to the rear wheel, then around the bumper, fighting the whipping wind in order to weave the rope throughout.
He crept to the rear driver’s side wheel and there he paused, staring up into the space where the giant snowman had terrorized them. He waited, straining to see those arms, to hear those teeth above his head, to sense the giant presence bearing down on him, his chest and stomach twinging in remembrance of how hard he’d been thrown across the yard.
But nothing broke through the swirling snow. Nothing but the high chiming of the reindeer bells and the distant roaring of snowmen wandering through the blizzard.
Then the ends of the rope suddenly went taut. Taylor squeezed them, winding them about his wrists as they yanked toward the bumper. The Camry rocked, as if shaking in confusion at having been battered so dramatically, like its metal parts shivered in anticipation of the snowman returning and beginning the beating anew.
The ropes relaxed again, as suddenly as they’d tensed; the garage door having been tested and released. Taylor quickly wove the ends back and forth through the wheel with fingers too stiff to realize just how much pain they should be feeling. He tied knots into knots and then tied them off together, managing to wedge the now-connected tail ends of the rope against the tire where it would hopefully catch. He released it and rocked back as the rope went taut once more, this time the Camry sliding in the snow a few inches with a shush of tires across packed snow.
That done, Taylor abandoned the straining car, leaving with it a hope that it would stall the snowmen from getting to Greg and Mandy. Give him enough time to take care of the rest.
He angled himself toward the porch where he’d lost the flashlight, the paint can’s thin handle eating into his iced fingers. The snow had grown deeper, now risen up past his knees in these drifts. He waded through it, pants damp and dragging, the whistling of the wind scouring past his ears in a high-pitched shriek, echoes of all the elves he’d murdered, their devilish cries haunting him.
Where the snow grew denser, Taylor skirted around, his childhood instincts on high alert. The drifts of the yard gave way to a curvaceous valley where the concrete walkway toward the porch was lined with hedge bushes. He hit a solar light with the toe of his sneaker and the branches of the bushes with his body. That was enough to turn him toward the porch itself.
The snow on the wooden steps remained churned from their breakneck escape, the height of the layers light in comparison to the swells in the yard. The flashlight, still caught between two balusters under the railing, glowed faintly within the snow, the globe of dimming light beginning to disappear.
Taylor hefted it and turned the light toward the doorway into the house. The shattered ice barrier Greg had busted through had already regrown, a bluish reflection shining into Taylor’s eyes, tendrils of ice crystallized in patterns that anyone else would have called beautiful or majestic.
They weren’t either of those things though. They were deadly. Cold. Those dancing patterns indicating nothing but quick, untimely deaths.
He didn’t have time, nor anything resembling a bat, to break the thickening ice down again. Which meant if he was going to attract the elves from their position on high, he needed to use something he already had on him.
With a silent curse, he peeled off his jacket reluctantly, the wind immediately attempting to nab it from his grip. Then, in only his T-shirt and jeans, he rushed back down the porch steps, carefully keeping the flashlight’s
beam low to the ground. There he bent and stuffed the whipping jacket with snow as quickly as he could, packing it tight, giving the leather a hint of shape and form.
He peeled open the paint can. Lost the screwdriver the moment he put it down as it sank deep into the snow. The blizzard stole the thick smell of the paint. Taylor’s gasps came tighter and tighter as the cold permeated into the marrow of his bones, his movements turning jerky.
As he spilled the paint across the snow in a smeared pattern he began to count the minutes through chattering teeth. How many until hypothermia set in? How long before he lost this battle to those damn elves without them ever facing him down, the little bastards!
He’d known this. Just a few minutes; just a precious few before the cold grew too pervasive, before it cooled the blood too far, before it settled deep, deep inside—
Taylor staggered away and tossed the paint can into the far bushes. Then he flipped the flashlight up toward the storm, waving the beam around at that steep angle, then he lowered it, jerking the beam up and down against the snow as if he’d been running. Then he jammed it into the snow near his fake bloody corpse where it did its best attempt to continue glowing—a frail nightlight in the vast expanse of the fraught arctic touring the southern world.
Hopefully, they’d see it. All he needed was one—just one to circle down to double-check what they thought they saw. Just one.
He would have to be careful. The crack of his gun would spook the reindeer. But he’d also have to be quick; it wouldn’t take long before the elves discovered the trick with the paint. Quick and quiet, only one of which he felt capable of with the snowstorm screaming at him and his own breath hissing past his teeth.
He could do this. Hold down the shuddering. Force his fingers to work properly—he’d dropped the keys in the car, true, couldn’t even get them into the damn ignition. But he had one shot at this. One shot and if he failed…
Rise of the Snowmen Page 11
