I knew I couldn’t tell Eleanor to sit this one out. She wouldn’t listen if I had, but I could delay her plunge into danger, and that was better than nothing.
Ell nodded and went down the stairs, Chewy deciding he’d rather go with her than stay with us.
Mikey and I pushed on.
Helga’s door was closed all the way. I tried the knob, rattled and turned it with no luck. It was locked.
“Helga!” I shouted. “Open up!”
No answer.
I threw my shoulder into the door. It hurt, but I barely noticed the pain. I would later, I thought, if I got through this.
Taking a few steps back and steeling myself, I prepared to kick the door. I only had slippers on, so I knew this was going to hurt even worse. In drastic times you had to do what you had to do.
My foot slammed into the wood. The hinges shrieked almost as loud as the wind, but it still didn’t budge.
Helga kept screaming, and that was good. If she stopped, I figured it meant she was dead.
“I’ll be right back,” Mikey said, and he left.
I kicked once more. My heel felt like it shattered. No ignoring that pain. I tried again and again, but I wasn’t strong enough. I could’ve used that axe currently buried in the generator.
A few seconds later, Mikey appeared at my side.
“Watch out,” he said.
“What?” I couldn’t see what he held, it was too dark, but I sure as hell heard it. The gun’s muzzle exploded, the flash of light like a supernova in the hallway’s darkness. My eardrums felt like my heel—shattered. A high-pitched ringing echoed around my head. “Fuck!” I said. Or I thought I did, but I couldn’t hear myself.
The knob fell on the floor with a clang that cut through the ringing. I threw my shoulder into the door for the last time and it gave.
I expected to be rebounded back, but instead, I went right through and almost lost my balance. Thank God I stopped. Otherwise, I would’ve gone into the black thing hanging in the air.
Glass crunched beneath my feet as I regained my balance. I looked down and saw Helga’s lamp there, broken into a bunch of tiny pieces. When had that happened?
Despite this sudden entrance, the vague shadow shape hadn’t taken notice of us. Not yet.
“Helga!” I shouted. She knelt on the floor by the open window. The gray snow lay beyond, a gloomy backdrop to this horrible experience. Wind burst in, whipping the curtains hard enough for the rod to rattle.
“Helga, look at me!”
She ignored my voice, her arms outstretched, entranced by whatever the wraith wanted her to see. Screaming then stopping; screaming then stopping.
My shouts grabbed the monster’s attention.
I barely saw it. Though it was dark and I thought I was looking right at it, it seemed to float in the corner of my eye, almost like it wasn’t there at all. Really, I felt it focus on me more than I saw it do so—at least in that moment. I felt its cold, its malice, its hunger for death.
I blinked and when I opened my eyes I saw no shadow anymore. I saw a haggard old man. His skin was corpse-blue and wrinkled, hanging off his bones like dough. He wore a white smock and dark pants. The stench of his breath wafted toward me. It smelled of coffee and stale cigarettes.
“Grady, my boy, come here.”
The ghostly apparition curled one finger in front of his face, flashing his yellow teeth in a smile.
“You’ll just feel a tiny pinch, I promise.”
This ghostly man opened a box of buried memories I’d forgotten about. I was no longer in my late twenties; now I was a five-year-old boy at the doctor’s office, my dad telling me it was going to be all right, that it wouldn’t be as bad as it seemed, and me shaking my head, crying, scared out of my ever-loving mind.
I have never been a fan of needles, I believe I’ve mentioned this before, and that’s all thanks to a particularly bad experience I had as a child. The experience in question involved getting some kind of booster shot. That was bad enough, but I’d suffered an allergic reaction to it, where my shoulder turned green-purple and I couldn’t raise my arm higher than my head. It wasn’t terribly serious, but that sort of thing at that young of an age left a bad taste in my mouth.
The wraith somehow knew this.
The ghostly man’s hand fished in his smock’s breast pocket. I stood there in stunned silence as he pulled out a syringe with a needle as long as my forearm, the way the needle had looked to five-year-old me.
