The Ghosts of Winter Read online

  The Ghosts of Winter (They Came with the Snow Book Four)

  Christopher Coleman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1: The Breach

  2: The Cabin

  3: The Store

  4: The Intruders

  5: The White Ones

  6: The Siege

  7: The Pharmacy

  8: The Motel

  9: The Road

  10: The Bridge

  11: The Store

  12: The Fear

  13: The Trail

  14: The Boat

  15: The Warmth

  16: The Corrupted

  17: The Escape

  18: The Walk

  19: The Trap

  20: The Snow

  21: The River

  1: The Breach

  “They can’t get to us, can they?” Emerson asked, her eyes inquisitive, the tone in her voice one of curiosity, with perhaps the slightest hint of fear.

  I met my daughter’s eyes in silence, the expression on my face a mirror of hers. I turned back to the TV, ensuring what I was witnessing was real, that the cordon surrounding Maripo County had, in fact, been breached, and the Corrupted were now flowing into the wilderness, breaking the perimeter at the border where southwest Missouri converges with Kansas and Oklahoma.

  We weren’t safe anymore—I knew it the moment I tapped my phone to life and saw the news alert, covertly peeking at the headline during a lull in the movie that had been streaming on our living room TV. We were fewer than two hundred fifty miles away, so, of course they could get to us, and with no major city along that southern route, there would be little to interrupt them on the way. I felt the world begin to shift in that moment, to slowly rupture like an unstable brain clot. Whatever was to come going forward, it was clear we were never going back to the way it was.

  We had been too comfortable with what was happening inside the perimeter from the beginning. All of us. When the tanks and soldiers and helicopters that surrounded the area eventually became round-the-clock news, it should have frightened everyone to their core, triggered in us a signal that one of two things was occurring: either the military didn’t have a steady handle on the situation within the two counties, or that they had it under complete control and were orchestrating its continuation. I’ll admit it: during the entirety of the siege, I believed the second possibility the scarier of the two—the idea that the whims of the government and firepower of the military were all that was necessary to take over whole communities. But within minutes of the breach, when the helicopter cameras began to broadcast the flood of white demons, a seemingly unending flow of mutants disappearing into the cover of the thick forest, bouncing on their haunches like wild white chimps, the abstract fear of tyranny was quickly eclipsed by the more primal one of survival.

  “Dad!” Emerson, my oldest of three and the only girl in the brood. Her brothers are Ryan and Nelson, eight and five, respectively. They were both asleep when the news started to break.

  I turned to my daughter again, squinting, as if she’d just asked me to solve some ancient math equation. “What, Em? What did you ask me?”

  “Can they get to us?”

  I looked back to the television, once again validating the scene. My throat seized and I took a huge gaping breath, forcing oxygen to my cells.

  “Dad, you’re scaring me!”

  “David!” My wife Charlotte turned to me and cocked her head to the side, raising her eyebrows. I could see the fear in her eyes, afraid because I was scared.

  I wanted to explain it would all be fine, but I knew it wasn’t the truth. And I couldn’t release anything—even a lie—past the knotted ball that had formed inside my chest. I blinked several times, trying to send blood to my face, to present the sheen of calm to my daughter.

  “David!” Charlotte barked again. Emerson started to cry. Within seconds, Ryan was on the steps staring at the three of us, a tear lingering on his cheek as well.

  “It’s fine,” I croaked finally, smiling as I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I focused on the staircase. “What are you doing awake, buddy?”

  “I heard Emerson call you,” Ryan answered. “What’s wrong?”

  I flashed a frown in Emerson’s direction. “Nothing. It’s fine. They’ll...they’ll get it under control. It is...it’s scary looking, I’ll admit it, but they have...contingency plans for things like this.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they have a back-up plan. In case something goes wrong.”

  The siege of Warren and Maripo counties had been ongoing for weeks before it became public, and even then it was mostly a local story, a weird tale about some small town in the Bible Belt that had been quarantined due to a chemical leak. The tales of explosions and snow falling in May were dismissed by the rest of the country as urban legend and conspiracy, and as long as the accident remained contained to one area of the nation, the rest of us didn’t give it much thought.

  But as the reinforcements around the area began to grow, and leaks from the company responsible for the accident started to come at a steady rate, eventually shining the national spotlight on the area, it became a story that, if not frontpage news, was updated in the major papers every day, usually in the A section.

  And then the drone footage appeared.

  The video began innocuously enough, quiet and still, though the haunting backdrop, a long stretch of empty street flanked on either side by equally vacant buildings, suggested a looming threat. It could have been a scene from any small town in America, really—albeit one rendered to ghost-town status—replete with a steady row of commercial businesses found in most towns. A bank. A car dealership. A couple of fast food restaurants.

  Then, at the twelve second mark of the video, a white orb slowly appeared in the opening to the parking garage. The initial image was grainy and distant, and though it was unclear exactly what we were seeing, it was something alive, about that there was no doubt. Four seconds later, the rest of the thing’s body appeared, knuckling itself forward, clearing the walls of the garage and standing tall at the edge of the street. Finally, the white creature turned its head left, lifting its chin slightly as it focused its vapid black eyes on the floating camera above. And when it did, it hit the world like a toaster to the jaw.

