White
by Eddie Newton
It was white.
Meghan McAlester sat in the middle of the backseat, online and tuned out. Her sister Daphne was beside her, arguing loudly to no one in particular, maybe the decapitated head of the Barbie doll in her left hand. Sean was to the left, reading a comic book, his attention caught in the high-gravity swell of Jupiter, far, far away from the frigid wastelands of the December midwest. Ariana McAlester was making a list on her phone of the five hundred things to do when they got home. And David peered hard into the blinding wall of white that constantly re-formed to obscure the road, steering on and beyond as the wipers worked overtime to dispel the snow.
Wipe white wipe white wipe white.
It had been one of those family trips that David always seemed to forget before he went on the next one, one of those nerve-wracking rides that set family member against one another. Five people who normally had enough of each other after a mildly pleasant family-time on Sunday afternoons had been thrust together on a road trip that seemed to last eons instead of hours. Casual conversation had escalated into bickering, car games had devolved from finding all the states’ plates to welt-raising snake-bites and scalp-scraping noogies. It was the kind of togetherness that planted that small little idea in the back of the mind that someday grew up into divorce or running away from home. They had all had enough after the previous week of nagging from Gramma and the brow-beating merriment of Christmas (like a sugar overload), enough of the eeennndddllleeessssss road trip across the boringest state in the midwest, if not the universe. They had all had quite enough of each other.
The Impala crawled along the center of the two-lane interstate at about forty miles an hour, the fastest that David had allowed himself to drive for the last thirty miles. The road was slick and visibility was down to a quarter of a mile in a good spot. It was late, a little past the witching hour, and the combination of the darting flakes and black night made for difficult driving. The radio had warned them of the impending blizzard, but David had been unwilling to postpone getting home and free of this family togetherness. Now he regretted it doubly as he tried to stare between the flurry of fat flakes and simultaneously ignore his wife’s smug “I told you so” smile.
A bus broke free of the white swirls that blinded David from anything beyond his trunk. David swerved severely. The bus overtook him and passed, disappearing into the alabaster veil in front of him nearly as quickly as it had appeared behind. David slid against the left-hand side of the deep rut that had been formed down the two lanes. Each emergency lane was a sloped sidewall that had thawed and frozen a dozen times over this winter. The Impala rubbed against the icy wall, but like the bright orange tracks that David used to run his Matchboxes up and down when he was a grade-schooler, the car could not go off the road. The car just slid back into the lane.
“Damn!” David cursed after the reckless behemoth of bus.
The sharp retort from the backseat was instantaneous, “Dad, you said damn!”
“Daphne,” Ariana scolded.
“What?”
“Watch your mouth.”
“What?”
“You know what you said.”
“I didn’t say nothing!”
“You said damn,” Ariana snapped.
“Mom, you said damn!”
Both parents, simultaneously—“Shut up!”
And so the car quieted again. David’s hands grew sweaty on the steering wheel. They felt oily as he gripped the foam-rubber tighter, harder, to keep steady control. The skies grew worse, thickening with the white in the haunting beams of the headlamps. The roads became even slicker. David realized this was going to become very dangerous. He did not want his family in such a potentially harmful situation.
“Ari, when’s the next exit.”
Ariana fiddled with her phone, taking a full minute to navigate the simplest of apps. They were just a few miles past Falton on Interstate 94.
“There’s an exit a mile or two down the road,” Ariana said.
One mile. David thought he could make it that far. He slowed the Impala all the way down to twenty-five, felt comfortable with the dwindled speed, and forged on, content that he was only about five or ten minutes away from safety. He felt no desire to rush dangerously on unsteady ground when they were mere moments from finding a safe and warm hotel.
They came upon a large Cadillac that crawled along the highway at the abysmally safe speed of only ten miles an hour. The right turn signal stuttered endlessly into the winter. David would bet his last buck that the driver would be within spitting range of eighty years old. He gently eased the Impala into the passing lane and sped up to fifteen, inching past the creeping car. He gave the Caddy a wide berth, passing it as gently as he could. As he fell neck and neck with the big boat of a car, he ventured a glance. Indeed, the driver looked like he had been around when Caddies were made of stone instead of steel. As he looked at the liver-spotted gent and his white-tressed wife, the old bird gave him a bird of his own.
“He flipped you off, Dad. Dad, the old guy gave you the finger! Ha!”
Good ole reliable Daphne again, who could always be counted on to speak up at the least opportune time. David looked away from the man who looked like he might have changed Hugh Hefner’s diapers and finished passing him, with less care and generosity than he had previously afforded the octogenarian.
