Enough cars on the highway to know a lot of ‘em never made it.
Could we make it? I thought. We were still alive, so that counted for something, but we were also way behind. We’d chosen to isolate ourselves—I had chosen that for us—and that made us miss the news, instructions that could have had us at the river, ferrying across at that very minute.
I did a cursory examination of the office, but I already knew the search was pointless. There were no blankets to be had. We were going to have to break into one of the rooms.
I turned to head back to the car, and as I did, a wall of keys appeared in front of me, just off to my left. Each one was labeled with a room number.
“No shit,” I murmured. I had gotten so used to key cards over the past two decades, I didn’t think motel keys—in their true “key” form—still existed.
I grabbed three keys, with consecutive numbering, knowing that five people in two beds—maybe one—was going to be a stretch. Though, truthfully, it was unlikely the kids would let us out of their sights for the night, and vice versa. But maybe the rooms had connecting doors, making it the perfect setup.
I walked back to the car where Charlotte was waiting with the window down. “No blankets, but we have our choice of luxury rooms. Shall we take the honeymoon suite?” I held up a key. “Or the presidential?” I held up another.
“Aren’t they all the same?” Charlotte asked, missing the joke.
I nodded. “Guess I’ll decide.”
WE CHOSE THE FIRST two rooms in the sequence, which were perfect really, adjacent to each other with connecting doors. One had a queen bed; the other was furnished with two full-sizes. The kids took the second room without hesitation, Emerson with her own bed while the boys shared the other. Despite the lackluster aurora above the outside doors, there was no electricity in the rooms themselves. But the shine of the auxiliaries was enough, finding its way in through the windows, giving enough ambience that the kids were asleep again in minutes, despite the excitement of the impromptu motel stop.
The outside light had the opposite effect on me, however. My eyes were fixed on the thin curtains that covered the windows, anticipating that at any minute a low, lanky shadow would appear there, swaying for just a moment before bouncing on to the next room. Or perhaps it would linger, sensing our presence the way those at the cabin had, perching like owls as they calmly waited for us to flee in desperation into the ambush.
I tried to calm my mind, distract it for a moment from the terror of the White Ones, and I closed my eyes and focused instead on our looming trip to the Safe Region, wondering if we had made the right decision to run in the first place. If we had waited the situation out at home, maybe we would already be across the river, secure in some refugee facility, where at least the basic needs of life would be met. And yet there was the message from Joel (I need your help), and the one from Charlotte’s sister (They made it here), neither of which suggested those two parties had made it to any clearing.
But weighing my regrets with reality was as useless as dreading shadows in the window; what was done was done, and what would come would come. The only thing to do now was to act; rise early, head for the cabin, and then beeline it for the Mississippi. And if the cabin was overrun, we would make do with what we had on hand. Sorry Newton.
Several more considerations entered my mind, and then slowly thoughts of winter entered, and the crunch of afternoon snow beneath my boots as a child. And just before sleep took its toll, thoughts of shadows across the window appeared again in my brain, and this time the black form stretched out against the window, casting the silhouette of a giant spider.
The shadow never came, but somewhere during the night, the generator gave out, and the darkness that flooded the room awakened me as if it had struck me in the gut.
And then the noises followed minutes later, and I knew we had a problem.
The first sound was the patter of feet on pavement, as if a dog had been set loose to run down the outside length of rooms. And then a dull scratching began, the rubbing of flesh on faded stucco, and soon I could picture them outside the rooms, testing the soundness of the motel, the foundation and doors, and later, no doubt, the glass of the windows.
“David?” I could just make out the figure of Charlotte beside me, now sitting up, her head turned toward the window.
The thud of palms against glass came from the next room, and that noise was followed by the screams of Emerson and the boys.
Charlotte was out of the bed like a rocket, banging her leg against the lone chair in the room as she dashed forward, sending it against the wall. But there was no sound of pain from her, and in seconds, she had navigated through to the adjacent room and was back with all three kids, huddling with them on the bed. She stood quickly and walked back to the threshold between the rooms, shutting the door and sliding the bolt closed. She walked back to the bed. “Oh my god. Are you guys okay?”
There were sounds of panic and muffled crying, but I could tell by the noises that no one was injured.
“Did anybody see them?” I asked.
A sea of headshakes came from the bed.
“Okay, so we don’t know how many there are. Maybe it’s just one.”
“It’s never just one,” Ryan announced.
I frowned, knowing he was right. Besides, I had heard the patter of more than just a single pair of feet. “Yeah. Charlotte, do you have your phone?”
“It’s...” I could see her arm reach for her purse on the dresser beside her. “Yeah. Why?”
“No point saving the battery to call anyone, so we might as well make use of the flashlight.”
She handed me the phone and I activated the light, and then I walked back to the passthrough door, and, without conferring with the rest of my brood, I unlocked the latch again and pushed it open.
