Storm Front - eARC

by Robert Conroy

  “Can’t find the Goddamned hydrant,” the fireman snapped. “You want to be useful, help us look.”

  The only water going on the fire was coming from garden hoses that were manned by frightened neighbors. Mike, little trained in fire prevention, saw that their efforts were ineffective. Understandably, the neighbors were trying to put out the fire and save their homes, when their efforts should have been used to contain it. Three houses were burning furiously, and there was nothing anyone could do to save them, while billowing clouds of smoke carried burning ashes through the snow to others. Unless something was done, the fire would continue to spread until it hit either a playground or a street. Until that time, many homes could burn.

  “You’d think all this snow would put it out,” Petkowski said. It seemed logical to Mike, too. Snow was water, after all, but the heat from the fire was evaporating much of the snow before it hit the flames. Rain might have worked, but snow lacked the density.

  “Might as well piss on it,” Petkowski added.

  “You might burn yourself and never be able to live it down,” Mike said. “Instead, why don’t we help them find the hydrant?”

  The two men began to crawl around where they thought there was a curb. Hydrants were funny things, always around and always in the way when you were mowing your lawn or looking for a place to park. Nobody liked the ugly things except when you needed one. Every few houses had a hydrant in front, but few people would be able to tell you exactly where they were. Your dog could, of course, but dogs had different agendas and, besides, they couldn’t talk.

  As Mike crawled and duck-walked through the snow, he thought of Maddy and her excursions that had gotten her soaked. At least he had better protective gear, although he could feel rivulets of melting snow going down his neck and onto his chest and back.

  Damn it, how far away could one be? And how far from the curb was it? And where on earth was the curb? He couldn’t recall. He and Petkowski had split up. Maybe they should have stayed together? They could have held hands and walked their way through the snow until they found one.

  Mike stumbled and fell face down in the snow. He picked himself up and hoped no one had seen him. They hadn’t. They were all either fighting the fire or also looking for a hydrant. A second fire department snowmobile showed up with more personnel and more hose and they joined in the search.

  “Got it,” yelled one of the newly arrived firemen. Mike swore in frustration at his own wasted effort, and aided in the effort to clear a mountain of snow off the hydrant.

  “God, I hope this one works,” the fireman said. “A lot of them don’t, you know.”

  Mike winced. It had taken them forever to find this one. How many more houses would be ashes if they had to look again? Nonworking hydrants were a minor scandal that the mayor had sworn was corrected. They would soon find out.

  Luck was with them. A hose was connected and a powerful stream of water began to soak the houses not yet touched by the fire. A couple of roofs were smoking from the heat, but the water quickly put an end to that nonsense. The second hose was just as effective. It would be a long while before the fires were out, but, for the time being, they were contained. A couple of homeowners were pissed that more effort wasn’t being made to save their houses, but it quickly became obvious that nothing could be done.

  “We’re covered with snow,” Stan said. “I look like Casper the Friendly Ghost and you look like Frosty the Obscene Snowman.”

  Mike took a deep breath and grinned. “Screw you, Polack. I’m the Grinch.”

  * * *

  Traci Lawford lay naked and huddled on the floor of her bedroom. Her entire body hurt. She was numbed from pain that was both physical and psychological. She had promised to cooperate in return for not being mutilated and she had done her part. But she never dreamed that anything this awful could happen in her life. Until now, she never realized how fortunate her life had been.

  Traci could have lain down on her bed instead of the floor, but her bed had been defiled, profaned by the repeated assaults upon her. She would stay on the floor.

  They had taken her up to her bedroom and Raines had raped her first. It wasn’t as horrible as it could have been when she closed her eyes and willed her mind to be elsewhere. Then the little guy, Tower, had assaulted her with a degree of violence and built-up anger that stunned her, and she’d screamed from the pain. She quickly realized that women didn’t like Tower and he was taking out his rage and frustrations on her, and that she shouldn’t provoke him. He thought her screams were a rejection of him, which they were, and they made him angrier. With more emotional strength than she thought she possessed, she willed herself to silent endurance.

  Then Raines wanted oral sex and she complied, hating every moment of the humiliation as she knelt before him. Tower watched them and laughed, which made it worse. She considered biting down on Raines, but rejected it. What they would do to her wouldn’t be worth the momentary satisfaction.

  A moment later, Tower was ready again and she complied, this time in silence. Tower was an animal with incredible sexual recuperative powers. Time and again he assaulted her, and long after Raines was satisfied. Raines thought Tower’s stamina was funny.

  Tower hit her once, splitting her lip. She’d begged him to stop when he was forcing himself on her for perhaps the fourth time, and it had angered him. She didn’t scream again, not even when he’d sodomized her, which was far more painful.

  Finally, Tower grew tired and left her in the bedroom.

