“Maybe the place has been evacuated,” Fred added.
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“Get away from there, Kate,” Todd called to her again, unnerved.
It was his voice that seemed to reach her. She turned around and tromped back through the snow toward them. Her eyes hung longest on Todd. They were no longer the dazzling green they’d been back at the airport bar; they now seemed drained of color and looked like steel divots.
“Let’s keep moving,” Fred said, slinging an arm around
Nan’s narrow shoulders. He administered a kiss to the top of her head and, pressed together as if one, they proceeded down the center of the street toward the fires burning in the town square.
“You’re scared,” Todd said, walking alongside Kate. She had not put her arm back around his waist. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed. And I’m not scared, either.”
“Next thing you’ll tell me you’re not a liar.”
She folded her arms across her chest but Todd could see the stirrings of a smile beneath the surface of her lips. “I can’t believe this is happening. This is supposed to be Christmas. Happiest goddamn time of the year.”
“Do you have a cell phone? You should probably call your fiancé, let him know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, thanks.” She fished around in her purse for her cell phone. When she finally located it, she tried turning it on, to no avail. “Shit. Battery’s dead.”
Todd dug his own cell phone from his coat. “Here.”
“Thanks.” She accepted the phone but didn’t use it right away. “That guy we picked up—did that really happen?”
“Yes.”
“And the little girl? I mean, what the hell was that all about?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Christ. I’m not scared,” she said again, “but I
do
feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Todd smiled. “And that doesn’t scare you?”
“I’m a tough gal,” she said, shrugging. Suddenly she looked very pretty. “It takes a lot to scare me.”
Todd’s smile faltered. He was thinking of the little girl with no face.
“Shit,” Kate said, looking at Todd’s cell phone. “Take one guess what will make this evening even better.”
“No signal?”
“No signal.”
“Terrific.”
She handed him back the phone. “Right at this very moment, my fiancé’s parents are probably catching him up to speed on all the medication they’ve been on for the past year, and how my soon-to-be father-in-law has been wearing the same pair of socks all week to cut down on laundry. Miserable lot.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“We haven’t set a date yet.”
“How long have you been engaged?”
Kate laughed. “See, you’re hungry to do the math, right? If I say we got formally engaged over two years ago, you’ll smile and say something nice and benign, but inside you’ll be thinking, ‘Man, this chick’s crazy if she thinks this guy is ever going to seal the deal.’”
“Is that true? You’ve been engaged for two years now?”
“Three. We got engaged on our second date.”
“Hmmmm,” he said.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“I’m still trying to think of something nice and benign.”
“Forget it. If you’d seen the winners I’ve gone out with in the past, you’d be all about Gerald.”
“So that’s his name? Gerald?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So he sounds like someone’s butler.”
They both laughed.
“Thank you,” she said, “for taking my mind off things. I kept getting a weird feeling.”
“Like what?”
She looked at the rows of houses they were passing, silent and dark and brooding. “Like there are people in there watching us.”
The town square was like a Norman Rockwell painting gone horribly awry. At the center of the square was a bronze statue of a man on a horse, the horse’s front legs pawing at the air. Surrounding the statue and scattered about in the snow like stuffing torn from an old mattress were strips of tattered clothing—shirts, pants, underwear, even a baseball hat. Fires burned in old oil drums that had been erected along the street, the great flames reflected in the blackened windows of the shops that circled the square. Cars had been evacuated seemingly without heed, many of them in the middle of the street with their doors ajar and their batteries dead. A bicycle lay on its side, its frame bent in the middle at a firm 90-degree angle.
“What the hell happened here?” Kate said. She surveyed the damage, then looked up past the shops where the spire of a darkened church punctured the sky like a syringe.
“Looks like a battlefield,” Nan commented as she slowly made her way around the bronze statue at the center of the square. “Who set these fires? Looters?”
Lowering his voice so the women wouldn’t hear, Todd leaned over to Fred and whispered, “Where the fuck is everyone?”
“For their sakes, I hope they left long before whatever happened here.”
“And what exactly
did—”
Nan screamed.
