Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  As Miri hit the gas and the tires spun in the snow, Allie glanced to the right and saw the ice men bent over Torres, digging into him and ripping out strands of a vapor she could barely see through the storm, ribbons of the thing she could only think of as Carl Wexler’s soul.

  “Faster!” Allie said as they pulled away. “Get us to Jake’s!”

  “What about the rest of the ghosts?” Miri asked.

  Allie thought of Carl and Gavin Wexler and how they had not wanted even the people who loved them and were still living to know they had returned. She realized that they had no way to predict the wishes of the dead.

  “My concern is for Isaac and for your father, and for the living. The rest of them will have to fend for themselves.”

  NINETEEN

  Timmy Harpwell drove his battered red F-150 through the storm, massive plow blade adding all the weight he needed for traction in the snow. He had three other drivers out working for him tonight, plowing a handful of private developments and business parking lots. A storm this size, they couldn’t just wait until morning and deal with it then. Timmy understood that, but he sure as hell hadn’t planned to be one of the grunts freezing his ass off tonight. He’d made the mistake of hiring his wife’s nephew and the little puke had called in sick. Timmy had tried calling Franco, who hadn’t been answering his phone all damn day.

  “Assholes,” he muttered. He’d been in a perpetually pissed-off state for the past fourteen hours or so.

  Lukewarm air blasted from the truck’s vents. The truck’s heater had chosen today to shit the bed, and he couldn’t get properly warm. His fingers were cold on the steering wheel, even with gloves on, and his toes were cold, too.

  I’m too young to feel this damn old, he thought.

  The engine groaned under the weight of the plow blade as he hit the brakes, slowing down to turn into the parking lot of Dudley Plaza, a rinky-dink little strip mall whose anchors were Domino’s Pizza and White Hen Pantry. Working the lever, he put down the plow blade and gunned it, clearing a swath of pavement. Six inches of snow had fallen since the last time he’d been by and the snow just kept falling.

  “Fuckin’ snow,” he whispered.

  Timmy missed the shithole video store that had once been next to White Hen; they’d had the most interesting porn section in town. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t find online these days, no matter how perverse, but there had been something about perusing those video racks that he liked. For some reason, his wife would watch porn with him back when he could bring a videotape or a DVD home, but she thought there was something more unsavory about watching it on the computer.

  Tonight his balls were so cold he didn’t think he’d ever be able to get turned on watching porn—or doing anything else—again. When he got home, he’d wake Amy up and see if she wanted to try to warm them up. The thought brought the first smile to his face in hours.

  He put it in Reverse, raised the plow, and took a swig of coffee as he backed up for another run. When he looked up, someone was standing in his path, headlights barely able to illuminate more than a silhouette.

  Timmy leaned forward to peer through the windshield.

  “What the hell?” he muttered. “Out of the way, moron.”

  Shifting into Drive again, he revved the engine, having no interest in rolling down the window and letting the storm in. Whoever the idiot in the middle of the parking lot in front of Domino’s was, he didn’t get the message.

  “Oh, for Christ’s—”

  Timmy never finished the sentence. His mouth hung open and he stared, cocking his head to one side. The figure ahead had moved nearer as if sliding or gliding along the just-cleared pavement, crossing a dozen feet in an eyeblink, and now that it had come closer he could see it more clearly.

  No way, he thought. It’s got to be some kind of—

  It flew at the truck, dagger fingers reaching, jaws wide, teeth bared, and shrieking in harmony with the storm. It struck the truck’s grille just above the plow blade and vanished in an explosion of ice crystals that scattered across the windshield. Only then did Timmy realize that the shrieking had been his own and that the horrible, inhuman, keening wail was still coming.

  Heart thundering, his whole body numb, he clapped a hand over his mouth to silence his screams. Taking long, hitching breaths, as cold as he’d ever been in his life, frozen to the bone, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw the terror in his eyes and knew that he was not the man he had always believed himself to be. He felt his heart racing, felt himself on the verge of tears he refused to shed, and knew something had broken inside him. A strange sort of anger overcame him.