  For a few moments after they’d left her, she wanted to die. She rolled from the bed and lay on the floor of her bedroom and wished her world would end. But it wouldn’t. Traci was not going to commit suicide, even if she knew how, considering that there was nothing resembling a weapon in her room. In their contempt for her, Tower and Raines hadn’t even tied her up. Therefore, she concluded reluctantly, she was going to have to live. She thought about escape. They had taken her clothes and emptied out her closet and removed the bedding. She was on the second floor and scared to death of heights. A jump to the ground would hurt her, perhaps breaking bones and leaving her to freeze to death in a mound of snow. Even if she were to make it to the ground safely, where would she go? She would leave a trail through the snow that they could follow to where? A neighbor’s? Do that and she’d endanger others, and she could not bring herself to do that. At least not yet.

  Of course, she had their word that they would not kill her. Sure. She’d seen their faces, and heard their voices, and they already were killers. Like they’d said, what would one more murder mean? If it was to their advantage to keep her alive, they would do so. But if it wasn’t, she had no illusions. They would cut her throat just like the others they’d bragged about. Traci shuddered from a fear she couldn’t control.

  Traci had to do something. She couldn’t leave the room because they’d locked it and barricaded it from the outside. She thought about barricading it from the inside with furniture, but that would only delay them for a moment. Her own bedroom had become a jail cell.

  She wasn’t thinking rationally and knew it. The abuse and the terror had overwhelmed her. She had to take back some control or she would die.

  Muffled voices came through the heat vent. Traci crawled over to it and pressed her ear to the metal grill. The acoustics in old houses were funny. Sometimes you could hear things you didn’t think you could. And sometimes you heard things you didn’t want to.

  * * *

  Joe Gomez and Tommy Hummel had finished the six cans of Coors in a very short while, and had gotten thoroughly bored playing cards. The news from the radio and on the small portable television told them nothing they didn’t already know—it was snowing. The television news said that power was out in many places but, knock on wood, not yet in their corner of the world, and even if it did, they’d hook up to a truck battery.

  They’d dozed fitfully on the uncomfortable furniture in the office. Joe’d pulled rank and claimed the old, beat-up c
ouch and wondered if he’d made the right decision. All the springs seemed to be broken and attacking his kidneys. At least they still had heat and the toilet flushed.

  “This is stupid,” Joe said.

  Tommy yawned. “Agreed.”

  “We just can’t sit here all night. We’ve got a big-ass truck with a plow and lots of power. We ought to be able to do something useful.”

  “It’d be easy if we could actually drive it somewhere. We could get through the snow if the roads weren’t jammed with tourists.”

  “What if we don’t use the roads?”

  Tommy giggled. “Tell me you are not suggesting that we go cross-country, through parks and over people’s lawns with that gigantic thing are you? Christ, we’d break anything we rode over and get sued.”

  “If it’s an emergency, why not?”

  “If we knew something was an emergency, I suppose we could do it. But who’s going to tell us what an emergency is?”

  Joe smiled and reached for the phone. “First, I think I’ll phone the cops and tell them we’re available and see what they think. Then maybe we can go out and play.”

  Tommy thoughtfully examined an empty Coors can. “If we’re going to be on call, I guess we should stop drinking. Too bad we ran out of this stuff several hours ago. Stopping would have meant something. Now it just means I gotta go take a tremendous piss.”

  * * *

  They didn’t find Wilson Craft for a while. He wasn’t one of the kids, so no one was keeping track of him. He’d always come and gone as he wished; doing whatever job he thought needed to be done. Technically, he worked for the principal, but the staff thought of him as basically self-employed.

  He wasn’t discovered until one of the teachers, young Sue Stapleton, wandered into the gym to see if there was anything else in the way of padding to help make the hallway floors more comfortable. Her screams brought Maddy and Donna. Wilson lay on his back. His eyes were wide open and he seemed to be conscious, but wasn’t responsive. There was a huge bruise on his head and blood seeped from an ear. The ladder was on its side in mute explanation of what had transpired.

  Maddy and Donna checked for a pulse—it was steady but weak—and tried to talk to him while a distraught Sue called 911.

  They were lucky. An EMS snowmobile just happened to be a couple of blocks away and arrived within minutes. The two technicians checked him briefly and radioed for more help.

  “Possible fractured skull and possible broken back” was the rough and grim prognosis. Obviously, he had to be transported to a hospital for proper care and, equally obviously, that wasn’t going to happen for a long while.

  Instead, one of the techs took the snowmobile and returned shortly with a doctor who lived a couple of blocks away. The doctor confirmed the technician’s diagnosis—it was either a broken back or a fractured skull or both.

  “Doctor, can he hear us?” Maddy asked. The doctor shrugged. He didn’t know. Wilson Craft would have to be transported with extreme care to a hospital and in an ambulance, not a snowmobile. In a perfect world, they would place a wooden board under him, wrap him in cushioning material so he wouldn’t shift and hurt himself even more, gently place him on a stretcher, and then put him in an ambulance. He would be driven carefully to a hospital where experts would evaluate him, X-ray and scan him, and perform numerous other tests that would likely save his life. But not tonight. The doctor said he wouldn’t survive a trip on a snowmobile and the techs agreed.

  Everything that could be done was done. The doctor said he would remain and stand watch. Without proper medical care, Wilson Craft was going to die. The only question was how soon.

  * * *

  “Wally, do you know where I am?” Governor Lauren Landsman asked over the telephone.

