The wraiths showed her Sarge, her dog that had been dead for years, and though she had probably thought about him often, chances were she hadn’t spoken about him in a while. Not since the snow fell, at least. She was alone those two-ish weeks before we entered her life. She had no one to talk to, and she didn’t seem like someone who would talk to herself.
This meant the monsters were listening. But how? How could they hear anything over the constant howl of the wind? How could they hear anything through the walls?
It made no sense. Nothing did.
They maybe could’ve been able to read minds, sure, but that seemed outlandish to me. Yes, even after summer blizzards and the giant shadow spider and the rat queen. Even after the craziness I saw in Ed Hark and the man at the store.
Logic told me they couldn’t read minds because they’d know what we were up to. They’d know I was going to do this and that, and they’d plan accordingly.
And I’m still alive. Still here.
I didn’t count the possibility out completely. One thing this apocalypse has done is open my eyes to the impossible.
So I lay there in the dark, staring upward and not seeing anything. My own mind was whirling out of control. I thought of the wraiths, the rats, the snow, of Chewy, of our food situation, and of Eleanor. Always of her.
The kisses we shared drove me crazy. I wanted it again. I wanted her in my arms.
I got my wish an hour or so later.
The bedroom door was closed and the house sat in near complete silence. I heard the hallway floor creaking as someone crept my way.
My muscles went rigid with fear. Thoughts of the wraiths having read my thoughts about them reading my thoughts filled my head. So many thoughts, it was crazy.
I had no weapon readily available, but I sat up and prepared for a fight.
Relief came as soon as I saw the pale face and flowing auburn hair floating in the darkness. Her hair was so vibrant, it nearly glowed.
“Grady?” Eleanor whispered. She stepped inside. She wore loose sweatpants and a baggy hoodie. “Are you—?”
She noticed me on the edge of the bed. My hands were bunched into fists. I must’ve scared her because she took a step back.
“Sorry,” she began.
I smiled. “It’s okay.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“Nope.”
“Me, either,” she said. “Can I—?”
I shifted backwards and pulled the comforter over. “You don’t have to ask, Ell.”
She batted her eyelashes. Despite the dark, I thought I saw some color bloom on her cheeks. She crossed the room and sat next to me.
I thought: Screw it, I might be dead tomorrow, and I put my arm around her waist and pulled her close. She didn’t resist.
We lay side by side, staring into each other’s eyes for a moment.
I leaned in for a kiss; so did she.
I had never tasted anything sweeter.
That night was the best night of my life, and I wished it would never end.
But all good things come to an end, that night included.
No sun shone through the curtains and barricades, however. Outside was just blackness, pure and solid. If you stared out there and allowed your eyes to adjust, you’d start to make out the snow. It turned into a grayish landscape as far as you could see.
We went on for a week without a problem. We went on doing the same things we always did, which was mostly nothing.
The highlight of many of those days was when we all gathered around the tiny crank radio Helga owned. One of us scanned the channels slowly, hoping for something other than static and religious doomsayers. The doomsayers had stopped a couple weeks back. The static hadn’t.
We each leaned forward, our ears listening carefully for the slightest foreign sound. A snippet of a voice, music, a bell or a beep—anything besides the omnipresent static and silence.
After about forty-five minutes to an hour of this, we’d shut off the radio and go back to the business of doing nothing. Of waiting. Of sitting. Of acting like everything was okay.
We played cards and Trivial Pursuit (Stone always won both), and ate and talked. I even read some of the smutty romance books Helga had on her shelves. They were more entertaining to me than the nonfiction Calvin left behind. Those books were about the Civil War and Watergate, subjects I wasn’t particularly brushed up on, not since high school. A boring history teacher killed my desire for such topics many years ago. Eventually I’d crack Calv’s books open, but only when I ran out of the saucy romance stories.
The only positive was Ell and I growing closer. We started sleeping in the same bed, sharing our meals, just the two of us, and even reading the same romance novels.
I’d read a chapter, she’d read a chapter, and then we’d discuss it like a couple of nerds. A few times we even got Stone and Mikey to reenact some extra-dramatic scenes. It was quite a show. Helga about busted a rib laughing. Chewy was confused as to why Mikey was talking in a falsetto voice and wearing a shirt on his head in place of a long-haired wig.
Good times, good times.
Ell and I weren’t saying I love you or planning a wedding any time soon, but of all my past relationships, hers and mine felt different—stronger, more real.
It was on the eighth night back at the house that something happened.
Eleanor had gotten up to get a bottle of water. The house burned bright with lights. It wouldn’t save gas on the generators, but it would save our lives from the monsters outside.
At least, we thought so.
I lay in bed half-asleep, hoping Ell would be back soon. I missed her warmth. I’m not sure how much time passed, but her screaming fully woke me up. It eventually woke everyone else up, too.
I fell out of bed and bolted toward the sound of her voice.
She was in the kitchen. Over the sink was a small window with flowery curtains framing the glass, but since the snow fell, Helga had it boarded up. A cut of about two by two inches was in the wood, enough for you to peek into the backyard. When we first got here, I could make out the patio furniture and the grill, large white humps in the snow. Now they weren’t visible. Now they were completely buried.
