Jack glimpsed a gallery of faces inside the scattered vehicles. A woman sat in a blue Mini, her face a gloomy portrait of Monday morning depression. There was a family of four inside a red Mercedes-Benz station wagon; the man and woman were frozen in what appeared to be heated argument in the front seats. Two young kids sat in the back; the older sister had her arm wrapped around her little brother who was crying.
Jack shivered. It felt like he was walking through a photograph.
He reached the roundabout halfway down Main Street. The roundabout was the heart of the town center and it was commonly known as the Octagon, even though it didn’t come anywhere close to being eight sided.
Jack walked over the grassy island in the center of the Octagon. There were a handful of naked maple trees to his right, still waiting to bloom after winter. The branches reminded Jack of the long, crooked fingers of a fairy tale villainess. An old man was sitting on a wooden bench with a takeout coffee cup in his hand. His other hand was partially clenched at his side, like he was holding onto something that wasn’t there anymore. When Jack looked further down the street, he saw a small Highland Terrier wandering across the road, sniffing at the door of a candy shop. The dog was dragging a thick blue leash behind it. Jack glanced at the old man’s hand again and wondered if the little terrier had slipped free.
“Hello,” Jack said, kneeling down in front of the old man. He searched for a hint of life in those glassy pale blue eyes. “Can you hear me sir? Blink if you can. Move your eyes or do whatever you can.”
The old man did nothing.
Jack sighed and got back to his feet. He saw the sign for Hudson’s Restaurant across the street. Hudson’s was an ugly rectangular block of a building with a green wooden exterior and a long sheet of awning that extended over the front entrance. Despite its looks, the residents of Alexandra Falls, along with the scattering of tourists that passed through regularly, loved it. Hudson’s was the most popular eatery in town with its outstanding and affordable breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. On top of that, it boasted an outstanding variety of freshly baked cakes, all made by Linda Hudson, who ran the restaurant with her husband Steve.
Jack crossed the road and approached the green building.
Hudson’s was always busy in the morning. There’d be lots of people inside right now.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said, glancing at the little white terrier roaming across the street. “I won’t forget about you.”
He pushed open the glass-paneled door and stepped inside. Hudson’s was indeed busy, full of waxworks sitting at the tables, crammed into the booths at the side, or standing in line waiting to pay. Some people in the queue had paper coffee cups in their hands. Some of them had been sipping coffee when the freeze hit – they were holding the paper cups at awkward angles and the brown liquid had poured out and dribbled down their chins, leaving a small muddy puddle at their feet.
Most people in the booths had cellphones in their hands or lying on the table. Jack leaned down to the nearest booth and checked the phone of a young woman with blonde hair. The screen was blank. He pushed the power button and nothing happened.
So it wasn’t just his phone that was down.
“Hello?” Jack said, glancing around the restaurant. “Is there anyone in here? Anyone who isn’t…”
What?
He walked further inside.
He looked behind the counter. There was always the chance that someone was hiding out back.
“Hello?” he said, louder this time. “My name is Jack Murray, I live on Washington Street and I’m…”
I’m what? Terrified?
“I’m a survivor of the attack. Can anyone hear me? Please come out if you can – I just want to help. I’m looking for other survivors.”
Steve Hudson, tall and scrawny with a thick moustache, was standing at the cash register attending to the customers.
Jack approached the counter and the first thing he noticed was the drawer lying wide open. It was fat with green bills, an indication of Hudson’s ongoing popularity within the community. Jack felt his heart speeding up again.
“That’s a lot of money Steve,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth between the man and the cash register. “Isn’t it?”
Jack left a pause, waiting for Steve to say something.
Steve didn’t answer.
That hunger – it was back and it was swelling up inside Jack like a fat balloon. That desire to take something that wasn’t his. He’d felt it twice today already – first when he’d approached Mrs Lancaster and again with the man at the ATM.
Jack wanted to get closer to the money. To touch it.
To take it.
He tried to rebel against these urges. This wasn’t like him. Jack Murray had never felt the desire to steal anything before. Why would he? He’d never been deprived of anything and yet despite an affluent upbringing, nobody that mattered had ever called Jack spoiled. That’s because his parents had done such a good job of keeping him grounded. As a result, Jack was the epitome of the ‘good kid.’ That’s the way everyone in town thought of him. It was only the losers at school, the deadbeats like Vince ‘Creepy’ Kutter that ever called Jack a spoiled brat. But Kutter came from a bad home like all the creeps and anything that resembled a ‘normal’ upbringing was considered spoiled to those guys.
Jack reached a hand towards the cash register.
He waited for Steve Hudson’s sinewy arm to swat his hand away. What would Jack say if he got caught in the act? He’d say it was the shock, that’s all. That he was testing Steve, testing everyone in the restaurant, seeing how far he could go in a town where nobody was able to stop him.
But Steve didn’t have to intervene.