“Won’t hurt at all. And after we’re done, you can have a lick of my lollipop!”
The doctor chuckled, advancing. He walked with a zombie-like gait. Each step brought more of the apparition’s unnatural cold closer.
I froze, unable to move, unable to scream.
Far away, I heard Mikey’s voice. I wasn’t sure what he was saying because I barely heard him. It was as if I was sitting at the bottom of a pool while he shouted at me from the high-dive.
Other voices joined in: Stone and Eleanor and even Chewy’s barks.
As much as I tried to turn toward them, I couldn’t. The wraith’s spell was nearly unbreakable.
Nearly.
A sudden burst of light snapped me back into reality, and the old man began melting before my eyes. Flesh dripped from his bones, and his face contorted into a liquefied nightmare. Then he disappeared.
Eleanor grabbed under my arms and pulled me up. “We have to go,” she said.
“Helga!” I shouted, pulling away from her as a stream of fire passed inches away from the side of my face. Stone stood in my peripheral vision, using the bug spray and the lighter to create blinding light and dangerous but wonderful heat.
I heard a screeching sound—a mixture of a scream and wicked laughter. In that irrational moment, all I could think was that the sound belonged to the devil himself.
Now that some time has passed since that night, I know it came from the wraith. But was I far off in my thinking? Was there much of a difference between the wraiths and Satan? No, I don’t think so.
Mikey and I reached Helga as Stone drove the wraith out of the room. In the corner of my eye, where that black shape hung, I saw it fading, turning to ash the way the hand in the kitchen window had.
We were winning. We were going to get out of this.
But my optimism was crushed when Helga turned around, her haunted face in full view.
If you’ve ever seen a zombie movie or cracked open a novel or comic about the living dead (and who hasn’t?), then you know getting bitten is virtually a death sentence. When a zombie takes a chunk out of a loved one, there’s always a character who thinks they can save them, who thinks maybe things will be different for their wife or their husband or their mother or their father. Maybe they can survive.
We, as the audience, know that’s utter bullshit. One of two things is going to happen to the newly infected character. They are either going to turn into a mindless, flesh-craving monster, or they are going to be put out of their misery before such a thing can happen, and the person who pulls the trigger is always the one who loves the victim the most.
After that, the story goes on. It’s called a trope, and that particular trope happened so often in zombie-related media that we, the audience, sometimes rolled our eyes when it did.
It’s easy for us to think to ourselves—or in Stone’s case, shout at the screen—“What are you waiting for? Shoot ‘em! Put ‘em outta their misery!” It’s easy for us because it’s just a movie, just a book, just a comic.
It’s not real.
But what happened to Helga wasn’t fiction. It was real, and it was her life.
When she looked up at me, I knew her death warrant had been signed.
Her eyes were lifeless, fogged over with a grayish-white haze that resembled the snow outside; her lips were frozen in a terrified grin, teeth bared; and worst of all, a jagged black mark ran down her forehead between her eyes, stopping just above the bridge of her nose. I had seen the same black mark on Ed Hark
and the man who attacked me at the store in town. I had seen firsthand what the mark did to people, and the thought of Helga becoming a violent beast filled me with a dread I’d only felt when I first saw a gut-shot Jonas bleeding out on the Harks’ kitchen floor.
Mikey held one of Helga’s hands. He was sobbing softly. I held the other, her flesh so cold against my fingers it burned.
Audience logic had left me, replaced by the muddled logic of a fictional character. I thought not of putting Helga out of her misery, but of saving her. I wanted to get her away from the monsters and help her return to normal.
Deep down, I knew it was impossible, but untethered emotions cast away my already weak voice of sensibility.
“Come on, help me get her up,” I told Mikey.
Behind us, the jet of flames stopped, and Stone said, “Fuck—what’s going on?” I heard him shake the can of bug spray and strike the lighter again. “It’s out.”
Chewy barked from downstairs, and I wondered what he was barking at. What terrors had entered the first floor?