I stopped in the kitchen doorway. The wood over the glass hung crookedly. One of the nails lay on the counter in a pool of blood. The blood belonged to Eleanor. She had ripped the board off with her bare fingers. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
At that moment, I knew Ell was a different person. I thought maybe the wraiths had gotten to her already.
“What is it, Ell?” I rushed over and wrapped my arms around her.
She trembled, and she wouldn’t answer with words. Instead, she pointed at the window.
There was the answer.
Long black fingers worked beneath the frame, wedging themselves under the wood, creating a small gap. At the end of the fingers were nails as sharp as blades. From the gap, the icy wind blew inside the kitchen. It was the coldest I’d ever felt.
I acted fast, pushing Eleanor out of the way and making for the stove. She was babbling words I couldn’t understand. If I could’ve understood them, I don’t think they would’ve even registered. My mind was in panic mode. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to find out what was on the other end of that shadowy arm.
At the stove, I turned the closest knob. It clicked-clicked-clicked for a few seconds that felt like an eternity before the spark caught and flames spouted from the burners.
The nearest flammable item was a half-used roll of paper towels. I grabbed it and held it against the burner. Fire engulfed it almost instantly. There was no time to waste once that happened. Paper burns fast. It ripped down the roll and toward my hand.
Near unbearable pain followed as large chunks of ash fell on my fingers. I bit my tongue and focused on the window. It wasn’t easy, I wanted nothing more than to drop the burning roll, but I knew if I didn’t stop the wraith before it got close enough to Eleanor or myself, things would become muc
h worse.
As soon as the burning paper towels were a few inches away from those long black fingers, they began to fade. I had never seen anything like it before, not even with the rats or the spider. It almost looked like the dark material of the hand turned into ash or grains of sand and, once caught in the wind, it scattered into nothing.
Fading, fading, fading…until it vanished completely.
My skin still pulsing with pain, I grabbed the window and jammed it down. It made a solid thunking noise as it closed, but I wasn’t satisfied. I scrambled for the bloody piece of board and wrenched it back into position. From there, I found the nail in the sink, slightly bent and also slick with Eleanor’s blood, and pounded it into the board with the base of Helga’s blender.
Then I turned back to Eleanor. She was pressed against the wall, hands clutching her throat, face as white as a sheet of paper. Something more than terror inhabited her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, only stared past me at the window.
“Eleanor, it’s over. It’s gone.” I took her hand and pulled her to me. Her body was stiff as I pressed her against my chest, hugging her. “It’s gone.”
Stone crutched into the doorway, leaned on the jamb. He rubbed his eyes and spoke in a sleep-heavy voice. “What the fuck’s going on? What’s burning?”
I had no answer; I barely had any words at all.
After a few moments of trying to get myself back under control, I said, “One of those things almost got in.”
“What?” Stone was wide awake now. “How? We have lights on all over the place—” It was then Stone surveyed the kitchen. Aside from the fire on the stovetop, no other lights burned.
Eleanor suddenly said, “I turned the lamps off. I don’t remember doing it, but I know I did.” She shook her head, swallowed loudly. “That thing outside told me to, and I…I listened to it.”
I placed my hand on the small of her back. “It’s okay. We’re okay. Don’t worry about it.”
“How could it do that?” Stone said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Helga said the same thing. Something’s happening. The wraiths, they’re getting smarter. We have to be even more careful than before.” I took a deep breath, exhaled. “But we’re fine for now. We got it under control.”
Though I said it, I didn’t exactly feel this way. This was my attempt at being levelheaded.
Stone saw right through it, I could tell, but he kept quiet. For Eleanor’s sake.
Besides, as it turned out, I was wrong.
A few seconds after I spoke those words, I heard a loud but muted clank, and all the power in the house went out.
I turned to Stone, and we both said the same thing:
“The generator.”
7
Burn
I bounded down the basement steps, running on pure adrenaline. Stone followed.
At the foot of the stairs, I waited for him. I held the flashlight toward his feet so he could see.
“Don’t have to wait on me,” he grumbled.
“I don’t wanna go any farther all alone, man.”
“Fair enough.”
Once he was with me we went onward through the twisty basement hallway. I was in the lead, and when I turned the corner I slammed into something. The sound of Mikey’s voice filled me with relief. I thought I had come into contact with one of the wraiths. If I had, if I’d touched it—well, that would’ve been a bad deal.
“Ow! Shit!” Mikey shouted.
“Mikey, what’s going on?” I reached down, grabbed a handful of his shirt, and pulled him up. “What happened to the generator? What are you doing down here?”
Mikey stuttered, trying to get the words out. I almost slapped him the way they did in movies to get him back under control. Actually, I think I was the one who needed slapping, not Mikey.
He looked at me. “I…I don’t know. One second I was dreaming about my mom, and now I’m here.”
A strong scent of gasoline wafted from his clothes. In my head I knew what had happened, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself, nor did I want to see it firsthand. Taking Mikey’s arm, I led him toward the stairs and told him to go wait with Eleanor in the kitchen. He did as I said, and a few seconds later I heard Ell’s distraught voice.
