Before Greg had found the best pocket of happiness the universe had ever thrown his way.
He gasped out loud, the darkness going red behind his eyes. Glowing, like his agony had become some visceral, bloody reality. Shifting, like his world had been yanked out from under him, falling, separating—
Wait.
He opened his eyes to the swishing of a whip, bright, colorful Christmas lights sweeping up into the air on the other side of the SUV, the garage ceiling blinking in shades of green and red and orange and purple.
Greg sucked in a breath and then regretted it, for the whip leapt forward, a stocky figure suddenly illuminated at the hood of the car, coming around fast. That whip swung out, flashing lights in the darkness, twisting backward, away, ready to snap forward—
With a shout of fury, Greg lifted the gun and squeezed both Mandy and the trigger with abandon. The shots echoed fiercely, cracks reverberating in an agonized sequence, Mandy startling awake, then gasping, then shrieking.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
The Christmas light whip snapped into the air with a whish-crack, but it was far above their heads.
Pop-pop-pop.
The elf coughed, gagged, jerked like a marionette. The lights seeming like its strings as they swirled around above his head, demanding compliance.
Pop-pop-click-click.
Greg grit his teeth so hard an ache grew in his jaw. His ears rang, the sound of the elf collapsing against the concrete nothing but a muffled shuffle of clothing and wet candy before the Christmas light whip whirled and landed in a circular pattern about the body. As the light steadied out, no longer flashing across the garage in an epileptic’s nightmarish pace, Greg found his throat tight, his breathing coming shallow and quick.
Slowly, Mandy’s crying penetrated his mental fog, her hands up around her ears. He lowered the gun and kissed the top of her head. Let himself get lost in the smell of her, alive and well, for the moment.
Then, in a series of metal clicks and a rush across the tracks, the garage door abruptly lifted, all the broken, stretched, and ruined strings dangling uselessly. A chilly, stormy wind blew in. Snow swirled. Greg scrambled to stand, Mandy almost a dead weight in his arm. He lifted the gun against the form that appeared, but it was too tall, too narrow and straight to be a person.
He squinted against the harsh wind. Mandy’s toes found his stomach again and her arms his throat. The shape was a tree branch, or a trunk. The bark stripped and sheared in places. Obviously having been yanked from whatever snowmen had been using it in order to lodge it under the bent and broken garage door to keep it open.
A movement in the darkness drew his eyes, and his gun followed suit as he took aim.
“Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
“Taylor?”
The light from the whip behind him shed the dimmest multi-colored glow across Taylor’s stained T-shirt. The white fabric had gone rusty with what looked like blood and crystallized sugar. Bits of ash clung to his disheveled hair and tufts of fur to his damp clothes. The stench of animal carried into the garage on the billowing snow flurries, Greg getting a lungful when he heaved a relieved, exhausted sigh, something breaking just a tad, deep inside him.
“Christ, Taylor, I could have shot you!”
Taylor didn’t respond but to reach Greg’s side and unceremoniously snatch the gun from Greg with frenzied, stiffened motions. Where their hands touched, a splash of cold shivered over Greg’s skin.
“You’re freezing.”
But Taylor wasn’t listening; he was aiming at a form ducking in under the garage. A form with a peppermint gun in one hand, sharpened snowflake stars glinting in the other.
“It’s been ordained!” screeched the elf, her voice holding a tinge of insanity. The peppermint gun waved, a round shot spitting off in Taylor’s direction. “The Great and Merry Santa has declared war upon Taylor Yeristan. He will die!”
The gun clicked empty in Taylor’s hand. “Shit! Do you have another magazine?”
“Another…?”
Greg glanced down at the chaotic pile of empty aerosol cans. The blowtorch empty; the nail gun run dry; his make-shift spear broken by the window. Taylor must have followed Greg’s gaze, for he began to tear through the pile of cans, searching desperately for something to use as a weapon.
A snowflake ninja star sliced across Taylor’s leg, cutting a thin line through his jeans and causing Taylor to grunt and his knee to buckle. Greg twisted instinctively, getting Mandy as far from the elf as possible despite the projectiles beginning to rain in Taylor’s direction and not his own.
