Gray Snow: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

by Paul Curtin

  Acid bubbled in his stomach.

  “I really do appreciate your hospitality,” Travers said.

  He couldn’t contain it. “You son of a bitch. After we took you in and fed you and—”

  The leader hit the back of Sean’s head with the butt of his pistol. It wasn’t a hard smack, but it filled his head with fog and his eyes flashed with lightning. Kelly yelped, and someone shouted for her to shut up.

  The leader said, “Let’s all try to keep calm here. We all want you to know that we don’t intend to kill any of you. We don’t want to dirty your nice little home. As I was explaining to Sean here, we only want a few things. And they should be simple enough to get if you all cooperate.”

  Sean met his wife’s eyes and saw the terror—more than that, something else sprinkled into it. It wasn’t just fear—fear was a reaction. A surface emotion. This was something deeper.

  “You might be asking why Sean is in his underwear—and that’s because what you all own, we now own. So I took his clothes. They’re mine now. Same applies to all of you. You have nothing. The sooner you all realize that, the easier this’ll be.”

  “I think I want to take that shirt,” the tallest one said, pointing at Kelly.

  She gripped the front of it near her collar bone as the others cackled. “Yeah,” another said, “it belongs to us now. Cough it up.”

  “Your pants too.”

  “And your panties.”

  “Shut up,” the leader yelled. “All of you shut the hell up.”

  They sank into silence. The fire crackled. The leader said, “We’ll just get what we want and then we’ll be on our way. We’re headed south to warmer pastures. But just know that it’s nothing personal. You all have kept yourselves sealed up here while the rest of the world rotted. It’s fine, but now I’m going to help y’all do the charitable thing and share.”

  The men chuckled. Sean said, “We can work out a deal.”

  “Sean,” Elise hissed.

  The leader extended his hand to silence Elise. “You’re not in a position to be making a bargain,” he said to Sean.

  “There has to be something,” Sean said.

  “There is: all your food and supplies.”

  “You can’t take everything. That’s all we have.”

  “That’s the way things go now.”

  “You’ll kill us.”

  “I said we’re not killing anyone.”

  “You’re going to.”

  The leader walked around Sean and licked his lips. “You still don’t get it, do you? You don’t get how this goes.” He turned toward the group. “Bring the girl over here,” he said, pointing to Molly.

  Molly rolled back with wide eyes. A man stomped over to her from behind and lifted her by her armpits. She screamed. Andrew, next to her, socked the man across the face, the man reeling to the side and falling over. The room stirred. Kelly held Aidan tightly. Another man grabbed a fist full of Andrew’s hair and slammed him to the floor. Sean jumped forward, but someone kicked him in the stomach and he went down hard. One of the guys led Molly toward him while Travers aimed the shotgun at Sean.

  The leader yelled over them. “You’ll understand how things are soon enough.”

  Elise yelled for them to stop, and Michael sat with his fists balled. “Stretch out her hand,” the leader said.

  The other man tossed her in front of the coffee table and gripped her by the wrist, slamming her hand against the wood and pinning it down. She screamed as the leader unsheathed a large hunting knife from his belt.

  “No,” Sean yelled out and tried to rush toward them, but Travers stepped forward and put the shotgun barrel in his face. The leader looked back to him. “Stay still or your kids have to watch you die.”

  The leader grabbed Molly’s hand, but she fisted it. He pried her pinky out, and she cried for him to stop. “Please, please. Don’t.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Sean yelled.

  The leader pressed the blade against her middle knuckle. “How many fingers do you think it’ll take until you get it? How many fingers?”

  A thin film of blood emerged under the blade. Molly howled. “None,” Sean said.

  “I think at least one.”

  “None, please. I swear. I understand. I get it.”

  The leader paused and pressed the blade a little harder, Molly crying. The leader said, “You sure?”

