Storm Front - eARC

by Robert Conroy

  Frieda always found things to complain about, and her complaints ran from pay, working conditions, the union, the school board, her co-workers, and her sex life. Donna said Frieda was only happy when she was complaining. Maddy joined her and they went into the cafeteria. Several people wearing snow gear were carrying packages into the kitchen. Maddy found Donna Harris opening a box. A wispy cloud of steam escaped from it.

  “What the heck is this?”

  Donna grinned. “A gift horse. The PTG got a few snowmobiles and picked up food from Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell. They’re still open because the staff’s stuck there, and were going to throw all this food out until somebody in the restaurants got the bright idea to get it to us. We also got coffee from Starbucks and Tim Horton’s. If you want tea, you’re out of luck. Want a burrito?”

  Maddy took a bite. It was still sort of warm and absolutely delicious. There was a noise behind her and she saw other teachers lining up kids to get the food. The kids looked groggy, tired, and very, very hungry. She saw some smiles as the odor of good, greasy fast food permeated the room. Maddy poured some coffee into a disposable foam cup. It was still very close to being hot. And, damn, it tasted good.

  Mrs. Santana, one of the parents on the snowmobiles, grinned at the sight of the hungry kids and the equally hungry teachers. “Mine are home safe, but I couldn’t help but wonder about these munchkins, stuck here and all that.”

  “You’re a godsend,” Maddy said, ignoring the fact that Mrs. Santana was concerned only about the kids and not the adults, which was about par for the course. Mrs. Santana wasn’t being cruel, only typical. Maddy wondered if anyone would have thought to bring them food if there hadn’t been children. Not a chance. Sunrise was only a little ways off and maybe the day would be better than the night. It couldn’t get worse, could it?

  * * *

  “Sergeant Stuart, may I have a word with you?”

  Mike looked up from the desk. A tall, thin man in his forties stood before him dressed in expensive cold-weather gear. Although Mike hadn’t memorized all the faces of the refugee population, he didn’t look familiar. Most likely he was a new arrival in the police station. But why? If he’d been anywhere else, it was likely better than being stuck at City Hall.

  “Sure,” Mike said, wiping grogginess from his eyes. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’d like to know if I can take my daughter home.”

  Mike was puzzled. “Is she under arrest?”

  “I don’t know. My name is Dr. Peter Thomason and my daughter is Cindy Thomason. I understand she’s being held here because she was in an accident earlier yesterday morning. I also understand she’s injured and I’d like to get her some proper medical care.”

  Now Mike remembered, as the cloud lifted from his tired brain. “Your daughter caused a major accident that resulted in the early blockage of northbound MacArthur. Thanks to her and her inability to control a Corvette, at least one police car is seriously damaged, one officer bruised, and maybe hundreds of people didn’t make it home. In fact, I’d say a lot of them are right here and lying on our floors trying to get to sleep thanks to her. It is also possible that the accident she caused resulted in a number of deaths due to asphyxiation.”

  Thomason paled and Mike felt a twinge of sympathy. His daughter had done something stupid, not malicious.

  “No, Doctor, your daughter is not under arrest, although there will doubtless be some very serious charges filed against her at a later time. If you have a means of taking her home feel free to do so, and I assume you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here. And when you do get her home, I strongly suggest you contact a very good lawyer.”

  Thomason nodded stiffly. “I would greatly appreciate it if you had the charges dropped. After all, she was injured. I checked her out. She definitely has a broken nose and she’ll need major dental work on her front teeth. Also, some of the people here have been picking on her for allegedly causing the tieup, although I’m rather certain the weather caused it and not my daughter. Under the circumstances, I’m confident family discipline would be sufficient.”

