The Ghosts of Winter

by Christopher Coleman

  The boy finally lowered the crowbar and stepped forward, frowning. He clicked his chin up, a sign of suspicious curiosity. “Killed any yet?”

  I nodded. “One.” Then, as if seeking further credentials, I added, “With a tomahawk.”

  The boy stared coldly at me for a moment, and then he began to blink as he flashed a wide grin, the type of smile rarely found outside of youth, joyful and wonderous. “A tomahawk? Damn, bro! Straight Geronimo shit!”

  At the absurd comparison to the Apache leader, I let out a humor-filled laugh, the first one I could remember since we’d left for the cabin. But as quickly as it arrived, it waned. “But you’re right,” I said, “other than the message they were playing on the radio, I really don’t know what’s happening. Where is everyone?”

  He shrugged. “Went to the Safe Regions. Tried to get there, at least. Enough cars on the highway to know a lot of ‘em never made it.”

  “What’s a Safe Region?”

  The kid dipped his head, grinning as he kept his eyes on me. “Seriously? You ain’t heard about the Regions?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s places they blocked off to keep them things out. Set ‘em up quick too. Too quick you ask me. Like they knew this shit was coming eventually. Supposedly got tanks and shit along the borders. Army. Crazy, right? Went from a cordon keeping them things in to now us being in the cordon to keep ‘em out.”

  “Where are they? How...how do you get there?”

  “It’s only two; just gotta pick which direction you wanna go. You gonna want the one on the east though. Get your ass across the Mississippi, and you basically made it. Natural border of the river, I guess. Makes sense. The other one goes from New Mexico to L.A., but I don’t how they gonna seal all that land off. People over there’s fucked you ask me.”

  “Just like us in the middle.”

  “Yup. Texas to the Mississippi. And anywhere north. People in like North Dakota? Wyoming? Those bitches is most definitely fucked.” He shrugged. “You still got time though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They giving people ‘til Friday to get to one of the checkpoints. Checking ‘em at bridges, I guess. Or gonna have boats and shit loading people up and ferrying ‘em across. After Friday though, they shutting that shit down and you on your own.”

  “Why just in the southern part of the country?” I asked. “Why not set up regions everywhere? Why not in the north?”

  “‘Cuz the north is cold, man. At least when winter comes around. And it snows. People saying they going get stronger in the snow, but I don’t know how anybody could know that.”

  “I remember the rumors.”

  “Fucked up if it is true. Just gonna let them people up north fend for themselves.”

  I felt a shiver run down my spine. “So, why’d we get screwed too? Why didn’t we get a Safe Region? Arkansas, I mean? And Texas and Louisiana?”

  “Shit was too far gone by then, man. Government lost control, and by the time they finally got their arms around it, them white motherfuckers had already gotten too far south. They gave up on us, man, like they always do. We was like a forest fire they knew they couldn’t put out, so they just let us burn, hoping to kill the flames somewhere down the mountain.”

  I stood motionless for several beats, processing all the kid had told me, my only thoughts now on getting my family east, across the Mississippi. I looked back at the boy, and as I did, the second man approached the counter. He looked a lot like the kid, though he was probably ten years older and a hundred pounds heavier. I nodded hello at him.

  “My name’s Jamaal, by the way,” the boy said. “This is my cousin, Bo. And we ain’t here for Oxy; we here for insulin. Bo got that sweet blood.”

  Bo flipped his hands in a what-are-you-gonna-do gesture.

  “You see that fridge behind you?” Jamaal asked.

  I turned around slowly as if confused by the question, but I spotted the small refrigerator to which Jamaal was referring. I turned back.

  “That’s where it’ll be. Power’s been out a while, but hopefully it’s still cold.”

  I nodded and walked to the refrigerator, and as I retrieved the dozen or so vials of insulin, I had a sudden flash of gratitude. We were lucky, really. Nelson—or any of us—could have had a condition that was utterly reliant on medicine or procedures to stay alive. Insulin. Dialysis. Chemo. To have asthma in a calamitous world was one thing; diabetes or cancer in a world gone to hell was something else entirely.