They all hurried over to Nan, who was trembling on the other side of the bronze statue, staring with horrified eyes at something in the snow.
“What is it?” Fred said quickly, dropping Todd’s duffel bag and coming up behind her. He grabbed Nan firmly by the shoulders. In her fright, the woman had dropped the teddy bear; it lay now in the snow.
“Jesus,” Todd said, coming up beside them.
Here, the snow was black with what looked enough like blood to cause a tremor of fear to rise up in the back of Todd’s throat. The firelight reflected in it, giving it a muddy copper hue, and there were bits of twisted, fibrous ropes trailing through the snow in every immediate direction away from the blood.
“Is that
blood?”
Kate said, suddenly right at Todd’s back. “Jesus Christ, it is, isn’t it?”
Fred pulled Nan against his chest. Todd heard the woman’s muffled sob.
Kate pointed to the strands of ropy material strewn about the snow. “What are those things?”
“From an animal,” Fred said. One of his giant hands was cradling his wife’s head. “Something happened to an animal here.”
“So those are
guts?”
Kate said. “Those are fucking
innards?”
“Shhh,” Todd told her, and jerked his head in Nan’s direction. “Calm down, okay?”
“Todd, what the fuck happened here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something bad happened here.”
“We’ll call the police, tell them—”
“No,” Kate said. “We need to get out of here.”
“We’ve got no car. We need to call the cops—”
“The cell phones don’t work!”
“—and wait for the cops,” he finished calmly. Yet his heart was strumming like a fiddle in his chest.
“We need to
leave,
” Kate insisted. She gripped him at the shoulders and stared at him hard. Todd expected to see tears welling up in her eyes, but her gaze was surprisingly sober. “Fair enough. I lied before. I’m scared now, all right?”
“We’ll be okay.” Todd exchanged a look with Fred, who walked back around to the other side of the statue, with his wife still clinging to his chest. Todd bent down and scooped the stuffed bear up off the ground. Then he took Kate’s hand and tugged her over to where Fred stood with Nan.
“There’s no one here,” Fred said over Nan’s silvery hair. His eyes looked hard as steel and yellow in the firelight.
“Someone set these fires,” Todd suggested.
Fred lifted one shoulder. He looked astoundingly calm. “If they’re the same folks who left those entrails out on the snow, we probably don’t want to go looking for them.”
“Entrails,” Kate repeated, as if saying it aloud would prove just how ridiculous this all was. “Fantastic.”
Nan lifted her head off her husband’s chest. Her eyes were glassy, but she looked more composed than Todd would have suspected. “Kate’s right. We can’t stay here. This place feels…it feels—”
“Wrong,” Kate finished. “The whole place feels wrong.
Like there’s a giant electric cable running under the earth, and we’re all just vibrating up here on the surface.”
Todd looked around. He didn’t like the empty shop windows any more than he liked the dark houses along the outer street. The cars were worse—parked at crazy angles indiscriminately around the square, they conveyed a sense of panic and hasty evacuation. He remembered reading a book about Chernobyl a few years ago, and how thousands of people had abandoned their cars and their homes and had taken to the highway just to get the hell out of town. Yet if these people hadn’t taken their cars, how had they evacuated? Surely not by foot—not in this weather.
“Okay,” Todd said finally, scooping up his duffel bag and slinging it back over one shoulder, “I’ve got an idea. I’m going to try to find a telephone. In the meantime, you guys check these cars, see if anyone left the keys inside.”
“Forget the phone,” Kate said. “Let’s just take a car and go.”
“If none of these cars start, you’ll be happy I found a phone.”
Fred nodded. “All right. Just be careful, Todd.”
Todd nodded. He bent down and tucked his pant legs into his boots. He was bleeding through his jeans and his leg was throbbing but they didn’t have the time to spare. He’d worry about his leg later.
“I’m coming with you,” Kate said, putting a hand on Todd’s shoulder.
“No. Help Fred and Nan look for cars.”
“They don’t need my help. And none of us should be running off alone.” Then she offered him a crooked smile. Suddenly she was more than just pretty—she was
beautiful.
Vaguely, Todd wondered if good old Gerald was worried about her. “Besides,” she added, “I’ve got the flashlight, remember?”
