The Snow: A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel Read online

  “You’re crazy if you think you’re going to be able to drive out of here with that van of yours, man.”

  Stone squinted. “Really? Do you think I’m an idiot?” No hint of humor in his voice.

  “Well, trying to drive in this weather would be an idiotic thing to do.”

  “I’m not driving anywhere!” Stone shouted. Eleanor stirred beside me. I pulled away, shedding my blankets and covering her, then I turned and met Stone’s eyes. They had gone hard and flinty. He looked nothing like the Stone I knew and loved so well.

  “Then what are you doing? Because going out there is suicide, friend. There’s something outside, maybe more than that, I don’t know. I don’t wanna find out. Whatever it or they are drove Ed crazy.” A collage of images whirled through my brain. The dead boy talking to me in the snow, his body aflame, Angie’s corpse soaked with blood and falling over in the closet, Ed all blank-faced and cold-eyed, Jonas bleeding out on the kitchen tile. I may not have known exactly what it was I saw in the snow, but I knew they were there, and they were deadly.

  “I believe you, Grady, but I’m not going far. I’ll be careful. Besides, I’m only going out to my car and turning on the radio. Relax and don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

  The radio.

  I was speechless. How had we not thought of that already? The electricity around here might’ve been down, but radios received their transmissions via wavelengths, and just because our electricity was out didn’t mean all electricity was out. Radios were ancient technology, really, but it seemed that the old tech was the most reliable.

  Stone saw the reaction on my face. “Yeah, exactly,” he said. “Going outside doesn’t seem so idiotic now, does it? I think we’re past that point anyway.” He shook his head. “Because I’m going insane in here waiting for someone to tell us what’s going on. And I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon. Three people we knew are dead. We’re gonna either freeze to death or run out of food, and there’s apparently supernatural monsters outside that want us dead. I think we’ve waited long enough.”

  Stone lunged forward, his crutches shaking. I crossed the room, about to close the door. Mostly because of the things out there. They weren’t far away, I felt that. I felt them lurking, waiting for one of us to step out so they could turn us into mindless beasts, the way Ed was when I shot him. I felt them watching us.

  But at the door, hand on the knob, I stopped. Hope swelled in my chest, wonderful and warm.

  Outside…there was sunshine. A very small sliver of gold cut through the hazy clouds above. Slanting rays reached the porch. It no longer looked like dusk but coming dawn instead.

  “What?” Stone asked.

  I pointed. “The sun.”

  “The sun?” He said it like it was some alien language, then his eyes ballooned to twice their size. “The sun. Holy shit…”

  I about screamed with joy as I leaned over and hugged Stone tight. He hugged me back, one crutch tapping my leg.

  “Do you think it’s going to melt the snow?” he asked.

  I peered out through the glass door. “It’s a lot of snow.”

  “It’s July.”

  “Good point.”

  “I’m going out there now. If there’s monsters or whatever, the sun’ll keep them back.”

  A chill went up my spine. Jonas had said the same thing in the Harks' house, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Stone went out, and I grabbed the rifle and followed after him in a sweatshirt and some sweatpants I’d taken from Ed’s closet. The wind was still fast and harsh and the cold sliced through my layers all too easily, but that didn’t stop us. The sun had given us renewed strength as well as hope.

  Stone unsurprisingly trucked through the snow with minimal problems. He was just that kind of guy. When he set his mind to doing something, he did it no matter how hard the task was or how long it took to complete. His disability might’ve slowed him down sometimes, but he never let it completely stop him. I admired the hell out of him for that, but I wished Jonas was here with us.

  But he was gone. We were just the Two Musketeers now.

  Head on a swivel, eyes narrowed, I scanned the surrounding area, and something on my right stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a towering dark figure.

  My heart plummeted, my blood pressure spiked, and my muscles tensed, ready for action.

  When I turned, swinging the rifle and locating it, I almost laughed. That towering dark figure was just one of many trees surrounding Prism Lake.

  Stone was already at the van, wiping snow from the handle and windows.

  Next thing I knew I was heading toward him as he was disappearing inside the driver’s side door.

  With Stone having cleared the way, I climbed in the back of the van only half a minute later and shut the door behind me just as a nasty gust of wind rocked us. The van's shocks groaned. White flakes continued blasting the windows. Some of the cold air slipped through the cracks and bit at my exposed skin. I barely registered any of it. The prospect of finally learning what was happening proved too exciting.

  Stone sat in the driver’s seat, wearing an I-told-you-so look on his face. I shook my head as if to say this was crazy. Then I remembered where we were and set the rifle against the door. With my left hand I leaned forward and pointed at the ignition. “Start her up.”

  Stone took a deep breath. “Now that I’m here, I don’t know if I wanna know. I don’t know if I’m ready for it.”

  “I’ll do it.” I opened my hand for the keys. Stone didn’t give them to me. Time was wasting away. We hadn’t gone far from the lake house but that meant nothing. There was no magical bubble of protection around the area. If the shadows wanted us, they’d get us. Nothing would stop them. Sure, some things might slow them down, but I figured it wouldn’t slow them down for long.

