The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Joseph Turkot

  I ask her what the hell happened here. She says it was a year ago, or she thinks anyway, that she was captured on the ocean. A storm on the great brown sea, and there they were. I know she means the snow walkers. They took us all in, she says. She tells the story of her abduction as we enter one of the doors and I tell her to stop talking so I can look ahead and listen. The hallway is as metal plain and empty as the main room before, with less light. An arm of the skeleton. The windows on this wing of the building have been covered with snow and barely any light gets in. What condition is he in? I ask. The hurt one. He was shot, she says. He is alive though. We walk down the corridor, Voley almost at her side, no longer growling. I can’t figure out how old she is, but my gut tells me she’s probably Russell’s age. Pretty, and the thought that she looked pretty registers for a moment. How could she be clean? I ask her if there is power here and she says no. But there is fuel. You’ll take me to it next, I say. We don’t want to stay here, she begs me, her voice quavering, but I tell her to shut up and tell me about the ones who took her from the sea.

  She leads me deeper into darkness, talking about another mutiny on the ship that captured her. A second split. Eventually, a group settled in these mountains, and when they first arrived it was still raining. She tells me that recently there was a group that left though. I ask if it was because of the power plant and she acts like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Was it because of the radiation? Like all the flyers? I ask. But she still says she’s not sure what I mean. And that the group left just the other week. They left in boats for the West, because there wouldn’t be enough food here anymore to support everyone. Face eaters, I say, remembering in my head the bodies of the men that Ernest and his crew gutted. All floating face up in the bobbing sea. Those that wanted to leave the ice and snow. Heading to Utah and never made it. The map of Leadville in their boat. I don’t tell her because I still don’t trust anything she says and know she’s probably full of shit. When we reach another door she pauses and looks at me. They weren’t face eaters, she says.

  They were worse, she goes on, and she turns to me too fast and I scold her again with the pistols. They’re maniacs. You have to help me. They won’t let me leave. How did you get here? she asks. I almost answer, but I hold back, because I know that anything I share is a risk. Why are they worse? I ask. We pause at the door. I want to keep moving because I know Ernest is somewhere on the other side, but I have to know. I wait for her answer and keep my aim steady. Why? Why worse? I ask again. I glance behind me in case this is all a setup, and someone else is in the building stalking me. And she’s buying time for them to get close enough to jump. But the hallway is one single tube, and there’s no one there, all the way down into the dark cavity of the main room.

  They rape me, she says. That’s what they kept me for. That’s why I’m here. And I can’t leave. There’s nowhere to run. The snow started and there’s no way to reach water anymore. The boat is too small even if we did reach it. The ones that left, they took the best of what we had. Any hope for me to get free. You’ve got to help me. They’re going to be back and they’re going to try to keep you too, she says. The truth suddenly spills out of me. It’s the word rape that makes it happen, and the face of red beard lying dead in the snow, and the ones Voley chewed up in the apartment, but mainly because I see Clint. His blue eyes and the sky of my nightmare. And I think it makes sense now after all. She’s not lying. A different kind of evil—not the face eater, but maybe worse, like she says. She looks at me with shadowy eyes and hair and is pretty again, like she wouldn’t know how to shoot a gun if I handed her one. They’re dead, I say. What? she replies. Let’s go, keep moving. She doesn’t, she just looks at me, troubled, like it can’t be true. What do you mean they’re dead? I explain to her, just enough to convince her. I tell her that there were three of them and they’re all gone. I tell her the color of the man’s beard. And that his rifle is back there on the desk in the other room. Didn’t you see it? She tells me no, but for some reason she starts to cry. Heavy sobs, and she says red, like it’s a question. Yes, red. Now let’s go, I order her. She just stands outside the door and keeps crying. I can barely see her face and her hair in the dark hallway, but all I can think about is reuniting with Ernest now. Even if I did believe her, I feel no joy from freeing her from the sex trap. She’s just another liability. A person I can’t care about. Someone who gets left behind after all this is over. Move! I shout.