Returning her smile, Todd nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
They started by peering in the window of an old hardware store. The door was locked and Todd felt uncomfortable smashing the glass. “Let’s go around until we find a shop that’s unlocked.”
“What if none of them are unlocked?”
“Then we break in. But I’m not too keen on making any unnecessary noise around here.”
“In other words, you don’t want to bring attention to us,” Kate said, the underlying message being that Todd believed there were still people around someplace. Hiding.
They crunched along the icy sidewalk, stopping at each door—a bookstore, a Laundromat, a flower shop—and tugging on the door handles. Each one was locked up tight against the dark and the cold. If the townspeople had evacuated in such a hurry, it seemed odd they’d take the time to lock up all the doors.
“You were going to tell me something about that little girl,” Kate said behind him as he peered into the smoked glass of the flower shop. Just hearing Kate mention the little girl caused the hairs to stand at attention along the nape of his neck. “Something about her face. What was it?”
“Forget it.” He turned away from the window and walked over to a convenience store. “I was just seeing things. My mind playing tricks on me.”
“You can’t even convince yourself that, let alone me. Tell me.”
He sighed. “It was…”
“What?”
But he’d caught movement inside the convenience store. “Quick, give me the flashlight.”
“Anything?” Nan called from the curb.
Fred felt around the steering column of an old Buick.
There were no keys in the ignition. “Nothing,” he called back. Then, under his breath, he uttered, “Damn it to hell.” He checked the visor, under the floor mats, in the glove compartment: nothing.
He climbed out of the car and ambled over to an old Volkswagen Beetle. The driver’s side door stood open but the interior lights were off. A dusting of snow had fallen across the windshield. On his way, he summoned a warm smile for Nan. Over the years, Fred Wilkinson had become quite adept at masking his fears for Nan’s benefit. It was ingrained in him, just as it had been ingrained in Fred’s old man. Those first eighteen months when they’d moved to Atlanta and the veterinary practice seemed on the brink of failure, he’d kept a smile on his face despite the hardship. Similarly, when he’d come down with cancer five years ago, Nan would have beat him to the grave with her worrying, had he not been the poster child for optimism. He’d beaten the cancer and proved to Nan that positive energy could be just as effective as traditional medicine; even though he’d been scared shitless, Nan had never known. It was just how he was built, with those easy grins and strong embracing arms coming as naturally to him as breathing.
He leaned down and peered into the Volkswagen and immediately fought off a wave of nausea.
“Fred?” Nan called from the curb as he staggered a few steps back from the car, a hand over his mouth and nose. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
He waved a hand at her. “Stay there, hon.”
Taking a deep breath, he approached the car once again, bending down and peering inside. The driver’s seat was saturated with blood, the surface of which sparkled with ice crystals. A single sneaker was wedged beneath the accelerator, and it appeared to be filled with ink. The cold kept much of the smell at bay, although it was impossible not to catch a
whiff of the underlying decay that hummed like a cloud of flies inside the car.
The keys were dangling from the ignition.
“Figures,” Fred muttered, leaning over the messy seat and cranking the ignition. The engine groaned but would not turn over. Which was just as well; could they have really all piled in here and driven away? All that blood…
Someone would have to pry that sneaker out from under the accelerator first,
he thought, then immediately vomited in the driver’s side foot well. Thankfully, the snow across the windshield blocked him from Nan’s view.
After a few seconds catching his breath, Fred wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then extricated himself from the Volkswagen. As he stood, tendons popped in his back. Nan had been on him about not doing his exercises lately. He was paying the price for his lethargy now.
“No good?” Nan said.
He shook his head. “Wouldn’t start. I think it might—”
A man was standing directly behind Nan, no more than five feet away. His clothes hung off him in tattered ribbons and were splattered with blood. The man’s eyes were dead in their sockets, his face as expressionless as an Egyptian mummy.
“Hon,” Fred said quickly, holding both arms out toward his wife. “Come here. Quick.”
“Fred, what in the—”
“Come here,” he repeated. “Now.”
