White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Wyoming plates,” Emma said. “I can tell from the bucking bronco on the left. Read it in a book somewhere.”

  “Yeah?” At her tone, he craned his head over his shoulder. They were close enough that their helmets bumped. “You say that as if it means something.”

  Instead of replying, she swung off the Skandic and waded against the driving snow and through thigh-high drifts to the Dodge. The wind snatched Tony’s space blanket, pulling it out behind her like a flag made of aluminum foil. “What are you doing?” he called. Dismounting, he slogged against the suck and grab of the snow at his calves. He watched as she crouched to swipe the Dodge’s front plate, which was a brighter red than the car, with raised white reflective letters and numbers.

  “Sixty-seven,” she said, tracing with an index finger. “See? Stamped in the upper right-hand corner.”

  Hunkering down beside her, he studied the plate a second, then shrugged. “Okay. So?”

  “So … does that mean the year the plate was issued? Because that would be weird, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him, the legs of a furry blood-tarantula staining her bandage as it bunched with her frown. “We always get a renewal sticker every year, not a new plate.”

  “Do you guys have a vintage car?” When she shook her head, he said, “Well, that explains it, then. They’re probably vintage plates, like the truck.”

  “Maybe, but don’t vintage cars have special plates? Like blue or something, and a different numbering system? This looks like a regular license.”

  “Well, maybe it’s different in Wyoming than Wisconsin.” He waited a beat. “You want to tell me what’s eating you?”

  “What’s eating me?” Grunting a humorless laugh that was mainly air, she pushed to a stand. “You mean, more than everything else tonight?” She shivered and pulled Tony’s space blanket tighter around her shoulders. “I don’t know … it’s just”—she turned a look from the truck to the house—“this feels … off. I know I keep saying that, but it’s not right, Eric. I just can’t put my finger on what it is, though.”

  He stood, wincing a little as his knees complained. “Everything looks weird at night. Plus, we’re in a storm, and you’re hurt.” The urge to comfort her, pull her into a hug, was very strong, and he throttled it back. “A lot’s happened, Emma. You crashed. You lost a friend. I don’t know about you, but when my day started, I sure didn’t see myself ending up here.” If anything, his day had started out even worse. As spooked and worried as he was … I actually feel better here. A crazy thought. He looked down at her face, so ghostly white and pinched with cold. I feel better here, with her, than I have with anyone anywhere else in as long as I can remember.

  “Yeah, you can say that again.” Her eyes shimmered, and she looked askance. Even with that thick screen of snow, he saw her jaw clench. “I know all that,” she said, meeting his eyes again. She pulled herself straighter. “But that’s not what I mean. Look at the truck, Eric. It’s barely covered. All this snow, but it’s like it just got here.”

  “Well …” He threw the Dodge an uncertain look. “Maybe it did. Those guys’ tracks are only just now filling up.”

  “But Eric, we’ve been on the sled for a long time, at least an hour, don’t you think? Long enough for the tracks on the road to almost disappear. And the crash …” She swallowed. “Eric, that happened a couple hours ago, right? The sled’s odometer says we’ve come a little more than fifteen miles. But the turnoff wasn’t that far back from the van where Tony said he and Rima lost the truck.”

  “A half mile, yeah.” He saw what she was driving at. Even if it also took whoever drove it here an hour, that meant these guys should’ve been here for quite a while. The truck’s tracks hadn’t deviated. The driver hadn’t stopped or turned off somewhere else along the way. The way the snow was coming down, not only should the truck’s tire tracks up this long driveway have filled in, but that Dodge ought to be nearly invisible.

  So how come we still see tracks? Why isn’t there more snow on this truck? On an impulse, he tugged off a glove and put his hand on the truck’s hood.

  “Is it warm?” Emma asked.

  “No,” he said, taking his hand back. The metal had leeched all the feeling, and he haahed a breath and shook his hand to push the blood into his fingers to warm them. Man, that was cold. Burned like a blowtorch. “But with barely any snow on it at all, it ought to be.”

