They Came With the Snow Read online

  “Thank you.”

  “And then I’ll catch up.”

  Naia locked eyes with me, the glisten of tears evident. “You’re coming?”

  I grin. “Of course I’m coming. Maybe you’re right about what you said, I don’t know, and I don’t think now is the best time to discuss the entire nature of our relationship. But I think you’re an amazing person, and I am in awe of you every day at how strong you’ve managed to stay throughout all of this. If I was here with anyone else I know, anyone other than you, I wouldn’t have made it a week.”

  “Thank you,” Naia mumbles, managing to be humble under the circumstances.

  “I don’t think you understand, Naia, I’m coming with you for my sake.”

  She coughs out a half-laugh, half-cry. “Pussy.”

  I erupt in genuine laughter at this, and begin walking back toward the stairway that leads to the dining area and the awaiting Dutch oven. It’s time to go. Now. It’s time to move past our false security and look for the possibility of a future, however bleak it may be.

  “I love you, Dom.”

  I stop in my tracks and feel the tightening strain of my abdomen, as if snared from behind by some human magnet.

  “I just want you to know that.”

  I nod once and continue walking.

  I STARE OUT THE WINDOW down to the crabs, whose numbers seem to have dwindled slightly. This immediately raises concern. Perhaps they’ve spread from the front of the union to around the perimeter and are now surrounding us. On the other hand, maybe they’ve left for the time being, as they’ve done each time previously.

  The crabs that remain keep staring. Watching.

  The windows of the Warren student union are stained with age and the film of cigarette smoke. These are no newfangled plasti-glass windows—the kind with double layers and laminate reinforcements—this is seventies-era, junior college window technology. To look at them, they appear to be no match for the brick-like construction of the oven. One heave and the thing should blast through the panes like a cannonball through pottery.

  “Are you ready, Naia?” I yell. The distance between my location and the back of the union is probably fifty yards, but in our new world of silence sound carries quite well.

  “I’m ready,” she says soberly. “And as soon as I hear that crash, I want to hear the sound of your footsteps running this way.”

  I look down on the creatures one last time, gauging the best method to send the oven to the ground. There’s nothing to it, I decide. Nothing to it but to do it.

  I lift the oven from the table and, battering ram style, swing it back once. Twice. On the second swing forward I let the thing go. As expected, it breaches the glass easily and hurtles toward the ground like a dead body.

  I watch it hit the pavement dramatically, shattering like a firework across the quad, the sound deep and violent, like the crash of a mortar shell.

  The plan was for me to run the instant I threw the oven, before it even hit the ground. I would then catch up to Naia, and after a few seconds of waiting—enough time for any crabs in the rear to move toward the sound—we would make our escape and head off toward the plaza. It wasn’t a plan that would go down in the annals of history, but that wasn’t what we were shooting for. We were just trying to give ourselves a chance.

  But I was stuck in the scene, hypnotized. I couldn’t leave without seeing the reaction of the things, the whole time praying they would flock to the noise like so many barracuda to a dead whale’s rotting corpse. We just needed two or three minutes. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was a fighting chance.

  The blown up fragments of the oven splayed at the feet of the first line of crabs, and they gave the pieces only a glance. Those behind them seemed not to notice at all. The eyes remained on me.

  “Dominic, let’s go!”

  I step up to the open window and breathe in the cool air. The crabs had shown no interest in the weaponized oven, but my face has suddenly stirred their attention. They pack in closer, their necks still craned up at me, eyes locked as if I were a dictator on the verge of giving some nationalist speech from his palace balcony.

  “Go Naia.” My words are barely audible, a trial command before the real one gets unfurled. “Naia! Go! Now!”

  Mercifully, there is no protest from Naia, and I hear the heavy push of the door to rear of the union. I feel guilty almost immediately, knowing Naia was expecting me to be just behind her. But I have to be sure. I have to know the crabs haven’t sensed the escape happening behind me.

