by Ronald Malfi
Todd frowned. “You gonna answer me or just hold us hostage?”
The woman looked up at him. “You wanna go out there again, be my guest.”
“What about the power? The electricity?”
“Dead.”
“And the telephones?”
The woman leveled her gaze at him, clearly showing her displeasure in answering such mundane questions. “Dead. One of those things must have cut the lines.”
Todd caught a look from Kate. Her skin looked nearly translucent in the moonlight issuing through the store windows.
“Who’s this guy?” he said, acknowledging the body bent over the crate of soda.
“Jared.”
“Can we cover him up with something?”
“There’s some trash bags on one of the shelves,” said the woman.
Rubbing his hands together for warmth, Todd walked down the aisles until he found a box of trash bags. He tore into the box and pulled out a number of bags, then carried them over to where the body lay in one corner. Its head was split open like a ripe melon, the innards frozen and nearly sparkling. Todd draped the body in the plastic garbage bags, trying to not look at it too closely.
“Thank you,” Todd said after he’d finished.
The woman shrugged. “Not my trash bags.”
“I meant about what happened out in the street. I guess you saved our asses.”
The woman set the rifle down on the counter…then, looking over the rest of them, must have thought better of it and picked it back up again. She went around to the rear of the counter and produced a case of bottled water. She heaved it up onto the countertop. “This water’s fresh. If you’re thirsty.”
“Christ, yes,” Kate said, getting up. She looked to Fred and Nan, both of whom nodded, and she approached the counter. It was obvious she was keeping her distance from the woman with the gun.
“Eat whatever you want, too,” said the woman.
Kate screamed and staggered backward, her hands over her mouth. She was looking down at something on the floor. Todd couldn’t see it; the rows of junk food blocked his view.
“What is it?” Fred asked, his voice hard.
“Another one,” Kate practically groaned. “There’s…there’s blood all over the floor.”
Todd stepped into the aisle to see a second corpse—this one much more mangled than poor Jared, whom he’d just covered up with trash bags—strewn like roadside garbage against one wall. It was nearly impossible to discern any sense of humanity from the black, glistening heap. A dark smear of blood trailed behind it like the tail of a comet.
“Jesus,” Todd breathed.
“That’s Mr. Farmer,” said the woman with the rifle. “He used to own this place.”
Kate looked up at her. “Did you kill him, too?”
“He wasn’t Mr. Farmer when I killed him.”
“What’s your name?” Todd asked, pulling fresh plastic bags from the box. He moved closer to the glistening heap on the tile floor. Glancing down, he could see where the blood was beginning to congeal and where ice crystals had started forming along the sections of exposed white flesh.
“Shawna Dupree.”
“You from around here, Shawna?”
“Spent my whole life in Woodson.” Then, as if it were a humorous observation, she added, “Might die here in Woodson, too, you know.”
“What’s going on?” Fred asked from across the room, as Kate, all too anxious to get away from Shawna and the mangled corpse on the floor, brought him and Nan bottles of water.
“It started earlier this week,” Shawna said. “They came in with the snow.” She seemed to consider this, then added, “They are the snow.”
“Who came in with the snow?” Todd asked, draping plastic bags over the thing that had once been the proprietor of this little convenience store. “What was wrong with that guy out there in the street? He looked about ready to kill us.”
“He was,” said Shawna.
“Why?”
“Because he wasn’t himself,” she said. “He was one of those things.”
“What things?” said Kate.
“Whatever came out of him when I shot him,” Shawna said. “Didn’t you see it?”
“What was it?” Todd pressed.
Shawna Dupree took them all in, as if deciding what to do with them. Finally, she propped the rifle over one shoulder and headed around the counter. “I have to pee. I suggest you all keep that door locked.”
When she was gone, Nan sighed and looked down at her hands. She said something to her husband about their daughter Rebecca.
“Here.” Kate handed Todd a bottle of water, once he’d finished covering up the second body.
“I guess we’re lucky it’s so cold in here,” he said. “Otherwise these two would be stinking to high heaven.”
Kate grimaced.
“Sorry,” he said, popping open the bottle of water.
“Your leg’s still bleeding. Let me see.”
“It’s fine.”
“Let me see.”
“Fuck.” He hunkered down, his back against a freezer door. He tried to roll up his pant leg but it would only go so high before it caused him too much pain. “I can’t.”
“Take your pants off.”
“Miss Jansen, you’re engaged.”
“Ha. Very funny. I’m being serious.”
“Just let it be. It’s not that big a deal.”
Fred appeared over Kate’s shoulder. “Let me have a look.”
Todd managed a pained smile. “You gonna put me out of my misery?”
“You should be so lucky,” Fred said, bending to his knees with some difficulty. Todd noted that maybe the old guy wasn’t in as good a shape as he’d initially thought. “I can cut the pant leg or you can take them off. It’s up to you.”
“Christ. You two should buy me dinner first.” He unbuttoned his pants and managed to worm his way out of them, until they were bunched up at his ankles. He didn’t bother looking down at the wound.
“Not so bad,” Fred said, leaning over him. “How’d you do it?”
