by Ronald Malfi
In his dreams, he was running along a snowy hillside that crested high above a model train village. Something chased him. Something hideous and malformed, the noises of its pursuit akin to the feral ululations of wildcats. He ran, his skin burning and his eyes tearing, knowing that he could not keep up the pace forever. It was only a matter of time before a sharp bladed talon pierced through the soft flesh of his back, bursting through his backbone and severing his spinal column…
At one point, Kate was looking down on him. She smiled warmly and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Then he was in a truck or an ambulance or some such vehicle, with whirring buzzers and blinking lights all around him. Faceless people in white attended to him. At one point he sat bolt upright (or at least imagined he did) and shouted nonsense into the ether.
There was a room—puke green walls, paisley curtains, water-stained acoustical ceiling tiles. There was a small television set bracketed to the wall, and in the doorway, shapes blurred back and forth like memories of family members long forgotten.
Justin was there. His son. He stood for a moment in the doorway, his mournful dark eyes almost pleading with him. Todd felt himself wanting to say something, wanting to reach out and touch the boy, but he felt strapped down and helpless. This isn’t my body, he thought. And if it is, I am no longer in control of it.
Which made him think of monsters. Monsters that took over people’s bodies and marched them around like puppets on strings.
But no…no…
Later, the pain came.
Still somewhat groggy, he blinked his eyes open to find a large Hispanic female in a white jumpsuit of sorts drawing blood from his inner forearm. She looked down at him and smiled humorlessly.
“Where…am I?”
“Hospital,” said the nurse. “You were shot.”
“Shot?”
“Do you know your name?”
“Yes,” he said. “What happened to my friend? A woman. Her name’s Kate.”
“There are people outside waiting for you,” said the nurse. “You should rest, but they seem very eager to see you. The doctor said it would be all right, if you are up for it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Please.”
The nurse left and Todd attempted to prop himself up on the stack of pillows at his back. The movement caused a sharp pain to go shooting straight across his right shoulder, where it pooled like lava along the right side of his ribs. Wincing, he gripped the bedsheets in both hands until the pain subsided.
Two men in black suits entered the hospital room.
“Mr. Curry,” said the first suit—a well-built man in his late thirties, sporting a buzz cut that turned silver at the temples. They both stopped at the foot of his bed, their hands folded in front of them. “I’m Carl Freed and this is Michael Shovenson. We’re with the Department of Defense, Chicago field office.”
“Am I under arrest or something?”
“Not at all,” said Freed. Beside him, Shovenson—skin the color of ground coffee and a bald head reflecting the fluorescent ceiling lights—produced a notepad and pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “We just need a statement from you about what happened.”
Todd attempted to raise his right hand and drag his fingers through his hair, but just lifting it halfway caused the pain in his shoulder to explode again. He sucked air in through clenched teeth.
“You in pain?” asked Shovenson. He had a voice like a bassoon.
“A little.”
“We’ll just take that statement,” said Freed, “then get out of your hair. Your girlfriend is outside waiting to see you,” he added, as if hoping this information would move things along more quickly.
“I’m afraid you won’t believe a word of what happened,” Todd said. He tried on a smile but it felt false on his face. For one horrible moment he thought he might actually break down in tears in front of these two men.
“We just need to hear it from you, Mr. Curry,” Freed said, unrelenting.
“A lot of people in that town are dead, Mr. Curry,” Shovenson added.
Todd took a deep breath, then said, “There were things in the snow.” He thought about this statement for several drawn-out minutes—the agents did not press him at all as he thought—then finally added, “I think they were the snow.”
“How did you get into town?” Freed asked.
Todd told them the whole story, starting with the flight cancellation to renting the vehicle to what had happened when they picked up Eddie Clement in the middle of an otherwise deserted road. Shovenson took minimal notes and neither man ever raised an eyebrow. When Todd began telling them about the creatures in the snow and about the walking skin-suits, he did so with terribly forced levity, the words impossible to his own ears…but the men still did not balk.
When Todd finished, he sighed deeply—which also hurt his injured shoulder—and fixed both men with a frank stare. “You probably think I’m full of shit. Ask the woman outside—the one you called my girlfriend—and she’ll corroborate everything I’ve just told you, word for word.”
Shovenson flipped his notepad closed, then stuffed it back into his suit jacket.
“This was just a formality,” Freed said. He walked over to a nightstand and picked up the remote control for the television bracketed to the wall. “We have reports to write.”
“Reports,” echoed Shovenson, as if this were some part of a private joke the two men shared.
Freed clicked on the TV. After the picture came on, he began flipping through various channels. Most of the channels were news stations, each reporter looking grim and uncertain. Freed finally left the TV on one channel where a female reporter was talking about the bizarre events that had occurred in a small town outside Minneapolis, resulting in the disappearance of half the town’s population.
Todd blinked and just stared at the TV.
“So far,” said Freed, “we’re looking at twenty-nine separate incidents across the country. Several more were reported in Canada, and more reports are filtering in every hour. The folks who rescued you wound up rescuing another thirty-eight people from Woodson, many of them hidden in basements and armed like militiamen.”