He left the old couple back in the white, watching as the blizzard first swallowed up the large image of the Caddy, then slowly, slowly, erased the headlights and that droning blink of the right turn signal. The McAlesters were alone once again.
The exit came up on them fast and David had to force the brakes harder than he would have liked on the glassy surface of the highway. They slowed to a crawl and David eased the Impala toward the emergency lane, ready to escape the daunting roadway in favor of a hotel room with a warm bed. But a large reflecting orange sign barred his way from even considering a path up to freedom. “Do Not Enter” was emblazoned across the sign’s breadth. David was dumbfounded and rolled past the blocked exit at just about five miles an hour. As he slowed, stunned, the Caddy with the old folks blundered by with a rude honk, turn signal still blazing, though the right-hand turn went the way of the McAlesters’ plans of escape. The white swallowed up the Caddy once again.
“Don’t let us stop, David,” Ari snapped. “If we stop, we’ll get stuck for sure.”
Ariana was right. Stopping in the middle of the road would do no good to anyone. They would either find themselves stuck (Ariana was under the stern belief that the only thing that was keeping the Impala from being bogged down in the ever-increasing depth of the snow was motion, and David tended to think this was not a bad assessment, even if it was delivered with unnecessary bitchiness) or sitting targets ready for whatever reckless maniacs might appear like a white hare from a top hat from the wall of snow that followed them.
So David rolled on, keeping his speed at no less than ten miles an hour, but little more than that. Slowly, as a minute passed, then two, the safety of hotels melting into that erased place called “been there”, their chances for any soon end to this untenable drive dwindled fast.
“What happened?” Sean asked.
David wanted nothing more than to just pull over and give up. But the thought of being smothered by snow was worse than moving on, going forward, getting to whatever was next.
Ariana shook her head. “The exit was closed. Why was the exit closed?”
A mile fell away, then another half. There was no hope in turning back. This was a four-lane interstate highway, the other side separated by six yards of unnavigable snow. The only way back was in the face of oncoming traffic and their way was blinded. They would have to forge on.
David stared down the white, that blinding blurred curtain that would not show him what lay ahead. Why white? He drove obliviously toward the future with nary a hint to curve or hill or exit, just white, endless white. Why?
Whyte? Whyte? Whyte?
“How far to the next off-ramp?” David asked.
Ariana paged through a map on her phone. She was very pale (white). She was scared, but she trusted her husband. Her answer was not one that he liked. They were on a deserted stretch of midwest, when sometimes the distance between off-ramps could be ever so long. Some twenty-six miles long. At present speed, that was a good two and a half hours.
Ariana fiddled nervously with the radio. Static dominated across the band. She settled on that paragon of the a.m., the am station. It sputtered sporadic speech at them—bits of song and commercial jingles undercut by the hiss of broken noise, as if even the powerful radio signals lost their way in the veiled mess of winter. White noise. The signal strengthened for a steady bit and a weatherman came around to updating the road conditions. “Driving out there is dangerous.”
“No shit,” Daphne said.
Neither parent admonished. They were focused on the white, never mind some blue language.
“State Police have recommended no travel in the tri-county area. The wet snow that fell over much of the state earlier today has become a sub-layer of ice as temperatures have dropped after sundown. Travel is—”
Static drowned out the next part. Very tense, David’s mind supplied. Suicidal, Ariana finished silently.
The radio returned—“Visibility is down to just a few dozen feet in many outlaying areas. Temperatures continue to drop, adding a severe wind chill factor to the already hazardous driving conditions. Please, if travel is not of absolute necessity, please stay—”
Static again. Home, David silently suggested. Alive, Ariana thought darkly.
They came upon another car. It was a slow creeping approach. David had slowed their progress to little over ten miles an hour. The car in front of him was going almost the same speed. He had glimpsed the faint specks of one pulsing taillight about a mile back and slowly inched his way toward them, eager for a partner with whom to brave this dangerous path. Of course it was the Caddy with the old folks in it, still announcing that right hand turn that David knew damn well was still almost twenty miles away. He marveled how quickly the old human survival instincts crept up in the face of danger. A half an hour ago he would have given his first born (well, actually, he’d have probably tried to give them Daphne) just to have the road to himself. Now the primal instinct for a buddy system, for strength in numbers, to gather the covered wagons in a circle, came on him strongly. He settled into the wake of the car in front of him at a safe distance, comforted by the soft red glow of the blinking taillight.
