Storm Front

by Robert Conroy

  Wally again paused to let that sink in. Hopefully. Some people were such complete and stubborn asses. “Please, use your heads and not your emotions. Stay put. For those listening on your car radio to our FM affiliate, you may already be in great danger. If there are open buildings nearby, leave your vehicles and get to them as soon as you can before the snow gets even deeper and more dangerous. If you stay in your car, you run the risk of freezing to death before the roads are reopened. If you insist on staying in your vehicle, only run your engine intermittently and then with the car windows opened a crack. If you don’t, you could suffocate. Bear in mind that your exhaust pipe may already be filled with snow. Like I said, your best bet is to get out of your car and into some other shelter.”

  An intern handed him a sheet of paper. He read the contents and nodded. “Here’s something else to consider. Check the pipes that are the outside vents for your furnaces. If this snow gets much deeper, they might get covered. If that happens, carbon monoxide could back up and into your houses and that would be very dangerous.”

  Wally signed off and looked at his producer. The two men were shocked by the intensity of the snowfall. The normally loquacious Wally Wellman, star of TV6, really had nothing further to say.

  * * *

  Two adults and three kids in a car, even a large mini-van, was a recipe for disaster, especially if the car wasn’t going anyplace.

  “I wanna go home,” complained Milly, the middle child. She was seven. John was nine and little Amy was two. She was asleep, which was a blessing. Awake, she’d be trying to destroy the car and anyone in it. The term “Terrible Twos” must have been coined with her in mind, her parents thought.

  Phil and Debbie Stiles had been taking the two older kids to school. Normally Debbie did the job, but she and Phil had the day off and decided a change in routine would be fun. After getting rid of the two older kids and dropping Amy at day care, Phil and Debbie would shop, have lunch, go home, and see about making another little Stiles. It’d been a while since they’d had any real privacy, and Phil had almost forgotten what Deb looked like naked.

  But the sudden, heavy snow had been a very unpleasant surprise. They were on northbound MacArthur and not much was happening. The snow was falling heavily and he had to keep using the wipers and defrosters to see anything at all. As it was, the car in front was a white blob.

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while,” he finally admitted.

  “What should we do?” Deb asked. There was a note of concern in her voice. People in their social and economic circles rarely felt helpless, yet that was exactly what they felt and neither she nor Phil liked it.

  Phil admitted that he had no idea and that was upsetting. He always had ideas and he always felt that he was in control. “I suppose we should sit here until traffic clears.” Sometimes he thought he could see police flashers in front, but he didn’t know what they meant. Maybe they meant that traffic would move when whatever was holding them up got cleared out. If that didn’t happen soon, the snow would be too deep for the car to handle, four-wheel drive or not.

  “I don’t know if I like that idea.” Deb said.

  “Well, you want to get out and walk somewhere with these kids? I don’t like abandoning the car, either.”

  She admitted he had a point and they settled down to do nothing. Walking was not an option. For one thing, they hadn’t dressed for the weather. They had no boots or heavy clothing. Hey, they were just going for a short drive in their own town, weren’t they?

  Phil turned off the ignition, but it quickly got cold, so he turned it on again. However, that was dangerous, so he kept the window cracked open. He decided he would run the motor for a while, turn it off, and keep repeating the process. It should keep everyone warm enough, and conserve fuel. He had a little more than half a tank. He hadn’t had the radio on. Instead, they’d been listening to a CD. He and Deb always found the news depressing.

  Turning the engine on and off was a good idea, but he couldn’t see under the car where the rapidly accumulating snow covered the exhaust and blocked it when he turned off the ignition.

  Phil began to get sleepy. A blast of snow came through the window and hit him on the face, reviving him for only a moment. He closed the window, unaware that Deb had closed the one on the other side. He yawned and closed his eyes. He needed a rest.

  * * *

  “Hi Mike, it’s me. Try and guess where I am and what I’m doing.”

