literature

Through the Snow

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  Down along a four-lane stretch of Pennsylvania highway marches a small boy clutching his little league baseball bat, forcing his way, fingers numb and nose dripping, against and through a winter blizzard.  He is a silhouette outlined in cold gray and broken by the millions of falling flakes in front and around him.  The boy’s world is as far as the cruel snow will allow him to see; it surrounds and closes off and only let’s in the freezing cold to do its miserable work.   He remembers his mother’s favorite winter saying, “That Jack Frost is one mean son-of-a-bitch.”

  The boy, himself, had always liked the cold because it made the inside seem so much warmer, and he liked the snow because of the sled hill behind his house, but now he thinks he understands what she had meant about Jack Frost and his temper.
A fresh snow fall had started early in the morning as he lay asleep under a pile of blankets in the back seat of a deserted minivan.  The blankets he had found while scavenging through some of the cars left along the highway; the ones without dead people in them.  The minivan, he had found with its front seats and dashboard thoroughly spattered and smeared with blood.  The blood had scared him, but the thought of freezing outside in the night scared him even more.  So he crawled into its back seat and burrowed under the appropriated blankets as the wind blew in hard gusts across the lanes and shook the van and the boy to sleep.

  He woke up the next morning with the sound of his sister’s screaming on the surface of his memory.  He put on his still wet snow pants and big blue Giants jacket, his gloves, hat, and snow boots.  Then grabbing the bat and his Batman backpack, he slid the van’s door open and stepped back out into a sea of white.  It was still coming down.  The freshly fallen layer came to just below his crotch and he almost had to crawl through it.  
That morning he made little progress trudging through a foot and a half of the white powder, lifting one leg high up, knee to chest, before planting it back down in the cold, wet snow, and then lifting the other one.  Slowly, very slowly he made his way towards the shopping plaza that he considered to be the center of town, resting every time he came across an empty and unlocked car.  He would climb inside, dry his boots and feet as best he could and then lie down in the backseat for a few minutes before he started back out again.
His bat was always in his hand as he crawled.  He didn’t want to be caught off guard in case another one of them came out of the snow after him.  He had seen a few that were just lying there, sometimes with most of their body hidden.  One of them, a girl in a varsity jacket had been so buried that he nearly stepped on her. She had tried to get up and give chase but her legs were frozen and the muscle and skin crackled and tore as she rose.  
If he couldn’t see them, sometimes he would hear them calling out to him in inhuman howls and moans, painful cries of hunger.

  He trudged on through snowdrifts and between the white lumps of cars until he came to a sign that he knew very well.  It was a sign for the town strip mall.  It read “Kunkletown Plaza, Exit 23” and below that, almost buried, “2 Miles”.  Out of relief and exhaustion he exhaled deeply and stood and ignored the flakes that melted and dripped from his nose, just staring at the big green sign and thinking about the grocery store at the plaza and all the food there.  He sniffled and decided, against his stomach’s wishes, to rest for a few minutes.  He dug out the driver’s side door to an old station wagon, fought with the snow to get it open and then squeezed inside.

  He found a blanket in the back and pulled it to him.  A small dog fell out from it, dead and frozen.  The boy covered the dog back up and kept rummaging.  The trunk was full of boxes and the boy climbed over and between them.  Ripping open box after box and finding nothing much of any use, valuable maybe it was but not useful.  He pulled a wedding dress out of a box labeled “bedroom” and below it was a gold-rimmed photo album.  The boy thumbed through the first few pages and quickly ran out of pictures to look at, nothing interesting, just birthday parties and barbecues.  He stuffed the dress back down and pushed the box aside.  He found the radio and the flash light behind the bedroom box in a small plastic bin labeled “basement/emergency”.  
The radio he got working with the flashlight’s batteries.  The flashlight’s bulb had exploded a long time ago so he through that over by the dog.  He tuned the radio and thought he heard the whisper of a man from the radio’s speaker.  His eyes closed and he listened to nothing but static.  His mind went back to his sister’s cries and the way he had last seen his parents.

  His mother had been on call that night, Christmas Eve.  Her pager beeped just as they were putting the boy to bed. His parents both looked at each other.
“You have to go?” Dad asked, concerned.
“I’m sorry.  It’s that Flu going around.  The ER’s been stacked with them for the last two days.  ” Mom said.
“Well just be safe.”
“I will,” and she pulled the covers up to the boy’s chin.
She must have come home while he was asleep.  He was stirred awake by the sound of something thumping against his door.  Thumping and scratching.  Then he heard his sister’s voice,
“Santa?”
The sounds at his door stopped.  The boy was sitting up in his bed, listening.  He heard footsteps heading down the hall to his sister’s room; slow, dragging footsteps, like someone sleepwalking.
“Daddy?”
She sounded worried.  
“Mommy?”