  Franco, you motherfucker, he thought.

  Whatever the hell had just happened—a hallucination, he told himself, had to be—he never would have been out here if not for Franco. As Timmy exhaled slowly, his heart still banging, trying to get himself under control, he promised himself that he would make Franco’s life hell for a while.

  He frowned, realizing that the cold he felt was not just fear. His heater had finally died completely; nothing but frigid air was blowing in through the vents.

  “Goddammit!” he shouted, liking the anger in his voice. It made him feel better.

  He reached for the temperature-control knob … and something reached back. Ice crystals poured through the vents and sculpted themselves into sharp icicle fingers and grabbed on to his wrist.

  Timmy shrieked as its face began to slide in through the vents, jaws wide.

  He looked into its blue-ice eyes and saw a terrible nothing that seemed to fall into some soulless forever, and he pissed himself, the last of his dignity leaving him.

  And then he died.

  Doug stood in the storm, fighting the wind and the snow that whipped at him, and watched things carved out of ice drag Franco into the air. They were like wraiths, jagged, frozen bogeymen, and they whirled about on crushing gusts of wind for a second or two before they rushed head-on toward the sprawl of a tree’s bare branches. Franco shouted for help, his voice rising near a scream as he tried to fight them, and then there came through the storm the most sickening sound, a wet crunch as the wraiths impaled him on a pair of jutting, skeletal branches.

  “Jesus,” Doug whispered, and he turned to bolt for the snowmobiles, furious with himself for the seconds he’d wasted by watching Franco’s murder. Shock had paralyzed him and now terror freed him again.

  A gunshot cracked the night, echoes swirling in the blizzard. Doug spun around to see Baxter pointing a gun at him.

  “Is this you, Dougie?” Baxter asked, eyes wide with fear. “Did you do this?”

  “Fucksake, Bax … we gotta go!” Doug shouted over the screaming of the snowstorm. His heart banged against the inside of his chest. His face had lost all feeling; he had never felt such cold.

  Baxter marched at Doug with the gun aimed at his face, as if the wraiths were not still there in the woods, watching, and whipping back and forth in the blizzard overhead. Had he really lost it so completely?

  “Baxter—”

  “What the hell is this?” Baxter shouted. Doug saw the frost that had started to form on his face and stuck his eyelashes together.

  A crunch of boots on snow made them both turn and Doug had to shield his eyes from the snow to confirm what he thought he’d seen. Angela stood there, long ringlets of dark hair whipping in the wind, eyes wide with a sadness that broke his heart. Her thick winter coat and gloves and scarf might have made her look adorably comical any other night, anyplace other than this.

  “It’s exactly what I feared!” she said.

  Baxter marched toward her, aiming at her chest. “Who the hell are you?”

  “No!” Doug yelled, darting between them, hands raised. “She’s with me, man.”

  “So you had fucking backup? You had some double cross in mind?” Baxter screamed.

  Doug knew then that he’d snapped. The things were watching, gliding lower, sliding from the woods and coming acro
ss the backyard toward them, the swing set left behind, and Baxter acted as if they were no threat at all, even though Franco’s body hung impaled on a tree, blood already freezing in red icicles beneath him.

  “It’s not like that,” Doug said, his feet crunching in the deep snow as he backed up to where Angela stood.

  “No? Then what’s it like?” Baxter screamed, panic breaking him. “What the hell is this shit?”

  “They’re coming,” Angela said quietly, and yet somehow—through some trick of the blizzard—her voice carried to both of them.

  Baxter must have seen that she wasn’t looking at him anymore. He turned to see what had drawn her attention and it was as if he awoke to the truth in that moment.

  “Franco!” he screamed.

  Instead of fleeing, Baxter raised his gun and ran toward the wraiths, firing again and again. Doug saw one bullet strike home, shattering the heart of one of those ice demons without slowing it down. And then they were on Baxter, fingers stabbing and tearing.

