Then she spoke. “I heard someone outside calling my name.”
“What?”
“There’s someone outside calling my name,” she repeated. “It sounds like my mom.”
“Ignore it.” Goosebumps broke out all over my body, and not because of the cold. “Try to sleep.” I had seen her mother’s corpse. I knew with one hundred percent certainty her mother was gone.
Eleanor laughed. “Try to sleep? Funny.” She went stiff and clawed my arm. “Did you hear that?”
I shook my head. All I heard was the wind—the unnatural, shrieking wind.
“Listen,” she said. I did. “There it is again!”
This time, I heard it. A female voice, in pain, saying, “Eleanorrrrrrrr…”
“What are they?” she asked me, scooting closer.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Stone and Mikey don’t really believe us, I think. If they do, they don’t think they’re as dangerous as you and me do.”
“Maybe not, but Mikey saw something in the snow that first night. He might deny it out loud, but deep down, I think he knows.”
It took a while for Eleanor to speak again. She seemed to be intensely listening to the wind. When she spoke, she caught me off-guard. “Do you think they’re ghosts?”
I shrugged, somehow more frightened than I had been before. “Whatever they are, they’re as unnatural as the summer snow.”
“Grady! Grady! Graaaaaady!” a distant voice shouted then, barely audible over the wind. My body went rigid, and Eleanor felt it.
“They’re calling your name now,” she said. “They’ll call Mikey’s and Stone’s next.” She wrapped her legs around mine and buried her face in my neck. “It’s okay, Grady. It’s going to be okay.” Seemed like she was trying to convince herself this more than me, but it also sounded like a question, not a statement.
Is it going to be all right?
The things went on shouting my name the rest of that night, and the nights after that. We all heard them.
One night a couple of days later, Stone started screaming. It scared the hell out of me. I shot up from my place beside the fire and rushed over to him. He was leaning on his crutches by the window, the curtains parted. His chest rose and fell rapidly.
“What?” I asked. “Are you—” But then I saw what he saw.
Jonas was standing out in the snow, not far from the mounds our cars were buried beneath. He was waving at us.
“I thought he was—he was dead,” Stone said.
I closed the curtains. “C’mon,” I said, “come sit by the fire.”
“Jonas is out there, Grady. We can’t leave him out there! Are you crazy?”
“It’s not Jonas.”
“It is! Look at him, he’s wearing the same fucking clothes he was wearing when you guys left!”
Eleanor came over, parted the curtains, and looked over my shoulder. “Stone, that’s not Jonas, I promise. It’s one of them.”
Stone began crying as he backed away from the window. He said nothing, but he understood.
On the seventeenth day after the first storm, we ran out of food.
There was no vote, no coin flips, and no arguments. We knew what we had to do. We had to leave.
So, when the sun shone through the gray clouds sometime after three in the afternoon, we left. It wasn’t easy. The snow in those days had slowed down, but there was still about four feet of it covering the ground, and the cold…
The cold hurt your lungs, stung your eyes, turned your muscles and bones to ice.
In those seventeen days, we burned everything flammable inside the lake house. Beds, couches, carpets. We even took off all the wooden doors and hacked them up with a hatchet Mikey found in the basement. The blisters I got haven’t gone away yet. I don’t know if they ever will.
In those days spent inside the lake house, we probably inhaled a bunch of crap we shouldn’t have from the flames, but it kept us warm enough to keep going and that was all we could ask for.
Unfortunately, everything has an expiration date, especially now, and the lake house had expired then. We needed more shelter, more food, more things to burn. The problem with leaving was that we didn’t know where to go. Around the fourteenth day, before we set out, it was evident we’d only last in the lake house for a few more days, so discussions began.
“We just need to go,” Stone had said. “It doesn’t matter where. We need to go.”
Eleanor nodded. She was sitting with her back against the brick fireplace, the flames blazing to her left. “Anywhere’s gotta be better than here.”
A very hopeful outlook, no doubt, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, I was pretty sure we were a lot better off than most people, aside from maybe the President of the United States and his cabinet in a bunker somewhere miles below ground.
“We could go south,” Mikey said. “It’s gotta be warmer that way.”
Stone shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Remember what I saw on Facebook, Grady?”
“Yeah. Snow in South Carolina.”
“In July,” Stone added.
“We really think this is a national thing?” Eleanor said. In the light of the fire, she looked better. Healthier.
“If it wasn’t, someone would’ve come along to help us,” Stone said.
I nodded. “It’s definitely more than national,” I said. “I hate to say it, but I think it’s global.”
“Me, too,” Mikey said. “I don’t know…I just feel it.”
Eleanor bowed her head, a gleam of tears in her eyes. She knew, too.
“Eleanor,” I said, prepared to right my mistake, to offer her some false but comforting words.
She looked up at me, swiped her tears away with the back of her hands, and nodded.
“I know,” she said. “You’re right.”
Silence filled the living room for a while after that. Stone was the one who eventually broke it. I’m not sure how long after.
“We just need to go, man. It doesn’t matter where. We pack up our stuff and get the hell out of here. I don’t like it. I hear those things all the time. Calling my name. I hear my mom and dad. I hear Jonas.” He closed his eyes and grimaced. “I just wanna go and get away from them.”