  Mike didn’t think the family had much discipline at all, based on Cindy Thomason’s actions. Nor had Doctor Thomason said a word about his daughter being contrite, or that she even accepted responsibility for her actions. If Doctor Thomason felt the girl could drive her brother’s car without permission, create a major accident, cause injuries and tie up traffic without anything more than being grounded for a few days, Doctor Thomason was nuts. He knew that blaming the girl for the suffocation deaths of the family whose name he was too tired to remember, was more than a stretch. He’d let the prosecutors figure that one out.

  “Sir, she nearly killed one of my officers, so no, I do not feel benevolent. In fact, I think she was very lucky. I can’t drop charges because none have been filed. Let the district attorney and a judge sort out what should happen to her. At the very least, I hope she loses her license for a very long time along and pays a healthy fine.”

  “If she loses her license, officer,” Thomason said with a glare, “just how is she supposed to get around? We don’t have a chauffeur, or did you think we did because I happen to be a doctor?”

  Mike wondered if Doctor Thomason was a proctologist and returned the glare. “I don’t know how she’ll get from here to there and I don’t much care. She can get rides from friends, or even take the big yellow school bus that older kids hate so much. In my opinion and based on what happened, she’s too immature to be driving a car. Maybe this’ll shape her up. Perhaps she should have thought of the consequences before she tried to drive a car she couldn’t handle and in weather conditions that were extremely bad.”

  Mike knew that he had let his anger and exhaustion cause him to talk too much. Cops were supposed to keep their composure and he had almost lost his. Fatigue was no excuse. Doctor Thomason was perfectly capable of complaining about his behavior. Mike then wondered who Thomason might find around the place to complain to. Bench was disgraced and drunk, and the mayor was being investigated by the Feds. DiMona, he thought. Thomason could complain to DiMona, but the close-to-retirement cop was just as likely to tell the good doctor to go screw himself. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad world after all.

  Moments later Mike watched as Thomason departed with his daughter in tow. She looked concerned, but not particularly so. Mike got up and looked out the window. Big surprise—it was still snowing. Damn, would it ever stop? The clock on the wall said it was very early morning, but the snowfall seemed to have cancelled out any distinction between night and day.

  Petkowski came into the office and plopped onto a chair. “What was that all about?”

  Mike sighed and then grinned. “You don’t want to know, but it was all your fault.”

  Petkowski yawned. “What the hell else is new?”

  Chapter 14

  Not all the people driving snowmobiles were performing works of charity, such as carrying food to shut-ins and schoolchildren or taking medicine to sick people.

  There were a number of people of all ages and backgrounds who thought the weather was a wonderful opportunity to cut loose and party. Who cared if you had a world-class hangover tomorrow? Tomorrow had been cancelled and so had the foreseeable future. Nobody was going to work or school until the snow ended and was carted away. Disaster parties were common, although most of them broke up in the early wee hours, casualties to exhaustion. Some, however, had simply run out of booze.

  It was just before a dawn that no one would quite see because of the snow, when a dozen snowmobiles descended on Sampson’s Super Store. Tyler Holcomb heard the roar of the machines and went to the main front door. A score of people dismounted from their machines and entered the building with a chant of “Beer, beer, and more beer!”

  At first, Tyler thought it was kind of like a scene from Animal House, one of his all-time favorite movies and one that his wife hated. But then he saw that the crowd, mostly men, was staggeringly d
runk. Aw shit, he thought, just when he had everything settled down.

  “No beer,” he told them. “And no alcohol sales of any kind per the order of the police.”

  “Fuck the cops,” said a skinny young man in his early twenties. Tyler thought of carding him, but there wasn’t any point if there wasn’t anything to sell him.

  “Shelves are empty, people,” Holcomb said. “I’ve got nothing to sell you.”

  “It’s behind, in the back room,” the skinny guy added. “I used to work here, so I know where they hide it.”

  Tyler fumed. He wished the skinny guy still did work there so he could fire his skinny white ass. “Doesn’t matter. It’s now against the law to sell alcohol.”

  A bigger white man stood in front of the skinny one. His face was flushed and his eyes were glassy. “I know the law. We got a constitutional right to drink ourselves silly when there’s more than eight inches of snow as determined by the National Weather Service.”