  I returned to the counter and pinched the key hanging beside the gate from its hook, and then I quickly unlocked the metal lattice barrier and lifted it high. “That’ll be $81.50,” I said, sliding the medicine across the countertop with a certain formality.

  “My insurance got this,” Jamaal quipped back, not missing a beat. “I’m in y’all’s system.”

  “Yeah, well, the system’s down right now, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  Jamaal suppressed a smile and then turned up his mouth, nodding slightly, the universal tough-guy expression of approval, as if I’d passed some test that he’d been covertly administering to me. “Thanks, man,” he said. “We gotta get this shit in the cooler and then find the next place. Like you, trying to stock up on what we can ‘fore it’s gone or goes to shit.” He turned his head in the direction of Charlotte and the kids, who, to this point, had been as quiet as mannequins. “Nice to meet y’all,” he said, and then back to me, “Good luck, David Willis.”

  Jamaal and Bo turned and headed for the front, and as Jamaal pulled the door open to exit into the night, I called out, “Hey, Jamaal, what about you? You heading for the river?”

  He scoffed. “Hell yeah, but not the Mississippi. Me and Bo heading for the Rio Grande, baby! This time tomorrow, my ass a Mexican.”

  “Mexico? Why’s that?”

  “Pssh! Same reason everybody goes south, bro: can’t take the winters no more.”

  8: The Motel

  Charlotte said nothing for the first twenty minutes of the drive home, instead using that time to stare out the passenger side window of the Explorer, watching the green, deserted landscape of Interstate 62 race by. She was angry, angry at me for the risk I’d taken back at the pharmacy, and though I was willing to give her the time and space she needed to reconcile her emotions, we needed to get focused. Every moment was precious now. It was time to move on.

  “I’m sorry, Charlotte. I didn’t really feel like I had a choice.”

  Charlotte stayed quiet.

  “At some point, they were getting inside. And that point was a matter of minutes, not hours. At least the way I did it, if they had been a threat, I was in a position to do something about it. To stop them if...if it had gone another way. Which, by the way, it didn’t.”

  Not a sigh of annoyance nor a shrug of the shoulders, and I wondered now if she was sleeping, though I didn’t get that sense.

  “And now we know what’s happening. We have a goal now, a direction to head. Also, Bo is going to be able to regulate his blood sugar for a while longer.” I turned toward my wife now and smiled, but Charlotte kept her face to the glass.

  It was almost 10 pm, and we were headed back toward the cabin, all three kids asleep in the back. By any measure, our trip to Sprague had been a success. After some debate, we decided against a Wal mart run, deciding instead to secure what we could from The Holly Street Pharmacy, as well as the mom-and-pop grocery three doors down, which was also a relative bonanza of supplies. We had secured our load of Albuterol and inhalers from the pharmacy—as well as a variety of penicillin spin-offs—and from the market we emptied the shelves of their canned foods and cereal and crackers and pastas, as well as paper towels and toilet paper. With what we had already at the cabin, as long as we rationed carefully, we were good for several weeks more, maybe longer.

  “What’s the problem, Charlotte? Really?” This time my voice was stern, annoyed. “You act like there were options. I didn’t have a choice.”


  Charlotte finally lifted her cheek from the glass and looked forward through the windshield, still refusing to face me. “No matter who comes,” she said, “that was the agreement. No matter who comes, we don’t let them in. That was the promise we made to each other.”

  “They were getting in!” I snapped, far too loud. I lowered my voice back to a whisper. “Whether I let them in or not, they were getting in.”

  “What if you had had the gun?”

  I knew what she was asking, but I stalled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if you had the gun on you when they were coming in, prying at the bars like that? What would you have done then?”

  “I don’t know, Charlotte, I probably would have had the same conversation that I had, only with a gun in the small of my back. Nothing would have been different.”

  Charlotte shook her head, unsatisfied with the answer.

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Charlotte.”

  “You could have left the medicine by the back door. Just opened it for a minute and left it on the stairs. Or insisted they back all the way to the front before you opened the gate and slid it out. But you just unlocked the gate without a thought and lifted it. Why did you do that?”