  The news media couldn’t get enough of the footage, of course, and the video replayed on a loop for what seemed like a week straight. Even months later—right up to the point when the breach occurred (which would eventually lead to the toppling of the power stations, thus making further broadcasts impossible)—it appeared somewhere on television at least a few times a week.

  More footage appeared soon after the first leak, these showing various packs of the Corrupted roaming the streets like gangs, their violence implied by their gait and desultoriness, despite any noticeable signs of their victims. There was a purpose to these leaks, of course, and the pattern was obvious within the first month. They were a tool, one designed to keep the public frightened and on the side of the authorities.

  “They don’t look like they have it under control,” Emerson said.

  I quickly did the math in my head, calculating when the Corrupted would arrive, assuming at least a certain percentage of them would head East in the direction of Graden, our suburban community about fifty miles southwest of St. Louis. Even from the distant overhead shots, their speed and power were evident, the beasts moving like agitated animals—twenty miles an hour, maybe. That seemed an unsustainable pace, of course—they would certainly tire and slow at some point in their travels, or even stop and rest—but with the rough data I was collecting on the fly, I put the average rate at about twelve miles an hour, meaning they c
ould be at our doorstep in less than a day.

  “Well,” I answered, clearing the crack from my voice immediately, “it might not look like it, but they do. Also, it’s bedtime.” The event of the breach was unfolding in real time, and the response from the authorities had yet to be announced. It was only a matter of minutes before some local official, his expression dour and exhausted, entered the scene and told us to run for our lives, though with words far more muted and measured. “And Emerson, I don’t want you on that phone. Bed and sleep. Got it?”

  “It’s Friday,” she argued dispassionately.

  I shot a weary look and shook my head. “No phone.”

  Emerson frowned. “Fine,” she said, understanding my command had little to do with sleep and more to do with sheltering her from the horror and panic that would begin flooding through on social media.

  Ryan and Emerson did as instructed, and when they were in their respective bedrooms, I quickly headed to ours, Charlotte on my heels. I flopped a suitcase down on the bed and immediately started filling it with essentials.

  “Are you serious, David? You’re packing? Do you think it’s that bad?”

  “I don’t think it’s good. And I don’t intend to end up like those people in Warren and Maripo.”

  “But you said they have it under control.”

  I glanced at my wife and frowned and then quickly dropped my eyes. It was a lie for the kids; I assumed she knew it.

  “So, we’re just going to leave? Just like that? What about work and school?”

  “I don’t think that’s gonna be an issue for a while.”

  Charlotte remained quiet and still; I could sense her shock and growing dismay. “Where are we going to go?”

  “The cabin.”

  “The cabin? But...we’ll be...we’ll be so isolated. Why would we go there?”

  “Because we’ll be isolated. We can’t stay here, honey. We’re too close. Honestly, we should have left months ago. Moved to Oregon or something. Maine, maybe.”

  “David?” Charlotte put a hand to her mouth, and I could see the tears forming in her eyes, a growing acknowledgement that our life as we knew it was on the verge of crashing down.

  “Listen, honey, I’m just going off my instincts right now, and my instincts are telling me we shouldn’t debate this. The cabin has a lot of what we’ll need, though we will have to bring more. Food, for sure, as much as we can load up. And if we leave now, maybe Drew’s will still be stocked. There’ll be a run on the stores soon, I’m sure, but that place is out of the way enough that at this time of the year, I think we’ll be all right.”

  And the cabin had guns too. And ammo. Enough to hold it down for a few days anyway. I prayed that I was wrong, of course, and that over the next several hours the army would track down every one of the escaped monsters and put a bullet through the backs of their skulls. But I wasn’t betting the mortgage on it. We were lucky enough to have the cabin, and we’d have been fools not to use it.

  “What do we tell the kids?”

  I shrugged. “We’ll tell them it’s a vacation. I don’t know. A couple days of improvised fun.”

  “Vacation? School started a month ago.”

  I stopped packing and turned to Charlotte, giving her my full attention. “If the world...if things fall apart, at least for a while, they’re gonna know it soon enough. Emerson will know what we’re doing right away, so we should probably get her on board from the start. We need to keep this from her brothers as long as we can.”

  Charlotte stayed quiet for several moments, and I could hear the gears turning, cataloging the other essentials we would need for life in the wild: kitchen supplies, toys and books for the kids, keepsakes.

  “We need to bring Newton, obviously, and his food and litterbox.” Newton was our cat. “And don’t forget the inhalers.”

  Charlotte shot me a glare and turned as if I’d slapped her. But it wasn’t an insult she’d felt, the suggestion that she could ever forget Nelson’s medicine; the look was because I’d brought up the subject at all, and the repercussions a societal collapse might have on our asthmatic son down the road.

  “We have enough for now and we’ll find more if we have to. I promise. We just can’t forget the ones we have, that’s all.”