“Chasing that son of a bitch Eddie through the woods. I think a tree limb came out and took a bite out of me.”
Fred told Kate to seek out some implements from the shelves—adhesive bandages, rubbing alcohol, gauze pads, whatever else she could find. When she returned, she was juggling a bunch of boxes and had a bag of pretzels under one arm.
Fred unscrewed a bottle of peroxide and emptied it over the wound. It fizzed and burned slightly. Todd glanced down and saw a lightning bolt tear along his right shin, perhaps three inches long. Blood ran in muddy tributaries down his leg.
“Pretzel,” Fred said, as if requesting a scalpel from a nurse, and Kate popped a pretzel into his open mouth. As he crunched, he blotted the wound with a sanitary napkin, then proceeded to dress it in a gauze wrap.
“Some bedside manner,” Todd commented, and Fred chuckled.
A shadow moved out from the darkness. It was Shawna, looking younger and smaller than ever without her rifle slung over one shoulder. “Hey,” she said to no one in particular. “You think you could help me, too?”
They all looked over and saw that the left leg of her pants was saturated with blood. She had been walking with a considerable limp, too, although Todd hadn’t put two and two together until now.
As Todd pulled his pants back on, Fred turned to Shawna. He reached out and lifted the hem of her pant leg. Her entire sock and sneaker were black with blood. A firm look passed briefly over Fred Wilkinson’s face.
Without a word, Shawna carefully stepped out of her pants. Her naked skin looked nearly blue. Striations of dried black blood coated her left leg, and there was a deep gash along her left thigh that made Todd’s injury look like a pinprick.
“Good Lord,” Fred mused, leaning closer to examine the wound. “How long ago did this happen?”
“Yesterday evening.”
“Did you put anything on it?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any of that bourbon still lying around, would you?” Kate said, probably only half joking, Todd thought.
Fred turned to Todd. “Can you help her up onto the checkout counter?”
“Sure.” Todd looped one arm under Shawna while Kate came around and lent her support on the other side. This close, the girl smelled of days-old sweat and unwashed flesh. “How long have you been holed up in this store?” he asked her as they carried her over to the counter and hoisted her up.
“Since this afternoon.” Shawna winced as Fred came over and straightened her injured leg. “Before that, I locked myself in my house on Fairmont Street. That’s two blocks over, by the church.”
“Do you still have that flashlight?” Fred asked Kate.
“Hold on,” Kate said, and went over to dig around in her purse.
“No flashlights,” Shawna said. “I don’t think they know we’re here.”
“I have to see what I’m doing,” Fred said. “I promise we’ll keep it to a minimum.”
“Cover it with a towel,” she suggested, and reached down beneath the counter to produce a shoddy-looking dish towel.
Kate returned with the flashlight and Nan at her side. For some reason, the arrival of the older woman caused Shawna to blush, and she self-consciously tugged down her shirt to cover her panties. Until that point, Todd had hardly realized the poor girl was practically naked and on display to a roomful of strangers. He reached over the counter and found another dish towel, which he draped over Shawna’s hips. She looked up at him and offered wordless thanks.
“This is going to sting,” Fred said, and poured some of the peroxide into the wound while he held it open just slightly with a finger and thumb.
“Oh,” Shawna cried, and bucked her hips. One hand shot out and grasped Todd about the wrist. “Oh, shit!”
“Easy-easy-easy-easy,” Fred crooned. It was probably how he muttered to the dogs and cats he worked on in a typical day at the office. “Atta girl…” Glancing over at Kate, Fred said, “Give me some light, will you?”
Nan held up the dish towel to shield the soft beam of the flashlight from anything that might be just beyond the convenience store’s windows. Todd snuck a glance over Fred’s shoulder. The gash was deep, the tissue dark red and fibrous inside. Something wet rolled over in his stomach.
“How did this happen?” Todd asked.
“One of those things took a swipe at me.”
“What things? You mean like that guy out there dead in the street?”
“No,” she said, gritting her teeth as Fred addressed the wound once again. “I mean like what was inside that guy dead out in the street. What came out of him when I shot him.” She grunted and added, “That was Bill Showalter, by the way. Owned the hardware store since I was a kid.”
Todd and Kate exchanged a glance over Fred’s head.
“Shit, that hurts!”
“Hold still, darling,” Fred said, his nose nearly pressed to the wound. “Kate, would you give Nan the flashlight? I need you to find me one of those portable sewing kits.”
“No fucking way,” Shawna said, and attempted to draw her injured leg up to her chest. Fred’s hand was surprisingly firm and held her down on the counter. “You’re not seriously gonna sew me up, are you?”
“You need stitches. It’s the best I can do.”
Kate handed the flashlight to Nan, then slipped down the nearest aisle in search of the sewing kit.
Shawna’s grip on Todd’s wrist tightened. She looked up at him with dark, bleary eyes. Her face looked muddy and out of focus. “That bourbon I mentioned,” she said. “It’s down behind the counter.”
