This is not real, I told myself. It can’t be. This is beyond impossible. He is dead. I saw them pull his body from the wreckage. I saw three floors come down atop him.
I was both right and wrong.
I closed my eyes tight and said it aloud. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.”
But when I opened them, the boy was still there, still talking. So was the shadow hovering around Jonas.
“And all this blood squirted outta my ears and mouth. It tasted super yucky!” the boy continued.
Jonas remained transfixed as the shadow began moving toward him, shrouding him like the Reaper’s robe.
“Jonas!” I shouted. I don’t know how I did it, I don’t know how I tore myself away from the dead boy right in front of me, but I did, and I grabbed Jonas around the wrist. His body was stiff, corpse-like. He wasn’t budging. I pulled with all the strength I had left, determined not to lose Jonas the way I lost the boy. The boy who was somehow right here.
No, I didn’t understand what was going on then, and I’m not sure I entirely understand now, but all I knew then was we had to go. We had to go before this snow became our graves.
“Don’t leave me, Mister Fireman! Don’t leave—”
Finally, Jonas budged. He turned his wide eyes my way and we took off. I knew not to look over my shoulder, but I couldn’t help myself.
The shadow thing was gone, but the burning boy was still standing in the same spot I had left him. The flames crackling all over his body melted a large circle in the snow. With the accompanying brightness, I saw that one of his eyes hung from its socket, dangling there. The other eye was goo, like this thing had told me, and it was running down his cheek.
My stomach clenched with fear and nausea. I nearly stopped running. Maybe I would’ve, had Jonas not been with me, but when I began losing my balance, he grabbed my arm and pulled me up before I face planted and whatever those things were caught me again.
We climbed up the short hill and on to the Harks’ deck. My breath exploded out of me, leaving a white cloud of vapor hanging in the air.
Jonas was babbling. I only caught hints of what he said. “…what was that? I saw my—”
I pushed past him toward the sliding door. It was cracked open about six inches. A thick layer of ice had caked over the glass on both sides. On the inside, smeared but recognizable, was a bloody handprint. I wondered who it belonged to. Was it Eleanor’s? Or was it Mikey’s? Did one of them plant their palm against the door as they ripped it open in their mad scramble to get away from their insane, rifle-wielding father? Or maybe it belonged to Angie, their mother. Had she stood there when Ed shot her, clutched the wound in surprise, and tried to stay up by finding balance using the glass before she fell over and died? Was she still dead?
I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. All I wanted was to get inside the house.
Like I saw earlier, the lights were still on. A jet of heat streamed outward toward us, an invitation if I’d ever known one. Jonas and I both felt it. He threw the door open, the track screeching as loud as the wind, and we both went in. I closed it half a second later. It was much warmer inside, yeah, and I didn’t want any more of that heat to escape, especially when we didn’t know how much juice remained in the generator, but it was more than that. Those shadow-things were fresh in my mind, and though I doubted something as flimsy as glass could stop them, I felt better with the door closed.
When you think about it, it was the adult equivalent to a kid hiding from the imaginary closet monster by pulling the covers over their face.
Now the monsters weren’t imaginary.
“What the fuck was that?” Jonas said. “Did you see that? My stepdad was standing there in a wife-beater with a beer in his hand. He was yelling at me for not bringing up the trash cans. He started taking off his belt and wrapping it around his knuckles. Grady, I—”
I shook my head. “I-I don’t know what that was.”
“Grady, he’s been dead for twelve years.”
“I know,” I said. “I didn’t see him, not like you did, but I believe you…because I saw something, too. The boy I couldn’t save. He was on fire, but alive and talking to me.” I closed my eyes. I thought I was going to cry.
“What the actual fuck, man.” Jonas leaned over the counter and dry-heaved. The booze wasn’t the cause, I can guarantee that. “When I looked at you, there was like a big cloud of black smoke in the shape of a person just hanging around you.” He heaved again. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Did we get drugged or something?”