The way was uneventful for the next four or five miles. A half an hour had passed since they had found the Caddy again, but David thought that it felt more like an entire night had passed. The wind soughed through soft flakes, whispering wispy taunts—
Whiiite niiiight. Whiiiiite niiiiiight. Whiiiiiiiite niiiiiiiiight.
Since they had found their road buddy, two more vehicles had sandwiched David in, and he felt comforted by the presence of these machines. The vehicle behind him looked like a car by the low ride of the headlights, but the high, wide headlamps of the vehicle in the rear was that of a semi-truck or a bus. Their caravan numbered four and David felt safety in their community of cars.
Then it fell out of the sky.
It landed just along the emergency lane to the right, striking the green marker that announced that the weary troupe had passed yet another mile. It smashed the sign, drove it into the high white bank, and then it met the solid, frozen ground and exploded.
The night lit up and it looked like high noon, a sweltering, old west type of high noon where the sun bronzed the world with its golden tan. The flakes were exposed in their myriad maze, and David marveled at how thick the blizzard was, how full the world was of falling flakes, how deftly, completely, they were sealed off from everything. Even the brilliant light of the explosion did not shine too far. It reflected the light back in on the fallen debris, letting the bright white light the night no farther than a hundred yards. The blizzard smothered this artificial sun.
The explosion rocked the Impala. David had been compensating for the wild wind, but the force of the shockwave made him swerve and he fish-tailed dangerously before he regained control. He filed comfortably in behind the Caddy once again. The heat of the detonation had melted the snow between the car and the explosion, showering the Chevy with snow-turned-rain. Water now plastered the passenger side windows. The wind was working quickly to freeze it. What the hell had that been?
“Daddy?” It was Daphne.
David looked up into the rearview mirror and Ariana turned around. Meghan was gawking out the back window, trying to see whatever had fallen from the night sky. The white was already closing the veil between the burning projectile and the Impala.
“Daddy?” Daphne cried again.
She wanted an answer. David had none.
Ariana whispered comforting words to Daphne, who started crying in ugly sobs. Meghan stared backwards, pale as a ghost. Sean had dropped his comic and was watching the car behind them swerve and skid, trying to regain control.
“Daddy, that was a bus,” Daphne sniffed. “Like it dropped from a cloud.”
The Caddy had not so much as flinched in its determined route along the highway. Behind them, the other car had fallen back into line. In the rear, the semi-truck was still a high, strong pair of lights. No one had stopped, because stopping may have meant staying. The snow was getting thicker on the road and David felt fairly sure that the momentum of the vehicles was all that was keeping them from being bogged down in the deep white. No one stopped. They had all driven on, leaving behind the mystery.
“David, what in the hell was that?” Ariana asked, eyes wide open.
David could see too much of their whites, drowning her normally pleasant baby blue pupils. He shook his head, speechless. A bus had fallen from the sky in the middle of a blizzard and he had no idea why or what or anything. It was all white. All unknowable.
“Meg, write your number on your hand,” David called back to his eldest.
“Huh?” Meg mumbled, in shock.
“Your phone number,” David said calmly. “Use a marker, pen, whatever.”
David slowed down and carefully slid into the passing lane. The vehicle behind him followed the lead and pulled up next to him in the right lane. The man was driving a Ford Fusion, alone, mid-forties, nervous and haggard. The driver of the Ford kept one eye on the road and the other flickered back and forth between the blinding snow in front of them and the scant, dangerous four feet between his Fusion and the Impala. Meghan put her palm with her number against the window.
The other car dropped back and Meg’s phone rang a moment later. She put the call on speaker.
“What happened back there?” came the nervous voice of a stranger inside their sedan.
“It was a bus,” Daphne said quietly. She finally remembered she thought bawling was for whiners. “A goddamn bus fell out of the sky.”
“Did it crash off an overpass?” the Fusion driver asked, as scared as the kids in the back. As scared as David. But David couldn’t show it.
Ariana checked the map on her phone. They knew exactly where the bus had fallen. It had struck down mile marker one-ninety-one as if it were a bull’s eye. There were no overpasses or bridges anywhere near that section of the road. Just old-fashioned midwestern plains. Flat as a pancake.
“No overpass. No bridges,” Ariana said.
“Maybe it fell out of a cargo plane or something?” the speakerphone stranger suggested.