  “Right. That’s what I mean by off. Sounds crazy, but … it’s almost like the storm wanted to make sure we saw the tracks, this truck.” Emma inclined her head at the Skandic. “I mean, look at the sled. It’s already filling up.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking in the thickening layer of white on the sled’s seats and foot wells. Screwing his hand back into his glove, he studied the house, a two-story with a large wraparound porch, which reared up from a field of solid white. A glider, laden with snow, hung from chains to the right of the front door. More snow pillowed in hanging baskets suspended from hooks on either side of the porch steps. The porch light illuminated the front door in a spray of thin yellow light. The door was black, hemmed by sidelights of glowing pebbled glass. To the left, a large bay window fired a warmer, buttery yellow, and further back, a feeble glow spilled through a side window. Kitchen, maybe. The second story was completely dark.

  “Somebody’s home for sure,” he said, wondering why that didn’t necessarily make him feel any better. His nerves were starting to hum with anxiety, and a creep of uneasiness slithered up his neck. “Must be the guys with the truck.”

  “If they live here, then why do they have Wyoming plates?”

  “Maybe they’re just visiting.”

  “Then where are the other cars? Or trucks? This is a farm. Where is everything? Where are all the other machines?”

  “Well, they wouldn’t leave them out in the snow. Maybe they store everything,” he said, turning from the house to look at the barn, which stood off to the right, maybe a good seventy, eighty yards away. A large spotlight, with the kind of shallow metal shade that looked a little like a flying saucer, surmounted a very tall pole in the very center of a wide-open space; fence posts marched to either side. The top rungs of a large corral were visible, but no animals had been out for some time. The snow was unbroken and very deep, and that barn, huge and hulking, felt deserted: an enormous hollow shell and nothing more.

  “No equipment sheds,” Emma said, coming to stand beside him. “No silos. If you’ve got animals, you usually have a silo for grain. There aren’t any water troughs in that corral that I can see, and no equipment sheds. So maybe there are tractors or something in there, but I’ll bet there aren’t. Eric, this feels like someone’s idea of a farm, like a movie set.”

  “Maybe it’s a hobby farm,” he said, and wasn’t sure he even convinced himself. Turning from the barn, he stared back at the house for a long moment, listening to the dull slap of snow on his helmet. “Whatever it is, we can’t stay out here.”

  “I know.” Huffing out a breath, she shook snow from Tony’s space blanket. “I guess we knock.”

  He didn’t want to, though he didn’t see a choice. “Stick close, okay? People in Wisconsin can be pretty strange.”

  “Ed Gein,” she said.

  “Lived on a farm,” he said.

  “Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t.”

  “But he should’ve.” He felt his mouth quirk into a lopsided grin. “Gein, Dahmer, Taliesin … it must be the water.”

  “Yeah.” She gave him a strange look. “Must be.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just a headache.” Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Bad.”

  “You hit your head pretty hard.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve had headaches for a long time. I’m supposed to take medicine, but …” Her voice dribbled away.

  The tug of his attraction—that insane urge to hold her—was so strong it hurt. He imagined removing that helmet, cupping her face in his hands, and then … “W
e need to get you inside. Hold up a sec.” Wading back to the Skandic, he lifted the seat, dug around in the storage box, and came up with Big Earl’s Glock. He felt her stare as he jammed the muzzle into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. “When we go up there …”

  “I know. Stay close.”

  “I’m not kidding around. I mean it,” he said, almost angrily. “I don’t want you getting hurt worse than you already are.”

  “Too late for that,” she said.

  2

  NO STORM DOOR, which was weird. No peephole and no doorbell either, just an old-fashioned brass knocker. Eric gave a couple quick raps. Waited a few seconds. Hammered the door with his fist. “Hello?”

  “That did something,” Emma said, nodding toward the door.

  Eric saw a swarm of darkening shadows in the pebbled sidelights as someone approached. A moment later, the knob rattled and the door swung open on a balloon of warm air scented with the unmistakable aroma of macaroni and cheese.