“What are you doing?” Charlotte asked.
“Dad!” Emerson screamed.
“Listen, listen! It’s coming in. They’re coming in.” The pounding on the glass continued, and now it sounded like the thing was launching itself against the window. “And if we wait for another one—or more—to start in on this room, it will be too late. What will we do then?”
“Shoot them!” Emerson answered.
I sighed, “Yeah, well, that will be an option, but they’re fast, Em. Relentless. If there are more than two...I don’t know.”
“How do they know we’re here?” Charlotte asked, frustrated, as if we’d been thrust into a game that was rigged against us, which, of course, we had been.
It was a good question, and one I’d chewed on since the cabin. The White Ones could have followed Lee and his friend, and that’s how they ended up at the cabin earlier, but Nelson had seen the creatures first, before Lee arrived, and they had come from another direction, not down the road that led to the house. I began to believe the car was the tip-off, that they had made the connection between the Explorer and our presence. We had no idea how intelligent the Corrupted were—as far as I knew, no one did—but the evidence was growing that the creatures could put more together than I think most would have believed. We all assumed it was smell, the way we would have with any common animal; but where would they have acquired that beastly ability? They were human after all, at least in their initial anatomy, and thus would have been assigned the same sensory equipment as any other person.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “but if I can get them to flock toward that room, we can shut them inside, make them try to get to us through the passthrough door, and then leave out the front before they realize what’s happening. Check the window, Charlotte. Tell me how many you see. Quickly.”
Charlotte stared at me bewildered for a beat, but then she raced to the window and peeked through the sliver of fabric that separated the two panels.
“What do you got, Char?” I said, my voice stressed with urgency.
Charlotte backed away and sighed, and I could tell the news would be good, relatively speaking, of course. “
Only two that I can see. But it’s so dark. There could be twenty.”
“Okay, we’ll go with two then. If there are more, well...hopefully they’ll be drawn to the room by the two out front.”
“What are you going to do, David?”
“I’m going to break the window. Or at least try.”
“Break the window? How are you going to do that?”
I moved the phone light around the room wildly, in search of something solid to throw, an item with enough heft that it could at least put a sizable crack in the window, figuring the blow would ratchet up the antagonization and encourage the beasts to finish off the shattering and make it through into the room. But, as it turned out, motel ashtrays and free-standing lamps were a thing of the past, even in the lowest of low-end motels, and as I scanned the room further, I quickly realized there was nothing solid enough to even damage the television screen, let alone the window that fronted the room.
“Fuck it.” I felt my way over to the nightstand that bracketed my side of the bed and opened the drawer, and from it I pulled the magnum—which I’d not forgotten in the car this time—and chambered a round. I walked back to the threshold between the rooms and said, “When you hear the gunshots, wait a few beats. The noise might scare them off at first, but they’ll come back, and I don’t think it will be long before they do. Then, when you hear me call it out to go, you go. Got it?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, indicating the danger of the plan was significant, but she nodded without discussion.
I nodded back to her and then stepped across the foyer into the kids’ room, where I shined the light on the middle of the window, getting the picture in my mind of where I would shoot. I could see the silhouette now, the one from my dreams, with the White One’s limbs stretched wide, arachnid-like.
I was probably seven or eight yards from the window, and with a .357—firing against the window of a cheap motel—I had little doubt about the penetrating properties of the projectile.
I killed the phone light and took dead aim at the window, and then I let out a breath and shot the glass.
It wasn’t until the third shot that I heard the glass finally shatter, but I had fired the rounds off in rapid succession, and it could have just have been the delay between the impact on the window and the sound of the destruction reaching my ears. In any case, once the chime of the broken shards on the sidewalk finally settled, I stood motionless, listening, waiting for any sign that the monsters were on their way back to the room.
But there was only stillness outside, and, based on the silence in the adjacent room, Charlotte had followed my instructions and waited for the signal before running. Another thirty seconds passed with still no sign of the creatures, and finally I walked back to the other room, where my family greeted me with eyes like dinner plates.
“Everybody okay?”
Charlotte and the kids nodded. “Where are they?” Emerson asked.
“Let’s take a look. Remember, if it’s clear, we’re going to make a run for it. No hesitation.”
I walked to the window and peeked out, searching for any movement in the blackness, though the act seemed useless and unreliable. Still, I was encouraged by the absence of noise. “Hang on,” I said, and then I opened the door slowly and immediately looked to the left, in the direction of the adjoining room where the window had just been blown out from the inside.
My eyes found nothing at first, but they quickly adjusted to the dark, and on the ground, atop the pile of glass, I could see two figures, neither of which was moving. I pulled Charlotte’s phone from my pocket again and tapped the flashlight to life, and then I shined it toward the damage I’d just caused, my heart racing with promise. And there, in a mangled heap, their limbs intertwined like the tentacles of two albino squids, were two White Ones, one with its chest shredded, its organs splayed across its torso like an overturned platter of lasagna. The other creature was equally destroyed, though this one from a bullet to its face, which, in its present form, was unrecognizable as such.