Todd pressed the flashlight against the window of the convenience store to eliminate the glare. Inside, the flashlight illuminated overturned aisles, bags of potato chips and popcorn on the floor. Soda had congealed to the tiled floor and busted soda cans were scattered about like spent shotgun shells.
“What do you see?” Kate said in a low voice by his ear.
“Place is a mess.”
“Is there someone in there?”
“I thought I saw movement…”
“But now you’re not so sure?”
“I’m not—”
The flashlight’s beam fell on what at first appeared to be a strange tropical plant caught in the process of blossoming. It took several seconds for Todd’s brain to register what he was actually seeing, and he jerked backward away from the glass. The flashlight clattered to the snow, causing the beam to cut out.
“What?” Kate said. “What’d you see?”
“Someone’s dead in there,” he managed. “Head was split open…”
“Oh my God…”
Again, movement from within the store caught Todd’s attention. He jerked his head up and squinted through the darkness just as a whitish shape flitted across the aisles. Whoever—or whatever—was inside was heading for the door.
“Get back,” Todd shouted at Kate. Together, they both stumbled backward off the snow-packed curb.
The convenience store’s door flung open, Christmas bells on a strip of rawhide rebounding off the smoked glass, and a shape sprung out into the night. There was the sound of a long-barreled gun being charged and Todd felt his body brace for impact.
Nan took a hesitant step toward Fred, an odd, almost coy smile playing across her features.
“Fred, what is it?”
But Fred was through pampering. He reached out and grabbed Nan’s wrist, yanking her down off the curb and into his arms. He was still staring at the man in the tattered and
bloodied clothes, who was staring right back at him with inkblot eyes. Holding Nan in a strong embrace, Fred began to back away from the curb.
Nan pushed off him, looked up at his face. “What the hell has gotten into you?” But she must have noticed that he was looking at something over her shoulder, because she turned and followed his gaze. When she saw the man in the bloody clothes on the sidewalk, mere feet from where she’d just been, Fred felt her entire body go rigid.
“Are you hurt?” Fred said, addressing the stranger. He continued walking backward, unwilling to take his eyes off the stranger. “Hello? Are you okay?”
“Fred…”
He rubbed Nan’s head with one hand. It didn’t appear that the stranger had a weapon; if he were to rush at them, Fred was pretty confident he could fend him off. Still…
“Todd!” he shouted. “Kate!”
The stranger hunkered down, like an animal preparing to pounce. A silvery rope of spit oozed from the man’s bottom lip.
Fred froze in midstep. He felt his bowels clench. In Nan’s ear, he muttered, “Run.”
“Who are you?” said the stranger who’d just come bursting out of the convenience store. It was a woman—that much Todd could tell from her voice—and she was pointing a rather angry-looking rifle at them.
“We’re lost,” Todd said, somehow finding his voice. “Our car broke down just outside of town.”
“What happened here?” Kate said from behind him.
The woman appeared to scrutinize them from behind her rifle. After a few drawn-out seconds, she said, “Turn around.”
“Please,” Todd muttered.
“I said turn around.”
“Don’t shoot us,” he said, turning around as the woman requested. He consciously stepped in front of Kate, although he wasn’t sure if his body would be enough to arrest any bullets that came shooting out of that gun.
“You, too,” the woman said to Kate. “Turn around. I want to see your backs.”
Kate did as she was told, her hands up in the air.
The woman with the rifle came up behind them, grabbed fistfuls of their coats, and patted them down like a police officer searching for weapons. “Okay,” she said, and Todd and Kate turned back around to face her. With the gun lowered, it was easier to make out her features. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and for the first time Todd saw that she held the rifle somewhat awkwardly, as if doing so was new to her.
“I’m Todd Curry,” he said, hoping an introduction would break the ice. “This is Kate Jansen. We were driving and our car—”
“There was a man,” Kate blurted.
Todd nodded. “Yeah. He—”
From across the square, Fred’s voice carried in a wavering echo: “Todd! Kate!”
The woman jerked the rifle in the direction of Fred’s voice. She looked nervous and too thin, and she was practically swimming in her clothes. Todd noticed a fresh slick of blood running down the left leg of her pants.