The Snow
A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel
Flint Maxwell
Copyright © 2020 by Flint Maxwell
Cover Design © 2020 by Carmen DeVeau
Edited by Sonya Bateman
Special thanks to Sabrina Roote
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work.
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This inhuman place makes human monsters.
― Stephen King, The Shining
1
Introductions
On a scorching hot July afternoon, a lone snowflake fell from the summer sky.
It danced toward my car, landed on the windshield, and melted a second or two later, leaving a tiny stream of water to zigzag down the glass. I was looking right at it, but its strangeness didn’t register until much later, after things went bad.
Yes, this is when it began, the bad things, but before I get into that, I think I should get the introductions out of the way. My name is Grady Hill, I’m almost thirty, and I live—well, lived—in Northeast Ohio. Once upon a time, I worked as a firefighter. I don’t anymore. Yep, that’s me.
If you don’t know already, the world has ended, and it all started with that lone snowflake. Even if I had been paying attention when it fell, what would I have thought of it? I don’t know; it’s hard to say. Northeast Ohio is home to all sorts of odd weather. Besides, one snowflake? But I can tell you I wouldn’t have believed my eyes, that I’d make all sorts of excuses about what it actually was. Maybe a drop of rain or a splash from a nearby car’s windshield wiper fluid.
Still, I’m not sure because as it happened, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about the fire, the smoke, and the dead boy. How once the chaos settled, all that was left of him was a blackened husk that they pulled from the apartment building’s smoldering remains. These thoughts weren’t anything new around this time. They haunted me almost constantly. As I sat at the red light before the highway on-ramp, that first snowflake now long gone, I saw the flames and heard the boy’s screams. I felt the smoke stinging my eyes, and strangling my throat.
“Get a move on, dumbass!” someone yelled from behind. That brought me back to the present.
I hung an apologetic hand out the window, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. Some heavyset fella in an American flag tank top, sitting on a Harley. Even though I hit the gas and flipped my turn signal on, I guess I wasn’t moving fast enough because he zoomed right past me, shouting another loving expletive I didn’t fully hear over the roar of his motorcycle. Anyway, I gave him the middle finger, but he was already tearing up the road. A wise person once said you can’t win ‘em all. That person was right, but still, that’s a damn shame.
I eased on up the ramp and merged with the flow of weekend traffic. There was a good amount of it, too. The long July 4th weekend meant most people were off of work that Friday, and a lot of them were probably doing what I was doing, which was heading for greener pastures. I was going to Prism Lake, about three hours south of where I lived and worked. It was a yearly occasion for a couple of my buddies and me. We’d been going since we were kids. Stone’s dad used to take us every summer, until the three of us discovered girls, that is. That’d be around our freshman year of high school. Age fourteen or fifteen. After that, we went only once or twice.
Then, before our senior year, Stone and his parents had been driving up to East Lansing one Christmas to visit some relatives, and a drunk driver swerved into their lane and hit them head-on. Stone’s mom and dad both died, his dad instantly (and hopefully painlessly), and his mom in the hospital after a couple of days. Stone was in a week-long coma, though, so he didn’t know it until he woke up. Besides his parents, Stone lost most of his ability to walk, too. Months and months of rehab got him up and moving, but he can’t get anywhere without his sturdy set of crutches.
Before the end of the world, my only brush with death came when I was nine and my pet hamster passed on. Broke my heart into a million little pieces. My mom was gone, too, but she died when I was just a baby. The only way I got to know her was through the old pictures and notebooks my dad kept in a few boxes in our attic. They were filled with some really personal stuff, stuff I probably shouldn’t have read at the impressionable age of nine—but then again, I had probably read a few Stephen King books by that time, too.
In my mom’s notebooks, she'd written these great short stories in a beautiful, looping script. Stuff about a boy getting his first puppy and them growing up together until one day the dog wasn’t able to stand on her own anymore and the boy—now a young man—had to put the poor thing down. He buried the dog, Cupcake was her name, and one day she came back, but not in a zombie-like Pet Sematary way.
She came back as a “benevolent spirit” (which was how my mom described it) and told him that it was all going to be okay, that life would go on and the boy would grow into a fine man; he’d find love and raise children and have a good job. Maybe he’d eventually get another puppy when the time was right; and some days, when he looked into the new dog’s eyes, he would see a hint of Cupcake in them.
Man, I loved that story. I can recite it word-for-word, I read it so much. I also kept a photocopy folded up in my wallet, but my wallet’s long gone now. I can’t tell you where.
I digress.
I was talking about Stone. One of my two best friends. When he went through that tragedy, he was eighteen or so and didn’t have to go off to some orphanage or stay with distant relatives. He got to choose where he wanted to go. My dad, bless his heart, let him stay with us the rest of our senior year and then a few more while we went to college, even though we really didn’t have the room in our small house.