  She sounded scared.  He heard her let out a short cry.  She shouted for the boy’s help from her bedroom but he was frozen where he sat.  His hands gripped the covers tight and his eyes were wide; every hair on his body standing straight out and his blue blood feeling like ice running through him.  He heard the sounds of struggle and soon she was just screaming.  After a minute or a lifetime the screaming died to a low but constant gurgling sound, like someone choking, and a moment later there was silence.  The boy leapt from his bed and went for his lucky bat, the one that had hit the first and last home run of his baseball career.   He ran to his door and locked it.  His heart shook his chest.  He put his ear against it and heard something faint over the sound of his own beating blood; the sound was something like jelly being squished around in between somebody’s hands.
He moved away from the door and to his closet, where his snow pants were hung.  He found his old boots buried in the back of the closet.  He put them on before taking his baseball bat up in his hands.  He thought of going to his sister’s room and trying to help her, but then he gulped hard when he thought about what was waiting for him inside her room.  He decided to run for help.

  Soon he had his window open, and he was leaping out into his mom’s favorite bushes and was running across their lawn, just waiting for some person or thing to come running out the front door after him.  He looked back once as he ran, only to see his parents standing in his sister’s window, clawing at the glass, smearing blood onto it, trying to get out at their son while below them, in the first floor family room picture window stood their Christmas tree glowing red and gold.

  Three days later he sits in a wood-panel station wagon tomb with a dead dog and a stranger’s family memories with his lips quivering, water leaking from his eyes and trailing down to one side of his lips where he licks it away.  He cries, and moans for his mom, his momma.  His legs are cold and wet and he’s rocking himself, hugging his ribs tight.  He wishes he had his mom with him now and not some frozen dog.

“This is an emergency broadcast.”  The radio says to him.  He stops crying and tries fiercely to steady his breath.  His fingers find the volume knob and he turns it up as far as it goes.  “This is an emergency broadcast from the Fort Tobyhanna Military Reservation.  We have a sterilized…” the signal fades to static noise for a few seconds and the voice comes back, “…guarded facility and we are taking survivors.  All healthy United States citizens please make your way to the Fort Tobyhanna …” more static lasting much longer, “Please bring any identification.  Any person seeking asylum but exhibiting bite wounds will be turned away.  If you have been bitten by an infected human, please…” static snow, “This is an emergency broadcast from the Fort Tobyhanna….” The signal is lost.

  The boy knows where that fort is though.  It’s right across the street from where he plays baseball and he knows the way from the grocery store.  He wipes his eyes and crawls over the seats and back out into the blizzard.  He takes the plaza exit.  He needs to eat.
Four hours later he slides on his butt down a white hill lined with the white bumps of just planted shrubs and lands in the plaza’s parking lot.  It’s nearly midnight but it doesn’t matter.  The whole world is gray and it’s been coming down that way since Christmas morning.  The boy bounds across a cemetery of buried shopping carts and automobiles until he stands at the big glass automatic doors of the Save-Rite shopping center.
He sees the smashed in window covered over with a tarp and some duct-tape and he ventures in, gripping the bat’s taped handle tight in one hand and moving the tarp aside slowly with the other.