As Mikey and I stood Helga up, I caught a glimpse through the open window.
They waited in the snow, those shadowy shapes, going against the natural order of the world. So many, they merged into a large, single blot. So many, I couldn’t count them all. They advanced in the slow, confident way of someone who knew they were going to get what they wanted.
Eleanor screamed. I jerked my head in her direction. She was standing in the doorway, pointing behind me. I turned back. Three large red snakes were slithering over the windowsill, forked black tongues dancing between their venom-dripping fangs. Their eyes were the same orange-red the rats’ had been.
With one of Helga’s arms draped around each of our shoulders, we left the room, ushering the others out with us. I stopped and turned to close the door.
The snakes each raised, their heads nearly brushing the eight-foot high ceiling. They hissed in a chorus, ready to strike. I reached for the knob, grabbed it, and slammed it closed just as the snakes attacked.
The force of the hit broke through the wood, sending splinters flying and me falling on my ass. Luckily Mikey held Helga by himself. I scrambled to my feet, which wasn’t easy thanks to the hallway runner slipping beneath me, and helped Mikey again.
Stone and Eleanor were a few yards ahead, waving us forward.
“Go!” I shouted. “Don’t wait! Go and get more spray!”
A snake head burst through the wood. The cold coming off it reached us before the snake did, thank God.
Somehow I managed to speed up. It’s amazing what fear can do to a person. We hit the steps, then the foyer, and turned into the kitchen, the apparitions right behind us.
“Duck!” Eleanor said, raising a can of bug spray and a lighter in front of her face.
Mikey and I hit the floor, dragging Helga down with us. Chewy was frantically dashing around the linoleum, confused and terrified as hell. I wished I could’ve comforted him.
Flames erupted from Ell’s hands like magic, lighting away the darkness. The snakes shrieked in pain as the fire hit them and drove them backward.
“She all right?” Stone was saying to me on the floor. Helga’s head lolled, and her eyes were still covered by the grayish-white haze. I thought the black mark on her brow looked like it had faded, but I knew that was just wishful thinking.
I shook my head at Stone. I couldn’t talk right then. My jaw felt frozen; the act of moving it would surely be painful as hell.
“Fuck,” Stone said. “What about you guys?”
“I’m okay,” Mikey said. “I think so.”
Eleanor came over to us. In the dim beam of Stone’s flashlight, I saw the gleam of tears falling down her cheeks. “It’s gone,” she said, “but there’s more outside.”
“Not for long,” Stone said. “That window upstairs is open.”
“We have to go,” I managed. “We have to go now. Staying here is a death trap.”
“Going outside is a death trap,” Mikey said.
“Without light and heat, and now with an opening…” I said. I shook my head.
“They’ve surrounded the house,” Stone said. “I saw them out the window. There were so many. I don’t even know how many.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, flashlight beam jumping all over with the movement. “Fuck, man.”
Just then, Helga murmured something. We all snapped our attention to her.
“What, Helga?” Eleanor said hopefully.
Helga cleared her throat. I saw a hint of her old self beneath the haze of her eyes. Maybe there was hope for her yet. That’s the thought that crossed my mind when I looked into her face—but a few seconds later, that new hope shattered.
“Did you hear that?” Mikey asked.
From deep within Chewy’s chest a menacing growl rumbled.
“What the hell was it?” Mikey continued in a horrified voice. “They can’t be coming in, can they? They’re not real things. They’re just shadows!”
The sounds from above said otherwise. Snapping wood and shattering glass.
I heard it, as did the others.
More wraiths were inside, and they were bringing their friends.
“Everyone grab spray and a lighter,” I said.
The others made for the supply on the dining room table, leaving me with Helga in the kitchen.
“Grab as much warm clothing as you can,” I continued. In my head, I was planning our escape route. “Blankets, jackets, hats. Hell, if nothing else, rip the curtains from the rods!”
Where the hell are we gonna go? I thought.