  “Yeah?” The guy was maybe just a year or two older than Eric: not tall but compact, wiry, and lean as a whippet. Like the truck, his clothes were vintage, olive drab BDUs, although it looked like the kid had taken pretty good care of them. BODE was embroidered in dark blue letters on a subdued ribbon over his left breast pocket. Over the right was another ribbon: U.S. ARMY. From the SSI on the left shoulder, whoever had owned them back in the day had been Airborne, and 7th Cav. He recognized the subdued badge: that distinctive shield with its black diagonal stripe and silhouette of a horse’s head. The kid’s gaze flicked from Eric to linger on Emma. “What happened to you?”

  “My friend and I were in a wreck,” Emma said, and then her voice wobbled a little. “Eric and his brother and two other people stopped to help, only their car’s stuck, so we followed your tracks and—”

  “Whoa, you guys crashed?”

  “Yeah.” Eric studied the guy another long second. Those BDUs were way out of regs. Pockets were a little strange, too. Slanted and a little big. The whole getup was like something a guy might wear in a chop shop, but the way the kid carried himself was … military. On the other hand, he was a newly minted Marine; what did he know? Maybe they did things differently in the Army, or the uniform belonged to a relative. “You Army?”

  “What, the uniform give it away?”

  He pushed past the sarcasm. “Seventh Cav?”

  “C Company, Second Battalion, yeah.” The kid’s sky blue eyes narrowed. “So? You got a brother over there or something?”

  “No. Just me … I mean, soon.” Eric stuck out his hand. “I’m Eric. Just finished basic at Parris.”

  “Yeah? A devil dog? Hey, that’s cool.” Something in the guy’s face unknotted, and he grabbed Eric’s hand. “Bode. You got orders?”

  Since killing my father? Well, not so much. He forced a grin. “Lejeune. I hear we’re going to ship out to Marja.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Um … Helmand Province, I think.” At the kid’s puzzled expression, Eric said, “You know, Afghanistan.”

  “Afghanistan.” Bode still looked mystified.

  “Bode?” Another voice, drifting up from behind. “Who is it?”

  “Got us a devil dog,” Bode said, and now Eric saw another kid, also military and in the same olive drab, about five feet back. A paper napkin was tucked at his neck. Bode said, “That’s Chad. We’re on leave. Chad, this is Eric and that’s—”

  “Emma,” she said.

  “Hey,” Chad said around macaroni and cheese. His face was narrow, his nose no more than a blade, and he was pretty twitchy, kind of wired. To Eric, he looked a bit like a small and very anxious rat. Chad swallowed, said, “So what’s going on? You guys broke down?” His nose wrinkled. “Man, what’d you guys do, take a bath in gas or something?” To Emma: “What are you wearing? You look like a baked potato.”

  “Space blanket,” she said.

  “What?” Bode and Chad tossed a glance, and then Bode said to Emma, “You mean, like one of those souvenir Apollo things? From Cape Kennedy?”

  “What?” she asked. “You mean, Canaveral?”

  “Naw,” Chad said. “They changed it. That’s the old name.”

  “Say, can we come in?” Eric interrupted. “It’s really cold.”

  “Ah sure, yeah, jeez.” Then Bode glanced past Eric’s shoulder. “Hey, look at that. It stopped snowing.”

  “What?” Five seconds before, the blowing snow had been thick and driving. Now, no snow fell at all, not even the occasional solitary flake. Like someone turned it off. Eric stuck his hand beyond the porch railing. No snow. What—

  A static burst, followed by a staccato buzz, sounded from his left-hand pocket, and he jumped. The walkie-talkie; Eric had forgotten about it.

  “It can’t be them,” Emma said. “We’re too far away.”

  “Those your friends?” Bode asked.

  “Might be, but she’s right. They’re fifteen miles back,” Eric said.

  “Radios sometimes travel better at night,” Bode said.

  “Yeah.” The handset’s oversize antennae caught on the inside fabric of his pocket, and Eric fought to work it free. A hash of static and broken words crackled from the unit’s mechanical throat: mur … danger … bodies …

  “Hey,” Bode said. “Sounds like you snagged the same police channel we—”

  He broke off as Eric got the handset out just in time for them all to hear the scream.

