Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

for both herself and her husband. “You’re okay, aren’t you, Fred?”
    “Sure,” Fred said, calming down. “Wish I would have thought to buy some extra undies at the duty-free shop, though…” He cleared his throat, then said, “A man out there, did you say?”
    “Yeah, Fred. Yeah.”
    Their nervous, mingled breathing had fogged the windows. Todd could see nothing except the dull tallow glow of the remaining headlamp cutting through the darkness outside. He exchanged a look with Kate, then popped open the driver’s side door.
    The cold attacked him mercilessly the second he stepped from the vehicle. He hugged his coat around himself, stuffing his bare hands beneath his armpits. Something was hissing beneath the Cherokee’s hood, causing vapor to billow up in a cloud from the grille where it practically froze into crystals in the freezing night air. Todd afforded it no more than a cursory glance—the right front corner was wedged into the snowdrift, of all luck—before stepping out into the middle of the roadway.
    He expected to see a black ribbon of blood snaking through the packed snow, perhaps one of those high foresterboots strewn off to one side. Entrails, even. But the road was clear, the snow unblemished except for the double helix carved into it from the Cherokee’s fishtailing tires.
    “Hello?” he called out…though he could hardly muster more than a pitiful croak.
    “Todd?” Kate said, coming up behind him. Her breath clouded the air like great bursts of magnolia blossoms. She placed a tentative hand on his right shoulder. “Todd?”
    “Hello!” he yelled, much louder this time. His voice boomed and echoed down the canyon of snow.
    A shape moved in the darkness up ahead, red in the glow of the Cherokee’s taillights.
    Kate’s hand became a claw digging into Todd’s shoulder. He thought he could feel her heartbeat vibrating through it.
    The shape staggered out into the middle of the snow-covered roadway, bloodred in the taillights’ illumination. He moved like something out of a George Romero film, and although Todd was relieved to see the man unharmed, this relief was instantly followed by an unanchored sense of animal dread. One winter when he was thirteen years old, he’d been skating with some friends on a frozen pond behind the church. Before anyone knew what had happened, one of the kids—a chunky, poorly coordinated boy named Bernie Hambert—had vanished. He’d broken through the ice and plunged straight down into the black, inky water. He’d left only a single glove behind, a five-fingered starfish on the ice. There had been adults nearby who ushered them all off the lake, then risked their own lives creeping out toward the hole in the ice in an effort to save poor Bernie. Amazingly, one of the adults had managed to reach in and simply snag ahold of Bernie’s ski jacket and yank him up through the hole in the ice. The kid was sopping wet, his skin the color of carbon paper, his teeth rattling like maracas in his head. The second he hit the air, frost began to form on his clothes and even,Todd remembered with horror, on his skin. One of the adults draped a coat over the boy’s quaking shoulders. When Bernie Hambert followed the adults off the ice and to the safety of solid ground, he’d walked with an uncertain Frankenstein gait, a sort of lumbering toddler walk that conveyed to all the other kids watching from the snowdrift that this had been serious business. That he could have died down there, for Christ’s sake, under the ice.
    Todd thought of Bernie Hambert now as he watched the man in the red and black flannel coat shuffle toward him. He had that same disoriented Frankenstein gait Todd remembered so clearly from that day at the frozen pond.
    “Sir?” Despite his unease, Todd approached the man. “Are you hurt?”
    The man froze as Todd came up to him. His eyes were as rheumy as a drunkard’s, the lower lids rimmed in red, and his complexion was a mottled cobalt