  That was almost funny, Tyler thought. Maybe the big guy wasn’t as drunk as he looked. “Can’t do it and I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “You don’t have to,” said the bigger man, “we’re just going to take it.”

  “Send the bill to my parents,” said the skinny guy, who then broke up laughing. “They’ll fucking crap.”

  Holcomb placed himself in the aisle way leading to the back. “I’m asking you to leave.”

  “Fuck you,” said the big guy and the others cheered him. Big Guy then pushed Tyler away. He landed against a stack of canned goods that fell with a clatter.

  Tyler got up and Big Guy took a wild swing. He missed and Tyler kicked him in the knee, dropping him. Tyler then wheeled and backhanded the little guy across the face, sending him skidding on his backside down the aisle.

  “Enough,” said one of Tyler’s cops who’d finally decided to step in. Badges were shown and all belligerence quickly went out of the drunks. “I guess they meant it when they said no booze,” lamented one of them.

  “Against the walls,” the cops growled to the remaining crowd and patted them down. To Tyler’s astonishment they found several handguns and a number of knives. It occurred to him that he’d been very lucky.

  Holcomb was congratulating himself on his good fortune, when there was a sudden, loud crack, and the building seemed to vibrate.

  “What the hell was that?” someone said.

  Tyler forced a smile. He’d seen the movie Titanic a half dozen times with his wife who loved it and even bought the 3-D version DVD. He sometimes wondered what Captain Smith was really thinking when the ship went down. Aw shit, he and his wife decided. Tyler just liked to see the white chick naked again.

  “Nothing important,” Tyler said, knowing it was a lie.

  * * *

  Traci jammed her ear against the heat vent. Raines had gone outside to investigate something and had returned. If she was careful, she could hear pretty much all that they said.

  “It was a fire down the street,” Raines said. “A bunch of houses were really lit up.”

  “Wish I coulda watched it,” said Tower.

  Raines thought the scene had been unusual. They’d spotted the glow through the snow and he’d managed to huff his way the couple of blocks to it. He’d been at enough fires, hell, he’d even set a few, but this was really strange. No fire trucks, no flashers and no sirens. A couple of real firemen had connected hoses to hydrants and were trying to contain the blaze.

  But he’d seen badges on a couple of men and realized that the cops were not totally immobilized. They too had snowmobiles, which meant they could go inspecting abandoned houses at any time. He’d gotten close enough to hear people saying that the snow would break in a few hours, which was just what the fools on the television were saying. When that occurred, he and Tower would be better off moving. Even if the amateur weather forecasters were wrong, this wasn’t the beginning of a new Ice Age. The snow would still stop sooner or later. No, it would be much better to be prepared to move quickly the instant it did.

  Tower listened to the explanation in silence. “Too bad,” he finally said. “This is a nice house.”

  “All the more reason the cops are going to check it out. They always check out the rich people’s places first when something happens.”

  “What about the girl? We told her we wouldn’t kill her, didn’t we?”

  Raines had been mulling that one over. He didn’t give a shit about promises, but wondered if she was still useful to them.

  “If we need her as a hostage, she goes with us. If we don’t, she could tell them what time we left, what we were wearing, and maybe even what direction we went. No, if we don’t need her as a hostage, we’ll kill her. We’ll wait ’til the last minute of course—she’s cooperating real nice and that’s kind of fun.”

  Tower laughed. “Yeah.”

  “So we’ll just keep her around, keep fucking the shit out of her, and then you can slice and dice her if we don’t need her, and that looks pretty likely.”

  In the bedroom above, Traci shook with fear as she listened through the vent. All illusions were gone. She was as good as dead if she didn’t do something fast. What had seemed impractical or dangerous a few moments before looked now to be her only choice.

  But if she could only tell somebody, she might stand a chance.