  Inside the police station, Mike grinned into his cell phone, happy to hear a voice that was more than friendly. Hers was a calming sound in a world that was getting more and more dangerous with each moment and not just because of the weather. He was about to embark on a job that had the potential to be incredibly dangerous. He needed a light moment.

  “Let me guess, Maddy. You’re at school with a couple of hundred antsy kids who are going nuts ’cause they can’t leave.”

  “Close, but not close enough,” Maddy said. “I’m in the furnace room in my underwear, and I’m trying to warm up and dry out.”

  “Is there a reason for this, or is it something you’ve always wanted to do? And if the maintenance man is in there with you, our budding relationship has just taken a big turn for the worse.”

  Maddy laughed. It was good to hear his voice, too. She rarely called him at work and he had little opportunity to contact her, but today was a different story.

  After putting on her coat and boots, she told him, she’d gotten a list of things the others wanted from their cars. The list included important stuff like food, cell phones and medications and low priority items like books.

  “Like a fool, I agreed to get them,” she said. Mike laughingly agreed with her assessment.

  She had made it to her own car without too much trouble. Lots of effort, yes, but no real trouble. She was the youngest, fittest, and most athletic teacher there, which made her the likely choice to go scrounging.

  Then she’d gone on to other cars where she’d filled some bags with phones, boots, and all sorts of cold weather gear and whatever food that was in them. The food consisted mainly of potato chips and granola bars, which wouldn’t satisfy hundreds of kids.

  Thus, she’d been heavily laden down with awkward parcels as she pushed her way through the snow and back to the school.

  “I was doing so well until I stumbled over one of the parking bumpers. I fell flat on my face and all the crap I’d been carrying went all over the place.”

  “You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  “No, and thanks for asking. Only my pride suffered. I must’ve looked like an idiot. Someone with a video camera could’ve made a fortune showing it on America’s Dumbest Teacher Tricks. However, I then spent the next several minutes trying to gather up what I’d lost. I was already wet from the falling snow, and now I was up to my elbows in it. It took a while, but I got just about everything and headed to school. I almost made it.”

  Mike was trying hard not to laugh again. “Almost?”

  “I tripped over a bike rack.”

  Mike couldn’t contain himself. He doubled over and pounded his desk. It felt so good to back off from the horrors that were developing. “Jesus, I wish I’d been there.”

  Despite herself, Maddy laughed along with him. “Yeah. Me, little Miss Big Ten Volleyball Jock, couldn’t even stand up without falling down. I was right outside the door, so Donna and Frieda came out to help me. When I finally got in, I was soaked and freezing. Thus, I am now in bra and panties and sitting as close to the furnace as I can without burning my butt off while my clothes dry. And I’m alone, by the way.”

  Across town, Mike smiled into the phone. Talking to Maddy was a bright and welcome break in a grim world that was getting worse real quickly. Without any of their normal resources or backup from other communities, the Sheridan police were planning a raid on the two men suspected of murder who, according to the motel manager, were still registered in rooms at the Sheridan Motor Inn. Maddy’s voice was
a beacon of light in an otherwise miserable day, one that might just turn incredibly dangerous and ugly.

  “Maddy, will you do me a favor?” he asked sweetly.

  “What?”

  He began breathing with mock heaviness. “Describe your bra and panties?”

  She giggled. They were what she referred to as “industrial strength” and not something from Victoria’s Secret. She whispered into the phone, “If you’re so damn curious, come and see them yourself.”

  Yeah, he thought after hanging up. Right after we take down two killers.

  * * *

  Six officers led by Sgt. Patti Hughes made it to the Sheridan Motor Inn on snowmobiles. Mike was one of them. Sheridan didn’t have a SWAT team or anything like it, although they had a lot of weapons and other equipment thanks to Federal government largesse. It had come from Homeland Security following the 9/11 attacks. Nothing big had come up in years to require a SWAT team. Had something occurred, they would have called in the county sheriff or the Michigan State Police for help. They did not have that luxury this time. Sheridan’s depleted police force was on its own. If the two murderers—alleged murderers, he corrected himself even though he knew damn well they were as guilty as sin—were still at the motel, they had to be stopped.