  Someone behind them gasped, and hard, so loudly even the leader turned. Their eyes settled on Aidan. His chest was rising and falling, but it was as if he was eating the air instead of breathing it. His face grew red, and the veins in his forehead bulged. “He’s having an asthma attack,” Sean said and tried to move toward him.

  Travers kicked him down, and he stumbled. The leader looked from Aidan to Sean and licked his lips. Of all the things he could have done, he licked his damn lips.

  “He needs his inhaler,” Sean yelled.

  Aidan grabbed at his chest and smacked it, the look in his eyes emitting terror. His little ribs expanded and contrasted, strained and difficult. Kelly held onto him. “Please, he needs his inhaler,” Elise cried.

  The leader straightened himself and pushed his foot against Molly’s side. The man holding her hand released her, and Molly toppled to the floor. She reached out to her little brother and grabbed his hand. The leader said, “You think you know. You sit in this comfortable little house while the world goes to shit. You think you know.” He kneeled next to Sean, both of them watching the boy struggle. “Look at him. Look at him good. I could let him die right now. And there’s nothing you could do.”

  Aidan grew paler. “We’ll give you everything,” Sean said. “Please, just let me help my son.”

  “I had a son once. A man shot him for trying to take food so he wouldn’t starve.”

  Aidan jerked and released a wheezing breath, his eyes dripping tears.

  “I could’ve killed Travers, but I didn’t,” Sean said, looking between Aidan and the leader.

  “Because you don’t understand the way of things,” the leader said.

  “Oh, God. Aidan. Calm your breathing. Calm it down,” Elise said.

  Sean rushed toward his son, but Travers put a boot into his back and he was stopped short. Sean wanted to scream at Travers, about how he was a son of a bitch, a bastard, or that he should rot in hell, but his throat was dry and he couldn’t produce sound, so all he did was cough.

  “Everything, even your life, even your family’s life, belongs to me,” the leader said. “Do we understand one another now?”

  Sean understood. He did. God, he did.

  Elise

  Aidan took a couple puffs from his inhaler, Elise watching his chest ease. It didn’t do much to calm her own breathing though. The leader ordered Michael, Aidan, and Andrew to move food from the reserves to the garage. Then he and the tall man dragged Sean and the women up to the bedroom.

  With every step she felt as if she were disembodied. Her brain was clouded, reality not concrete. The tall man pushed her further up the stairs. She watched over the railing as one intruder carried a box of food from the basement to the garage, his footprints smearing ash into the carpet. They were taking everything. Their whole lives.

  Molly had ceased crying after a few minutes. Her finger hadn’t stopped bleeding, so Elise held her hand and pressed against the wound. Wouldn’t let go no matter what. The leader kicked open the door to the master bedroom, waved his gun, and said, “Ladies, find a seat. Anywhere will do. Just keep your hands where I can see them.”

  The tall man shoved the three women toward the wall. They sank right to the floor, Kelly watching the men, grasping for a hand to hold without looking. Molly grabbed onto it, her other hand clasping Elise’s. Elise pulled her daughter’s head into her shoulder.

  The leader turned on an LED lantern and the r
oom filled with light. He then led Sean to the safes. “What do you have in them?” he asked.

  “Guns. Ammo. Papers. Cash.”

  “Supplies?”

  “If you count guns and ammo as supplies.”

  “I do,” he said with a smile. “The best kind of supplies.”

  Her husband looked back at her, and her heart dropped. The defeat in his eyes. The wounds laid bare there. The life had been sucked from his body until he was a shell. Nothing left. His eyes shifted to Molly and back to Elise. She wanted him to know she still loved him, but he turned away.

  “Open them up.” The leader motioned with his gun, and Sean stepped forward. Sean pressed his finger against the pad on the safe, the light turning green, and typed a few digits into the pad. The safe clicked, and he stepped out of the way. The leader grinned. “It’s open?”

  “It’s open.”

  The tall man watched the women, his eyes drilling into Kelly who was trying her best not to make eye contact. He bit his lip with his ghastly teeth and then looked back to Elise. She stared him down but shifted her eyes away after a few seconds. He pursed his lips and kissed in her direction.