  I unleashed a mammoth sigh, an encompassing sign of uncertainty, weariness, and defeat. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want your sorry, David! I want to know why you did it!”

  I felt the burn of resistance flood to my cheeks now, triggering the urge to ratchet up the fight. Instead, I paused, giving the question its due consideration. “Because I believed him, Charlotte,” I answered. “That’s why. Jamaal, I believed him. There was a sincerity in that kid, in the way he spoke, the things he told me. He gave us information. Information that might keep us alive. There was no reason for him to do that.”

  “We don’t even know if it’s true,” she retorted, her voice dripping with disappointment at my naivete, as if my accepting of Jamaal’s words on their surface was something only a child would do.

  Charlotte needed pragmatism from me, something reasonable upon which to cling. “Also, he didn’t have a gun. Him or his cousin.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  I pursed my lips, accepting the point. “No, I guess that’s true, but a kid that age, if he had had a gun, he would have brandished it right away, just to let me know who was boss. I suppose the cousin could have had one on him somewhere, but I doubt it.”

  “And if he did have one? And he pointed it through the gate at you. What then?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it might have gone differently, but honestly, I don’t even know that. I just know my instincts were to trust them, and that’s what I did. And I was right to. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been the wrong choice, but in that moment, a decision had to be made, and I made it. And they’ll be more to make going forward, probably some just as important as that one. You, yourself, made one back at the gas pumps when you decided to rev up the car and turn that trio of Corrupted into omelets. You didn’t think about it, you just made it.”

  Charlotte shimmied her head, dismissing the comparison, though, in my opinion, it was more than apt. Thankfully, however, she let the point lie, for which I was relieved. There was nothing more to be gained from the conversation, and I was exhausted.

  As if reading my mind—or perhaps just sensing my weariness in the way only a life partner can—Charlotte said, “We shouldn’t go back to the cabin tonight.”

  I glanced at her quizzically. “What?”

  “It’s too dark now. And as far back in the woods as the cabin is, it’ll be pitch black when we get home. And if those things haven’t left—which we’ve got no reason to believe they have—it’ll be an ambush.”

  On the surface, I hated the suggestion. According to Jamaal, we needed to reach the river by Friday, which was less than two days away. I didn’t know anything about where the checkpoints were or the procedures or papers we would need to cross, but it didn’t much matter. We just needed to reach the banks of the Mississippi, and once there, I felt confident we would be in the clear.

  I checked the gas gauge again; we had enough fuel to make it back to the cabin and then to the river, but there was always the threat of a breakdown, an alternator going, a tire going flat. And the longer we were out on the road, the greater that possibility became. And without the Explorer—or some type of motor vehicle—we didn’t have much of a chance.

  On the other hand, Charlotte had a point: if we made it back to the cabin and got trapped at the end of the desolate road that led to it, we weren’t getting out alive again. We had to go back at some point, of course—there were essentials to retrieve before we abandoned it for good—including Newton—but going back there at night indeed seemed a dangerous play. “I’m not sure the Holiday Inn’s got any rooms available.”

  “Maybe not, but the Relax Inn is only a few miles from here. You know the place I’m talking about. That dumpy motel we always pass and make fun of from the road.”

  “I do.”

  “I noticed their lights were still on when we drove by it on the way down. It caught my eye because I thought maybe only we lost power and it hadn’t gone out everywhere. I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t want to jinx it.” Charlotte paused, as if remembering the feeling of hope she’d felt in that moment, which was only hours ago. “But I guess they must have a generator or something. Anyway, if the lights are still on, we should check it out. We’ve never driven onto the lot or anything. Maybe it’s not that bad. And if it is empty—meaning no Corrupted or other villains hanging around—we should stay there for the night. That’s what I think anyway.”

  I nodded in agreement, suddenly relieved by the idea. “Okay.”