  Mike was on the team because he had volunteered, and because his four years in Detroit qualified him as a combat veteran, even though he’d never pulled his gun, much less shot at anybody. Now, covered with snow and sneaking in the back entrance to the motel, he wondered about his sanity. They had Kevlar helmets and bulletproof vests that made them look dangerous, but they were far from being a well-trained unit.

  The trip to the motel had been slow and had its own dangers. The snow was blinding, forcing them to drive their snowmobiles extremely slowly. They had to wind their way around large snow mounds that were cars and smaller ones that could have hidden thick shrubs or decorative rocks. Hitting one of them could easily disable a vehicle and possibly injure a rider. Visibility was so bad that Hughes was depending on GPS to get them to the motel.

  When they arrived, they found the manager pale and shaken. He managed to pull himself together and confirm that two men had registered using the credit card of a man now known to have been murdered. He added that they were in a small suite on the second floor. He also said that the second floor was virtually empty because traffic had delayed arrivals. The men had pre-paid with a Visa card, so there was no guarantee that they hadn’t left, except for the fact that their car was still in the parking lot. Mike wondered just how the manager could tell that with all the vehicles covered with snow, but was then told that the guests had assigned spaces, which made it fairly easy to keep track of things. There was closed-circuit television for the hallway showing that it was empty. Hughes actually asked the manager if there were hidden cameras in the rooms and the poor guy was shocked by the question.

  He vehemently denied it. “We’re not that kind of place, Officer.”

  Too bad, Mike thought. Just once it would be nice to have somebody break the law and have it be helpful. He asked for and was promised tape of the hallway for the last couple of days.

  The suites on either side of their targets were vacant, which was also a blessing. After confirming that there were no maintenance passageways that could secretly lead police to the suspects’ suite, the task force broke into two groups. Hughes, Mike and two other officers moved to a suite with a door that adjoined the suspects’, while the others waited at the other end of the hallway, effectively sealing it. If the bad guys tried to exit their room, Hughes hoped she had set up a decent ambush. Mike thought it looked like the cops could get caught in a crossfire, but Hughes just shrugged and said there weren’t any really good choices. Her real fear was that, despite the manager’s assurances that the two suspects weren’t in the lounge or anywhere else, they would unexpectedly show up in the cops’ rear. Again, what could they do with their limited manpower? These guys were killers and they had to be taken down.

  They’d made it to the adjacent suite without difficulty. Once inside, they listened carefully for any noise from the next-door suite. They heard nothing. Hughes put a listening device that resembled a high-tech stethoscope against the door that adjoined the suspects’ suite.

  “Not a sound,” she muttered softly. “This thing is sensitive enough that I should hear someone breathing. They may have gone, damn it.”

  No one wanted to think too long about that possibility. These guys were killers and the police did not want them running around the community. Of course, they weren’t all that crazy about confronting them in a crowded motel room, either.

  Hughes slid a threadlike fiber-optic cable under the connecting doorway. The interior of the other room showed on a monitor. The clarity of the picture was astonishing. She moved the cable like a snake and showed still more.

  Mike stood behind her looking at the monitor. He caught something in the corner of the screen. “The bathroom,” he snapped. “Go there.”

  The cable wasn’t long enough to actually go into the bathroom, but it did show part of the shower-tub combination. A shoeless human foot was visible. The toes pointed downward, an impossible situation for someone taking a bath. The foot wore a sock.

  Now they were confident no living thing was in the suite. They unlocked the connecting door and rushed in, guns ready in case they were wrong. The suite was empty. But there were two dead bodies in the tub, lying in a pond of congealing blood.