Jack pulled his hand away from the cash register. It took tremendous willpower but he slowly stepped back. Even though he couldn’t see the money anymore he was still thinking about it.
The hunger didn’t go away. Jack wanted something for free.
He looked at the glass fridge beside the counter. There were cakes and biscuits of all shapes and sizes stacked in there – chocolate eclairs, donuts, cookies and large, superbly crafted birthday cakes, one of which was shaped like a heart with pink icing and fresh strawberries running around the edge.
“You mind?” Jack said, glancing at Steve.
He walked over to the other side of the counter. Jack reached his arm into the fridge and grabbed a vanilla frosted donut off the shelf. He took a big bite. It didn’t taste very good but nonetheless he kept eating and it was gone in a mere three bites.
Jack looked at Steve.
The Hudsons were good, honest folk. Decent, upstanding members of the community. They’d never caused Jack any harm – on the contrary they’d always been nice to him, even throwing the odd sweet-tasting freebie his way when the school football team won a big game.
“I’m sorry Steve,” Jack said.
He looked into the man’s eyes, two unblinking rocks of marble. He leaned in closer, like he was about to whisper a secret that no one else could overhear.
“What the hell is going on here Steve?”
Steve didn’t move.
Jack stepped away from the counter with a heavy heart. He walked towards the door but stopped on his way out and turned back to face the customers.
“Does anybody know what’s happening?” he said.
Jack felt a growing sense of panic inside. Was he the only survivor in town after all? That wasn’t just speculation anymore. What if there was some freak mutation in his biology that allowed him to withstand the attack?
He turned his back on the waxworks. He opened the door and stepped outside with his head hanging low, his eyes to the ground.
When he looked up, someone was standing in the Octagon.
Something.
It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was a cloud of fuzzy light. Jack recognized it as the sort of light he’d seen on old TV screens with no signal. Snow. TV snow. And there was something insi
de the snow – something dark and human-shaped. Its entire body was featureless except for two large black eyes that looked like round pebbles. Its hands rested on the snow like someone with their palms pressed flat against a window. As it – the Snowman – watched Jack, it bobbed up and down like someone floating underwater.
“Jack,” it said. A man’s voice. It was a whispering shriek of a voice. It was mundane, unspectacular and yet at the same time, it was a sound that belonged in the darkest nightmare.
“Come here Jack,” it said. “Won’t you trust me?”
Chapter 4
Jack ran down Main Street as fast as he could.
He looked over his shoulder only once, making sure that the thing wasn’t chasing after him. But the Snowman hadn’t moved. It was still there, hovering like a strange deity in the Octagon.
Even from a distance, Jack could feel those two black eyes burning a hole through his head.
He kept to the middle of the road. If he strayed too close to the buildings and shop fronts then something was liable to reach out its long fuzzy arms, grab Jack and drag him inside towards a fate worse than death. There could be hundreds of Snowmen watching and waiting on the sidelines. Jack wasn’t going to take any chances.
He ran harder. His lungs were on fire. There was a frantic, choking noise coming out of his mouth, like something was stuck in his windpipe and slowly killing him. It wasn’t long before his arms and legs got heavy and he began to slow down.
Jack looked for somewhere to hide. He was approaching a large, beautiful old building with Greek style columns at the front, which from a distance at least, made it look like an old temple. It was in fact, the Alexandra Falls Post Office. Without a second thought, Jack ran up the short stone staircase that led to the front door. Fortunately the door was lying wide open.
Jack raced inside and staggered forward for a few paces before collapsing onto the carpet.
He didn’t move for about a minute after that. Jack’s face was buried deep in his hands. He didn’t want to see anything. He also tried to close his mind – blocking out all the instinct that urged him to start thinking, to try and make sense of what had just happened.
But everything else could wait. For now, all Jack could do was listen to the high-pitched wheezing sound of his body grasping for oxygen.
Eventually he flipped himself over so that he was lying on his back. He lifted his head off the floor and took a look around.
The post office was busy for such an early hour. There was a small queue at each one of the three service desks – the first customers of the day most likely. Now they were going to be trapped in those lines, forever waiting to be served.
Bummer.
Jack propped himself up so that he was leaning on his elbows. He was entranced by the faces of the people working behind the desk: two middle – aged women and a younger man – the polite, yet guarded smiles they pointed at the customers while trapped in mid-conversation. It was such a mundane yet fascinating thing, particularly the sadness in their eyes. Or maybe Jack was just imagining that part.
He looked behind him.
There were several wooden tables at the back of the large room, close to a row of shelves containing a vast array of stationery items – pens, pencils, notebooks and envelopes of all sizes.
Jack had an idea. He got up, walked over to a table and flopped down on the bench. His breathing wasn’t quite back to normal. Neither was his heart rate.
He reached an arm towards the shelves and pulled out an A4-sized notepad and a small pen. He scribbled on the front of the notepad to check if the pen had ink. It did.
This was good. Now he’d be able to think things through better. If he could write it down, see the words clearly in front of him, one thought at a time – maybe he could make sense of this bizarre situation.
