Chapter 5

5

Moves

* * *

All we heard was dead static, but hope wasn't lost yet. We were still on the presets.

96.5 KISS FM played a constant beep, like when your ears ring; 92.5 was all static, the auditory equivalent of a scrambled TV channel; 97.5, the classic rock station had a looping message, "We are experiencing technical difficulties, we are sorry for the inconvenience, please stand by," but I figured this had probably been playing since the blizzard began. The only channel we found with a person still on the air was 95.5, a religious station we stumbled on by turning the tuner until a voice stopped us. On this station, a man spoke in a calm voice, which I found much more unsettling than if he had been freaking out. He was reading from the Bible, passages about the end times.

Sunday school was many years ago, so most of it went over my head, but the man said: "Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it."

And before Stone and I gave up, the man added another verse—this, he said, from Revelation 1:3.

"Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near."

Too late, I thought, the time isn't near. The time is now.

We scanned more channels, both AM and FM, and heard nothing.

Stone turned the radio off. We sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the blasting heat from the registers. The blasting, blessed heat.

"We should go in," I said. "Mikey and Eleanor will be up soon. Probably think we're dead or something."

"Mikey'd like that," Stone mumbled.

I ignored his comment as best I could, mostly because he was right and I hated that he was right. Mikey didn't seem to like us…or anyone. He was young and he had gone through a terrible tragedy, I know, but we were in this together. That was the only way we were going to get out of this. There was still time for him to come around. But not much.

Stone met my eyes. He seemed like a different person. The snow lay heavy on the windshield. The heat had melted a pea-sized hole through it. Stone pointed to it now. Light was filtering inside the cab. "Sun is out, and it's only getting brighter."

I leaned over and peered through this tiny opening. Truth be told, I noticed no difference from when I first saw the golden light coming through the clouds. I certainly noticed no increase in temperature outside. I always thought when it got this cold, snow wouldn't fall, but the snow was still falling. Not as much as before, but if it never stopped, it wouldn't be long before it piled as high as the house.

Stone continued: "I think we need to leave. Get somewhere else. And if the sun stays out, I think that's our opportunity. The light stops the shadow things."

"How do you know for sure?"

"Because"—he moved his hand toward the driver's side window—"we're still here and we're still sane."

"Where do we go?"

"I don't know. Somewhere else. Somewhere with other people who can tell us what the hell is going on and not read us Bible passages."

"Stone, I think we should stay here for now. There's so much we don't know yet. And everyone's shaken up. Give it a few days, a week, see if the snow melts and the temperature rises."

"Maybe you're right."

I turned the car off and removed the keys from the ignition. "C'mon, let's go back inside."

He sighed. "We should vote, at least. Ask Eleanor and Mikey what they wanna do."

I almost said that the last time we ventured from the lake house one of us wound up dead, but I didn't because I didn't want to think about Jonas lying on the floor, lifeless and bloody. I never wanted to think about it again.

"Okay," I said. "That's fair. We'll vote."

I climbed out, the warmth from inside the van reaching and trying to pull me back. It was hard to resist but I did. Stone put an arm around my shoulder. I took one of his crutches and he kept the other. We moved quicker that way.

We made it, but in just that minute or two that we were exposed to the elements, my face went numb, and I swear I felt the eyes of a hundred things watching us. Probably paranoia. I hoped.

Once inside, I closed and locked the door faster than I had ever done in my life, knowing deep down that it wouldn't be enough.

* * *

Eleanor and Mikey slept for most of the day. They were knocked out, and I thought that was good. When you were unconscious, all your problems were put on pause. I had lost Jonas and it hurt like hell, but I didn't lose both of my parents in just a matter of hours.

Mikey woke up sometime around five in the afternoon. I asked him how he was doing and he nodded at me, grumbling something. He grabbed a can of creamed corn. We didn't have a can opener on hand, didn't think to grab one when we were at the Harks', so Mikey hacked at the can with a long, serrated blade. The noise woke Eleanor up for a few minutes. She went to the bathroom then flopped down on the couch without saying a word to anyone.