“Get cover!” shouted Taylor as he threw the empty aerosol cans toward the elf, one of them pinging in midair as a snowflake star embedded in the metal.
The elf remained by the garage door, the snow swirling about her body beginning to take shape, beginning to flow with a purpose. One can flew over her head to smack against the repurposed snowman arm. The snow blurred faster, turning the elf into a whitened snow globe decoration. The billowing wind circling, circling tighter and faster so that it rocked the SUV, smashed the last dangling paint cans so that their strings twisted around one another in a tango dance.
Taylor’s next thrown aerosol can hit the snowy barrier and ricocheted off, the can bouncing harmlessly back across the concrete floor and chasing Greg through the garage. He ducked down behind the generator with Mandy to set her on the ground.
“I need you to keep down, okay?”
“You have to shoot the elf,” she demanded, her teeth bared as she crinkled her nose in a sneer. “You have to shoot the elf.”
A can smacked the generator and bounced over their heads, Greg ducking belatedly before tracking the can’s path until the it landed with a muffled thunk. Right on Taylor’s duffel, a lump of black fabric, last year’s peppermint gun stuck in the handle. But that elvish gun didn’t have any ammo, all of it melted and rotted over the year.
There might be other magazines though. Dumped from the bag when Taylor had upended it earlier. Greg should have checked. He should have had them on him. He should—it didn’t matter what he should have done, he just needed to check now.
“Don’t move,” he ordered Mandy. Then he scrambled toward the bag.
Taylor let out a litany of curses and there came a screeching of metal scraping against the wall. Greg looked up in time to see Taylor pressed against the stone, a trash can lid held in front of him that was riddled in peppermints leaking red and rainbow where the lights of the Christmas whip reflected. He’d hit the exhaust pipes Greg had rigged from the generator to the window. The hollow howling of the wind over the pipe was replaced by that awful clanging, screeching as the exhaust pipes fell. They crashed against the ground, breaking apart in a heap reminiscent of a junk yard.
He cast around the emptied contents of Taylor’s duffel in a panicked rush, picking up and tossing aside an empty butane container, an old Christmas light whip that couldn’t do more than flicker, and useless smoke bombs. His fingers finally closed over a magazine, the smooth, oblong metal spiking a ray of hope in his heart.
“Taylor, I’ve got one!” he shouted. He lifted it where Taylor might see through the dim, rainbow glow, but Taylor’s expression didn’t change.
“That’s for my forty-five! I dropped it out in the snow!” Another snowflake star embedded in the trash can lid right where his fingers held it steady. “Fuck! I’m going to lead her back out. You grab Mandy and get to the street, all right?”
“You want me to what?”
“The storm, it doesn’t extend past there!”
Greg shook his head angrily, but didn’t resist, didn’t argue, not when his gaze dropped to Mandy. Her hair, already wild and messy, now flung like a violent wave about her head, whipping and snapping in the wind. Her toes curled hard against the concrete where they just barely stuck out from his shirt; her knees shoved high under the fabric; her arms tight about them, holding herself in a small ball.
His gaze dropped further
as he returned to her, his clothes shuddering across his skin, his body moving sluggishly from exhaustion, his feet already aching at the anticipation of running through the deep snow yet again.
But there, next to Mandy’s bottom, part of it lodged against the generator, was the bandolier with the candy cane candles. He hadn’t been able to get them to work, but maybe Taylor knew how. Maybe Taylor could try something with them.
Another snowflake star pinged off the generator. Taylor had begun to work his way forward against the wall, away from them, his voice rising over the storm as he screamed bloody curses at the elf that would have had Greg berating him for saying in front of Mandy just yesterday. Just a few hours ago.
With a bit of hope staunched in his throat, Greg yanked the bandolier from the edge of the generator and called out, his voice breaking in his attempt to be louder than the restless wind and the pinging, clanging metal on metal echoing throughout the garage.
“Taylor! Catch!”
Greg threw the bandolier, the last two candy candles knocking against one another. The wind caught the empty end of the bandolier and whipped it up, but Taylor bent and caught the other end before it smashed against the ground.
