The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  Then the chopper took off, and it quickly shrank to blinking lights in the sky, and its clatter reduced quickly in volume to a murmur. Then it had wholly gone, and there was only the falling snow. A dozen military men, and myself, were standing around in the aftershock of the whole event. Guards had been doubled at the perimeter of the camp. Everybody had been searched. Military police had set up an incident room. My boss, Colonel Bruschetti, clapped my shoulder, told me I’d need to work a few overtime sessions on this one. I said fine, I said OK, anything you need sir. I said, overtime is the least of it. Jesus, I mean (I said) this is terrible, sir, this is terrible.

  He nodded. He drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out tragically. ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘So much evil in the world.’

  ‘Evil,’ I said.

  ‘Poor Amos,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t meant for him, I guess it was meant for Robinson.’

  ‘I,’ I said, ‘guess so.’

  He looked up at the night sky, where it seemed that the cold stars had been dislodged in their millions and were fluttering down. Apocalypse as litter. ‘This weather,’ he said. ‘It’s unseasonal, this much snow – I’ve lived here thirteen years, never seen the like.’

  ‘No sir,’ I said.

  ‘They got snow in Florida,’ he said. ‘You heard? In September? In September, though?’

  ‘Near October,’ I said. ‘Sir.’

  ‘But in Florida?’ he repeated.

  He went his way, back to his barracks apartment, and I said, ‘See you tomorrow sir,’ and I drove out to the motel.

  The army snowplows were keeping the roads open, but driving in the dark after the day’s excitement was a disconcerting business; the road was flanked by two chalk-colored cliffs of snow that lent a bizarre monotony to the driving experience. The cones of light from my headlights illuminated the same patch of white road, the same flanking white sidewalls, and after a few moments I lost the sense of motion at all. The inch of snow under my tires muffled the noise of the road. I seemed parked in a white box with the lid off, waiting only for the giant hand of God’s Spirit to lower a white slab over me and seal me away forever. When I strayed on the silent road, pulling a little to the left, the illusion that it was the wall moving in towards me, rather than I moving towards it, was very hard to shake. I rubbed my face with my palm, trying to wake myself up, but I had fallen into a sort of coma. I was living in a fairy tale. The world was freezing around me.

  Then there was a sign, hurtling forward as if some hurricane force had thrown it straight at me. And this was my turn-off.

  Off the main road the army trucks had cleared the way for about half a mile. After that the drifts had been accumulating for a week or more, and I had to pull to a stop. I clambered up and over a two-hundred-yard hump of snow before I got to the motel where Mo was staying. The staff there had tried their best to clear their own front area, but armed only with shovels they hadn’t been able to do much. The front door was clear, but the first-floor windows at the back of the motel were snowed in.

  I stamped as much snow from my ordinary shoes as I could, wiped it from my shoulders, and ducked into the lobby. The clerk didn’t even look up: she was staring at a TV screen. The news was carrying the story. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘What’s that? Is it local?’

  ‘The base,’ she said in a dreamy voice, without looking at me. ‘Down the road. Terrorists hit it.’

  ‘Man,’ I said, rubbing my hands to help my circulation. ‘That’s severe.’

  ‘Severe,’ she echoed in her TV-drugged voice. Her eyes never left the screen.

  I went along the corridor and up the stairs to Mo’s room. It took several bouts of knocking before he opened the door, and when he did he was holding a gun in his left hand. But he let me in.

  ‘You think that’s wise?’ I said, nodding at his left hand.

  ‘You could have been police,’ he said, gruffly, tossing the gun (actually throwing it) onto the bed.