Jack opened the page and his thoughts escaped through the pen. He scribbled frantically in his attempt to document everything that had happened so far.
At some point this morning, March 25th, a chemical attack was unleashed upon – upon where? It can’t just be Alexandra Falls. That doesn’t make sense. It can’t just be Oregon either…
Jack looked up from the desk.
“Can it?”
He shook his head.
It has to be a national attack – America has been targeted and possibly other nations too. TV not working. Cellphones down.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Jack pressed so hard with the tip of the pen that it felt like his knuckles would burst through the skin.
God, he was thirsty after that run.
He looked over his shoulder. There was a large refrigerated display unit with bottled water and sodas near the service desks. Jack went over and helped himself to a small bottle of water. He opened it and drank it all in one gulp.
Jack sighed. He wiped his mouth dry with the back of his hand, took another bottle and went back to the desk.
He looked at the last thing he’d written down.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
We’re under attack. I think, so far at least, I’m immune to whatever it is that hit us. But what did hit us? It’s like no weapon I’ve ever heard of before – some sort of chemical agent with the ability to paralyze people. Stop them in their tracks. I read about a rare medical condition once – Locked-in syndrome, where people are aware of their surroundings but they can’t move their muscles.
Jack glanced over his shoulder at the customers. Then he turned back to the paper.
Are they still conscious inside their bodies? Is that what’s going on here? A weaponized version of locked-in syndrome?
Or are they dead?
Who is capable of this?
And what the hell did I just see in the Octagon?
Jack dropped the pen and it rolled across the table. Questions, questions, questions. He got to his feet and paced back and forth across the room, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. Before he knew it, he was standing beside the people at the service desks. He felt like a visitor in a futuristic museum, walking through an exhibition that replicated the interior of a twenty-first century post office.
“Who are the most likely candidates?” Jack said, looking at an old man standing in line for checkout number three. Jack was speaking in the same formal tone that he’d used in eleventh grade debate club.
“Russia?” he said. “North Korea? Anyone else we’ve pissed off lately?”
He walked up and down the line, scratching his chin thoughtfully.
Who haven’t we pissed off lately?
“Even if it’s the Russians or North Koreans,” Jack said, “doesn’t that throw up another problem? Because I don’t believe a weapon like this exists – not right now. Paralysis gas? Surely not. But let’s just assume for a moment it does and if so, who is capable of creating such a weapon?”
Jack returned to the desk and picked up the notebook and pen. He brought them over to the service area, the pen hanging out of his mouth. As he walked, he studied the last two lines he’d written down:
Who is capable of this?
And what the hell did I just see in the Octagon?
Jack stood by his audience, addressing them like a lawyer talking to a jury in a courtroom.
“What about the Snowman?” he said. “What about that thing I just saw out there? Was I hallucinating? Was it real?”
Jack paused.
Something else came back to him.
He scribbled frantically in the notebook.
It knew my name.
“For God’s sake,” Jack said, looking at the waxworks as if he was expecting them to react in shock. “It knew my name. And it spoke with – wait, did it have an accent of some kind?”
He thought it over as he walked back to the old man in line number three.
“No I don’t think I heard an accent sir,” Jack said. “Or maybe I was just too scared to notice at the time.” He laughed, forcing it out so hard that he sounded like a maniac in a padded cell. “It’s not every
day you see something like that you know?”
He put pen to paper.
What else?
He glanced at the waxworks, his eyes roaming up and down the line.
“What if I’ve been barking up the wrong tree?” he said. “What if this is something else altogether? I’ve been certain from the get-go that we’re dealing with a chemical attack but what if I’m wrong?”
He stopped in front of a large woman who was cradling a cardboard box in her arms. Jack glanced at the address label and noticed that the package was bound for Los Angeles, California
“What else could it be?” he said. “Any ideas ma’am?”
Jack grinned and walked away.
He found himself wandering towards the service desk. In particular, he focused his attention on a cheerful-looking woman sitting behind desk two. She’d been handing out change to a woman when the freeze hit. Now she’d been left with an exaggerated, cartoonish smile, her eyes big and her mouth wide open like she was gasping for breath.
“You know something,” Jack said. “I haven’t been straight with you guys since I got here. I haven’t been straight with myself either. There’s a word that’s been in the back of my mind since all this started. It was there when I saw those people on the street and it was still there when I saw my parents in bed together. I swatted it away because I didn’t want to take it seriously. Then I saw the Snowman…”
He turned to face the rest of the waxworks.
“Promise you won’t laugh okay?”
Nobody moved.
“Aliens,” Jack said.
It sounded crazy, even to a roomful of people who couldn’t express themselves.
“What I mean,” Jack said, holding both hands up. “Is that this can’t be the work of humans. It just doesn’t add up, not this kind of weapon. Don’t you think?”
Jack sighed and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
The Dystopiaville Omnibus: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Horror Collection Page 18