For a moment, he merely stared at the fabric and candy canes in his hand, like he strained to see what it was through the dim rainbow light striving to pierce the darkness, to pierce past the snowy drifts undulating like white caps through the air.
Then Taylor spared Greg a dark, dark grin that spoke of some of the most wonderful parts of the man. The evilest parts, the parts that could make Greg squirm in the pitch black, could make him gasp in astonishment.
As Greg gathered Mandy into his arms, Taylor broke into action, fluidly gripping the longest piece of exhaust and tugging it forward through the storm, against the concrete. It screeched like the elf, howling a deep, mournful song when the wind buffeted past its hollow opening. In a smooth, quick motion, Taylor knelt on his end of the pipe, popped one of the candy candles and aimed it into the hollow metal.
Tucking Mandy’s head down, Greg rolled partially out of hiding from behind the generator in time to see the explosion of reddish sparks erupt on the inside of the elf’s snowy barrier. A beautiful array of light and spectacle turned the elf’s barrier into a trap. She bounced and screeched, batting at the fires that erupted across her flailing taffy-lined skirt.
And with the snow shaper’s distraction, the barrier collapsed completely, a wash of whirling ice and snow becoming a widened, whirling skirt about her middle before landing in a still-circling pile against the concrete.
Taylor didn’t even wait for the snow to settle. He threw the trash can lid at her face and jumped forward behind it. Still smoldering, she lifted her gun.
Greg sucked in a sharp breath, but Mandy was far less subtle in her worry as she screamed, “Get her! Kill the evil elf!”
Taylor complied, shoving the barrel of the peppermint gun up, the peppermint ricocheting off the ceiling of the garage and bouncing against the SUV. Then he punched the elf, her head snapping backward, followed by her body. Taylor landed square on top of her, her subsequent yell of defiance muffled when he violently shoved the second candy cane candle directly into her mouth.
“Oh—” Greg quickly covered Mandy’s face, her little fingers immediately grabbing at his hands in annoyance.
The candle exploded in a puff of sugar brains and smoke.
Separate colors glinted within that smoke. Orange here, purple there, a tinge of green before the smoke curled into a blue swatch.
The elf’s hands slid down into the snow, her fingers unmoving, her body twitching one last time.
Taylor sank back, and, after a moment, threw his head up to face the sky. His chest heaved. His shoulders sagged. His shirt clung to him damply, while snowflakes coated his hair like drifts of ash. His profile stood out sharply, the relief of a warrior after a battle written into his sinews.
The storm howled a last, long shriek; the call of the dead and dying. A last hurrah, as the snow flurries grew wider and looser, losing their ferocity. A last threatening promise, as the wind softened, the weather cleared, the world growing calmer, calmer, until settling.
A sudden tranquil quiet stretched far, like a bubble growing around them, dampening the noise of the world. That tranquility grew so loud it buzzed at Greg’s ears, until Mandy licked his palm and pulled her face away with an affronted complaint. She slipped from his grasp, wiping hair from her mouth.
“Are the snowmen all gone?” she asked.
Beyond the garage, within the white expanse of yard now lit by sparkling neighborhood lights, the snow lumped in hills that resembled half-formed snowmen, their bulbous bottoms unmoving, yet carrying a hint of hibernating perils. The lights off neighbor’s decorations drew more shapes within the darkness, lighting the world with color and erraticism, like a mockery of the real dangers they had just fought to live through.
No wonder Taylor hated the cheer and décor.
Still kneeling in the snow, Taylor sank into himself, chin going to his chest. Then he looked over his shoulder. “You okay?”
Was he okay? Taylor had gone out and faced down who knew how many elves, in a blizzard, surrounded by angels and snowmen and Santa knew what else and he asked if Greg okay?
Greg broke. He pushed forward, gripped Taylor by the arm, pulling him up and away from the melting elf sinking patterns in the icy snow.
“Something happen?” started Taylor, concern etched across his brow.
Many things had happened. Many, many things, not least of all Taylor surviving whatever holiday evil had stalked this Christmas Eve. He didn’t have words though. Didn’t have enough of them, didn’t have ones that could convey what needed to be conveyed.