  ‘And if I had been the police, would it have been wise,’ I said, ‘to have opened the door with a gun in your hand? If they’d have seen that, they’d have, like, pounced. Just act normal, man. Just talk normal to anybody who—’

  ‘You!’ he bellowed, suddenly, turning and raising both his hands – the gesture was like that of surrender, but the meaning was exactly the opposite. The meaning was hostility. ‘You don’t tell me what to do – you fucked it up. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? You hit the wrong guy. The plan wasn’t to whack some junior nobody.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, backing off a few steps. ‘Hey – man—’

  He advanced on me. ‘One thing you can’t do,’ he said, his voice huge with anger, ‘one fucking thing you’ve never been able to do – is talk street, don’t call me man, motherfucker. You’re a middle-class fucking college boy, you’re a writer, you’re a fucking pussy, you’re a fucking pansy, you bald-headed pussy. You had a childhood cosseted and pampered – you don’t – you don’t know – you don’t—’ His rage spluttered to a temporary halt.

  I had backed up against the door. He was standing in front of me, perhaps four feet away, his hands by his face, the palms slightly curled as if he had frozen in the middle of reaching out to wring my neck. His blue-bead eyes were staring.

  I swallowed. I could feel my fragile heart thudding.

  I looked swiftly about the room, and this is what I saw: the bed was still made, the sheets neat as a rectangle of cardboard, so he had not been asleep. The gun was lying near the pillow, where he had tossed it. The TV, on an articulated arm sticking out of the wall, was showing the news, but the sound was turned down. The bathroom light was on. The mini bar door was wide, and its Lilliputian bottles were scattered, empty, all about the carpet.

  I looked straight at Mo. I tried to summon my courage. When he was in one of these rages he could be very hard to handle, but my experience was that the anger often drained away as swiftly as it had come on. I tried to pacify him. I held up my own hands, palms forward, directly in front of my chest. ‘Mo,’ I said, in a small voice. ‘Can we just talk about it?’

  His breathing was audible, rough. He was staring unblinkingly at me. His arms were still up.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, wheedling. ‘Can I have a drink? Can I just have a drink? Or,’ I added, forcing a smile, trying to defuse, ‘have you drunk all the drinks?’

  This allusion to his drunkenness, though intended comically, tipped him over the edge into rage. I realized as I said it that it was poorly judged. He lurched suddenly towards me, breathing a groan of sheer wrath, his right hand clumped into a fist. My legs jellified, and I just slumped to the floor. I was squealing. I was genuinely, physically terrified of this man. His fist hit the door above me with a splintering thud. It went right through.

  An animal panic took me, and I scrabbled like a ferret along the carpet, half rising and half leaping to get up onto the bed and over it to the other side. Mo had turned. ‘You fucker,’ he said. He didn’t shout, he spoke distinctly, clearly. ‘You fucker.’

  I was gabbling. ‘We didn’t plan for that eventuality – the junior guy turned on the microphone for Robinson – we should have anticipated that eventuality but we didn’t, it’s not my fault, it’s absolutely not my fault, that eventuality was not—’

  Mo stalked towards me, his huge hands out in front of him like Frankenstein’s monster. A splinter of chipboard from the door was stuck in the crevice of two of his fingers.

  I leaped up on the bed as he came down the side of it, and jumped down again, keeping the mattress between us. On an impulse I grabbed the gun, and held it in front of me.

  ‘Just be cool, Mo,’ I said.

  But he was a big man. He reached easily right over the bed and simply plucked the gun from my hand. Then he flipped it around and pointed it at me. I flinched. ‘Jesus, Mo, quit this, could you just? Just?’ I said, high-pitched. ‘Just give me a break? – Can we talk about it? Can we just talk?’

  He aimed the gun precisely at my nose, and held it there. I flinc
hed, pulled myself together, tried to look calm, half-flinched again. ‘Mo,’ I said. ‘Mo, Mo.’

  ‘You,’ he slurred, loudly. ‘You – just stay there.’ He slipped the gun into his pocket and stalked straight out of the room.

  I let a great tense breath loose itself out of my lungs. With the relaxation came a rush of instant resentment. ‘Jesus, Mo,’ I called after him. ‘What are you playing at? You coulda given me a heart attack. That’s not just a manner of speech with me, you know.’