  The leader turned the safe’s hand, and the sound of the gear cranking emitted a loud crack. Sean jumped. Sean’s guns and ammo lay before them: rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Loads of ammo. “Would you look at this.” The leader picked up one of the scope-mounted rifles, pulled the bolt back and forth, and pressed the stock against his shoulder. He aimed it toward the corner of the room and looked down the scope. “This is beautiful,” he said. “Come look at all this.”

  The tall man tore his gaze from the women and looked in the safe. “That’ll even the odds.”

  “That’ll even the odds for a long time.” He turned toward Sean. “All right, give me your hand.”

  Sean looked incredulous. “I gave you what you wanted.”

  Elise held Molly tighter. The leader’s face showed nothing but calm. “I won’t ask again.”

  Sean put out his left hand, his non-dominant one, and the leader grabbed it. “You got the handcuffs?” he asked the tall man.

  The tall man pulled them from his back pocket, the metal speckled with rust, as dirty as the snow outside. The leader grabbed Sean’s hand, smashing his fingers together, and clasped the metal around his wrist. He then pointed to the white radiator on the wall next to Sean’s side of the bed. “Cuff the other end to it.”

  He let him go. Elise saw how tightly the cuff had been cranked, how Sean seethed when the leader put it on. The radiator was only a few feet away, but Elise could barely watch as her proud husband, like a shamed dog, approached it, sat, and cuffed himself to it.

  “Show me it’s tight.”

  Sean sighed and pulled on the cuffs. It held. The leader returned to the safe. Elise tried to catch her husband’s sight, but he stared off in front of himself. She stroked her daughter’s hair and kissed her forehead.

  The minutes dragged on. The leader pulled the weapons out one by one, examining them, pulling back the slides on the pistols, sometimes disassembling, and looking down the barrels through the open ejection ports. “All very clean,” he said. “You took good care of these.”

  Sean didn’t reply. Then the leader started on the ammo, removing them cumbersome box by cumbersome box until everything was fanned out across the floor, sorted by caliber. The leader rested on his knees at the center of it. “Were you expecting the apocalypse?” he asked, laughing.

  Elise looked at Sean, but he wasn’t staring off any longer. His head was turned toward the nightstand—toward the gun safe that looked like an alarm clock. Sean had conked out in the living room after dinner. Andrew and Michael had helped carry him up to the bedroom, but before they laid him in the bed, she took his pistol and stuck it back in the alarm clock safe. She kept the urgency of that knowledge bottled inside.

  She watched Sean shift his weight toward her. He nodded to her, and she returned it, the gesture unmistakable. “It’s there,” she told him without words, “it’s there.”

  A spark flashed in the wet of his eyes. He scuttled his butt to the far end of the radiator.

  “What’re you doing?” the leader asked, poking his head up. Sean relaxed his limbs as the leader walked around the bed, scanning the area around his captive. “I asked you a question.”

  “Trying to get comfortable.”

  “You’re handcuffed to a radiator. It’s not meant to be comfortable.”

  “These things are digging into my skin. I’m trying to—”

  The leader kneeled next to Sean and jammed a pistol into the soft tissue under his chin. With his other hand, he clasped the handcuffs and tightened them even further. Sean’s mouth opened wide as if he wanted to scream. “Do you think I won’t kill you right here?” Sean’s throat rose. “You think I care even one bit whether you die in front of your wife and kids?”

  “Boss,” someone called over to him.

  Elise hadn’t seen the other man come in through the door. The leader sighed, keeping the pistol jammed into place. “What could you possibly want right now?”

  “We’re having an issue downstairs.”

  “Then take care of it.”