“Mikey? What are you doing?” A pause. “Is that gasoline?”
“I think so…I don’t know,” answered Mikey, sounding ashamed.
I went back to Stone, and we continued on to the room the generator was hooked up in.
Usually, the generator let off a constant thrumming sound that I found soothing. It didn’t anymore. With the sound’s absence I felt anything but soothed. Stone and me wound our way through the hall cautiously. I kept thinking something might pop out at us, like in a Halloween haunted house attraction. Those were fun; this was not.
In the stillness, I not only heard my heart thundering against my chest, but I thought I heard Stone’s, too. The darkness was terrifying and the confined space of the corridor was even worse.
I shined the light in the room and saw the damage to the generator. Everything good that had happened to me, to us, over the last few days deflated in an instant.
The generator, Helga told me, was a large inverter, whatever that meant, and it had cost about five grand. Five grand would’ve seemed a ridiculous price before the blizzards, but the me of now was grateful for this little red box on wheels. Besides knowing that Honda made it, the only other thing I knew was as long as we fed it gasoline the little red box powered almost everything in the house. We would’ve been icicles weeks ago without it.
“Shit, Grady,” Stone whispered. “That doesn’t look fixable.”
My hand shook and the beam wavered. Stone hit it right on the money; it certainly didn’t look fixable. The axe Mikey had been using to chop wood when we came back a few days ago stuck out of the top of it. The casing was broken. Cords dangled from the gash like guts from an eviscerated corpse, which was what the generator was now, right? A corpse. No way we’d get it running again.
Stone crutched closer to it.
I pointed at the floor. “Careful.” My light glimmered on the shiny puddle of gas that had leaked from the generator.
Stone navigated around it. He grabbed the axe and, with a grunt, gave it a yank. It didn’t budge. “Yeah, that’s in there pretty good. What the fuck is going on?”
“They’re getting in our heads,” I said.
“I got that, but do they give us super strength, too?” Stone snorted. “A pipsqueak like Mikey couldn’t do this.”
“He was chopping wood just last week.”
“Shit, I can chop wood and I’m half-crippled.” He patted the generator. It made a noise that echoed all through the basement. For some reason, it reminded me of an undertaker slapping the top of a casket. This here’s our best one! You wouldn’t wanna spend eternity in anything else! That thought mixed with the cold brought a chill down my back.
“I’m just saying,” Stone continued, “look at how deep the axe is buried. It’s like he’s on steroids.”
“How are they doing it?” I wondered aloud. “How are they getting in our heads and telling us what to do?”
“Maybe they aren’t.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “You think Mikey did this on his own? Ell, too?”
Stone shrugged innocently. “I’m just saying, he hasn’t really taken a liking to us. I mean, you did kill his dad, Grady.”
“I had to.”
“I know that. But I don’t know if he knows that. And can you blame him?”
“What about Ell? She likes me—”
“Oh, I know that, too.” Stone winked. “A house becomes pretty quiet when they’re ain’t nothing to do but read and sit around. Squeaky bedsprings, Grady, squeaky bedsprings.” He chuckled and patted me on a shoulder.
My face burned with embarrassment.
“Relax, buddy. You’re both adults. It’s your business.”
How he could be calm at a time like this, I didn’t know, but I say that a lot about Stone. That was just him. He had his occasional outburst or depressive state, sure, but even in the face of death, he cracked jokes and laughed. That was just a coping mechanism, a way to remind you it wasn’t all bad, even when it was.
I changed the subject back to the more pertinent generator. “Well, if this is fucked, what are we gonna do?”
Stone shrugged again. “I don’t know. Go out and get another one. That is, if the cold hasn’t made ‘em useless. I doubt there’s any Home Depots or Lowe’s around here, either. And Amazon certainly isn’t doing their two-day Prime deliveries anymore.”
“Damn it.”
“You know what we have to do,” Stone said seriously.
I nodded. I did know, but I wasn’t ready to leave. I wasn’t ready to go back out in the snow and the cold and the dark. I wasn’t ready to fight shadow rats and crazy people. Hell, maybe death wouldn’t be so bad after all. At least I’d finally get some much-needed rest.
“That ski resort is, what, a few miles away?” Stone said. “Hell of a lot farther than the grocery store.”
“And that felt like we were traveling for years.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
The thought of the cold motivated me to kneel down and take another look at the generator. I rounded to the back of it, and saw that Mikey hadn’t skipped any steps. He must’ve hacked up the power cables with the axe before he buried it in the unit. I grabbed half of one and held it in the light.
“Yeah,” Stone said, “no fixing that.”
I was about to voice my disappointment, but a scream from above us cut me off.
It was Helga.
Stone and I looked at each other for a moment, both surprised, both scared, then we headed upstairs. I hung back to help him, but he waved me off. “Go,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I caught up to Eleanor and Mikey, who already were halfway to the second floor, Chewy at their heels.
I grabbed the back of Ell’s shirt. She stopped, turned toward me. “Go get some bug spray and a lighter,” I told her, then to Mikey: “You follow me.”
Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter Page 9
