Free Snowblind by Christopher Golden Page A

own voice, and his brother’s.
    The tug on his ankle lasted only a moment, long enough for him to be twisted around, to glance back inside his room and see Jake grasping at empty air, screaming his name.
    And then he was falling.
     
     
    Allie burst into Jake and Isaac’s room with Niko and Miri only steps behind. She staggered to a halt, staring at the horrid tableau before her. Jake stood beside the window, tears in his eyes and a scream dying on his lips. The window was open but the screen had fallen out. Snow whipped into the room, not much but enough that she could see prints on the carpet where Isaac had been standing moments before. The snow was already melting, the prints disappearing.
    “Oh my god,” she heard Niko say behind her.
    Then she heard herself shrieking the same words as she rushed to the window and looked out, praying she would not see the thing she feared most. But there Isaac lay, twenty-five feet below and not moving.
    Jake said something but Allie could not hear him. She turned and bolted for the door, felt Niko try to take her arm and heard his soothing voice but tore free of him and ran out and down the stairs. She flung the front door open, hearing their footfalls behind her but not slowing, not waiting. Barefoot, bare-legged, she plunged into the knee-deep snow and forged a path to the place where Isaac had fallen, telling herself with every step that the snow had broken his fall, that it was so deep and soft it would have been a gentle landing.
    The window screen stuck out of the snow like a cleaver jutting from a butcher’s block.
    Numb, she came upon Isaac and saw right away that it had not been a gentle landing. Her baby boy had broken when he fell. His left leg and his neck were turned at impossible angles. His face was turned up toward her and she saw the panic and fear etched there and felt a cry of grief rip her up inside as it forced its way from her lips.
    She dropped into the snow and picked him up, cradling him as she had done on so many nights when he had a fever as an infant. Isaac had been a sickly boy.
    “Mom, please!” Jake pleaded behind her. “Come back inside! The ice men will get you! Please!”
    Allie barely heard him.
    Then Niko was there, one hand on her shoulder, and she glanced back and saw Jake and beautiful Miri standing together in the open doorway, crying and shivering, each also broken in his own way. Allie laid her head back against Niko’s chest and released a sob that became a wail.
    “We need help,” Niko said. “I hear a plow over on Salem Street. The phones aren’t working and I can’t get a signal on my cell. I’m going to run and flag the guy down. He’ll have a radio. He’ll…”
    The words trailed off. Allie had heard them but wasn’t listening, didn’t care, couldn’t feel anything other than the grief that tore and gnawed and ripped at the cavity inside her chest where her heart had been.
    Niko ran back into the house and she heard him talking quickly with Jake and Miri, heard something about shoes and pants and frostbite. Niko rushed out again moments or full minutes later, she could not be sure. Jake called to her, still begging her to come inside.
    But Allie could only sit and watch the snow begin to accumulate in the hollows of Isaac’s eyes. The wind had dropped to almost nothing, turning the blizzard into a gentle snowfall, and the night had begun to lighten to a gray dawn, all of Coventry covered in ice and snow.
    Miri called out to her father, crying for him to come back.
    But he never would.

TWELVE YEARS LATER

FIVE
    Doug Manning sat at the table in the corner farthest from the door, close enough to the bathrooms to catch the faint scent of stale urine. Chick’s Roast Beef had gone downhill over the past few years but he wasn’t going to bitch about it. Everything in Coventry—hell, the whole country—had gone downhill. The talking heads on TV said the economy was improving, but most of the guys he knew were still