  Angela had Doug by the arm and they turned to each other, shouting at each other in unison that they had to run. They went headlong, practically falling forward through the deep snow, the effort pulling hard at the muscles in Doug’s legs so that by the time he reached his snowmobile he crashed into it before throwing one leg over. Angela jumped on behind him, straddling the seat and screaming at him to go.

  He started it up and the engine roared as he twisted the throttle. The snowmobile gunned forward, its single headlight picking out a path ahead as he raced for the street. No way would he try to backtrack through the woods, not now. He’d dropped his backpack but the saddlebags on the snowmobile were full of what he’d taken from the other houses. He forced his fear down, packed away his childhood terrors deep in his heart where they had always lain in wait. Where he believed they lay in wait for all of us when we are fragile, or alone in the dark.

  Enough of fear, he told himself. This could still be a fruitful night, but only if they lived.

  “Dougie,” Angela said, speaking close to his ear.

  He glanced back and saw two of them rising and diving in the storm, and then starting in pursuit.

  “Hold on!” he shouted as they went up over a snowbank and down into the street. He swung the snowmobile to the left and gunned it again. Snow kicked up behind them as they shot off down the street with the headlight leading the way, knifing through the darkness, as if trying to outrace the killing grip of winter itself.

  “Dougie, listen,” she said, so close and warm at his ear, though their speed blew the snow so hard that it stung as it hit them. “It’s me, babe. I missed you so much. I know you blamed yourself for not being there that night, but I forgive you, Dougie. All I wanted was to feel your skin against mine again. If they get me … if they take me back, at least I’ll—”

  “Cherie?” he said, so quietly that in the raging storm she could not possibly have heard.

  “God, I love you,” she said, squeezing him tightly.

  They reached a corner and he swung right, headed for Greenleaf Street, praying the power would be working there or on Route 125 just beyond it. As if streetlights will save you, he thought, and his heart broke.

  “How?” he asked.

  She screamed, then, and he twisted around to see her being lifted off the back of the snowmobile by her hair, kicking her legs and trying to reach for the spindly ice demon that dragged her into the air. It caught her wrist and climbed higher until she was only another shadow in the storm. Doug turned, screaming her name—not Angela, but Cherie—so much that had not made sense about the previous days suddenly making heartbreaking, breathless sense at last.

  His gaze was still searching the whited-out sky when he hit a snowbank he hadn’t seen coming, jostling him hard enough that he lost his grip on the handlebars. The sled went out from under him, its engine racing as it took air, and it crashed a dozen feet farther along even as he hit the snow, rolling violently. He felt his left forearm give way with a loud crack and cried out his pain.

  Lying on his back, staring up at the whipping snow, he saw Cherie fall, end over end, before she struck the ground. Again he roared her name. Cradling his broken arm, he stood and staggered thirty feet, over the snowbank and back into the street, where he found her bleeding and shattered.

  “No, baby, no,” he said as he crumpled to the snow-covered pavement at her side.

  Doug felt hollow inside, utterly bereft, unable even to summon the tears that his soul wanted to cry. He glanced skyward, expecting to see them descending upon him with their icicle fingers and bottomless eyes, but they were gone.

  Then he felt her move. Her eyes fluttered and his breath caught in his throat when he saw her focus on him. Her brows knitted in confusion.

  “Doug?” she said weakly.

  His heart seized on the tiniest shred of hope that she might live, that he would not lose her a second time.

  “I’m here, honey,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  Her confusion flared to anger. “But how did I get here? What happened to me?”

  The bitter, cutting edge in her voice gave her away.

  “Angela?” he said, his last hope extinguished.

  Her eyes rolled up and she passed out from shock, her injuries too great. But he had heard that bitter edge, had seen her eyes, and he knew that whatever part of Cherie had been inside her, the demons had torn it out again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered to the broken woman before him, the snow already beginning to accumulate on top of her, turning red and melting where it touched her blood. Things could have been so different if only he’d known.