  “No. My idea, Grady,” Stone said. “Quit trying to steal my thunder.” He winked at me, and for a moment he was the old Stone, not shaken or sad. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine coughed and rattled, but it didn’t start. He tried again. More coughing, and again, nothing.

  “It’s dead,” I said.

  “No. I feel it. It’s gonna work.” Stone’s face was a mask of determination. He cranked the key once more and as I was reaching for his hand, afraid he might accidentally break something important, the engine turned over and roared to life. Well, as much as a van’s engine could roar to life.

  With a laugh, Stone stuck both arms up in a show of victory. I clapped him on the back. Neither of us had noticed the music coming through the speakers. It was a CD of The Notorious B.I.G.’s greatest hits. The song “Juicy” thumped the seats and rattled the mirrors.

  Stone paused it, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Moment of truth.” His finger pushed the source button. The radio console switched from CD to AUX. The next one, we both knew, was FM radio. Stone stopped and took a deep, shaky breath. The next press of that button felt more than monumental to the both of us. Everything seemed to be on the line. Our sanity, our happiness, our chance of survival.

  We both knew this.

  I took my own deep, shaky breath and nodded. “All right, do it.”

  He nodded back. “Together?”

  I placed a numb index finger on the button beside Stone’s. “Together.”

  And together, we pressed it.

  5

  Moves

  All we heard was dead static, but hope wasn’t lost yet. We were still on the presets.

  96.5 KISS FM played a constant beep, like when your ears ring; 92.5 was all static, the auditory equivalent of a scrambled TV channel; 97.5, the classic rock station had a looping message, “We are experiencing technical difficulties, we are sorry for the inconvenience, please stand by,” but I figured this had probably been playing since the blizzard began. The only channel we found with a person still on the air was 95.5, a religious station we stumbled on by turning the tuner until a voice stopped us. On this station, a man spoke in a
calm voice, which I found much more unsettling than if he had been freaking out. He was reading from the Bible, passages about the end times.

  Sunday school was many years ago, so most of it went over my head, but the man said: “Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.”

  And before Stone and I gave up, the man added another verse—this, he said, from Revelation 1:3.

  “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.”

  Too late, I thought, the time isn’t near. The time is now.

  We scanned more channels, both AM and FM, and heard nothing.

  Stone turned the radio off. We sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the blasting heat from the registers. The blasting, blessed heat.

  “We should go in,” I said. “Mikey and Eleanor will be up soon. Probably think we’re dead or something.”

  “Mikey’d like that,” Stone mumbled.

  I ignored his comment as best I could, mostly because he was right and I hated that he was right. Mikey didn’t seem to like us…or anyone. He was young and he had gone through a terrible tragedy, I know, but we were in this together. That was the only way we were going to get out of this. There was still time for him to come around. But not much.

  Stone met my eyes. He seemed like a different person. The snow lay heavy on the windshield. The heat had melted a pea-sized hole through it. Stone pointed to it now. Light was filtering inside the cab. “Sun is out, and it’s only getting brighter.”

  I leaned over and peered through this tiny opening. Truth be told, I noticed no difference from when I first saw the golden light coming through the clouds. I certainly noticed no increase in temperature outside. I always thought when it got this cold, snow wouldn’t fall, but the snow was still falling. Not as much as before, but if it never stopped, it wouldn’t be long before it piled as high as the house.

  Stone continued: “I think we need to leave. Get somewhere else. And if the sun stays out, I think that’s our opportunity. The light stops the shadow things.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “Because”—he moved his hand toward the driver’s side window—“we’re still here and we’re still sane.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere else. Somewhere with other people who can tell us what the hell is going on and not read us Bible passages.”

  “Stone, I think we should stay here for now. There’s so much we don’t know yet. And everyone’s shaken up. Give it a few days, a week, see if the snow melts and the temperature rises.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I turned the car off and removed the keys from the ignition. “C’mon, let’s go back inside.”

  He sighed. “We should vote, at least. Ask Eleanor and Mikey what they wanna do.”

  I almost said that the last time we ventured from the lake house one of us wound up dead, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to think about Jonas lying on the floor, lifeless and bloody. I never wanted to think about it again.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s fair. We’ll vote.”

  I climbed out, the warmth from inside the van reaching and trying to pull me back. It was hard to resist but I did. Stone put an arm around my shoulder. I took one of his crutches and he kept the other. We moved quicker that way.

  We made it, but in just that minute or two that we were exposed to the elements, my face went numb, and I swear I felt the eyes of a hundred things watching us. Probably paranoia. I hoped.

  Once inside, I closed and locked the door faster than I had ever done in my life, knowing deep down that it wouldn’t be enough.

  Eleanor and Mikey slept for most of the day. They were knocked out, and I thought that was good. When you were unconscious, all your problems were put on pause. I had lost Jonas and it hurt like hell, but I didn’t lose both of my parents in just a matter of hours.

  Mikey woke up sometime around five in the afternoon. I asked him how he was doing and he nodded at me, grumbling something. He grabbed a can of creamed corn. We didn’t have a can opener on hand, didn’t think to grab one when we were at the Harks', so Mikey hacked at the can with a long, serrated blade. The noise woke Eleanor up for a few minutes. She went to the bathroom then flopped down on the couch without saying a word to anyone.