I quickly turned back to my family. “They’re dead,” I announced. “The two that were trying to get in. Apparently, I hit them when I shot out the window. They’re done.”
“What?” Charlotte said breathlessly.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, David,” she said, almost giggling now, the words a combination of disbelief and newfound impressiveness.
“Yeah, dad!” Emerson said in a whispered shriek, her voice on the edge of tears.
“All right, let’s go.”
I led the Willis’ out the door of Room 112 to the Explorer, which was parked only a few paces from the room. It was perhaps the major benefit of staying in a motel, I thought in that moment: when necessary, you could make a quick getaway.
When everyone was piled into the SUV, I assumed my spot in the driver’s seat and then reached for the key to start the engine.
Not there.
“Shit!”
“What is it?”
“I left the keys inside.”
“Why...why didn’t you just leave them in the car?”
Not a useful question at the moment, but I decided not to snap that point at Charlotte. “Habit. I’ll be right back.”
I was in the room in seconds, the light from Charlotte’s phone guiding me once more. I found the keys on the dresser immediately, and as I turned back for the door, I heard a low, rumbling noise coming from somewhere in the distance, just beyond the parking lot of the Relax Inn. It was like a heavy wind rising from the interstate, and I froze in place, listening for a more definitive source and direction of the whooshing sound. I couldn’t place the noise, or the thing supplying it, but it continued to grow louder by the second, steady and relentless, and my muscles tightened as my breathing grew shallow. I finally stepped to the door of the room and exited, and as I did, I aimed the beam of the flashlight toward the access road that led to the motel.
The first one appeared from under the cape of darkness, its blank face emerging like a goblin in the night, bobbing up and down like the head of a broken doll. In a moment, its white body followed, legs propelling the torso forward.
And behind the first, an army followed.
“Fuck me,” I whispered, spitting the words out like a sickness. I blinked several times at the approaching horde and then began to trot toward the Explorer as if in a dream, my legs not allowing me to freeze this time, instinctually keeping my pace unhurried and even. I reached for the door and, almost comically, I dropped the keys to the pavement. I stooped down to retrieve them and then fumbled them again, my hands now shaking uncontrollably with fear. “I’m choking,” I said aloud, nearly laughing as I said the words, realizing this was how I was going to die.
But I quickly realized if I died, my family died too, and with this thought now embedded in my brain, I recovered quickly, snatching the keys like a chameleon picking a fly from a leaf, and a beat later I was in the car and turning the ignition.
“What’s wrong, David?” Charlotte said absently, having still not seen the danger. But she was already looking in her side mirror, knowing in her gut that trouble was on the way.
And in a second, she found it.
I threw the car in reverse at just the moment Charlotte let out a piercing scream, and I quietly lamented the fact that I hadn’t backed the vehicle into the spot, trunk toward the door. But I reversed from the space quickly and gripped the gearshift, and as I shifted the Explorer to drive, the first of the creatures slammed against the back bumper, shaking the SUV as if we’d been rear-ended by a small sedan, a Toyota Corolla or Dodge Neon, perhaps.
Emerson was screaming now, Ryan and Nelson crying behind her, the latter child beginning to wheeze, on the verge of another asthma attack.
“Go, David!” Charlotte screamed, her focus now myopic as she monitored her younger son.
I looked in my rearview mirror to see that the monster that had crashed into us had latched onto the rear wiper and was now perched on the bump
er, its white belly flush against the window as it held itself to the car like a tree frog to the leaf of a cocoa tree. In the section of window beside the creature, I could see the outlines of the full band of white monsters, dozens of them perhaps, continuing to flow toward us like an avalanche. I couldn’t make out their features from that distance in the dark, but there was little to make out anyway; the White Ones were essentially featureless, like moths around a lamppost, relentless and indistinguishable from one another.
I watched the torso of the one attached to the bumper disappear above the back window as it scurried to the roof, and as its white toes slid from view, a bolt of terror flashed through me.
“Is it on the roof, dad?” Emerson asked. “It’s on the roof! It’s on the roof!”
I didn’t acknowledge my daughter; instead, I accelerated down the access road and quickly merged back onto the interstate, not looking back at the tableau of mutated creatures that had arrived like a fog, apparently having followed the report of the gunshots to the Relax Inn.
I stared at the speedometer now, locked onto the steadily climbing number, watching it like the price of a recently purchased stock. When the dial hit seventy mph, I shouted, “Seatbelts, everyone! Now!”
The clicks of buckles sounded like gunshots all around me, and then I fastened myself in, pulling the strap tightly to my chest. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. “Hold on,” I said, a dusting of doubt in my tone.
The Ghosts of Winter Page 9