  With that, Charlotte marched from the bedroom and began scouring the house, marching from the kitchen to basement to the attic, securing all the items she deemed critical to our daily lives. Within the hour, the kids were loaded in the Explorer and we were on our way to Arkansas and our cabin on the shores of Lake Sloman.

  2: The Cabin

  Charlotte and I bought the cabin—a rundown foreclosure located in an isolated region of Northeastern Arkansas—in 2014. The secluded surroundings and lake were the obvious draws of the place, as was the pier, which came with an old rowboat that had been modified with an outboard motor. But unlike the eastern side of the lake, which was more of a tourist spot, the area where the cabin sat was no undiscovered paradise; it was rather desolate and poor, offering little in the way of retail or employment. As a result, when the cabin was foreclosed on in late 2013, the bank was eager to unload it as quickly as possible. So, when the house went to auction a few months later, we bid low and got the cabin for the proverbial song, and, after spending the better part of eleven months bringing it back to life, we eventually turned the place into our summer home, spending no fewer than four weeks there every year between June and August.

  But from the moment I saw the cabin in the online listing, I saw it as something more than a getaway spot. We had always called it our ‘weekend place’—sometimes our “retirement investment” or “second home”—but I always thought of it as our safehouse, the place we could flee to when the world came crashing down. It wasn’t that I had any particular revelations about what was to come, about the debacle in Warren and Maripo, but I was playing the odds, knowing that eventually something like what had happened would occur somewhere in America.

  “Why don’t we have TV here?” Nelson asked. My five-year-old was on his back on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling, twiddling his fingers above him as if casting a spell.

  “You know why, Nelson,” I replied from the kitchen, distracted as I stood at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes. “No TV on vacation. That’s our rule.” That was true, of course, but under the circumstances, I had to agree with my son that television would have been a useful addition to our scenario. Radio reception, both in the car and on our twenty-year-old boombox that sat like a relic above the fridge, was little more than a crackle; and cell service had always been spotty in the area, and normally required a two-mile drive up to the overlook to get anything reliable. So, without television, we were almost completely in the dark as to what was happening beyond our property. “Mom brought lots of coloring books and other things for you to do. And you can get on your tablet after lunch.”

  Nelson groaned.

  I glanced out the window at Emerson and Ryan, who were at the edge of our pier, a ramshackle structure situated about fifty yards down the left shoreline. They stood with a bucket of rocks at their feet, plucking them from the plastic pail and heaving them one by one into the lake, a contest of distance, I assumed.

  Ryan had yet to question the motives behind us pulling him and his siblings out of school for the impromptu cabin trip, and I suspected his sister had already explained it to him. Emerson, on the other hand, began querying our reasons the moment we told her to pack up, and we had made the decision to be honest with her from the beginning, at least in the broad sense, telling her we thought coming to the cabin would be the safest plan under the circumstances, in the off-chance things got hairy.

  Now, three days removed from the breach at Maripo, we hadn’t the slightest idea where we were in terms of safety. We had yet to see any of the Corrupted—thank goodness—but that didn’t mean they weren’t roaming around in the hills somewhere, surrounding us as we nestled in, waiting for the precise moment to launch their attack.


  I unspooled the kitchen window, exposing the screen, and called out, “Hey, you guys hungry?”

  Both kids turned in unison and nodded; Ryan gave a thumbs up sign.

  “Okay. Lunch in 10.”

  We brought most of what we had from home, but once everything was loaded away into its proper spot in the refrigerator and pantry, the kitchen still didn’t look plentiful. There was maybe enough to last three weeks. As I had suggested to Charlotte before we left, on our way into Lake Sloman we stopped at Drew’s, the mom-and-pop spot twenty miles down the road from the cabin, and the closest thing to a supply source anywhere near the house. Thankfully, with news of the breach only a few hours old, the shelves were still stocked as usual, though I doubted then that there would be anything left a day later.

  There was no mention of the breaking news from the owners—whom we had come to know fairly well over the years—and we only bought what seemed reasonable, not wanting to be the family that made a run on supplies and started the panic. But an unspoken dread had been passed at the register, as Lee—the heir apparent to his father’s store—looked from us and our groceries to the small television behind the counter where helicopter footage showed fleeing white bodies. An accompanying map speculated how the Corrupted might spread, along with speculative time frames for when they would reach the farthest portions of the country. It was over; neither of us needed to speak the fact aloud, and I was only grateful that he allowed us the transaction, though he no doubt regretted it the moment we walked out the door.

  I folded the top pieces of peanut-buttered bread onto the jelly bottoms, and the thought of food again gripped me. Three weeks. That was nothing. It would pass in a flash. And then what? Hunting for our food? It would come to that point, eventually, I supposed, if the government couldn’t bring the disaster under control, but would we arrive at that place in less than a month?

  I shook away the thoughts of doubt and lifted my head to call in the kids for lunch, and as my eyes met the serenity of the lake, my breath seized in my throat like a rabbit in a snare.