“No, I don’t think so.” But I thought that would be much better than the truth. “This is real,” I continued. “Whatever we saw out there in the snow, it was real.”
Jonas began unwrapping the shirts from his head. I collapsed on a nearby stool. I had no energy. I was scared as hell, on the verge of either sobbing or screaming my lungs out. We didn’t know what was going on, but we did know one thing: we were shit out of luck.
4
The Violence
Angie’s body was nowhere to be found, but a rust-colored splotch stained the carpet of the dining room. Here were more bloody handprints, shoe prints, and smudges. It was a crime scene investigator’s wet dream. One cotton swab swipe of the mess and the perp would be spending twenty-five to life in a state penitentiary.
I steered clear of it all. Paranoid thoughts of my DNA turning up in their tests and me getting somehow blamed filled my mind.
The first thing Jonesy and I did after we had settled down and gotten our breath back—which wasn’t an easy task, considering what we had just gone through—was find the landline. We didn’t have to go far, either. An old rotary style phone hung on the kitchen wall near the door. Despite its old style, the thing looked brand new, probably one of those retro type items stores sold for ridiculous amounts of money, expecting the customers not to know you could go pick one of these exact phones up for a whopping two bucks at your neighborhood antique shop. I’ve always heard you can’t put a price on nostalgia, but the big corporations thought otherwise.
Anyway, I picked up the phone and put it against my ear. Jonas leaned over, his eyes wide, waiting.
I heard a dial tone. It was the sweetest sound in the world. I told Jonesy and he literally jumped with joy, drops of melted snow spraying from his clothes.
I wasted no time in dialing the three digits I’d never dialed before. 9-1-1. The tone clicked off, and by this time Jonas had his own ear against the phone with me. After the tone disappeared, a long moment of silence followed. We waited without breathing, or at least I did. Then—
The line rang.
Unfortunately, the line only rang once before it went dead. Nothing. No dial tone, no robotic operator telling me the call couldn’t go through. Just dead.
“Try again,” Jonas urged.
I hung up, lifted the phone, and began dialing. I didn’t get far, however, because the line was still out.
It just wasn’t our night.
Jonas took it from me and kept trying. He must’ve done so for a solid five minutes, me standing there and hoping we’d get something, and him slamming the phone in the cradle, picking it back up, dialing, rinse, and repeat. All to no avail.
“We’re fucked,” he finally said.
I shook my head, but I kind of agreed with him. There was an unrelenting blizzard outside, a dead woman, a possibly crazy man running around with a rifle, and unexplainable things lurking in the snow. Saying we were fucked might’ve been putting it mildly, I thought.
Then again, I wasn’t going to just give up. We came here for a reason, and I wouldn’t let this trip be meaningless. We braved all that snow and those...things to get here.
So I wrapped my arm around Jonas’s shoulders and said, “We’re gonna be okay as long as we stay smart and look out for each other. Just like in the military, right?”
He managed a smile. “Yeah. Th
ree Musketeers.”
“Exactly. So let’s stock up and ride this out. Forget about everything else.”
“I’ll never forget about what I saw. My stepdad’s dead. But he was there, Grady. He was real. I could’ve reached out and touched him if I wanted to, and believe me, I wanted to slug him in the face. Fucking bastard.” Jonas shook his head. An angry red color rose to his cheeks.”
I knew the story, and you probably do, too. Mom and Dad split up, or Dad maybe dies, then Mom gets with the first asshole she meets, and winds up marrying the guy. He tries to replace your real father, but that’ll never happen. Stepdaddy’s got a drinking problem, and when he drinks, he likes to push his little stepson and his wife around.
Well, Jonas got pushed around a lot. In middle school, it was less normal if Jonas didn’t come to class with a black eye at least once a month. He always had an excuse, too.
“Oh, Danny elbowed me when we were playing backyard football. It was supposed to be touch, but you know how the seventh graders are…” or “I tripped down the stairs and had to go to the ER. My mom about had a fit.”