Helga’s lips were moving, her lungs expelling air, but no words were forming. She was going through some kind of transformation. I had never seen it before, had only seen the results of the transformation. Struggling, she reached up and gripped my hand with claw-like fingers.
“Grady,” she moaned.
“It’s okay. Stay with me, Helga.”
I couldn’t help reminding myself of the conversation we shared just days ago, after we groomed Chewy. I told her it was going to be okay, that we were going to weather this storm. I was wrong.
God, I was so wrong.
“I’m—I’m going, Grady,” she said. Her eyes flickered, went fuzzy like a scrambled TV channel. “It got me. And—and—and I’m a danger to—” Her body jerked, and the tendons in her neck stood out like wiry cables as she fought whatever coursed through her veins. “Leave m-m-me here and I’ll d-d-do what has to be d-duh-done…”
“I can’t leave you, Helga,” I said. “You’re family.”
She tried to twist her pain-contorted face into something resembling a smile. “T-Thank y-you.”
“Grady! Let’s go!” Stone shouted from the hall leading to the front door.
Just then I heard a deep, menacing roar. To this day, I still don’t know the source of that terrible sound, but it’s haunting. And if I didn’t get up and get moving, it would’ve killed me.
So I rose. The others came back to help, but as my eyes focused on them, Helga screamed. Then, with more strength than someone her size and in her state should’ve possessed, she knocked me halfway across the kitchen floor. I hit the refrigerator hard, colliding with cold metal.
“GO!” Helga shouted, pulling herself up and standing on wobbly legs. The black line on her forehead pulsed and squirmed like a living thing. Her eyes were no longer TV static but matched the color of the line. “GET OUT! I CAN’T FIGHT IT MUCH LONGER!”
Eleanor ran over to me as I watched Helga draw a knife from the sink and jerk it above her head. She moved like a puppet controlled by a drunken master.
Screaming, Helga lunged toward us.
I cringed, expecting to feel the blade tear through my flesh, but at the apex of her downward thrust, her body went rigid and the weapon fell.
“GO! GO!” she bellowed in a voice that wasn’t quite hers.
Stone shouted, “Come on—ah, fuck!”
I heard the spouting fire from
the bug spray flamethrower and saw an orange glow out of the corner of my eye. A second later, one of the wraiths screeched as it was reduced to ash.
Eleanor and I got moving.
I took one last look at Helga as she fought the murderous rage taking over her mind and body, and a deep sadness stole through my fear. That look, however, didn’t last long. Eleanor was dragging me toward the front door.
“Oh, Grady!” shouted the same old man I’d seen earlier, the nightmare doctor of my past. “You don’t get to taste my lollipop without getting poked first…”
A chorus of hissing came from the snakes.
I saw other terrors as we fled, too. A clown with long, sharp teeth; some sort of science-fiction monster I can’t even accurately describe; a middle-aged woman in a bloody smock with a rolling pin in one hand; a wriggling shark; a ghost; and even the dead boy who had so viciously haunted me in the months leading up to the end of the world.
It was a veritable smorgasbord of things that scared each and every one of us, yet we never stopped.
We kept going until we forced the front door open, which proved more than difficult against the weight of the freshest snow (despite shoveling a path whenever the sun allowed).
Outside, more black figures hovered at the corners of our vision, waiting for their prey…waiting for us.
It seemed we were trapped. It seemed there was nowhere to go.
I thought to hell with rolling over and letting these abominations win so easily.
We weren’t going down without a fight.
I snatched Eleanor’s bug spray and lighter from her back pocket, and I began shooting fire into the dark, snowy night.
The closest wraiths retreated, but they were far enough away to not be affected by the light. I plunged onward through the snow in nothing but my sweatpants and hoodie and slippers. No coat, no hat, no boots, and no gloves, I had already begun to lose feeling in my limbs. To hell with that stopping me, too.
I didn’t care. I was terrified and determined to get the others to safety; but above all else, I was pissed. Pissed these things thought they had a right to take my life, to hurt my family, to force us to live in fear.
Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter Page 10