Dad cleared out a bunch of junk from the basement, and Stone stayed down there. He even built a ramp over the basement stairs so he could get up and down easier. But Stone barely left his new room in the beginning. That first year was particularly hard for him. School started. He didn’t go, and fell way behind because of it. He quit eating, lost a bunch of weight. He was crazy about basketball—I mean, he could shoot and dribble like a pro. Ask him anything about the sport—its history, current pro standings, what Michael Jordan ate before Game Six of the ’98 Finals—and he’d tell you. He’d tell you all while sinking a step-back three right in your face at the local YMCA. He was never wrong, either. I always said if there was an NBA themed Jeopardy, he had to get on there and win himself a few bucks. But the accident meant he couldn’t play anymore, not like he used to, and his interest in basketball waned, too.
Despite all this, he graduated on time and got his diploma in front of a crowd of five hundred or so people. After that, he got his business degree from Kent State, and now worked for a big company in downtown Akron. Made good money. Once he got through the depression, he never acted like a guy with a disability, and I always respected the hell out of him for that.
My other best friend, the third member of the Three Musketeers, as we liked to call ourselves, was Jonas.
Jonas join
ed the Marines right out of high school and married his sweetheart a few weeks after he got stationed in Hawaii. Yes, you read that correctly. Of all places in the world, the lucky bastard went to Hawaii and worked on helicopters for five years. The government paid for pretty much everything, too, but he got out when his contract was up. His wife, Miranda, was pregnant with twins and he wanted them to grow up in Ohio, where he had grown up. He took a pretty good job at the Akron-Canton airport. The only downside to all of it was the fact that Jonas was mostly deaf in his left ear. Being around the loud engines so often had caught up to him. He wore a hearing aid, but not one of those clunky types you see seniors wearing. This hearing aid was sleek and barely visible.
Jonas’s twins were born on the first day of spring four years ago. Stone and I were there pretty much the entire time Miranda was in labor, and when we were finally allowed back in their hospital room and Stone and me got to hold the newborn girls, I cried. I’ll admit it. Daphne and Velma were their names (yes, like the characters from Scooby-Doo), and they quickly became family.
I’ve never married or had kids. It seemed like something I’d always get around to, but I know it’ll never happen. Not with the way the world is now.
The storms and the darkness destroyed everything.
The last time I saw Jonas before we all met at Prism Lake was only about a month ago, a couple of weeks before I failed to save the boy from the burning apartment building. Stone, on the other hand, I hadn’t seen him for nearly two months. Some best friend I am, huh? It wasn’t like that, though. Out of those eight weeks, he was probably traveling for half of them, doing deals in Dallas and San Francisco, flying overseas to London and Japan, shaking hands and signing contracts.
After I saw the dead boy, I put up an impenetrable wall around my emotions. Sounds lame, and I didn’t mean to do it, but that’s what happened.
I was stuck in an endless loop. Work at the fire station, come home, watch television and not comprehend any of it, then sleep. I barely ate, but I did make the occasional trip to the grocery store. Mostly for beer and cheap vodka from the liquor aisle.
Later, the depression got worse, and I found that I couldn’t work anymore. Seeing one of our trucks or some random building on fire just brought me back to that horrible moment, and I’d freeze, which is one thing you can’t do on the job.
So I cashed in on paid vacation time and a bunch of sick days I had banked, and I slipped deeper into my role as a recluse.
Until the day of the first snowstorm.
It was Jonas’s idea to go to the lake and rent out the cabin like the old days. I didn’t think Stone would go for it—the place would probably bring up too many bittersweet memories—but he did.
I was reluctant, I’ll admit, but Jonas convinced me. The Three Musketeers don’t exist if there’s only two, he had said. He was right.
I pulled off the highway and followed a winding road for another two miles. The woods thickened on both sides. Other than the occasional car or semi, I saw nearly no vehicles, which I found slightly unsettling. I didn’t know it at the time, but lots of weird things would eventually happen. The deserted feeling that the empty road gave me wasn’t one I was fond of. I remembered back when traffic was bumper-to-bumper; when, about half a mile from the turn-in, you slowed your car down to a crawl. Prism Lake was the spot when we were kids. It always seemed like there were a million people there. You pull in and you’d see these small boats hauling a wakeboarder or two, each wearing big puffy life jackets, the drivers with a beer in hand and sunglasses resting on the bridge of their nose; you’d see families clustered on the beach, their faces and shoulders covered in a thick layer of sun block; you’d see a hundred or so people playing volleyball or catch or whipping a Frisbee around; you’d hear dogs barking and kicking up sand as they sprinted toward their owners in the water; you’d take in the smell of the lake and the barbecues, and all the laughter and clashing music blasting from someone’s portable stereo.
But when I pulled onto the gravel road so many years after my childhood, there was none of that. It was as empty as what it would become.
A graveyard.
“There he is!”
Stone leaned on the porch railing, his crutches resting behind him. He wore a vest with about a million pockets; it made me think of a fisherman. On his head sat a wide-brimmed bucket hat, adding to the image. No zinc oxide on his nose; most, I think if not all, black people didn’t exactly cake on the SPF 30 come summertime. Or ever.