All the usual things frightened victims of abuse say. The black eyes were bad, yeah, but it was much worse than that. Mostly his stepdad hit him in the places long-sleeve shirts and pants hid.
Once, when we were changing in the locker room after gym class, Jonesy took off his shirt, which was something he never did in front of other people. The gym teacher made him because Tevin Inyos had a nose gusher and the blood got all over Jonas—or something like that. I don’t know, can’t remember for sure, but I do remember seeing all those bruises. His back was more purple and blue than it was skin-colored. I pointed it out because I was young and curious, and Jonas got all embarrassed. It took me a few years to understand why. He told us he fell off his skateboard, but I was pretty sure he didn’t have a skateboard. Young me could never understand the truth. My dad wasn’t the most loving guy, but he never laid a finger on me. Never would. The fact that someone three times your age and size could was beyond my comprehension. When our gym teacher, Mr. Nolan, saw the bruises he didn’t fall for Jonesy’s endless list of excuses. Next thing I knew, Jonas had to go stay with his aunt in Canton for the summer, and he didn’t come back until his stepdaddy and mom were separated.
Stone and I didn’t find out the reason for Jonesy’s sabbatical for years, and only when Jonesy got drunk and told us everything. We put most of it together, but hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth was much worse. So much worse. I had already hated his stepdad for a variety of reasons, mostly because he was a dickhead who yelled and smashed things when he got angry, but after hearing Jonas’s stories about just how bad he was, I wanted to find the guy and kill him myself.
I never did. It was a thunderclap heart attack that happened about six years ago. Jonas didn’t celebrate when he heard the news like you’d have expected. He just nodded and went on with his life. He had put that part of his past behind him, and I couldn’t blame the guy for that.
“And I don’t know how I’m gonna be able to leave this house, not with whatever the hell that was lurking around outside,” Jonas said now, sounding close to tears. “I can’t face him again, Grady. I just can’t.”
“It’s not him,” I said. “Whatever made the projection is real, but your stepdad and the dead boy aren’t. I promise.”
Jonas bowed his head and said nothing.
We split up and searched the house soon after. We looked for warm clothes, easily transportable food, and weapons. I stumbled upon Ed’s gun case. The door hung open, and I thought of taking one but hesitated.
Growing up near the city with a dad who spent most of his evenings after work parked in front of the television, and with no other distant relatives besides a grandma who was old-going-on ancient, I never got into outdoorsy stuff like hunting. I’d never shot a gun. The many hours spent killing aliens in Halo certainly didn’t count. Hell, I’d never even held a real gun. Once, Stone’s cousin had an air soft party and I faked sick and didn’t go. The truth is guns scared the living hell out of me, as I think anything that can end a human life with the mere squeeze of a finger should scare the living hell out of someone.
Jonas, on the other hand, knew his way around a weapon.
I studied the rifles for a few seconds before deciding it best to let Jonas do the handling. I left, wound my way up the staircase to the second level, found the master bedroom, and began sorting through closets. It felt wrong, like I was a burglar looking for hidden jewelry or stashed cash, but it only took the wind’s screeching to remind me this was necessary. If I wanted to survive, I needed warmer clothes, and pretty much anything beat an old suit coat and a pair of sweats for protection against these freezing temperatures.
There was one big closet in the back right corner of the room. I stepped lightly, worried about creaking floors. I don’t know why exactly, besides the fact that this all felt wrong. Maybe because I thought Ed was still around, waiting in the shadows with his rifle, covered in his wife’s blood, crazy-eyed, rage-filled, and ready to put a bullet in my gut. Logically, that was probably bullshit. Ed might’ve talked funny, and maybe he’d succumbed to a moment of anger, but he was no dummy. Moving Angie’s body told me his thoughts were now of cleaning up the mess he’d made. Ditch the evidence, get your head clear, and then get the hell out of Dodge. The blizzard would slow him down, sure, but it would also give him a head start before the cops started looking.
This was all assuming whatever the shadow things were hadn’t gotten to him yet.