Todd studied the seriousness of Freed’s face. “So…so this happened all over?”
“Twenty-nine different towns,” Freed repeated. “Mostly relegated to the Midwest. By all accounts, it seems there was something in the storm.”
“That wasn’t just a storm,” Todd said.
To this, neither Freed nor Shovenson felt the need to comment. They adjusted their ties and passed a look between them that suggested they wanted to go back to their hotel rooms and go to sleep.
“We left a card with a contact number with your girlfriend,” Freed said as they both moved toward the door. “If you think of anything else, or just need to call and talk to someone about what happened, don’t hesitate to use the number.”
“Get well,” said Shovenson, and the two men left.
When Kate came in, she looked much smaller and emptier than he had remembered her. She watched him for a few moments in the doorway before coming to his bedside and kissing him squarely on the forehead. Her eyes glittered with moisture.
“Are you hurt?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I guess I was luckier than you, huh?”
“What exactly happened?”
“It was Molly. She shot you just as we were heading from the station down to the road.”
“Molly…”
“Brendan died. She blamed you. After she shot you, she dropped the gun and just sat down in the snow, sobbing, until the guardsmen showed up. She’s been taken into custody.”
“Jesus…”
“There were more people, Todd. In Woodson. They were hiding in basements and attics and in different places throughout the town.”
“Yeah, I heard. Those two federal agents or whatever they were just told me.” He nodded toward the TV, which was still reporting the inexplicable occurrences that had ha
ppened across North America over the past week. “Can you believe this?”
“It’s like one big cloud came in and draped itself right over the middle of the country,” Kate said. “But it didn’t happen everywhere. Just quiet, remote towns. Just like Woodson.”
“Because they’re smart. Because to do what they needed to do, they had to be able to cut the towns off from the rest of society. They had to pick places where they could easily do that.”
“And what exactly did they come here to do?”
“Feed,” he said. “Change us, maybe. Did you see what it looked like when that cloud opened up at the end? Just as it started sucking those things back into it?”
“Like you could see through it to the other side,” Kate responded. “Like there were other places up there, beyond our world.”
The notion caused his head to throb. He rested back on his stack of pillows, his respiration labored.
“After it was all over, I went back for Charlie and Cody,” she said. “I thought maybe if those things had left their bodies, maybe they’d…you know…maybe…”
“Were they alive?” he said.
Kate didn’t answer, but Todd already knew what the answer would be. On the TV, the reporter was replaced by a computerized map of the United States alight with red “hot zones,” as they were labeled, throughout the country. “This just in,” the female reporter’s voice carried over the scene of the map. “Eleven people were discovered alive in the small South Dakota town of East Fork, their stories no different from the hundreds of others we’ve been hearing for the past two days now, bringing the total number of Midwestern towns involved in this uncanny and unexplainable nationwide event up to—”
“Please shut that off,” he said.
Kate clicked the TV off. “Gerald’s down in the lobby. We’ve been here for a few hours. I didn’t want to leave until I knew you were all right.”
“Thank you.”
“I took the liberty of putting my number in your cell phone,” she said. “I hope you’ll keep in touch.”
“After all we’ve been through?”
She laughed. “I’m not your only visitor, by the way.”
His own smile faltered.
Smoothing his hair to one side, she said, “I hope you don’t mind. I found the number in your cell phone and I thought it was the right thing to do…”
Looking past Kate, Todd could suddenly see Justin standing in the doorway of the hospital room. The boy was wearing the same ski jacket and bright boots he’d been wearing in what Todd had assumed had been a dream. When the boy caught sight of his father’s face, he closed the distance from the doorway to Todd’s bed in no time at all. Justin hopped onto the bed and, despite the pain it caused his shoulder, Todd gripped the boy and squeezed him hard. He smelled Justin’s hair, his skin, his clothes—taking in every bit of the boy.
“Daddy,” Justin said against his cheek. “Are you hurt?”
“I think I’ll be okay, sport.”
The boy hugged him hard and painfully around the neck. Todd felt his throat tighten and his vision grow blurry.
Brianna appeared at the foot of the bed. She looked frail and thin in a coat that hugged her too tightly, her hair tucked beneath a white beret. She clutched her handbag before her with both hands, uncertain what to say or even how to look.
“I’ll leave you guys alone,” Kate said. She turned and rested a hand on Todd’s shoulder. “Take care, Todd.”
“You, too.”
Kate did not look back at him as she walked quickly out of the room.
His arms still wrapped around his son, he offered Brianna a tired smile as he rested his chin atop Justin’s head. He could feel the boy’s heartbeat against his own, the child’s body warm and good. There was no pain here. Not here, not now. Still smiling at Brianna, he could feel the silence between them in the room, interrupted only by the scuffing of shoes outside in the hallway.
After a while, Brianna smiled back. “Merry Christmas, Todd.”
“Merry Christmas, Bree.”
She came and sat on the edge of his bed. Hesitantly, she rested a hand on his leg. After a few seconds, she began rubbing his leg…timidly at first, but gradually warming up to him.
Closing his eyes, Todd leaned back against the pillows and listened as his heartbeat strummed in sync with his son’s.
