Dead of Winter (7 page)

“
Yesssssss,” it
said.

Jake composed himself. He imagined
Carl lying in there, bloodied and broken and in urgent need of
attention. Now was not the time for fear no matter how unsettling
the situation might be.

But God, it was so damn
cold.

“
Carl, can you move? Are you
hurt?”

The figure jerked.

The reply: “They
knowwwwww.”

“
What? I don’t
understand.”

“
Theyyyy
knowwwwww.”

“’
They know’
what?”

A gurgling sound that might have been
a chuckle. Or a man choking on his own blood.

“
Carl?”

Silence from inside the
truck.

“
Carl? Answer me. Can you
open the door?”

No answer.

“
Carl? Shit!” Jake slapped
his palm against the window, knocking away more of the ice. He
sighed a cloud of frustration and wiped a hand over his face. His
touch was warm against the cold of his cheeks.

Inside the truck, tendrils of shadow
rose.

Jake backed away. “Lenny?”

“
Is he in one
piece?”

Jake was relieved to hear his friend’s
voice because for just a moment a marrow-freezing panic had taken
hold of him, filling him with certainty that when he turned around,
Lenny would be gone.

“
I don’t know,” he called
back. “Maybe. I can’t tell, but I can’t get the door open
either.”

He turned to find Lenny shivering but
moving toward him.

“
Let’s go find help,” Jake
said. “The door is stuck fast. The longer we spend trying to get
him out ourselves, the more chance he stands of dying in there if
he’s hurt bad enough. Let’s just keep going, make our way to the
police station and get them to come back for him. It’s too goddamn
cold here anyway.”

He couldn’t keep the desperation from
his voice and saw it reflected in Lenny’s eyes, but no argument was
proffered. The night was freezing fast and hard and they both knew
they could die out here if the snow got so thick they lost their
way.

They could send help. Assuming things
didn’t get so bad that they ended up being the ones in need of
it.

A blast of wind-borne snow lashed into
them, making Jake rock on his feet, the icy cold licking against
his uncovered neck. “Shit!”

Lenny nodded, teeth clicking together
as a shiver rippled through him. “Let’s go.”

* * *

They continued on into the storm,
neither of them saying a word.

Jake had never seen the town so quiet,
so deserted and he didn’t like it. The absence of the streetlights
made an alien landscape of Miriam’s Cove, the hollow roar of the
sea beyond Patterson’s Point lost beneath the faint hissing as the
snow fell in endless waves, white dunes heaping themselves high
against the somber black buildings. The darkness weighed down upon
them, a smothering thing.

They turned into what memory told them
was Lewis Avenue, a narrow street which opened out onto Cove
Central.

Jake could no longer feel his toes,
and the cold was spreading. His coat felt like a sheet of plastic,
the thickness of it rendered impotent by his fall in the
snow.

When they entered Cove Central, it was
as if they’d tripped a wire hidden in the snow. They stopped dead
in their tracks, their eyes following the lamps around the
thoroughfare as each one stuttered back on, flooding the area with
harsh white light.

“
That’s something at least,”
Lenny said, nodding once in wearied satisfaction. “Maybe now we’ll
be able to see where we going.”

“
Yeah,” Jake agreed. At the
sight of the drifts piling high against the buildings and
smothering the cars, he felt that knot of fear in his throat
tighten. He had thought the snow hungry before, but now that he
could fully appreciate the depth and the sheer mass of it, he
amended that description. It was not hungry. It was ravenous. And
no matter how implausible it was to think of snow as anything but
innocent, to attribute such a natural thing with sentience, he knew
there was something wrong with it. Something terrible
hiding
in it. And like
bleeding swimmers in a shark-filled ocean, here the two of them
stood, up to their shins in the stuff.

So let’s engage this little
madness for a moment shall we?
a quieter,
more reasonable voice in his head piped up,
and assume you’re right. Why then, has it not already killed
you?

He didn’t want to think
about that. Couldn’t, because aside from the fear and the
inexplicable dread he was valiantly attempting to blame on the
barbed wire coils of grief, he sensed something bigger at work here
– something far more peculiar and unpleasant than unseen things in
the snow. He felt
led
. Yes, that was it. He felt as if a hook had snagged in his
soul and someone, some
thing
somewhere was slowly reeling him in.

The night had become a strange place,
unfamiliar, unkind and filled with latent malice.

Carl Stewart was more than likely
freezing to death, if not already dead from his injuries, lying
there alone in the battered shell of his snowplow.

Joanne Quick was missing, or worse, a
possibility that had to have settled itself on Lenny’s shoulders,
ageing him terribly as he struggled through the drifts to uncover a
truth that might destroy his world.

The police station dominated the east
end of the square, a narrow two story red brick building,
unremarkable except for the cast iron black bars over the windows,
making it look like it had been designed by an aged cowboy pining
for the days of the old jails. Clumps of snow sat like sleeping
cats in the gutters and atop the windowsills. Over the door, a
brass sign marred by verdigris read: MIRIAM’S COVE SHERIFF’S
DEPARTMENT.

Lenny paused at the foot of the wide
stone steps leading up to the station. He frowned. Jake drew
abreast of him and rested his hip against the low wall that
bordered the steps, relieving some of the pressure from his aching
joints but cementing the cold into his flesh.

Jake didn’t have to ask why Lenny had
stopped.

Even though the streetlights had come
back on, the police station’s windows were dark.