  We enter another skeleton room with stairs on the far end. I ask again about the radiation but she won’t tell me anything. She’s having trouble keeping it together. The room is filled with more dead computers, and a large map on the wall. I stop to look at it because it’s so big. It’s the state of Colorado. On it, marked with different colored pins, are cities with their names rewritten. Most of them I’ve never heard of. And coming up from the bottom of the map is a dotted line, starting from the edge of the state and going up to the tip of the pin where New Leadville is marked. What’s the line? I ask. She’s still crying. Get it together, I yell. And I get the urge to shoot her again. I know where Ernest is, so why am I bothering to keep her around? If I let her go, she might try to stab me in the back. Just shoot her. But for some reason I don’t, and I wait. She takes almost a minute to stop the tears and I have to yell at her again to talk. Then she’s composed all of the sudden, steeled over. The ice, she says. It’s the ice.

  What do you mean? I ask. It’s how far they think it’s come, she tells me. She starts to explain but stops before I know what the dotted line really means. How it represents ice. What’s the matter with you? I did you the biggest favor of your life by killing them, I tell her. I know, she says, and pulls it together again. So that’s ice? Spreading all the way to the bottom of the state? I ask. Then she starts walking away again. Hey, I say. There’s the country map, she says. And she leads me to another bulletin board near a door by the stairs. It’s a smaller map but it’s the whole country. The same dotted lines run across it, stretching up like a peak into Colorado, but on this map they go all the way down through Texas, out into the Gulf of Mexico. I stare distracted at the United States and the lines. I haven’t seen the country in years. I trace the lines as they widen to the south, separating all the way down. How could this be serious? I ask. I try to convince myself it can’t be, because ice isn’t somehow taking up the whole bottom half of the country, and if it did, no one could know all this. She tells me that half a year ago they still had a computer system running. A computer that was getting transmissions. Something from working satellites. And that’s why so many planned to go west. Because the south is all ice now? I ask. She doesn’t say anything and I think I hear her sob coming back. I grunt in frustration and say angrily, Where’s Leadville? I run back to the other map, for a moment taking my eyes off of her. Get over here, I say. Then I study the bigger state-only map. Where is Leadville? I ask again. Underneath of New Leadville I see an old city name that’s been scratched out. The scratched out name is Platteville. My eyes scroll down a bit and I find Leadville, but there’s nothing there. No pin for it. No marker. Nothing to make me think it’s special at all. What does this mean, that Leadville doesn’t have a marker? She tells me this is Leadville, that we’re in Leadville, and that the markers mean it’s a place that people still live. Or that they thought people still lived. I look the whole state over and count. There are eleven pin markers. This is all bullshit, I say. The whole dream of Leadville starts to collapse all over again. The crush feels like the dream of the rainless city had never died in the first place, as if the flyers, the radio warnings, every sign along the way—all of them had been about the wrong Leadville. Not Russell’s Leadville. Our Leadville. But then I follow the dotted line and see that everything south of Platteville is in the ice zone. The real Leadville and everything south of it. And with thoughts of Russell I finally ask her: Have you seen anyone else here?

  No, she says. Anyone at all, passing through the town, taken in, seen by the f
ace eaters? Red beard and his brothers? Did they talk about anyone else? She cries again when I say red beard, and then I hear a cough. Loud and clear. From the room right next to us. She says no again, there’s no one else she’s heard about. Is he in there? I ask. She doesn’t answer and I tell her to go open the door. I know already from the cough. It’s Ernest.

  She starts away from the map and I keep both guns on her back. We walk to the door and I tell her again to open it. Then I see him, black beard and true Resilience rain gear. He’s in strapped in a chair with his arms stretched back. Tape wraps his hands and feet, and he can’t move. Ernest, I say in disbelief. I run past Voley and the woman and wrap my arms around him. He opens his eyes and smiles. He tries to talk but coughs again instead. Then he finally gets something out—Tanner, he says. Cut me free.

  I look around for a knife or anything sharp but I don’t see anything to use. I look for the nearest window but it’s too high. I try to pull the tape apart with my hands, tugging with everything I have, but it’s too sticky and I make it worse. He grunts as I cinch the tape tighter. The chair screeches along the floor and then comes to a rest. I need a knife, where’s a knife, I say. I stand up and realize I can just use my teeth. I duck back down and Ernest screams, No!