EPILOGUE
Nineteen miles west of Bicklerville, a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Tracy Murphy stood beneath the lighted awning of a gas station, pumping fuel into her Mercedes while surveying the stars that hung low over the distant trees. Somewhat jumpy from the strange stories that had been on the news the past two days, Tracy now doubted her decision to drive from her folks’ place in Iowa back home to Nebraska. She’d originally planned to stay with her parents until New Year’s Day, but she should have known better—Cliff and Joan Murphy fought like two feral cats tied up together in a sack. Had it not been for the snowstorm, the drive would not have been a difficult one at all. But the roads hadn’t been plowed and Chuck’s goddamn Mercedes kept overheating. Last night, as her eyelids had drooped lower and lower, she’d had no choice but to take refuge in a shitty roadside motel where the sheets stank of dirty feet and a bloated tampon floated in the toilet like detritus from a barge. And with all that weird shit on the radio about people disappearing from neighboring towns…well, the thought was unsettling, to say the least.
A rust-colored pickup truck pulled into the gas station and shuddered to a stop beside one of the pumps. Tracy could make out two slumped shapes in the cab, one larger than the other. No one got out of the pickup right away; as Tracy watched, the two figures remained inside, although she did not think they were talking. It looked like they were both staring straight ahead out the windshield at the highway as it wound off into the distant pines.
Eventually, a man climbed out. He wore a checkered flannel jacket and a grim expression. Several days’ growth shadowed the line of his jaw. The man cast an uneasy glance at Tracy, his skin looking sallow and almost dull green beneath the recessed fluorescent lighting up in the awning. Tracy felt a cold twinge at the base of her spine. Quickly, she turned away from the man and silently willed the fucking pump to go faster.
She heard the man’s footsteps approaching. Waiting for the man’s reflection to appear behind her in the smoked window of the Mercedes, she balled her fist around her keys, the ignition key jutting straight out between her index and middle fingers. She’d jab him right in the eye if he laid a hand on her…
But he moved right past her and into the store.
Relief washed over Tracy. When the pump clicked, she replaced the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back on. She looked back up and into the convenience store. The man stood looking at bags of junk food in one of the aisles, his back toward her. Tracy could make out unusual slashes in the fabric of his jacket, directly over the shoulder blades.
Something felt wrong. Tracy turned around and could more clearly see the second figure in the cab of the pickup truck: a young child in a pink ski jacket, the fur-trimmed hood up, covering the child’s face.
Something isn’t right about this, Tracy thought. The kid just stared straight ahead through the windshield of the pickup, the child’s profile hidden behind the hood. The hood itself looked smeared with what Tracy thought might be grease or motor oil.
Tracy approached the pickup truck. Stories of kidnappings filled her head. Years ago, she’d gone to elementary school with a little girl who’d been swiped from the schoolyard. No one had ever found her again. The girl’s name had been Lizzie and everyone used to call her Lizzie the Lizard because she had terrible eczema. Now, approaching the pickup, Tracy wondered what had become of Lizzie the Lizard…
Tracy stopped beside the pickup’s passenger door. Standing so close that her breath blossomed on the window, she reached out and tapped on the glass. Inside, the child did not flinch. The greasy substance on the child’s hood looked as if it could be blood.
; “Can I help you with something?” came a voice from behind her.
Tracy jumped and spun around. The man in the checkered flannel jacket stood staring at her, a box of Band-Aids in one hand. “No, I’m sorry,” she stammered. Thinking on her feet, she said, “I thought I recognized your…” But she didn’t know if the child was a boy or a girl. She took a guess, based on the color of the child’s coat. “Your daughter,” she finished.
The man just chewed at his lower lip, his eyes roving over her.
“Is she okay?” Tracy said. The child had not turned once to look in her direction.
“Emily’s shy,” said the man.
“Is she hurt?”
“What do you mean?”
Tracy pointed to the box of Band-Aids.
“No,” said the man. “These are for later.”
Tracy’s heart was suddenly zipping through her chest. She looked down and saw that her hands were trembling. Quickly, she stuffed them into the pockets of her coat.
“Excuse me,” the man said, moving around her and around the front of the car until he climbed up into the cab. Tracy took a few steps backward, just as the pickup’s gears squealed and the truck began to ease forward.
Just before it left, heading back out onto the road, Tracy thought she saw the child in the passenger seat turn and place a palm flat against the window. Tracy tried to make out the girl’s face but found it was impossible: the fluorescent lighting erased her features and threw glare on the window.
As the truck pulled out onto the road, Tracy recited the license plate to herself over and over again. Her goddamn cell phone had died—yet another luckless addition to this already lousy trip—but she would call the police when she got home later that night. She’d give them a description of the man and tell them what the girl was wearing, too, and how it looked like there was blood on the hood of her coat. About the Band-Aids, too, because that was just…well, that was just fucking weird.
She climbed inside the Mercedes with all the good intentions in the world, but by the time Tracy Murphy made it back home to Nebraska, she had forgotten all about the strange man, the box of Band-Aids, and the peculiar little girl whose face she had not seen.