  Detective Hughes got the manager. His memory was good. From the description, he gave them names, Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg from Cleveland, and a room number. He then ran down the hallway and threw up. They repeated the careful process of clearing the Kelloggs’ room, where they found plundered luggage and the identification belonging to Mrs. Kellogg, but no murderers.

  “Why did they kill them?” Hughes asked. She was pale and shaken by the discovery of the butchered bodies and Mike suspected he looked the same way. “And why were the Kelloggs in the bad guys’ room in the first place?” Mike wished he was smart enough to know. The Kelloggs had been butchered like hogs. No, he thought, even hogs were treated better. The two guys who’d butchered them were monsters.

  Mike had a thought. He dashed downstairs and grabbed the manager. “Where are the Kelloggs parked?”

  The manager pointed out the window to a snow-covered truck one floor down and on the other side of the narrow lot. The bed of the truck looked empty. Mike had a sick and empty feeling. He turned to Hughes and saw the same thing mirrored on her face.

  “The Kelloggs had snowmobiles, didn’t they?” she asked. The manager nodded dumbly. Now it made sense. They had been murdered for transportation. Along with everything else, a pair of serial killers might now be roaming Sheridan.

  * * *

  “Surprise, surprise,” proclaimed Donna Harris. “We’ve gotten rid of more than half the students.”

  “Now ditch the other half,” Maddy laughed, even though she accepted the reality that only a few more would be going anytime soon. Her clothes had dried quickly and she had left the furnace room. “What I would really like is a comfortable place to sit.” There was one couch in the entire building and it was in the teachers’ lounge. It looked as if those left in the school would be sleeping on the floor. Already some students had curled up on gym mats.

  That so many kids had departed truly was a real surprise. Donna wasn’t going to release students unless they were in the company of a parent or other adult who was registered at the school as a guardian. Even those kids who lived close enough to walk on normal days were kept in. It was too easy to get lost in the blinding snow. Some complained, but she ignored them, while other kids thought it was a lark. Wait a while, Maddy thought. Wait until they realize that Mommy and Daddy aren’t coming for them. They might be dealing with scores of sobbing little ones and maybe some that weren’t so little as night fell and they realized they were going to be sleeping at a school.

  There’d been a steady tri
ckle of adults using snowmobiles, cross-country skis, or even snowshoes arriving and taking their children. Donna wasn’t comfortable with all the arrangements, but parents were parents and she couldn’t veto them directly, especially when they showed up in person. She insisted they call her when they got home and most had understood her concerns and complied. Those who didn’t got a terse call from her after an appropriate length of time. At this point, Donna didn’t care if she pissed them off or not.

  Donna Harris had other pressing concerns. Food and toilet paper were the two major ones. As long as the electricity stayed on, the furnace would run, so heat would not be a problem. Water would not be a problem, either. But food and toilet paper would be major issues if they had to stay overlong. There was also the possibility the ladies room would run out of sanitary napkins, which would really be a problem.

  Donna had sent Mr. Craft, the maintenance man, to inventory and secure all the toilet paper they could find. With still more than a hundred students and a dozen adults remaining in Patton Elementary, rationing was likely. A multitude of bad jokes were made, generally about recycling toilet paper, but no one wanted to run out of the stuff, and some people, small kids in particular, used tons of it each time they went to the bathroom.

  Ironically, food was less of a problem. A full lunch for the entire school had been prepared, and almost half of it remained. Usually, the sizeable excess would have been thrown out, but Donna put a stop to that. Health laws be damned, she would hoard what she could for an evening meal. They would also give out smaller portions. Again, people would complain but they would be ignored.

  After locking up the vending machines and checking the contents of the freezers in the cafeteria, it was decided they could feed everyone for the day and maybe a second if they stretched it. It wouldn’t be gourmet cuisine, or even particularly nourishing, but it would fill bellies. By morning they would surely be out of this mess, wouldn’t they?