I sat on the floor by the fire, hugging my knees to my chest and watching the flames dance. The whole time, I realized this later, the dead boy and the burning apartment never entered my mind. Was it a breakthrough? Had I finally moved on?

No. There was just so much other bad shit that had replaced it, that's all.

Instead of a blackened corpse, I thought of Jonas's rattling, wet breaths. I thought of how I closed his eyes after he died, eyes that no longer saw anything. I thought of how I left him there in some stranger's house. My best friend, a Musketeer.

And I thought of the snow and the cold.

Always the snow.

* * *

The vote took place later that night. There was no sun now; it had set earlier than it should've. Eleanor and Mikey didn't say much, but they ate. I was glad about that. Too often people going through stuff forget to eat, myself being an example. Anything I ate after I failed the apartment boy tasted burnt, even if it wasn't. When things really got bad and my stomach grumbled loud enough to wake me in the middle of the night, I settled for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My grandmother said that was all she grew up on, and she lived to be over ninety years old. Make of that what you will.

I proposed the vote.

Eleanor stood from the couch, one hand holding a can of green beans, the other a fork, and said, "Are you crazy?"

I shrugged. "It's not my favorite idea, but it's only fair that we vote. If we want to survive this, we'll have to work together."

Mikey laughed from his spot in the kitchen. He leaned against a counter, still dressed in my ratty Cleveland Cavaliers shirt.

"Work together…that's rich," Mikey said.

I met his eyes, and a great anger broiled within them. Not some normal teen angst but anger toward me. I understood why. I had killed his father. I deserved much worse.

"Shut up, Mikey," Eleanor said.

Stone said, "Let's do this thing already."

"Working together," Mikey interrupted, "got us nowhere. Your friend's dead, along with my mom and dad. I think maybe we should just go our separate ways."

I wasn't about to coddle him so I said, "Okay, Mikey, if that's what you want, be my guest. Nothing's stopping you from walking out that door right now. You can take your dad's rifle with you. It's yours."

"Maybe I will!"

"Oh, Mikey," Eleanor said, "he's right. We have to stick together."

"Listen, kid," I said, "I'm sorry about everything. We were all dealt a shitty hand, you and Eleanor especially, but we're still here. I'd like us all to remain that way. But like I said, you wanna brave that cold and whatever else might be out there, go on ahead."

Mikey moved his lower jaw in a way that told me he was grinding his teeth. I waited a moment, calling his bluff, but he only crossed his arms over his chest and slouched more.

Eleanor went over and put an arm around his shoulders, which he shrugged off.

"So," I continued, "those who want to go on, raise your hands."

Stone raised his; as did Mikey. I watched Eleanor. Her arm came up as she eyed Mikey, then it came down.

"Great," Stone said. "A tie. Now what?"

I reached in my pocket and brought out a quarter. I had come prepared. "Tiebreaker. Stone, Mikey, you guys call it."

Mikey said, "Heads," and Stone shrugged.

"All right. Heads and we leave. Only when the sun is up—if it comes up again. Tails and we stay. I don't know for how long, but we'll discuss it when the time comes. Agreed?" Stone gave a thumbs-up, Mikey just stared at me, and Eleanor nodded. "All right."

I flipped the coin in the air. It seemed to hang for a long, long time, firelight glinting off of the metal, before it hit the carpet. Each of us leaned in.

It was tails.

Mikey mumbled, "Bullshit."

Stone said, "I don't like it, but a deal's a deal."

Eleanor and I said nothing. It's not that I didn't want to leave or that I was too afraid. The reason was that I thought we'd be rushing into it. Jumping the gun. We didn't know the situation. We weren't acclimated to it or the weather. We knew at the time there was a fuck-ton of snow and something out in it. Something…unnatural. We knew the electricity was out and our phones weren't getting service and it was cold as hell. We knew the only person on the radio was reading Bible passages and the government had been silent. That was all. I wanted to get a better understanding before we left, and I hoped someone would come along and save us.