  I think it’s me he’s yelling at, but I see his eyes staring right through me. When I turn there’s a pistol in my face. It’s her. I beg her not to shoot and she yells at me to drop my guns. I drop the one still in my hand but she remembers I have another one and I curse myself because I never searched her. The thought rages through my head: How could I have been so dumb? I reach toward my other pocket and she tells me to do it nice and easy. I slow down and take it out, dangling, and drop it on the floor. I hear Voley start to growl so I shout to cover it up, Why are you doing this? After what they’ve done to you? I see the wolf shadow moving behind her. Go Voley, I scream in my head, but my eyes don’t stray from the gun in my face and her mad eyes.

  “You stupid bitch,” she says, her voice shaking. Ernest grunts and slides the chair with a screech again, and I hear him squirming like an elephant behind me. Stop it, she says, pointing the gun quickly at Ernest and then again at me. The struggle stops and everything is quiet. I can’t understand why Voley hasn’t jumped on her yet, how can he not know! How can he forget us now!

  Kick the guns over, she says. I send my toes into the metal and one by one they slide across the floor. And then, as I’m about to charge into the gun myself because I think Voley really has forgotten us, he leaps on her back, snarling and snapping. She falls to the ground, rolls and shoots. The flash lights the skeleton room and Voley yelps and slides off of her. The yelp sends my body forward, an electrical charge in all my muscles. I commit to a lunge at one of the guns but I kicked it too far and don’t reach. Voley yelps again on the floor and she sits upright next to him and then looks back at me, pointing the gun. She checks Voley but he’s not moving now and then she tells me to freeze. Don’t try it, she says. Her voice, and all its brokenness and crying, has vanished now, replaced with cold rage. And in the thin stream of light that’s hitting her on the floor, I see her hair. It’s all I see. Bright red, and suddenly it all makes sense. Ernest fights to break free from behind me, and Voley cries. I can’t even see where he’s been hit. The sister slowly stands up and tells me what I already knew.

  You killed them, she says, her voice rising in anger. Voley tries to stand back up. His paws click on the cement floor and she turns and points the gun to finish him off. I jump forward the second her head turns and she swings right back to me, as if she expected it, and fires. The flash and the sound and the pain rip through my body. I smack against the cold floor and my head is spun back on Ernest. His eyes are wide open and he’s staring at me, but all his strength is useless, and he watches in horror, unable to help, to do anything. They’re not dead, she’s lying, Ernest pleads. I feel warmth coming out from under my sweaters and I slip my hand underneath. I’m having trouble breathing and I think my lung’s caved in, the same as red beard’s. Red beard, his sister. Sister and brothers all bound up in the wastes. Waiting for us to travel 5,000 miles all so that we could die at their hands because of a mistake. And then I calm down, it’s not collapsed—I can breathe. In and out, I take a deep breath to make sure I’m still alive. And then I can hear talking again. It’s Ernest, he’s telling her that they’re not really dead. That he knows me and that I’m lying. I couldn’t kill anyone. She screams something about the guns. Do you think I’m stupid? she says. She repeats it, that she knows the guns. They’re the same guns! she yells. When I roll over I hear Voley whine again and I hear Ernest say, She stole them. That’s all. Don’t do this. Please.

  She walks over and I look up to see the pistol pushing right into Ernest’s jaw, and then she points it back down at me as I roll onto my back. I lift my head to see where the blood’s coming from. The right side of my stomach. I tell myself it’s so close to the edge of my body that it didn’t hit anything important. I’m not going to die. I start to say it repeatedly, and then I hear Voley trying to move his feet again. My breaths start coming fast, and it hits me that I’m not getting air in. The lung really is broken. Dizziness starts and everything seems off-balance and hazy. I hear the chair scrape the floor again. Ernest trying to break free. To kill her. But he can’t. She stands over me and everything is darkness. Everything is her shadow. Did you kill them? she asks. I try to say no but I can’t catch my breath.