He merely forced Taylor close and drew him into an abrupt, passionate kiss. Their lips were cold, as were their tongues, and the faint taste of sugar seemed to coat their breath, as if the snow had been powdered crystals, finely, finely grained. As if sugar had strived to suffocate their lungs, they began to struggle, the kiss deep and desperate and…definitely not G-rated.
“Daddy!”
Taylor broke away, surreptitiously licking his lips. “Mands!”
Greg couldn’t let go though. He pressed his cheek against Taylor’s freezing one and took a breath, wanting to smell the man underneath all the sickly sweet sugar in the air. Taylor patted his back, his fingers running up along Greg’s spine, spreading a tingling sensation in its wake.
“Taylor! I killed an elf! Just like you showed me! Pewpewpew! Daddy was in trouble and almost got swallowed by the marshmallow flood and I shot the elf!” Mandy paused for a quick breath. “But it hurt my finger though. I need a Band-Aid, but Daddy said we couldn’t go inside because there might be more angels and I didn’t want to get eaten by an angel. At school, there’s a boy who believes angels save people. I’m going to tell him he’s wrong and stupid.”
At that, Greg pulled away from Taylor. “You can’t tell the other kids that.”
Mandy held out the finger that had supposedly gotten hurt earlier, though there wasn’t anything but dirt there. “Why not?”
He inspected the finger carefully. Kissed the tiny tip.
“Because they won’t believe you, Mands,” said Taylor.
“Then they’re stupid!”
“Well, I don’t disagree,” said Taylor in a tired voice. He’d walked past the back of the SUV and seemed to be studying the doorway into the house with its dried flood of hard candy and broken broom handle and drowned elf riddled with nails.
Greg sighed and ran his hands through Mandy’s wild hair. “They’re not stupid just because they don’t understand. You’re weren’t stupid just because you didn’t know how to add or subtract, right? Because it was just something you had to learn.”
“So you want me to teach them? I can teach them!” Mandy ran back to the elf Greg had shot and plucked the Christmas light whip up by its handle. “I’ll bring this in!” She cackled again.
Greg stood in time to see Taylor in the doorway, peering into the dark house. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “There could be more.”
“You remember where you put your keys? You said your phone’s in the kitchen, right?”
“There could be those angel things!”
“I’m just going to grab them. Be right back.”
“Taylor!”
But Taylor had already disappeared through the mudroom, the creak of the kitchen door wafting out into the obscene quiet in the garage. Greg threw a hand up, a curse on his lips before he turned and saw Mandy staring at him with a trembling lip, the Christmas lights dangling from her hand, its rainbow sizzling, reflecting its colorful dots within the SUV’s glossy beige paint.
“Will Taylor be all right?” she asked. “The elves won’t get him, will they?”
Her gaze dropped to beyond Greg, where the elf most recently dispatched melted into the snow in a red, green and gold smear of viscous sugar. Greg beckoned her over, the Christmas light whip trailing behind, through sugar trails and blown-about aerosol cans and broken bits of plastic from the smashed garage door.
“He’ll be fine,” said Greg as he gathered her into his arms, unsubtly tugging the whip from her hand and letting it flop back to the ground. “He’s a warrior.” My warrior.
The faintest traces of a burgeoning dawn turned the deep black of night into a purplish bruise about them. The distant mounds that had once been snowmen or snowmen-in-the-making ceased their shuffling as someone’s headlights stretched across the road, crossed the neighbor’s siding and then faded with the rumble of a quiet car out too-early on a Christmas morning.
“Am I a warrior too, Daddy?”
“You are.” He flashed her a grin.
“Even though I lost my jump rope?”
Greg paused.
“All good warriors know that they can turn anything into a weapon,” said Taylor from the doorway. He wasn’t looking at them, his focus on the thick layer of hard candy that now coated the steps, making them both slick and sticky. He leapt them easily and as he straightened, he jangled Greg’s car keys in one hand. “Found them. On top of the fridge. Luckily the snow wasn’t too deep there. Come on.”
Rise of the Snowmen Page 14