  “Hopefully, somewhere nice and warm and dry and holding a warm brandy in your delicate and sensuous hands,” Wally Wellman responded. He was still in the TV6 studio and very tired, but it was good to hear her voice. “And may I guess what you’re wearing?”

  “No such luck to the first and no to guessing the second. I am outside and standing on what was once Interstate 96, and I’m just about at the Brighton exit. I guess I’m about fifty miles from downtown Detroit. I’m watching the National Guard try to bull their way through the snow with armor that took down Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This whole thing is incredible.”

  “How’re they doing?” Wally asked.

  “Slowly, Wally, agonizingly slowly.”

  After hours of effort, the Guard had managed to clear only one lane of the interstate from Lansing to Brighton. Heavily falling and swirling snow, however, threatened to overwhelm their poor efforts. Thousands of men and women of the Guard were attacking the mountains of snow by moving down the various interstates that met in the metropolitan Detroit area, the approximate center of the area’s population, if not the storm.

  Even though she’d seen television and satellite images, Lauren was still stunned by the storm and the suddenness with which it took over everything in its path. For the first several miles out of Lansing, there was nothing, not even a hint of the disaster. Then there was a wet drizzle and, suddenly, a wall of white. It was as if there was an ordained dividing line between the lands of snow and no-snow.

  As everywhere, the Guard found its problems compounded by the thousands of abandoned vehicles that clogged the roads. They had to be moved aside far enough for plows to clear the road and for there to be an area to dump the thousands of tons of displaced snow.

  Lauren had pulled rank as governor and commandeered a tracked armored personnel carrier as her command post. She was aware that others might think it grandstanding on her part, but she could not abide the thought of sitting in her comfortable office and either reading about the problems the citizens of her state were having or watching them on television. No, she had to try and experience at least some of the difficulties as she tried to resolve the problems.

  All over, people were losing their homes, and those who only lost property were the lucky ones. Fires had killed a number of people as had a multitude of other causes. She’d been on the phone with several of the local mayors who’d tried to convey a sense of their tragedies.

  And what she’d seen looked like a snowbound planet from a science-fiction movie. In front of her, scores of men and women operated tanks, personnel carriers, and heavy machinery to push vehicles out of the way, while others used plows and front-end loaders to remove the snow. She knew she was useless from a practical point of view, but she hoped she was providing some moral support. This was becoming one of the worst natural disasters in the history of Michigan. Other than tornados and the occasional forest fire, her state had been remarkably free of much of the devastation nature routinely handed out to other areas, like Florida and California.

  It’s our turn, she reminded herself. There is no free lunch in life and paybacks are hell. Cripes, she thought, she was beginning to sound like Wally. The thought made her smile. Maybe next time she’d let him guess what she was wearing. Maybe she’d make it real interesting for him.

  “Over here,” yelled out a soldier who was standing by a car and waving frantically. All thoughts of Wally were wiped from her mind as she ran to the soldier.

  Bile raised in Lauren’s throat as the soldiers smashed the window of the car, opened the door, and dragged a stiff form out and laid it on the road.

  “What is it?” she heard Wally ask on her phone. “What’s the problem?” She had momentarily forgotten that she’d been talking to him and that the line was still open.

  “A dead man,” she told him, while walking over to the corpse. There would be no attempt to revive him. The man looked to be in his late forties or early fifties. He was frozen blue and his limbs were stiff. She wondered if he’d been on his way home to a family that now was worried sick about his not calling, or out selling widgets or something and wouldn’t be missed for days. Why had he stayed in the car? Had he suffocated? Not likely—the ignition was off. Had he frozen to
death? Possibly, but why hadn’t he left the car and tried to find better shelter?

  She knew the answer. They were in a rural area and the man probably couldn’t see a better place to go. Hell, he probably couldn’t see anything. Nor was he dressed for bad weather. The dead man wore a suit and an overcoat. He wore expensive shoes, not boots, and looked ready for a staff meeting, not a blizzard. She’d always heard that you should stay in a stranded vehicle and wait for rescue, and it looked like he’d done so until it was too late. At least they’d found the body, which might not have happened for a long while if he’d tried to cross a cornfield. She shuddered at the thought of what the thaw and animals would have done before his corpse was found.

  Maybe he’d had a heart attack on top of everything else? Hell, she thought, they’d probably never really know what happened to the poor guy. It really didn’t matter what the precise cause was. Death by storm should be written on the death certificate.

  “He won’t be the last,” Wally said softly. As the storm continued, the death toll rose.

  Soldiers put the corpse in a truck. It would be driven north, out of the storm.

  “Wally, I think I’ve seen enough,” Lauren said sadly. “I really wish you were here. I really don’t like being alone anymore.”

  “I don’t either,” Wally answered. “It’s been too long, Lauren.”

  * * *

  Maddy Kovacs was standing in the hallway when she heard what sounded like cheers. What now, she wondered. She had just left the small group around Wilson Craft’s comatose body. The doctor remained by his side, but was waiting for the end and not counting on any improvement. It was just too depressing for words, and she wanted to get away.

  “The cavalry’s arrived,” announced Frieda Houle, “and about damned time.”