Free Snow by Ronald Malfi Page A

was a look of pure terror on her face.
    Fred came next, shouting something indecipherable as he ran. Also…there was someone else closing the distance behind him…
    “What the hell is going on around here?” Kate muttered.
    Fred barreled up over the curb and collided with Todd and Nan, his breathing whistling audibly. Fred’s pursuer slammed on the brakes, skidding to a clumsy stop on the ice before his legs pulled out from under him. Had the circumstances been different, the fall would have been comical. But as it was, tensions were high, and the man did not stay down on the ground for more than a split second. Back on his feet, he appeared to waver in the air, his weight moving from foot to foot, like a swimmer about to dive into the deep end of a pool.
    The sound of the rifle fire was almost deafening.
    In the street, the man’s head evaporated into a red mist. The body sagged forward, then dropped straight to the ground, its legs folded neatly beneath it.
    Nan screamed and Fred cursed. Kate clawed at the back of Todd’s neck, gripping a fistful of hair.
    Then something else happened. The headless body in the street bucked once, twice, three times. Hot blood spurted from the abbreviated neck and coursed like an oil slick across the ice. There was the impression of levitation, although thedead man never actually left the ground; rather, something from within the man’s body was rising up, up. For one insane moment, Todd actually believed he was witnessing the dead man’s soul vacating the body.
    But this was no one’s soul. What rose up was a hurricane swirl of snow, funneled and compacted so that it was nearly tangible. It held the vague form of a human being, though as it continued to withdraw itself from the man’s body, Todd could see its arms—or whatever served as arms—were nearly twice the length of a normal person’s. It had no definable characteristics beyond the vague suggestion of humanity. And as it peeled away from the corpse—from out of the corpse—it hovered briefly above the body, nearly solid and comprehensible, before it dispersed into a scattering of snowflakes and was gone.
    The silence that followed was thundering.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    “What the hell was that thing?” Todd asked.
    They were locked inside the convenience store now, trapped in the dark with a young, rifle-toting stranger who looked barely old enough to drink legally. Fred and Nan sat against one wall, a dazed look on poor Nan’s face. Fred absently rubbed the back of her head while occasionally peering back out the store’s windows at the corpse in the street. Whatever the thing was that had exited the dead man’s body, it hadn’t come back.
    The woman with the rifle said nothing. She went around peering through all the windows, then headed to the back of the store where she proceeded to load another round into the rifle.
    Todd stood shivering in one darkened corner, his eyes volleying from the corpse out in the street to Fred and Nan and, finally, to Kate. Kate was sitting on the floor between two overturned racks of canned food and potato chip bags, her legs drawn up against her chest, her whole body vibrating from the cold. She was staring at the body that lay sprawled over a fallen crate of soda—the body Todd had glimpsed while shining the flashlight into the store moments earlier. Two dead bodies: one out in the street, one in here with them.
    Todd frowned. “You gonna answer me or just hold us hostage?”
    The woman looked up at him. “You wanna go out there again, be my guest.”
    “What about the power? The electricity?”
    “Dead.”
    “And the telephones?”
    The woman leveled her gaze at him, clearly showing her displeasure in answering such mundane questions. “Dead. One of those things must have cut the lines.”
    Todd caught a look from Kate. Her skin looked nearly translucent in the moonlight issuing through the store windows.
    “Who’s this guy?” he said, acknowledging the body bent over