  I sat on the floor by the fire, hugging my knees to my chest and watching the flames dance. The whole time, I realized this later, the dead boy and the burning apartment never entered my mind. Was it a breakthrough? Had I finally moved on?

  No. There was just so much other bad shit that had replaced it, that’s all.

  Instead of a blackened corpse, I thought of Jonas’s rattling, wet breaths. I thought of how I closed his eyes after he died, eyes that no longer saw anything. I thought of how I left him there in some stranger’s house. My best friend, a Musketeer.

  And I thought of the snow and the cold.

  Always the snow.

  The vote took place later that night. There was no sun now; it had set earlier than it should’ve. Eleanor and Mikey didn’t say much, but they ate. I was glad about that. Too often people going through stuff forget to eat, myself being an example. Anything I ate after I failed the apartment boy tasted burnt, even if it wasn’t. When things really got bad and my stomach grumbled loud enough to wake me in the middle of the night, I settled for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My grandmother said that was all she grew up on, and she lived to be over ninety years old. Make of that what you will.

  I proposed the vote.

  Eleanor stood from the couch, one hand holding a can of green beans, the other a fork, and said, “Are you crazy?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not my favorite idea, but it’s only fair that we vote. If we want to survive this, we’ll have to work together.”

  Mikey laughed from his spot in the kitchen. He leaned against a counter, still dressed in my ratty Cleveland Cavaliers shirt.

  “Work together…that’s rich,” Mikey said.

  I met his eyes, and a great anger broiled within them. Not some normal teen angst but anger toward me. I understood why. I had killed his father. I deserved much worse.

  “Shut up, Mikey,” Eleanor said.

  Stone said, “Let’s do this thing already.”

  “Working together,” Mikey interrupted, “got us nowhere. Your friend’s dead, along with my mom and dad. I think maybe we should just go our separate ways.”

  I wasn’t about to coddle him so I said, “Okay, Mikey, if that’s what you want, be my guest. Nothing’s stopping you from walking out that door right now. You can take your dad’s rifle with you. It’s yours.”

  “Maybe I will!”

  “Oh, Mikey,” Eleanor said, “he’s right. We have to stick together.”

  “Listen, kid,” I said, “I’m sorry about everything. We were all dealt a shitty hand, you and Eleanor especially, but we’re still here. I’d like us all to remain that way. But like I said, you wanna brave that cold and whatever else might be out there, go on ahead.”

  Mikey moved his lower jaw in a way that told me he was grinding his teeth. I waited a moment, calling his bluff, but he only crossed his arms over his chest and slouched more.

  Eleanor went over and put an arm around his shoulders, which he shrugged off.

  “So,” I continued, “those who want to go on, raise your hands.”

  Stone raised his; as did Mikey. I watched Eleanor. Her arm came up as she eyed Mikey, then it came down.

  “Great,” Stone said. “A tie. Now what?”

  I reached in my pocket and brought out a quarter. I had come prepared. “Tiebreaker. Stone, Mikey, you guys call it.”

  Mikey said, “Heads,” and Stone shrugged.

  “All right. Heads and we leave. Only when the sun is up—if it comes up again. Tails and we stay. I don’t know for how
long, but we’ll discuss it when the time comes. Agreed?” Stone gave a thumbs-up, Mikey just stared at me, and Eleanor nodded. “All right.”

  I flipped the coin in the air. It seemed to hang for a long, long time, firelight glinting off of the metal, before it hit the carpet. Each of us leaned in.

  It was tails.

  Mikey mumbled, “Bullshit.”

  Stone said, “I don’t like it, but a deal’s a deal.”

  Eleanor and I said nothing. It’s not that I didn’t want to leave or that I was too afraid. The reason was that I thought we’d be rushing into it. Jumping the gun. We didn’t know the situation. We weren’t acclimated to it or the weather. We knew at the time there was a fuck-ton of snow and something out in it. Something…unnatural. We knew the electricity was out and our phones weren’t getting service and it was cold as hell. We knew the only person on the radio was reading Bible passages and the government had been silent. That was all. I wanted to get a better understanding before we left, and I hoped someone would come along and save us.

  It never happened.

  I guess, when it comes to such drastic times as these, you have to save yourself.

  We stayed in that lake house for two weeks. In those two weeks, I saw the sun come out three times, and on the third time it didn’t hang around longer than an hour.

  When I was a kid and I stayed there with Jonas, Stone, and Stone’s father, the place seemed huge, a mansion, but those two weeks were like living in an icy sardine can.

  Sometime in that first week, I was in my bedroom. There was no fire in there, obviously, or heat, but I needed space from the others. Cabin fever was hooking its claws in us all. At one point, after two in the morning, Eleanor slipped under my covers and laid beside me. Her weight shifting the mattress brought me out of a light doze.

  I rolled over and said, “Eleanor?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. I thought I was dreaming, but she seemed so real. The beautiful hair, the slender shape of her body, her warmth.