It never happened.

I guess, when it comes to such drastic times as these, you have to save yourself.

* * *

We stayed in that lake house for two weeks. In those two weeks, I saw the sun come out three times, and on the third time it didn't hang around longer than an hour.

When I was a kid and I stayed there with Jonas, Stone, and Stone's father, the place seemed huge, a mansion, but those two weeks were like living in an icy sardine can.

Sometime in that first week, I was in my bedroom. There was no fire in there, obviously, or heat, but I needed space from the others. Cabin fever was hooking its claws in us all. At one point, after two in the morning, Eleanor slipped under my covers and laid beside me. Her weight shifting the mattress brought me out of a light doze.

I rolled over and said, "Eleanor?"

She didn't answer immediately. I thought I was dreaming, but she seemed so real. The beautiful hair, the slender shape of her body, her warmth.

Then she spoke. "I heard someone outside calling my name."

"What?"

"There's someone outside calling my name," she repeated. "It sounds like my mom."

"Ignore it." Goosebumps broke out all over my body, and not because of the cold. "Try to sleep." I had seen her mother's corpse. I knew with one hundred percent certainty her mother was gone.

Eleanor laughed. "Try to sleep? Funny." She went stiff and clawed my arm. "Did you hear that?"

I shook my head. All I heard was the wind—the unnatural, shrieking wind.

"Listen," she said. I did. "There it is again!"

This time, I heard it. A female voice, in pain, saying, "Eleanorrrrrrrr…"

"What are they?" she asked me, scooting closer.

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"Stone and Mikey don't really believe us, I think. If they do, they don't think they're as dangerous as you and me do."

"Maybe not, but Mikey saw something in the snow that first night. He might deny it out loud, but deep down, I think he knows."

It took a while for Eleanor to speak again. She seemed to be intensely listening to the wind. When she spoke, she caught me off-guard. "Do you think they're ghosts?"

I shrugged, somehow more frightened than I had been before. "Whatever they are, they're as unnatural as the summer snow."

"Grady! Grady! Graaaaaady!" a distant voice shouted then, barely audible over the wind. My body went rigid, and Eleanor felt it.

"They're calling your name now," she said. "They'll call Mikey's and Stone's next." She wrapped her legs around mine and buried her face in my neck. "It's okay, Grady. It's going to be okay." Seemed like she was trying to convince herself this more than me, but it also sounded like a question, not a statement.

Is it going to be all right?

The things went on shouting my name the rest of that night, and the nights after that. We all heard them.

One night a couple of days later, Stone started screaming. It scared the hell out of me. I shot up from my place beside the fire and rushed over to him. He was leaning on his crutches by the window, the curtains parted. His chest rose and fell rapidly.

"What?" I asked. "Are you—" But then I saw what he saw.

Jonas was standing out in the snow, not far from the mounds our cars were buried beneath. He was waving at us.

"I thought he was—he was dead," Stone said.

I closed the curtains. "C'mon," I said, "come sit by the fire."

"Jonas is out there, Grady. We can't leave him out there! Are you crazy?"

"It's not Jonas."

"It is! Look at him, he's wearing the same fucking clothes he was wearing when you guys left!"

Eleanor came over, parted the curtains, and looked over my shoulder. "Stone, that's not Jonas, I promise. It's one of them."

Stone began crying as he backed away from the window. He said nothing, but he understood.

* * *

On the seventeenth day after the first storm, we ran out of food.

There was no vote, no coin flips, and no arguments. We knew what we had to do. We had to leave.

So, when the sun shone through the gray clouds sometime after three in the afternoon, we left. It wasn't easy. The snow in those days had slowed down, but there was still about four feet of it covering the ground, and the cold…

The cold hurt your lungs, stung your eyes, turned your muscles and bones to ice.