Todd nodded, then liberated his wrist from her grip. He dipped down behind the counter and was uncharacteristically heartbroken by the tiny dog bed, blankets, paperback novels, and random snacks stacked back here: Shawna’s makeshift hideaway. He located a bottle of Wild Turkey and unscrewed the cap.
“One for you, one for me,” he said, taking a swig, wincing, and handing the bottle over to Shawna.
“Down the hatch,” she said, and embarrassed Todd with the amount of alcohol she downed in one swallow.
Kate returned with a little plastic case full of various threads, some sewing needles, and spare buttons.
“Perfect,” Fred said. “I’ve got a lighter in my right coat pocket. Heat the needle to sterilize it.”
“Fuck,” groaned Shawna. She took another swig.
Kate fished the lighter out of Fred’s coat pocket and proceeded to heat the needle while Nan balanced the flashlight beneath the tented dish towel.
“They’re almost not even there,” Shawna said. She was looking blankly across the store, her eyes unfocused. “They’re like smoke. They showed up with the snowstorm earlier this week. They look just like little…little tornados of snow, just twirling in the air, until they let themselves be seen. Then they only look like ghosts…like the suggestion of a person, an unfinished drawing. Not all there.”
Once again, Todd thought of the little girl with no face. Emily. Who the hell was Emily? Who the hell was Eddie Clement? Or what the hell was he?
Kate handed over the sterilized needle to Fred, who managed to thread the eyelet on the first shot.
“They can pass right through you and you wouldn’t even know it,” Shawna went on. She was in a different place now, her eyes so completely unfocused she could have been staring at the surface of a different plane of existence. “Except for their arms. They can concentrate and make their arms solid, just long enough to get inside you. See, that’s how they do it—with their arms. But they’re not like regular arms. They’re more like those big curved sickle blades. Like the kind of blade you see Death carrying in the movies.”
“A scythe,” Todd said.
“They can make those bladed arms solid just long enough to drive them inside you. They go in through the shoulder blades and they walk people, like puppets. Ouch!”
“Sorry,” Fred murmured. He was stitching up her leg now.
Shawna took another hit from the bottle. Todd had to steady her hand to prevent the gingery liquor from spilling all down her chest.
“That’s how I got cut,” she went on. “One of those bladed arms came swinging out of the blizzard and split me right open. But, see, they can’t be solid long enough on their own. That’s why they climb inside people. In people, they can move around and do whatever they want.” Her muddy brown eyes swung back to Todd. “They can feed.”
This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. I’m probably on the airplane right now, snoring loudly in my seat and disrupting half the passengers, on my way to Des Moines. Because this isn’t real. It can’t be.
“Ugh,” Shawna groaned, and her head slumped backward on her neck. Todd was quick to slide his hands against her shoulders to prevent her from cracking her skull on the countertop, but he wasn’t quick enough to catch the bottle of Wild Turkey before it rolled off the counter and broke on the floor.
“Ease her down,” Fred said serenely. “She’s okay. She just passed out.”
“Was she delirious?” Kate wanted to know. “All that talk of…of whatever the hell that was?”
No one answered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
And there was Justin, tiny baby Justin, just a pink and puckered smear in Brianna’s arms, the smell of him—of the baby—infused throughout the nursery: that smell of powder and warmth and new skin. Eyes squinted into piggy little slits, knuckled fists pumping blindly at the air, the baby cried a soundless cry. Brianna fed the child, looking tired and worn out but looking somehow refreshed and vivacious and full of some indescribable light, too, all at the same time. It was a wonder to behold, all of it. And Todd thought, I’m going to be a better man for you, little baby. I’m going to do things better than I’ve ever done them before, harder than I’ve ever done them before. I’m going to do all that for you, l
ittle baby. I’m going to try to make the world just one iota better for our little family and for you, for you, for you.
He grunted awake, a moan caught somewhere in his throat. Kate was lying beside him on the floor where they’d spread out pads of foam from egg crates they’d found in the storage room. One of Kate’s arms was draped over his side.
He sat up stiffly and looked around. Fred was awake, the rifle in his lap while he kept guard by the darkened windows. On the floor beside him, Nan was sleeping soundlessly on her own foam bedding, Fred’s coat draped over her. Snoring loudly by the checkout counter, Shawna slept beneath a bundle of dirty dish towels and aprons.
“I can’t believe I actually fell asleep,” Todd whispered. He eased Kate’s arm off him and she rolled over, murmuring in her sleep. “How long have I been out?”
“Only about an hour.”
“Seen any action?”
Still peering out the windows into the pitch-black night, Fred said, “I thought I saw movement between the barbershop and the bank across the square, maybe fifteen minutes ago. But I can’t be sure. And there’s been nothing since.”
Todd looked across the store to where Shawna slept fitfully beneath heaped towels and aprons. “Will she be okay?”
“Unless infection sets in, she should be fine.”
“What do you make of what she told us?”
“I think she was talking real fast and real loopy because I was driving a sewing needle into a hole in her leg.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question. Do you believe her?”
Fred spat a gob of brown saliva into a Pepsi bottle. He must have found a packet of dip somewhere. “I believe she’s scared pretty bad and has been trapped in this town for the better part of the week, fending off people who appear to have…”