  “We tried. We think your engineering background might—”

  The leader waved his hand, and the man stopped. He looked back at Sean and retracted the gun, resting it on his knee. “Mechanical engineering. In a past life. Still a valuable skill.” He leaned in toward Sean. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He sprang up and left, whispering something in the tall man’s ear before leaving with the other man. Elise listened to them sink into the distance, each step rumbling through the floorboards until the sound diminished to nothing.

  Silence. Her eyes moved from the door to the tall man standing over the three women. His breathing broke through the quiet. Mouth breathing. Almost panting. She tried not to draw attention to herself, but knew he was staring at them.

  As she ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair, he approached the open door and tilted his head to look down the hallway. Her heart raced. If the tall man was stupid enough to leave them alone, there were dozens of guns on the floor. More ammo than they could use. They could fight back. They could—

  The tall man didn’t leave.

  He eased the door closed with his index finger until it latched. Pressed his thumb against the lock. “Looks like we all have a little more privacy.”

  She swallowed hard. The man pivoted on his boot and reached around his back and brandished a pistol, smiling. “The boss don’t want to say what we’re going to do with y’all, but I don’t care.”

  Elise pulled Molly to her chest.

  “I wish we could stay here with you girls. Pretty things. All that ash out there’s just gonna make y’all dirty. Y’all so clean here.” He squatted down so his butt rested against his haunches, sniffing the air. “Y’all smell so good. The house is nice. But we’re going down south where it ain’t cold as hell, you know? Y’all’ll like that when we get there.”

  She darted a glance over to her husband who was scooting inch by inch closer to the gun safe. When she turned back, she caught the glance of the tall man. “Good thing we didn’t take your daughter’s finger. Shame to maim a female for no good reason. Especially one as pretty as your girl here.”

  Elise pressed her teeth together and resisted any sound from coming out. He continued, “Just so you know, we’re all really sorry.” He reached out and grabbed a strand of Kelly’s hair and she flinched back, the man smiling. “So when we kill the boys, just know that we’re not trying to hurt y’all. Y’all’re beautiful—females alone are a rare commodity these days. Good looking females though—that’s priceless.”

  Her stomach lurched. Thoughts of the horrors awaiting them flooded into her mind. She asked herself how these men could be so cruel, how they could justify
themselves. Asked what happened in the cold outside.

  He tapped his lips with the top of his gun and looked at each of them, a grin on his face. Those teeth. Those awful teeth. He jolted up and reached around into his back pocket and pulled out another set of handcuffs, hanging one loop on his index finger, rattling it. “I took care of a few cops,” he said. “These’ve been plenty valuable.”

  Dinner from a few hours before bubbled in her gut. She tried to control her shaking, but her hand wouldn’t stop.

  He knelt in front of them and bit his lip. “So many options, so little time.” His eyes grazed over Molly. Elise felt a lump swell in her throat. She couldn’t pull her any tighter than she already was.

  The tall man then turned his attention to Kelly. He leaned in closer to her and sniffed the air, his nose almost touching her skin, Kelly turning her head away. He inched closer, and she kept moving away until her head was against the wall and couldn’t go any further. He laid a kiss against her cheek, and she shoved him on the shoulders, the man stumbling back, smiling. He pushed himself up with his gun planted on the floor. “We have a winner,” he said.

  He grabbed a fist full of her hair and yanked. Her mouth opened in pain, though no cries emerged, and he forced her to her knees. Elise reached out, her hand wrapping around Kelly’s forearm but quickly slipping away. It seemed like she needed to do something. Anything. But she found herself looking down the barrel of the tall man’s gun. “No, no,” he said, “you stay where you’re at.”

  He yanked Kelly upward by her hair toward the middle of the room, Kelly crying now. He trained the gun toward her and looked over at Elise and Molly. “Go and join your husband,” he told Elise.

  As she rose, he clicked his tongue and then tossed the cuffs over to her. “With these,” he said.

  She slid her hand along the floor in jittery motions and picked them up. He followed her with his eyes while they crawled to the radiator. “Your hand goes in one and your daughter’s in another. Loop the middle to the radiator.”