In those seventeen days, we burned everything flammable inside the lake house. Beds, couches, carpets. We even took off all the wooden doors and hacked them up with a hatchet Mikey found in the basement. The blisters I got haven't gone away yet. I don't know if they ever will.

In those days spent inside the lake house, we probably inhaled a bunch of crap we shouldn't have from the flames, but it kept us warm enough to keep going and that was all we could ask for.

Unfortunately, everything has an expiration date, especially now, and the lake house had expired then. We needed more shelter, more food, more things to burn. The problem with leaving was that we didn't know where to go. Around the fourteenth day, before we set out, it was evident we'd only last in the lake house for a few more days, so discussions began.

"We just need to go," Stone had said. "It doesn't matter where. We need to go."

Eleanor nodded. She was sitting with her back against the brick fireplace, the flames blazing to her left. "Anywhere's gotta be better than here."

A very hopeful outlook, no doubt, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew that wasn't the case. In fact, I was pretty sure we were a lot better off than most people, aside from maybe the President of the United States and his cabinet in a bunker somewhere miles below ground.

"We could go south," Mikey said. "It's gotta be warmer that way."

Stone shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Remember what I saw on Facebook, Grady?"

"Yeah. Snow in South Carolina."

"In July," Stone added.

"We really think this is a national thing?" Eleanor said. In the light of the fire, she looked better. Healthier.

"If it wasn't, someone would've come along to help us," Stone said.

I nodded. "It's definitely more than national," I said. "I hate to say it, but I think it's global."

"Me, too," Mikey said. "I don't know…I just feel it."

Eleanor bowed her head, a gleam of tears in her eyes. She knew, too.

"Eleanor," I said, prepared to right my mistake, to offer her some false but comforting words.

She looked up at me, swiped her tears away with the back of her hands, and nodded.

"I know," she said. "You're right."

Silence filled the living room for a while after that. Stone was the one who eventually broke it. I'm not sure how long after.

"We just need to go, man. It doesn't matter where. We pack up our stuff and get the hell out of here. I don't like it. I hear those things all the time. Calling my name. I hear my mom and dad. I hear Jonas." He closed his eyes and grimaced. "I just wanna go and get away from them."

I was sitting next to him. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder. "Me, too."

But the question was where did we go?

"Going out there without a destination in mind is suicide," I said.

"Maybe that's not a bad thing," Mikey mumbled. Eleanor shot him a look almost as sharp as the wind outside. "What? The world ended, El." Mikey was only seventeen at the time, but he sounded like a man in his fifties, one who'd seen and experienced horrible things. Tragedy has a way of making you grow up, I guess. "God got sick of us, so He decided to freeze us all out."

Eleanor gave no reply.

"So that's it?" I said. "We just leave?"

The others shrugged.

"Got any better ideas?" Stone asked.

I said, "No."

"I'd say we have another two days of eating scraps before we have to go on," Stone continued. "Then we leave."

It was decided. We'd leave with no destination and no backup plan. I hated it, but I knew I had a couple of days to work up the courage to do it.

When everyone went to sleep that night, I forced myself to stare out the window into the darkness. I saw nothing but a sea of white. I did this for maybe three hours before exhaustion got the best of me and I passed out on the floor, huddled in blankets.

The next night, I did the same thing. It was relatively clear. Hardly any wind to kick up the snow and create a haze, but it was also dark. I don't know if you've ever been to the country, out in the sticks, where there isn't a McDonald's every half-mile or so, but there's hardly any light pollution out there. When the snow fell and the grid went down you could see every star in the sky on a cloudless night, and if someone turned on a lamp a few miles away it may as well have been another sun.

Going on the fourth hour of looking aimlessly out the window, something happened.

A light turned on.

I shed my blankets and pressed my face against the cold glass, squinting. My heartbeat went off the charts, and for the first time since I woke up to a world covered in snow and ice, I felt warmth. It was the heat of hope radiating throughout my body.

And just like that, our destination was found.