  But they only come closer to the union, and a few of them have begun to claw their fingers up the wall, stretching their arms up the brick façade as if testing it for scalability. In mere seconds, a row of them have lined up directly below the second story window, and the next line of crabs in the party has begun to climb on top of them. They’re forming a type of scaffolding and are aiming for the open window.

  “Dominic! What are you doing? Let’s go!”

  I spin to see Naia standing on the last step. “Dammit Naia, I told you to run.”

  “I did. And I told you to follow me. And you didn’t. So who’s wrong here?”

  I give one more peek down to the growing ivy of crabs working its way up the building and see they are only a row away from reaching the opening.

  “Dom!”

  I turn and run to the stairs, descending them three at a time and catching up to Naia at the hub of the union, just outside the campus store. The door leading to the rear of the building is open wide, wedged into a snowbank, and a path leads off to the clearing where Naia began her escape and then doubled back for me. Risking her life for me.

  I love you Dom.

  Maybe she does.

  But I love my wife.

  I wish there was some great dark secret or childhood trauma that led me to wander from Sharon, but there isn’t. It was just a perfect combination of everyday things. Humdrum routine. Interest from an attractive girl. The belief that I could get away with it. Obviously, I’ve considered that this whole event is my punishment for the betrayal, which always reminds me to add narcissism to the pie of everyday things.

  That first day, the day the world changed, within minutes after the blast when the phones still worked, I called Sharon at least fifty times. Home. Cell. Voice mail every time.

  Except once.

  She answered, frantically; I heard my name somewhere in the background, but it was barely a whisper on her lips. Whether it was due to the static of the connection or my wife’s condition I couldn’t tell. I’ve replayed the call in my head several times a day, every day since, hoping to find the answer, some clue that will let me know she didn’t suffer.

  “The snow isn’t too bad. It’s piled up pretty high by the door, but once you get to the clump of trees it’s much lower. We can make it.”

  I pick up my pack, which I stored earlier beside the door, and loop my arms through the straps.

  We step into the tracks of Naia’s initial run, and move as quickly as we can toward the trees. Naia is just behind me.

  I look back to make sure she’s keeping pace, and, from the corner of my vision, I see movement through the open door of the student union we’ve just left. It’s a wide flowing movement. Back in the hallway and steadily growing toward the door.

  A steady growing movement of white.

  I blink my eyes, trying to adjust my vision through the glare off the snow and the darkness of the building’s interior, hoping what I’m seeing is a mirage. But there’s no mistaking it. They’re coming for us. Dozens of them. They’ve crawled through the broken window and are following us.

  “Naia.” I swallow, trying to compose myself. “We have to go faster.”

  Naia knows instantly I’m panicked. She looks back. “Oh my god.”

  “Come on, we can make it.”

  I watch in horror as the first of the crabs reaches the snow and, upon touching the white powder with its foot, assumes an animal-like pose, immediately collapsing
to all fours like an ape.

  Then more of the crabs hit the powder and drop into similar stances, angular and twitchy, elbows and knees splayed in preparation for sprinting.

  I grab Naia’s hand and run with her, slow at first as we maneuver the deeper snow, and then more quickly as the snow thins under the limbs of the tree clump.

  Once under the canopy of the wooded area, we both stop with our backs still turned to the student union and the approaching horde. The grip of Naia’s hand tightens as she turns around, undoubtedly with the expectation that the things would be upon us the moment she looked.

  But they were still thirty or so yards back from us, creeping forward, they’re advancement steady and measured, the mass of white bodies drifting outward as they approached. They appeared as a surrounding army encircling their enemy.

  “Why don’t they just come for us?” Naia asks.

  “They seem...I don’t know. Not afraid exactly...but cautious.”

  “Do you see how wide they’re getting though? I think they’re trying to close us in. Trap us.”

  “I see it. We have to get through the clearing before they get in front of us.”