  TONY

  It’s a Mirror

  TONY LOST THE Camry after ten yards, although Casey’s flashlight and the brighter crimson penumbras from the three flares were still visible. After five more yards, the snow swallowed the third and farthest flare; at twenty-five, more or less, the second disappeared. Casey’s flashlight dimmed, but Tony could still pick it out. As an experiment, he waved his flashlight over his head in a big arc. A few moments later, Casey’s light bobbed a reply. So far, so good.

  He walked for what seemed like a very long time and until his face ached with cold. Clots of snow had gathered on his chest and shoulders, and his eyelashes dripped iced tears. Wow, had the van been this far? He didn’t think so. He turned to look back. Casey’s flashlight was gone, but the flare nearest the Camry still flickered, the pinprick of light as fuzzy as a red cotton ball.

  Okay, relax. So long as you see the flare, you’re still okay. But where was that stupid van? Fifteen more steps and he would call it—

  His boot came down with a splash. Gasping, he jumped back as the smell came rolling up. Gas. Was that right? He aimed his flashlight, and frowned. Gas pooled over the snow. He lifted a careful heel, eyeing how the gas slopped and rippled around his boots. Deep. This can’t be right; no car holds this much gasoline. You’d need a tanker truck for it to have leaked this much.

  Even so, that the gas was still liquid was wrong, too. Shouldn’t the gas have seeped into the snow, or …

  Wait a minute. He shuffled, felt his boots skate and slide as the ripples expanded in ever-wider circles. That wasn’t snow under the gas. It was ice, as smooth and featureless as silvered glass. Beneath his feet, his face wavered and swam, his reflection so perfect that he could see the swirl of snow haloing his head. It’s a mirror.

  “That is too weird,” he said, just to hear himself. His heart was suddenly thumping. “This has to be an optical illusion or something. You can’t make a mirror out of ice. It’s just … I don’t know … compacted snow and gasoline and …” He stopped. Never a whiz at chemistry or science, even he knew that made no sense.

  Yeah, but then what is this? Flexing his knees, he pushed off on his toes with a little hop. His boots splished, the gasoline sloshed, but the mirror-ice didn’t give or crack. He’d stirred something up, though. As he watched, a gelid veil smoked from the pool in thick, white tongues. Mystified, he swept a hand through the mist, watched as his palm cleaved the suddenly nacreous air. Where his hand touched, there was a slight give, a webby stickiness that reminded him of pushing
through musty cobwebs down cellar.

  This wasn’t right. A creeping uneasiness slithered up his spine. The curtain of fog was rising, not lifting from the ice so much as growing. He aimed the spear of his flashlight straight up. The light didn’t penetrate more than a few feet before the smoking mist swallowed it whole. The beam’s color was off, too: not blue-white but a ruddy orange, like old blood. Yet he saw enough.

  The fog was moving: not dissipating or being swept away by the wind but weaving and knitting itself together over his head. The fog was walling him in.

  Oh boy. His mouth went desert-dry. He should … yeah, he should really get out of here. The fumes were thickening, dragging over his face in cloying fingers that worked into his nose and down to his throat to worm into his lungs.

  Which way? He turned a wild circle, but the fog gobbled up his light. The air was getting worse, too. He tried pulling in thin sips, but the tickle at the back of his throat became an itch, then a scratch, and then he was coughing and couldn’t stop. He felt his throat closing even as his mouth filled with spit. Something squirmed in his throat, like maybe there was an animal with furry legs and sharp claws crawling around in there.

  Crazy, that’s cra—

  Something ripped behind his ribs, as if the blade of a hot knife had suddenly sliced through muscle and bone. Grunting, he clutched at his chest, felt the boil of something clenching, bunching. God, there was something inside him! This was like his mother, the way she clawed at her chest.

  Can’t … can’t breathe. His fingers raked his throat, scored his flesh. No air … can’t … got to get out, get out, get—

  A hand slid onto his shoulder.

  CASEY

  This Is Creepy

  “CASEY, IT WAS fifteen minutes a half hour ago,” Rima said.

  “Tell you what,” Casey said. “You’re so worried, you go.”