The shadows.
Man, I still didn’t believe I saw what I had seen on our way over here. I thought it was impossible, insane, and most of all, terrifying. I was nearly a hundred percent sure it had been a figment of my imagination, and I would’ve gone the rest of my life being okay with that assumption had Jonesy not been there with me and not seen the same thing.
“Jonas,” I whisper-yelled.
“Coming,” Jonas answered. He came up the steps, boards creaking beneath his shoes, and ducked inside the bedroom. A canvas bag swung from each of his fisted hands. Food. Canned goods and bottled waters. “Any luck?” he asked.
“In here.” I waved him over to the closet. “I don’t think I’ll be able to fit into a lot of this stuff, but it looks like your size.”
“Doesn’t matter. Layers are layers. It’s already gotten colder outside since we got here.”
“You went outside?”
Jonesy shook his head. “Hell no. I can feel it through the walls, man.”
He was right. When I focused my mind on it, I felt it, too. The heat in the house made little difference.
“We better get a move-on,” I said. “Grab as much as you can. Jackets, pants, gloves, boots. Some from the other side for Eleanor, too.”
“The girl stuff?”
“Yeah, Eleanor’ll need it.”
“Shit…but it’s her mom’s stuff. Do you really think she wants to wear her mom’s stuff? We could look in her room and grab some of her actual clothes.”
“She told me she had nothing for winter. It was all at her apartment in Cincinnati. The stuff she didn’t take to college, she donated to Goodwill. Plus, I don’t wanna stay here longer than we have to. I don’t like it. This place gives me a bad feeling.”
“Well, outside gives me a worse feeling,” Jonas said. “There’s fucking…I don’t know what out there. Ghosts? Monsters? Aliens?”
“Those things aren’t our friends, I agree. They showed us terrible stuff, but I don’t know if projections of the past can actually hurt us.”
“I don’t wanna find out,” Jonas said matter-of-factly. Then he went back to grabbing handfuls of clothes and stuffing them into garbage bags.
I followed suit. The conversation seemed over with. I found a nice pair of rubber boots in the back of the closet. Old and a little snug, but they nearly came up to my knees. With the snow higher than that outside, the boots wouldn’t be perfect, but they’d help.
I thought I saw another pair for Jonesy, so I got on my knees and crawled farther in, and that was when I bumped something.
Well, someone.
It was dark in the closet, but the sticky stuff on my fingers was red. I saw that clearly enough.
“Oh fuck,” I mumbled.
As I tilted my head upward, Angie’s dead body toppled over. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, but dead weight is something else entirely. When she thumped against my shoulders, she took both of us down, pinning me to the floor like a professional wrestler. With a grunt, I shoved her halfway off. More sticky blood clung to my jacket. Some of it had gotten on my face. An overwhelming urge to vomit took hold of my stomach, but I forced it down. This was no easy task. Besides the dead boy, Angie’s was the only other corpse I’d seen, and the boy was barely recognizable once the fire had claimed his life. I’ll tell you this, seeing a dead body is nothing like seeing one in a horror movie. Maybe it’s because you know the person is real and not some character. You know they were breathing and talking and smiling only mere hours ago. You know they were loved and they had loved others. Or maybe it’s because you can see the realness with your naked eye…the supple but paling flesh, the dark red blood.
Angie’s mouth hung open in a soundless scream, and a rotten smell leaked out from the wounds in her stomach. She hadn’t been dead very long, but already decomposition was doing its job.
I rolled away, practically hyperventilating, and reached for the nearest piece of clothing to wipe my face with. What I needed was a bucket of hot, soapy water and a gallon of hand sanitizer.
“Damn,” Jonas said, grimacing. He nudged the body with the toe of his shoe. One of Angie’s lifeless arms flopped over and slapped the carpeted floor with a muffled thump. “She’s dead, all right.”
“Jesus, that about gave me a heart attack.”
“Should we move her?” Jonas asked.
The Snow: A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel Page 7