  With that, Naia takes the lead into the open ground just beyond the trees. The snow is deep again, but with the sun high and beaming down, we’re able to knife through it fairly easily. We aren’t fast enough to outrun the crabs if they really want to catch us, but if they keep their rate steady, at the pace we’re going we can make the plaza.

  I look ahead at the shopping center parking lot and the small row of stores that border it. A Thai restaurant. A diner. A barber shop. A store that looks to be a combination of craft and office supplies.

  The lot is at least half-filled with cars, suggesting that several people hunkered down at the plaza following the blast.

  The blast.

  It had the sound of invasion. The way a jumbo jet flying just above the roof of a home sounds. Vibratory to the bone. Breath-catching. My initial thought was of war, of course. That the proverbial nukes had started flying. And notwithstanding the assurances from government mouthpieces on the radio broadcasts that this was not a military event, Naia and I still had our doubts. Especially once we ventured outside a couple days after. The landscape certainly had the look of a nuclear attack. What else could have made such a sound and then left the world a desert?

  A meteor?

  Yes, of course. We always held on to that as a potential theory. But it didn’t fit. Any catastrophic meteor crash would have turned Naia and me to dust along with everyone else.

  And then there was the mystery of the snow. I had always heard of the ‘nuclear winter’ that scientists hypothesized would follow a large-scale nuclear war, but I never thought the theory was literal and would involve massive snowfall. But maybe it did. Maybe this is exactly what was happening.

  But did nuclear weapons explain the crabs?

  I’d seen enough bad Hollywood sci-fi in my lifetime to know that radiation could turn humans into primitive white snow people. And a whole lot worse. Maybe Naia and I had great genes that were putting off the effects for a few weeks. Maybe it was just a matter of time until we both joined the ranks of this new race that was certain to inherit the earth.

  We reach the pavement of the parking lot where the snow has almost completely melted. By the looks of it, the crabs have stopped coming. They’ve formed a broad line of bodies and have formed a type of crab barrier between us and the campus. If we don’t find survivors in the plaza, the ways things are configured now, we’ll never make it back to the student union. Even if we find food and shelter, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to keep ourselves warm.

  We reach the first of the cars and I stop, brushing the snow from the driver’s side window to look inside; Naia takes a direct route toward the Thai restaurant at the far right end of the strip mall.

  The car is a small sedan and looks to be empty but for a few stray wrappers and a soda can. I move past the remaining cars in the row and walk up behind a white midsized box truck double parked in front of the diner. The back door of the truck is pulled down, and an open padlock hangs impotently to the side.

  I step up on the wide bumper of the truck, reach down and grab the thick handle, and heave up the door, which slides easily on its tracks.

  I turn and walk inside the dark trailer, reaching the contents about halfway in.

  Food. Beef and pork by the looks of it, and being kept perfectly frozen in the insulated truck. This would have been a nice treat to have back at the campus.

  Behind me I hear a scramble and a click.

  “Who the hell are you?” a voice asks.

  I turn to see a woman, younger than me but probably not by much. She’s dressed in a full coat and scarf with no hat, revealing a classically pretty face and a full head of long blond hair that’s seen better days for sure. In her hands is a shotgun.

  I raise my hands above my shoulders, slightly in front of me. “My name is Dominic Daniels. I’m a...was a professor at Warren.”

  “At Warren?” It’s a shocked whisper, as if doing the calculations on how long I’ve been there, so close to others.

  “That’s right.”

  “We didn’t think there was anyone else.” The woman’s voice rises at the end, hopeful, and her eyes fill with tears, unlocking a gentleness that is likely closer to her natural state than that of gun-toting protector of delivery trucks.

  “There are two of us, actually. There’s a woman named Naia with me. She went to see about the Thai restaurant just on the end there.”

  “What?” The woman’s eyes turn huge and her jaws drop wide.