They stood together in
silence for a moment, then Lenny sighed. “I can’t figure it out.
This is like a bad
Twilight Zone
episode or something. Looks like everybody’s gone.
Are we dreaming?”

Though he knew Lenny wasn’t serious,
but rather speaking from frustration and more than a little fear, a
similar thought had occurred to Jake and, like Lenny, he had been
unable to completely dismiss it as fancy. Dreams were not bound by
natural law and wasn’t that how things seemed in the town tonight?
Jake wished it to be so, some inner part of him warmed by the idea
of waking in his bed to find none of this had happened outside of
his own feverish imaginings.

But the hope was weak.

The cold was real, too real to pin on
a dream.

And let’s face it buddy,
even if it was a dream, the real world ain’t so friggin’ hot for
you these days, is it?

“
Maybe we should head back
just in case Baxter’s waiting at your house.”

“
Maybe,” Jake said. “But I’m
a little leery about following your suggestions after that last one
about me getting out of the house.” He grinned feebly and folded
his arms. “Let’s check out the station first. Maybe they’ll at
least have some still-warm coffee. If we can get in at
all.”

Lenny nodded and headed up the steps.
Jake followed, wincing. He whispered a silent prayer that the door
would be unlocked.

Just one break. Please. Just
one
.

Lenny slipped his fingers around the
brass door handle, thumbed down the button and pulled. Ice crunched
and tumbled from the crack in the doorjamb but the door did not
move.

Jake sagged. “It’s a goddamn night for
locked doors, isn’t it?”

Lenny didn’t reply, but turned, a
scowl on his face.

“
Can you see
inside?”

“
What difference does it
make?”

“
Maybe they just locked the
place up because of the storm?”

Lenny offered him a tired smile. “For
a grieving man, you’re sure quick with the sunshine.”

“
Call it desperation. I’m
sick to death of this cold.”

“
Then maybe we should kick
the doors down.”

“
Right, breaking and
entering into a police station. That’ll be one for the books.
Assuming of course we had the strength in our legs to even try
without crippling ourselves.”

Lenny snorted and gestured out over
the thoroughfare. “Doesn’t look like there’d be many witnesses
though, huh?”

“
No. Guess not.”

With a satisfied nod, Lenny turned
back to the door. “Oh JESUS!”

Jake’s scalp prickled and he took two
paces back from the door, almost expecting it to explode outward
with the same force that now held his heart in its hands. “What?
What is it?”

Lenny was standing stock-still, arms
by his sides, staring in through the rectangular glass panel on the
left side of the door.

“
Lenny?”

“
I…I saw
someone.”

“
Saw who?” Ignoring the
fresh bursts of pain that coruscated across his knees at the
suddenness of his movements and propelled by renewed hope, Jake
rushed to join Lenny at the window. He almost screamed when he saw
a white, hollow-eyed face leering back at him from the glass, but
then it shrank and vanished only to reappear at the behest of
Lenny’s breath. Condensation, nothing more, but it had almost been
enough to prompt those invisible hands into giving his heart a
final squeeze. With a sigh, he squinted to see through the
window.

Beyond the glass, the suffused light
from the street allowed him a glimpse of a pale rectangular smudge
which might have been the desk sergeant’s computer. Like imitation
moonlight, the silvery glow shining through the high windows sent
fractured streaks across the tile-floor hallway. The hall ran
toward the back of the building until darkness claimed
it.

The station seemed as deserted as the
rest of town, but in there, as out here, there were plenty of
hiding places.

Lenny’s tremulous breath rumbled in
his ear.

Still scanning the hall, Jake asked:
“What did you see?”

“
A woman.”

“
Did you recognize
her?”

“
No.”

“
Well…why didn’t you try and
get her attention?”

He felt Lenny shrug. “The way she
looked, I didn’t want to get her attention.”

“
How did she
look?”

“
Dead,” Lenny said simply.
“Or damn close.”

Lenny didn’t answer, but his breathing
had slowed. Jake guessed whatever had spooked him had already
rationalized itself in his mind now that he’d said it aloud. But
that still left the question of who was inside the station. Jake
cupped his hands around his face, and tried one last time to see if
he could detect movement from inside.

Lenny’s breathing quickened almost
immediately, thundering in Jake’s ear and heating the flesh
there.

Inside the station, nothing
moved.

“
In all my years in this
town I don’t think I’ve ever seen the police station locked up, for
any reason. So why now?”

No answer.

“
It’s bad but not bad enough
to evacuate a building as solid as this one, don’t you
think?”

No answer.

We have to get home or we’ll
die out here
, Jake thought as a wave of
cold rushed up his back, making his teeth chatter.

“
We better go back,” he
said.

Lenny’s only response was his
frightened breathing, now so loud that after a few moments Jake
pushed away and rubbed a tickle from his ear. “Would y– ?” he began
but stopped just as fast, one hand still clamped to the side of his
head.

He noticed two things at
once.

First, it was no longer snowing, but
any joy he might have felt at that realization drained from him
almost immediately.

Because Lenny was gone.

But he was just here!
Right next to me. Breathing like a horse in my bloody
ear!

His own breath shriveled before his
face then, eyes widening as something dreadful occurred to
him.

At least you
think
it was
Lenny
.

With a furtive glance around the town
square from his vantage point atop the steps, Jake yelled Lenny’s
name, once, twice, then waited.

The town listened, but did not
respond.