  There was a crash from further along the corridor. I heard plywood splinter. ‘Jesus,’ I said, more quietly, too quietly for him to hear. ‘You’ll have security here in a minute.’ Although, on the nightshift in a snowed-in motel, I supposed there was little enough to fear from security. I doubted if the cops would even make the effort of calling by, given the drifts outside. This in turn alarmed me further. I had an unsettling vision of Mo sitting on the bed with his feet on my chest, my corpse on the carpet, and nobody even coming to check what the sound of the gunshot was.

  Usually, as I said earlier, Mo would be decent with me when it was just the two of us, and would act up, get pissy, get abusive to me when there was a third party as audience. But every now and again he would surprise me.

  He emerged at the door to his own room, his arms full of miniature bottles. ‘Did you just smash the door down next door?’ I asked. ‘To get at the minibar?’

  ‘My one’s empty,’ he mumbled, stepped forward and dropping the dozen or so little bottles onto the mattress.

  ‘What if there’d been somebody in the room?’

  He glared at me. ‘I been here three days now,’ he said. ‘I can hear there’s nobody next door.’

  ‘But still, hey – I don’t want to be all – all criticizing,’ I said, still feeling my way for his mood, ‘but I suppose I wonder – hell, I wonder whether it wouldn’t be an idea to lie a little lower, you know? Not draw attention to ourselves?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said, dimly. His truncheon fingers were struggling to uncap a tiny bottle of bourbon.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, suddenly fierce, ‘not to say—’ he took a swig from the little bottle, ‘—pretending like you’re some wise guy, like you’re all street, fuck all that.’ He snorted derision. There was an armchair in the corner of the room, positioned for him to watch the TV from, and he slumped into the seat.

  I was still standing beside the bed.

  ‘The microphone,’ I said. ‘It’s just one of those things. We neither of us figured that the junior—’

  ‘You don’t ever shut up?’ cried Mo.

  ‘All I’m trying to say,’ I said.

  There was silence. Then Mo let out a big sigh.

  ‘I’m surrounded by fucking amateurs,’ he wailed. It was almost comical. I felt the urge to laugh. ‘I should go it alone – wipe the slate clean, leave no trace.’

  ‘It’s still worth claiming it,’ I said. ‘It’s still a military hit, a legitimate target. We can still claim it, yeah?’

  Mo said something to me then. I don’t want to report it here. It had to do with something that happened to me when I was a child, a traumatic something: and I had told Mo about it a while back – and wished soon after that I hadn’t told him, because he mocked me over it many times, he mocked me in front of other people. He mocked me there, in that motel room, on that night – he rehearsed the thing I had told him, and laughed at me. I can’t report what he said without revealing the thing that happened to me when I was a child, and I choose not to tell you that thing – that’s my secret. It’s buried with the snow. The snow made everything new. The whole world just stopped, and all its secrets are hidden away now where nobody can ever find them.

  Let me ask you a question. You’re lawyers, right? So: how long, in NUSA, before people start digging up corpse-meat to eat? How longer until that is made legal? More than that – how long until it becomes habitual, so that we no longer even think twice about it? So that we start to relish it, to think of it as normal? When the regular food-mines run empty – I know, because I chaired a mining committee, that miners come across human bodies all the time, in all manner of sleepy-faced dead positions in the snow, their tissue full of proteins and fats and preserved by the extreme cold. How long until hunger shifts human culture to that food source? There’s several years’ supply of high-protein food down there, whilst we arrange things up here.

  Or has it already happened?

  Of course, the government would cover that up, if it’s true. You ever see Soylent Green?

  Let me tell you something else: this I knew from way before. I was always unillusioned about this. You want to know, although you don’t ask it, why a nice middle-class Catholic boy like me turned into the enemy of the government and all that, why I followed the path I followed. But I saw, early, that this cannibalism was the way the world worked. I saw that when I was very young. So it shouldn’t surprise you. The cosmos isn’t pain and ugliness and all that adolescent shit, but of course it feeds on itself, and of course the bigger animals eat the smaller animals and of course the government is the biggest of the animals.