  He finds a girl in the candy aisle, sleeping under a pile of Halloween costumes on clearance inside a fort made out of shopping carts and tarps.
“Psst.. wake up.” He whispers, shaking one of her legs.  She doesn’t stir, then suddenly the leg he’s shaking darts out and hits his shoulder.
“Get away!” she’s screaming as she crawls out the back of her fort with the carts rolling and the tarps falling in.  She leaps up and sprints to the end of the aisle and looks back at a boy with black hair hanging from under his hat and a too fluffy coat and he’s rubbing his shoulder.
“Hey, I won’t hurt you!  I’m just hungry!” he shouts down to her.  She looks a little younger than him, maybe in second grade.
“Well you’re not eating me!”
“Look it’s not like that.  I’m a person.  I’m alive!”
“How should I know that?”
“I’ll help fix your fort.  I wouldn’t do that if I wanted to eat you.”
He wheels a shopping cart back into place and sets one side of tarp back over it.  She walks over and helps him with the reconstruction.  The boy tells her how he got to the store and about sleeping in the cars.  He draws a map for her with the crayons and paper they find in the stationary department.   Then he tells her about the voice that he heard on the radio and what it said.  He tells her about his plan to get to the Military Reservation.
“Do you want to come with?”
“It’s really cold, and I’m scared.”  
The girl tells him about her uncle who was bitten by one of their neighbors.  The uncle had taken her with him to the hospital but he turned into one of them out on the highway.  He tried to bite her.  She found this store the day after her uncle was bitten; the window was already smashed in.
“You can’t just stay here.  Come with me.”  He says, and she does.
They pack some candy and chips and juice boxes in his backpack and they head out into the snow.  He holds her hand as they leave the plaza and walk back out onto the road.  He pulls her gently up the snow drifts and they march together towards a new fort.
An hour later she’s asking,
“Can we stop?”
Her cheeks are beet red and her nose is dripping.  Her jacket is made for fall and her jeans are already soaked through.
“Ok, stay here. I’ll find a car.”  He leaves her and wanders further along, going from lane to lane lifting door handles and hoping that one will be unlocked.
A few minutes later he finds a door unlocked.  He pulls at it, pushing the snow out away from him.  He’s looking out as he pulls, squinting against the wind that shoots countless tiny flakes at him and he doesn’t see the old man with leather skin crawling over from the passenger’s seat, his face covered in dry blood and his mouth wide and ready to bite.  The boy is trying to hear what the girl is yelling from back where he left her.  
“I can’t hear you!” he calls back to her.
He doesn’t see the gray, dead hand reaching out for the collar of his Giants jacket.  The boy only hears those four words that the girl keeps crying over and over again from out there beyond a thick curtain of white flakes.  He doesn’t know what is coming out of the car behind him.  He only watches her coming towards him with the curtain folding back behind her.  Holding her hand out to him; blood trickles from it and falls to the snow, and she is crying,
“A lady bit me.”

  The boy feels cold fingers brush against the nape of his neck, and he wheels around, swatting the dead man’s hand away before jumping back and slamming the car door shut.  His eyes are on the girl even before the door closes.  She is cold, and wet, and crying.  He bounds through the snow to her and stands before her, looking down at the bite.
“She was in the snow.  She came up and bit me.”  She says through deep sobs.  The boy takes her hand, and examines the bite.
“We need to wrap it up to stop it from bleeding.”  He says, “Stay here!”
The boy takes off his backpack and his jacket.  He lays the jacket open on the snow and empties the contents of his backpack out onto the jacket.
“I’ll be right back.”  He assures as he turns and bounds back to the unlocked car with the man waiting inside.  This time he walks around and opens the passenger side door.  He sees the man lying across both front seats, groaning quietly.
“Hey you, look at me! Don’t you want a bite?”  The boy shouts at the dead man.  The man lifts his head slowly from the driver’s seat, and turns his sunken gaze to the boy.  The man’s skin is loose on his face, but it tightens as he opens his mouth wide and then sags again as he chomps down on his teeth.  The sound of the teeth gnashing into each other makes the boy cringe for an instant before he continues shouting at the man.
“Come on out, I’m good food!”
“Hurry up stupid!”
“You’re slower than my grandma!”

  The man crawls awkwardly towards the boy as the taunting continues, and it takes several minutes for the man to begin crawling his way out of the car, chomping into the air and groaning all the while.  The boy holds his open backpack before him, and exactly as the dead man begins climbing through the car doorway and into the winter world, the boy flings the backpack over his head, and zips it shut around the man’s neck.  The boy then grabs the skinny gray man by the collar of his bloody dress shirt and drags him out of the car entirely, closing the passenger door behind him.
The dead man lies on his belly as the snow falls and begins to cover his body, and still he moans from inside the boys backpack.  He doesn’t move, though.  He is too cold.  The man only lies still and lets the snow slowly build up over him.  The boy stands over the dead man, and remembers a phrase his father liked to use,
“Good riddance.”  The boy says.  Then he runs back to the girl, scoops up his jacket and the former contents of the backpack, walks with her to the car, opening the door for her, helping her inside, and then following her in before slamming the door and sealing out the snow.

  In the back seat they find several small blankets and a forgotten old t-shirt scrunched beneath the driver’s seat.  He helps her out of her clothes, and into the over sized t-shirt, then wraps the blankets around her, before he takes the shirt she was wearing and wraps her hand up tightly with it.  He holds her for a long time, and she cries into his shoulder.  He then tells her that he has to go for help, and that he will leave her with food enough until he returns.  She doesn’t put up any protest or give any sign of agreement.  She only sits inside the blankets with her head resting on her knees sobbing quietly, then sniffling, then sobbing again.

  The boy opens the door and is faced again with the cold and the feeling that he does not want to be out there ever again.  Still, he climbs out into the snow.  He carries only his bat and the snacks he could fit into his coat pockets.
“I will be back.” He says; reassuring her of a reunion that they both knew would never take place.  She sits folded up to herself, and she freezes that way in the boy’s mind.  He shuts the door softly, and starts back out through the snow.
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