I was sitting next to him. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Me, too.”
But the question was where did we go?
“Going out there without a destination in mind is suicide,” I said.
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing,” Mikey mumbled. Eleanor shot him a look almost as sharp as the wind outside. “What? The world ended, El.” Mikey was only seventeen at the time, but he sounded like a man in his fifties, one who’d seen and experienced horrible things. Tragedy has a way of making you grow up, I guess. “God got sick of us, so He decided to freeze us all out.”
Eleanor gave no reply.
“So that’s it?” I said. “We just leave?”
The others shrugged.
“Got any better ideas?” Stone asked.
I said, “No.”
“I’d say we have another two days of eating scraps before we have to go on,” Stone continued. “Then we leave.”
It was decided. We’d leave with no destination and no backup plan. I hated it, but I knew I had a couple of days to work up the courage to do it.
When everyone went to sleep that night, I forced myself to stare out the window into the darkness. I saw nothing but a sea of white. I did this for maybe three hours before exhaustion got the best of me and I passed out on the floor, huddled in blankets.
The next night, I did the same thing. It was relatively clear. Hardly any wind to kick up the snow and create a haze, but it was also dark. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the country, out in the sticks, where there isn’t a McDonald’s every half-mile or so, but there’s hardly any light pollution out there. When the snow fell and the grid went down you could see every star in the sky on a cloudless night, and
if someone turned on a lamp a few miles away it may as well have been another sun.
Going on the fourth hour of looking aimlessly out the window, something happened.
A light turned on.
I shed my blankets and pressed my face against the cold glass, squinting. My heartbeat went off the charts, and for the first time since I woke up to a world covered in snow and ice, I felt warmth. It was the heat of hope radiating throughout my body.
And just like that, our destination was found.
6
Welcome
I opened the door and led the way outside on that seventeenth day. Stone was on my back, obviously unable to crutch through the snow for too long. We had fashioned a sling that went over my shoulders and around my waist, and Stone was able to sit in it and lean against me. Uncomfortable for both of us. Luckily, Stone didn’t weigh much.
Behind me was Eleanor and behind her was Mikey. We had no belongings besides the clothes and coats and blankets we had wrapped around our bodies.
And the rifle.
Stone was holding that. He swept the area in front of us, the barrel visible in my peripherals.
I took a deep breath. The iciness stabbed at my lungs and burned my throat. My eyes watered and almost instantly dried out.
The day was clear. The sun hung in the sky, shining through the overcast. I wondered if it was a July sun up there and if it was the clouds that belonged to a different time. I shook the thought away, focusing on one thing and one thing only.
The house across the lake with the light on, our destination.
Couldn’t have been more than half a mile’s walk over the water and land beach, but in the snow and cold, half a mile away might as well have been as far as it is from Ohio to California.
We had to try, didn’t we? What other option did we have besides die? The old saying “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” played on a continuous loop in my head leading up to our departure. I would try to think positive and then a record would scratch somewhere in my mind, reminding me of how screwed we were. It was a classic conundrum. Still, I think we would’ve rather tried then given up. Humans are built to survive; it’s in our genetic code. That’s all this was. Surviving.
The wind blew harshly. I almost lost my balance. We hadn’t stepped off the porch yet, and already the difficulty of the expedition had me thinking about turning around. We may not have been able to get a fire going inside, but the walls would shelter us from the worst of the wind. Right?
No. The clock was ticking, time was running out. We had to leave.
For some odd reason, I had become sort of a leader. I don’t know why and I certainly don’t know why I accepted the position, but here I was, and it was my job to lead.
I went down the steps, or where I thought the steps were. My boots sunk about two feet through the snow before they found solid ice. I pressed all of my weight down, expecting it to break with Stone on my back. It didn’t.
That was good and made me feel slightly better.
If the rest of the ground was like that we’d get across without too much of a problem. As long as the bitter cold didn’t kill us first, and that was certainly a possibility. I took the next step and the next, reaching for the covered handrail for support, and then I was off the stairs and touching the ground.
Instantly, I sunk another two feet. Maybe more. It came up past my waist, and despite the layers I wore, the freeze got through my clothes.
“Fuck,” Stone said. “Too late to sit on your shoulders?”
“S-Screw you, Stone.” I found it hard to move my lips. They felt frozen like the rest of the world. I turned and saw Mikey and Eleanor sink at nearly the same time. Eleanor’s head and shoulders were all that stuck out from the snow, and although Mikey was still a kid, he had been blessed with his father’s height so it came up to about his upper abdomen.
“You okay?” I asked them.
Eleanor nodded. She wore a scarf over her face, exposing only her eyes and the bridge of her nose, but judging by the movement of her jaw beneath the scarf, her teeth were chattering.
“Mike?” I called.
“Better than ever,” he answered with sarcasm as sharp as the cold.
“Then let’s go on.”
From the small backyard, we navigated toward the nearest tree, as was the plan, stopped and took a break to catch our breath. Moving through the hard-pack was like trudging through mud. When the wind blew, I lost all will to go on. I’m sure the others did, too. I just kept telling myself, Next tree, next tree, get to the next tree.