  I didn’t think you’d understand.

  No.

  I turned the volume up on the television and sat on the end of the bed drinking raw vodka out of one of the tiny bottles. The news circled back to the microphone bomb every twenty minutes or so, but there wasn’t much they could report, and other news crowded it out. Mostly the news was weather. People dying of hypothermia all over, scientists and their theories, global warming. End of the world. With hindsight the weather was truly the big news, but at the time I was impatient, I wanted to see how the media mirror reflected me back to myself. I wanted, you see, to feed on myself. I figured the weather was just a bit of unseasonal snow. I thought there were more important things in the world.

  The clouds always used to look so innocent, but they devoured us – didn’t they? They opened their mouths and they ate the world. Fluffy, my ass.

  For quarter of an hour Mo seemed to have fallen asleep. But when I started talking again he woke up. ‘I still say we claim it, man,’ I argued. ‘One soldier’s like another, it hardly matters which is which. Let’s phone through a claim, before some other organization jumps on our bandwagon. Might as well make the most of it. Mo?’

  With his eyes closed, Mo said: ‘Wipe the slate clean. Starting again on my own.’

  I was looking right at him. His eyes clicked wide open. I almost jumped. It startled me.

  He stood up, pushing off from the arm of the chair. Then he took one step forward, so that his considerable bulk was between me and the doorway. The gun came out of his pocket.

  ‘Mo?’ I said.

  He fired the gun. Jesus, it made one big noise. I thought the walls would split open with the sound of it. I don’t know where the bullet went, except that it didn’t hit me, but I nearly jumped out of my skin. I screamed. ‘Jesus! Mo!’

  He moved his hand a fraction, re-aiming, but it was trembling slightly with the drink. He must have been much drunker than I realized. He fired again, and again the bullet went somewhere that wasn’t me. I jerked at the sound, I put my hands in front of my face – as if that would have been any protection! – I took a step towards him, thinking to run past him out of the door, but I changed my mind, I hovered, and then I just fled. I just fled. I had no courage. I wet myself – only a tiny little, but it was piss and it came out into my trousers, a dime-sized patch of moisture on my pants. I rushed to the window and fumbled stupidly with the catch. I was yelling. The noise was just coming out of my mouth like water from a broken-off pipe. Meaningless noise, vowels only.

  There was another gunshot and I fell over, but I hadn’t been hit. I don’t know why Mo, in that small room, had so much trouble hitting me. Maybe he was simply too drunk. Maybe he wasn’t really trying to kill me. But it surely felt as if he was trying to kill me. When I heard that third gunshot my leg
s just crumpled, and I slumped to the floor. My hand was still on the catch, and I didn’t fall all the way. And then, in a sudden rush, the window was open, and I was through, out into the snowflakey darkness.

  It was a second-floor room, but the drift was almost that high, so I fell into the brisk softness of the snow, still yelling in fear. I went through the papery surface of the snow and made a man-shaped two-foot shaft before my fall was broken. But I was scrabbling, and clambering out and round, as if the devil himself was behind me. I covered twenty yards, bounding down the chilly flank of the drift towards the main entrance of the motel, and behind me I heard poc-poc-poc, soft as a ping-pong ball hitting upholstery. Gunfire muffled by the snow. Snowflakes regularly spaced throughout a space of, let’s say, six hundred cubic meters – extraordinarily effective as a silencer. I thought, from the distant-sounding noises, that my adrenalin had carried me hundreds of feet away from Mo; but I looked over my shoulder and he was barely ten feet behind me. He had jumped out of the window after me, and was standing up to his hips in the drift, pointing and firing with the pistol. The chill of the air slid into my heart then, because I knew he was doing more than just firing drunkenly-randomly, I knew he was actually trying to kill me.