I waved and gave him a big smile. It was the first real smile to grace my face since the fire.
Yes, I was a master of fake smiles, but if my best friend couldn’t get me grinning, I was a lost cause. Sometimes, though, the fake ones were necessary. That was what you had to do. If not, people would ask you why you were so glum, and then you’d have to lie or, God forbid, tell the truth. I just wasn’t ready for that.
See, I never told anyone about the boy, about how much my failure fucked with my head. It was in the local paper, but the names of the firefighters weren’t in any of the articles. I told Stone everything—I mean, everything—but not this. I thought talking about it would only make it worse.
Stone was no dummy. He would know as soon as I got out of the car and turned around that something was wrong.
He grabbed his crutches, put his forearms through the rings, and made his way down the porch ramp and onto the gravel drive. “Let me get your bags for you, Grady,” Stone said.
“You sure?” I laughed. “I don’t got much. I can handle it.”
“Sure, and I’m sleeping with Beyoncé. I know you, dude. I know you gotta pack all your exfoliating scrubs, hair gels, and the baby wipes. Unloading’ll take all day without some help. You’re my pal, Grady, I don’t mind.”
I pulled my bag from the back seat. A single Adidas gym bag I’d had since the eleventh grade, all frayed and scuffed up. It was full of a few pairs of clothes—summer clothes, that is—and your basic toiletries. No exfoliating scrub or hair gel. I did have baby wipes, I’ll admit. They’re one of the most versatile things you can bring on a trip—or anywhere, for that matter.
“I like to look good. Shoot me,” I said, but the truth was I looked like shit. No sleep, barely eating, never going outside…that’ll eventually take its toll on a person.
I turned around. Stone was smiling wide, but once his eyes passed over my face, the smile faltered. With Stone there was no bullshit. It was obvious I was out of my mind, and even more obvious that Stone had noticed.
“What happened to you, Grady?” he asked. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week. And you’re all skinny now, man. You smoking meth or something?”
I hooked a finger on each corner of my mouth and stretched my lips. “Ahhhh,” I said, “still got all my teeth, don’t I?”
“A little grungy-looking, but yeah, guess you do,” Stone agreed. I hit him in the shoulder with a weak punch. He faked like he was hurt. “Damn, dude, you’re just gonna hit a cripple now? I always knew you were an asshole, Grady, but this…this is something else.”
“Shove it,” I said. “Jonesy here yet?”
“Nah. Not yet. You know how he is with the wife and kids. Has to say bye in each room of the house and kiss ‘em all a hundred times before he’ll leave. The soft bastard.”
I chuckled.
We were heading up toward the cabin. It looked pretty much the same as I remembered it. The whole thing was made of dark wood, a total fire hazard, but it gave it a sort of retro vibe I’ve always loved. Past the porch stood a red door below a weathered green roof, and from the room on the right side, a stone chimney pointed toward the sky. Beyond the cabin, through a few trees, was a shimmering body of water completely out of place in Ohio.
Prism Lake.
A few feet past the cabin were the steps leading down to the beach. A rush of nostalgia-fueled excitement hit hard. My legs were itching to drop everything and break for the sand, strip down to my underwear, and jump in the wate
r. Maybe the lake would purify me and free me from all the dark thoughts of the past.
I didn’t do that, but I wish I did. Because, in the next couple of days, the entire lake would be one mammoth block of ice.
Tires crunched in the gravel behind us. Stone was talking about his latest trip overseas. Part business, mostly pleasure, he said. I tuned in and out until Jonas honked his horn and saved me from picturing the bugs Stone had eaten in China.
Jonas was all smiles as music thumped from his car’s speakers and he pulled his two-door Nissan, a far cry from the usual minivan he buzzed Miranda and the twins around in, next to my beat-up Honda.
“About time!” Stone shouted. Jonas’s reply was not one but two middle fingers high in the sky. I set my bag on one of the porch’s rocking chairs, and we went back down the ramp.
“All this exercise is killing me,” Stone joked. He was in better shape than all of us.
A round of bro hugs came next, followed by our secret handshake, which wasn’t so much a secret as it was an old habit that had never died. We started this ritual after Stone saw some basketball players doing it during their pregame warm-ups. You slapped right and then left hands, and then, with your palms flat, you crossed both at your neck and made a slitting-your-throat motion. A little gruesome, yeah, but we’ve always thought it was cool.
“Where’s the beer?” Jonas asked. “I’m parched.” He swept a hand over his feathery brown hair. One thing he hated about being in the military was the buzz cuts. Soon as he got out, he let the ‘do grow.
“A beer sounds good,” I said.
The sky had since clouded over during the three hours it took me to drive down here, but the sun still burned through. I felt my recluse-pale skin toasting. That was okay; I was in need of some summer color. If you saw me then, you might’ve thought I rolled right off an autopsy table.
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