Eventually, I did.
Stone still had the gun leveled over my shoulder. It crossed my mind that I might trip and the gun would accidentally go off and kill one of us. Bad thoughts. I pushed them away and moved on to the next landmark.
At this point, the feeling in my right foot left me. It felt like I was dragging a couple of bricks. My brain forced my right leg to move again and again, until we got to the last tree.
It was a big oak with a trunk as thick as my car. Here, I leaned on my right shoulder and reached my left hand out to Eleanor. She grabbed it when it was in reach and I pulled her closer. Mikey was right behind her, face snow-caked, eyes looking defeated. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in, too. The four of us huddled there against the tree trunk while the wind picked up. This was always the plan. We needed the break and we needed the heat, as little as it may have been, of each other’s bodies.
This rest lasted about two minutes. It felt both like a lifetime and only a few seconds. Funny how that worked out. It was all we could spare, considering the sun hadn’t been staying out very long. And when it went down…
I didn’t want to think about that, either, but as the leader I had to. Those things…the monsters…the ghosts…the wraiths…whatever they were would come out from their hiding spots and change us, and I couldn’t let that happen.
“See anything?” I shouted over the whistle of the wind.
“Nothing but white. It’s like a Taylor Swift concert out here,” Stone answered.
Mikey laughed, but it barely sounded like one. I think it was the first time I’d heard him do so since his parents passed. Me, I was too cold to even try. The iciness had gotten past layers of clothing, my flesh, and even my bones. Now it was drilling into my bones. I didn’t know where it would go after that, but I figured I was going to find out whether I wanted to or not.
It was so cold that my body heat wasn’t melting the snow the way I or anyone would expect. You know what I mean. If not, let me give you this scenario: You walk through less than an inch of powdery white in your house slippers and socks when you grab the newspaper or mail down at the end of the driveway one morning, and on your way back the snow somehow makes its way into your slippers, and, oh shit, it’s melting. Now you’ve got wet socks, wet slippers, and it’s just so damn uncomfortable. Your morning’s ruined.
But let me tell you that’s not as uncomfortable—or unnatural—as when the snow doesn’t melt because it can’t melt and all you feel is the constant cold.
Like I was feeling. Numbness no longer existed or mattered; the freezing pain sliced through that with ease.
“Ready?” I asked everyone.
“No,” Eleanor said, “but let’s go.”
We did. Our next goal was the beach about a hundred feet away, down the slope and onto the sand, which was long gone, buried underneath the snow. As I stood on the edge of the land, the white still up to my waist, and looked out over the flat expanse of the lake, I thought to myself, the easy part was over, and that was just great.
“We’ll have to slide,” I said over the wind, my voice barely audible. With Stone on my back, I had to turn and lie on my stomach; the others didn’t. The snow got under my clothes and packed beneath my coat and shirts, icy against my belly. I eased us downward as best as I could, which wasn’t very good. I lost control about halfway, my boots slipping, and instead of shimmying we rolled, me crushing Stone and then Stone crushing me
for about five seconds. Five seconds that felt like an eternity, I should add. The snow lessened the blow, for the most part, but the hardness of the ice hurt. Pretty bad.
“Good going, Grady,” Stone said.
I swiped snow from my face and flung it away. “Sorry. And…ow.”
Eleanor and Mikey’s descent was much smoother. They both helped me stand again. When I looked down at my feet, I noticed the snow only came up to about my thighs down here. Still pretty high, but nowhere near as piled as it was by the house. But as we got closer to the lake, it grew taller again.
I stopped at its edge, where the tide should’ve been coming in, and looked out. The wind kicked up a bunch of white, creating a haze we could barely see the distant house through. I located the upper window, the one I’d seen the light coming from. It was still dark and this gave me another bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“No lamp,” Stone said, as if reading my mind. A telepathy reserved for best friends, the Two Musketeers.
“I know. You think it’s a bad omen?”
“Nah,” he said. “We all saw it last night when you woke us up.”
I looked at the window again. “Well, what do you think it means?” I was nervous we might’ve all been tricked, that our brains gave us what we wanted to see. Or…maybe it was the shadow things that had done it. Maybe they had projected that image of a bright lamp burning across the lake to get us out, to give us the courage to move on.
God, I hoped so. I really did, but the possibility of it seemed all too real.
On my left, Mikey snorted and said, “What do I think it means? I think it means whoever’s there is trying to save on their electricity bill.” He pointed up. “Sun’s out. Why would you need a light on now?”
“Kid has a point,” Stone said.
That eased my mind a little bit.
“Can w-we stop chatting and go on?” Eleanor said.
“Not yet,” I said. “I need a rock. Preferably a big one.” This wasn’t part of the plan but it was now. I wasn’t about to walk out on the frozen lake, get a few steps, and then sink to my icy death. I needed to test it. Finding a rock shouldn’t have proven to be a problem. The shore was littered with them. I remembered grabbing more than enough when we made our little fire in the sand on that doomed July 4th weekend, which felt like it so long ago now.
The Snow: A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel Page 10