  Still, he could not cry. Doug laid his head back and gazed up into the storm, and amid the whipping snow and punishing wind he saw a single pair of eyes glaring at him, dark pits like holes in the world.

  He screamed as the demon hurtled down at him through the blinding snow, long icy talons outstretched. Heart seizing, breath frozen in his throat, he rolled away from Angela and threw himself sprawling across the road. He felt those talons at his back, slashing, tugging, ready to eviscerate him. He reached the snowbank and launched himself over the top, twisting around to see how close he was to death.

  The snow swirled around Angela’s broken, motionless body, but of the ice demon there was no sign. Wherever it had gone, Doug prayed it would never return.

  TJ grabbed his wife by the hand and looked into her eyes, all the tension between them forgotten. The scraping continued on the walls and roof and TJ kept his eyes averted from the window over the sink, afraid that he would see another of the winter ghosts staring back at him with those empty, frozen eyes. Hate-filled eyes, as if the things despised him for the warmth of his flesh and wanted to strip it from him.

  “The upstairs bathroom has no windows,” he said, turning from Ella to Grace, still unnerved by the aged wisdom in her eyes. “We can stuff a towel under the door—”

  “It may not keep them out for long,” Grace said, her voice sounding even more like her grandmother’s.

  TJ put a hand on her back, hustling her along in front of himself and Ella. “I don’t see another option. They’ll find a draft eventually, get into the house. If we’re waiting out the storm, we’ve got to buy time.”

  He felt as if his pulse throbbed throughout his body, banging in his temples and the tips of his fingers and beating a rapid rhythm in his chest, but he had to stifle his fear. Grace—Martha—rushed for the stairs and started up, with TJ and Ella ascending behind her. At the top of the stairs, TJ started to turn toward the hall bathroom, but Grace had stopped short in the corridor, staring through the open door of her bedroom.

  Ella grabbed her daughter by the arm. “Hurry!”

  Grace pulled her arm free, turning to glare at Ella with Martha’s eyes. “Look outside!”

  TJ and Ella crowded behind her and saw that she had stopped to peer into her darkened room. The purple, frilly curtains that Grace loved had been drawn back and beyon
d the window the snow fell at a less drastic angle and the flakes seemed diminished. The storm had not ended, but it seemed to have weakened slightly.

  “Listen,” Ella said. “The wind has died down.” She turned and searched TJ’s face with hopeful eyes. “Do you think—”

  A terrible noise erupted in the attic overhead, a squeal like nails dragged out of wood followed by a little pop that TJ recognized as a light bulb bursting.

  “Oh my god,” Ella whispered, grabbing his arm so hard that her fingernails dug through his shirt and into his flesh.

  “It’s so cold,” TJ said, and he saw his breath fog in front of him.

  “They found a way in,” Grace said. “A vent or someth—”

  The attic had a hinged door with a drop-down ladder and as the three of them stared it began to shudder and bang with pressure from above. TJ stared in mute horror as the pull-string hanging below the trapdoor began to ice over.

  The shrieking began again, but this time it wasn’t the gale outside but the howl of frigid wind whipping through the house’s eaves. TJ looked at Ella and Grace, saw the sorrow and surrender in their eyes, and knew he could not live if he lost them. He thought of all the times he had held Grace in his arms when she was a baby and even later, as she grew—thought of all the nights Ella had fallen asleep curled against him in bed with her head resting in the crook of his arm—and he moved.

  Grabbing Ella, he shoved her to the bathroom. She careened through the open door and fell, sliding on the Italian tiles, scrambling to get back to her feet.

  “No, TJ, don’t—”

  He picked Grace up and went through the door, shouting for Ella to shut it even as he pushed Grace into the bathtub, thinking how absurd it all seemed, how wrong. How grimly mundane.

  “It’s not going to work,” Ella said quietly, her breath fogging in front of her.