  “The Thai restaurant. I think it’s Thai. I mean the name is someth—.”

  “No!” she screams. The woman turns and disappears from sight, and seconds later I hear her yelling. “Hey! Get away from there!” followed by two gun blasts.

  I jump down from the truck and follow in the direction of the woman, and immediately see her with her shotgun raised, and past her, in the background of my line of sight, I see three bloody crabs running away from the sound of the weapon.

  On the ground in front of the restaurant, Naia’s body is mangled and dismembered, the crimson rivers flowing from beneath her turn the snow to a sheet of ruby crystals.

  She’s dead.

  “THEY WEREN’T LIKE THIS at first.”

  Tom Godfrey is the owner of the diner where I’ve suddenly gone from prisoner to refugee. He has a kind face, the lines and wrinkles of it show the scars of worry and weariness. He has agreed to tell me what he knows. It’s been a week since I’ve been here, and after spending most of those seven days in a restaurant version of solitary confinement, the group has now allowed me to be amongst them.

  Danielle—the woman whom I first met—brought me my meals in the cordoned off dining area which was my living quarters. She started by just dropping them and leaving, but by the fourth or fifth day, she began to linger for a word or two of superficial conversation. I never loved Naia, and it’s fair to say that as the days and weeks blossomed I grew to resent her, but I’d grown so accustomed to her sole company that after three days of confinement I began to feel the symptoms of social withdrawal. Danielle noticed and threw me a bone of companionship.

  “At first they just looked at us. Studied us. We stayed away from them, of course, but after a few weeks, we started getting a little more daring. Well, some of us did.”

  Tom’s eyes drop for a moment and then flash back to me.

  “My son Greg. He was the manager of this place. It’s mine on paper, but Tom’s Diner was Greg’s in every way. He felt responsible for us. For Danielle and the other wait staff, and the customers.”

  I shift my eyes, studying each member of the group, trying to figure out who belongs in which category. Unlike in normal life, every one of the remaining six people in this new post-apocalyptic tribe looks to be cut from the same cloth.

  “He knew we couldn’t stay here forever, so he started gett
ing a little more daring with his outings. When the snow would subside, he’d take the jeep out and patrol the streets, trying to find survivors. That’s how James came to us.”

  Tom points at the youngest member of the group, a kid, probably still in high school.

  “Did he see any of the crabs out there?”

  Tom looks at me quizzical.

  “Crabs. That’s what Naia and I used to call them.”

  Tom nods. “He did. Hiding in the snows. Creeping around the fringes like they tend to do.”

  “Do you know what happened?” This is the big question, of course, and my choice of timing to acknowledge it is rather clumsy. But Danielle gave me no answers during our brief conversations, so Tom seems like the next best source.

  “I don’t. You probably know as much or more than we do. They think every place was affected. The world is over.”

  I bounce a somber nod. “Sorry to interrupt you. You were talking about your son.”

  Tom smiles weakly. “James wanted to see what the things wanted. The crabs as you call them. They never tried to get in, even though they could see us clearly through the glass door. That was at first before we covered it with the curtains. Anyway, James got to the point that whenever he saw one he would go outside and stand there. And they would just stare at him.

  Tom takes a deep breath.

  “But then one day he went out and they started to approach him. He ran back in right away that first time, but then he started to...push it. He started to believe you could, I don’t know, tame them, I guess, similar to the way you break a wild animal. He thought their gradual approaches just meant they were becoming more comfortable with him.”

  “I could see thinking that. But what was his plan? You said he felt like he needed to protect you. Like he was responsible. What did taming these things have to do with protecting you?”

  “Well, if the things turned out not to be dangerous—and keep in mind, up until that point we had no reason to believe they were—then we were going to leave. We were going to try to find others. Civilization. Maybe all the radio reports were wrong and there were actually places that were unaffected. Or at least functioning. Maybe this was all going to pass. Maybe there was a cure for these...people.”