  Minutes later, the dim radiance of orange auxiliary lights coming off the low roof of the motel glowed in the distance, and I could just see the top half of the Relax Inn sign beyond the trees. The neon was out, but the gleam of the moon caught the words just right, illuminating each letter in a dull, blood-red glow. As we got closer, I could see the advertisement for ‘Free WiFi and HBO’ on the marquee below. It was the setting of a horror movie, really, seedy and stereotypical, the place where wayward couples are forced to stop for the night after their car inexplicably breaks down on the road, and as they walk the distance from their car to the lodging, the man reassures his young lover that all will be fine. Charlotte and I had passed the place a hundred times previously, but I couldn’t remember ever doing so at night. And seeing the sign now, I knew on any night before the breach, I wouldn’t have stayed in the place if they paid me sixty-eight bucks a night.

  But this was a different night, as would all the nights be until we reached the Safe Region. Warmth and shelter were suddenly luxuries, the way they had been for thousands of years in thousands of places before the spread of civilization. Charlotte was right; this was the best course of action tonight, and as I pulled onto the access road less than a minute later and parked in front of the office, I sighed in relief to have made it.

  “Where are we?” It was Ryan, now awake in the further of the two back rows.

  “We’re stopping for the night, honey,” Charlotte answered. “We might be a minute so just go back to sleep.”

  I watched Ryan in the mirror, waiting for him to close his eyes again, and then I paused, scanning the remaining area of the back for any other conscious listeners. Seeing none, I turned to Charlotte and asked, “You sure about this, Char? I mean, seriously. This place looks like it was specifically designed for prostitutes and meth heads.”

  “There’s light,” she answered. “I just feel safer here than I would at the cabin. It spooks me just to think about being there.”

  The lights were a welcoming sight, despite their pathetic struggle to keep even the dimmest of halos shining down on the room numbers and ‘Office’ sign. Still, though, I felt the need to start in with my persuasion, to make Charlotte realize that this was one nigh
t max, and that before we headed for the river, we would need to stop by the cabin first. But really, what was the point of wading into that discussion now? “I understand,” I said.

  “We could just stay in the car for the night. I mean, we probably can’t get into the rooms anyway. And the kids are already asleep.”

  The temperature on the Explorer’s dash read 61°, probably not cold enough for hypothermia to set in, but too cold to sleep through the night in comfort. And there was no way I was leaving the car running all night; every ounce of gas was crucial now. “Yeah, okay, maybe, but it’s gonna get cold in here in a few hours. I’d leave the car on but—”

  “The gas, yeah, I know.”

  “I’m going to see if I can find some blankets. I’m sure they have extras in the office somewhere.” I said the words casually, knowing my leaving would provoke anxiety in Charlotte. “If I can’t find any, we might have to try to get in one of the rooms.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yeah, maybe that is safer now that I think about it.”

  “All right, we’ll talk about it after. Just hang here a minute. This door doesn’t look like much.”

  I was right; the door wasn’t much. I slammed my shoulder against the edge in three quick bursts, and the jamb disintegrated in a spray of wood and paint chips.

  The office was tiny, 10 x 12 maybe, furnished with a paisley couch, an empty vending machine, and a desk that had been adorned with Christmas garland, though the colors suggested something closer to the Fourth of July. A bell sat on the counter, and, like an eight-year-old, I rang it.

  I walked behind the desk, but I knew instantly the place had been cleared out. It seemed the proprietors had long gotten on their way to the eastern Safe Region, and whatever they could take with them, they did.

  A picture on the desk showed a family of five—just like mine—though it appeared the Relax Inn owners had been blessed with three girls, maybe three years apart. Three Emersons, I thought absently. Lord help them. I suddenly felt a wave of compassion flow over me, and for the first time since leaving our permanent house for the cabin, I sympathized with someone other than myself. Even with Jamaal back at the pharmacy, I was happy to help, but I also had the overwhelming feeling that they would be fine, at least as fine as anyone could be in this new world. But Mr. and Mrs. Relax Inn, along with their daughters, seemed fragile to me, unprepared for a world of White Ones. I could only imagine how scared those girls would be if they saw the monsters on their journey east, their black, searching eyes locking with the girls’ as the creatures positioned themselves in the road, cutting off passage to the Safe Region.