  “Those were my brothers. My dad. I want you to know that, before you die. Face eaters? They fought the face eaters their whole lives. Kept me safe from them. So know that, before you go. Understand what you did.”

  Don’t! Ernest pleads again, but it’s useless. I know I’m going now. To find the nothingness. Because I’m sure this has all been a dream. A dream that I lived a life. That there was a story about me, and in it were Russell, and Delly, and Jennifer, and the Cap’n, and Dusty, and Voley, and Ernest, and the whale, and the fox. And all those cities. All that hope. Leadville. The veneer. All of those things, a dream. A dream of a story. My story.

  And then I hear the gunshot. It’s so loud, but somehow, it sounds very far away. Like death is a pleasant feeling. Like it happens to you from far away. And not actually happening in front of me, right in my face, from above, to my own mind and body, by this red haired assassin, avenging her family. I can’t believe her, in that last moment, about her family. That they were the good guys I killed. Nothing would make sense that way. But the gun shot doesn’t end my vision or my hearing or my hope that she’s lying. I think for a moment there is an afterlife, and that such a place does exist, and it takes over all your senses from just where you are when you die, because everything around me looks the same—the same terror coming from Voley, and Ernest, and her—but her, she’s changed—she leans forward and then falls, crushes my body. My breathing slows down with her weight.

  I groan and scream and feel my heartbeat pumping up blood, like each beat is heavy and everywhere in my body. I heave up and she slides off of me. I lift my neck to see if Ernest got free, and this isn’t some strange version of death, but there in front of me I only see the dark hallway—someone’s there. A lone splotch absorbing what little light drifts down. A man with a gun. It registers. Someone shot her, shot her in the back. She’s dying next to me. I look around and see her gun is within my reach. I grab it out of her hand and aim for the form. It moves closer, and like the first time I saw the snow, the words destroy everything else in my mind—out of Ernest’s mouth from the chair they come: Russell!

  The cry is long and labored and real. He calls again and it’s the same name. Russell! I push myself to sit up, and there he is—limping toward us. Moving slow, his leg, his bad leg, I know it right away. He forces it down and quickly shifts his weight off it to the good leg. Each hobbled step bringing him closer to us from the abyss. Is she dead? he asks with great seriousness, like he’s not happy at all to see either of us, rifle stretched out in his arms, aimed tow
ard us. Red beard’s rifle. Looks it, Ernest says, even though I’m closer and can still hear her breaths. Slowly dying, but dying nonetheless. I repeat Ernest and say yes, she’s going, and then I scream, forgetting I may be on my way too, joining her. But I can’t do anything other than release my overwhelming disbelief and joy, and I throw myself up to my feet, but the pain of the gunshot wrenches me down to my knees. I breathe deep and feel air come in. Voley is sitting up and licking his back thigh where it’s red. Don’t move, Russell says. He takes out a long knife and cuts Ernest’s wrists and legs free. There’s a kit upstairs. On the right, the bottom shelf in the gray metal cabinet. It’s open. White box. Go. He tells all of this to Ernest and Ernest doesn’t say a word. He’s running down the hallway before Russell even finishes. Russell kneels down next to me, checks the pulse of the red daughter, finally believing us now that she’s dead, and then he leans into me. He squeezes me and loosens up, and tells me I’m going to be fine. Just hang on. It’s a graze, he says, lifting my sweaters while I watch the ceiling so I won’t see it. I use my failing strength to whisper Voley’s name. Check on Voley, I say. And he does, and I hang on, adrenaline the only thing keeping me alert. Then the strangest thing happens—the pain is gone all of the sudden, and I watch his face. He looks the same as I’ve always known him to look—deep eyes a little more sunken in his face, and his beard a bigger mess than it’s ever been, but it’s really Russell. I squeeze his leg from the ground with my right arm. He tries to stop me and then he just lets me. What happened? I ask, and forgetting the seriousness of all the blood around me, I feel almost angry at him. Like I have so many times before. Like he shouldn’t have taken so long, let it come so close. Made me really believe this time that he was never coming back.