  * * *

  Tyler Holcomb was in a sweat. The loud crack had not repeated itself, but the one sound had been enough to scare the pants off him. The building had vibrated and he knew what had caused it—the extraordinary buildup of snow on the roof.

  Like much new construction, Sampson’s was not built to last for ages. It was a cement-walled shell built on a slab. There were steel pillars and trusses supporting a roof that was only slightly pitched. It was designed to permit rainfall to drain quickly and was, theoretically at least, sturdy enough to hold significant amounts of snow.

  But had the designers anticipated anything like this monstrous snowfall? He had no idea what the building codes were, but he doubted they anticipated anything like this storm. He was the manager, not the builder or an engineer. So what did that loud noise mean? Nothing good, he determined.

  Holcomb gathered his managers and security people and asked for advice. It was obvious that they had only two choices: They could stay where they were or they could leave the building and take their chances on the weather. Holcomb looked outside and saw the snow still coming down heavily and still being whipped by winds into drifts that were taller than many men. He realized that too many people either couldn’t leave or wouldn’t leave, and he had no real way of forcing them out into the snow and with no place else to go if they did. They would stay regardless of what was decided.

  They found a couple of people who were in the construction business, and they said that a roof failure would likely come in the middle. But then an engineer said the heaviest snow buildup was along the edges and that’s where a failure would occur. Tyler threw up his hands. He didn’t know what to do. All his options were wrong.

  With another and even louder crack, the decision was taken away from him. The west center portion of the roof, the part directly over men’s clothing, opened up and, with a roar, dumped an avalanche of snow into the building while people screamed and tried to run through the crowd to safety. As the snow cascaded into the aisles, people were buried by it while others trampled anyone in their way.

  There was a brief period of stunned silence and then the screams began from the injured and the terrified. Quickly, Holcomb’s managers and security, along with scores of volunteers, started to dig their way through the piles of snow that now reached well above everyone’s head. The roof was open to the sky and fresh snow swirled inside the shell of the store, accumulating on the injured and the rescuers.

  Shovels were brought from the hardware and home sections, and scores of willing hands pulled snow and debris off of victims. At first there were only broken bones and cuts that stained the white snow red and lo
oked worse than they were. A makeshift first aid center was set up along a wall where the injured were treated. A couple of dead were recovered. Nearly a third of the interior of the store was covered by snow, just like a Swiss town in an avalanche. Holcomb remembered watching video of that domed stadium in Minneapolis collapsing. This was worse because people were involved. Dismayed, he thought that dozens could still be buried. Damn it, he thought, this sort of thing happens in Iran or some backward country like that. Buildings don’t fall down and go boom in the United States.

  Finally, the first police and fire personnel arrived. Holcomb caught the name of a grim-faced officer who seemed to be in charge—Stuart.

  * * *

  Mike saw that the store manager had organized things fairly well and decided not to make any changes. Instead, he went to an aisle and joined in the digging. In moments, he’d pulled out a woman with a bad cut on her head and a man who needed CPR to resume breathing. They were followed by a screaming child with a broken leg. Then he found another woman, unhurt but pinned under a counter. With some help, he freed her. She crawled away, sobbing her thanks.

  Next, he found a man whose skull had been smashed flat by a falling beam. There was no attempt to revive him. Mike and another man pulled the corpse to a wall with the others. They lay in an awkward row, and someone had managed to cover their faces. The latest victim made it four dead with a lot of the store yet to dig out.

  A thought struck Mike and he ran over to the manager. “Mr. Holcomb, when was this store built?”

  “Who cares?” Holcomb said in exasperation.

  “I do,” Mike snapped, and then more gently, “Humor me, it might just be important.”

  Holcomb thought for a second. “It was about five years ago, give or take. I wasn’t here.”

  Mike felt his spirits sink. “Who was the contractor?

  “How the hell would I know? I just said I wasn’t here then. Officer, I’ve got dead and injured to care for and there’s no time to play like this is a quiz show.”