Sean spoke up, the real world suddenly as fascinating as Krypton or Mars. “Not a plane. The bus wasn’t dropped, or whatever, from that high. It only smashed against the ground, like if it drove off a four-story building or something. If it had fallen from a plane it would have bored itself mostly into the ground, frozen or not.”
Sean was right. The bus would have been little more than an accordion when it hit the ground if it had fallen from a half a mile up. It hadn’t been falling fast enough to have originated from any great height. Besides, David was nagged by the thought that it had been the same bus that had barreled past them those few short miles and an eternity back.
The stranger signed off to concentrate on the road and the McAlesters drove in silence for ten minutes, accompanied by the pulsating rubber-on-glass whitewipe-whitewipe-whitewipe and the hollow howl of the white wind. They were creeping ever so slowly toward safety. David watched as the scarlet ticking light of the Caddy’s turn signal winked and blinked.
White.
Red.
White.
Red.
White.
Red.
White.
White.
White.
The Impala drove through the place where the Caddy disappeared before David could even begin to slam the brakes. He was stunned, but when his foot finally released his concrete pressure on the gas and went for the brake, he stopped himself. Braking would be death. He eased the gas again.
The Cadillac was gone.
“David?” Ariana asked.
As they had passed the last known location of the Caddy, the tracks had just stopped, right in the center of the highway. The next thing David knew, he was plowing his own path through the drifts of snow. He had spent the last half hour following in the freshly carved ruts of the Cadillac and now he was blazing his own trail. The tracks of the Caddy had not gone off the road—they did not go anywhere. They were just gone. As were the Caddy and its passengers.
Meghan saw it last. But not on the road, where her mother and father were searching, dumbfounded. She saw it to her right, a faint twinkle of red. It hovered at about the height of a tall evergreen. She saw the red wink out, come back, blink out, and was nevermore. Gone forever.
“It disappeared,” she whispered, staring after the place where she had last seen it. “It disappeared forty feet in the air.”
The phone rang. It was the car behind them.
“Something is out there,” the stranger said on speaker.
The Impala’s headlights picked something up in the deep snow. David eased up on the gas until he was crawling along at five miles an hour. He felt the snow pulling at him, trying to stop the car in its deep tracks. There was something yellow along the side of the road. It was a pick-up in the ditch between the interstate lanes, up to its hood in a snowbank. A group of teenage boys piled out of the cab as the McAlesters slowly passed by.
“I’m going to try to slow down enough to pick up those boys,” the stranger said.
David’s eyes darted in small bites to the yellow pickup, half swallowed by the deep ditch. The entire bed of the pickup had been flattened. It looked like a beer can that had been smashed in a can crusher. The rear tires were nowhere to be seen, mashed beneath the paper-thin rear end of the big truck. The windows had been shattered, but the cab of the Dodge was still intact and looked untouched. It was as if Godzilla had come out of the blizzard and ground the back half of the jacked-up truck into the snow as if it were no more than a big yellow smoldering cigarette butt.
The Ford Fusion reduced to the slowest possible speed manageable without being so slow as to get bogged down in the thick, adhesive snow. The large semi-truck moved to the rightmost side of the road and accelerated forward, passing the Ford as the Fusion slowed to just three or four miles an hour. The three boys ran alongside the car, pumping legs in the ruts left by the semi. They paced the Fusion and opened the back door, jumping in. The Ford sped up and fell in behind the semi.
David inched as far over to the left as he dared. The semi driver had finally decided, after the evidence of the flattened truck, that perhaps it ought to be the big rig leading this pack. David let the tanker truck pass him by. The man behind the wheel was big and hairy and the type that looked like he scared others much more easily than he was scared himself. But that man had the same look of bewilderment and fear on his face as they all had.
“How am I driving?” was stamped on the semi’s bumper with a toll-free number. The bold trucker had taken the lead to protect the caravan. David thought he was driving damn fine.
“They’re okay,” said the stranger’s voice over the speaker.
“What was it?” Ariana asked. “Did any of the boys see what happened?”
“No, ma’am,” came a boy’s voice. He sounded like he was six although none of those boys had been younger than Meghan. “We were goin’ too fast and fish-tailed into the ditch. Then somethin’— somethin’ stomped. The back window shattered and the whole truck gave a jolt. Then the whole back was just flat.”
The boy sounded like he was telling a tale that even he didn’t believe.
Daphne had been silent too long. She was going to say something terrible.
“It’s monsters, isn’t it?”
They passed the miles by and by, but the time crawled more slowly, as if each snowflake were a frozen second and they had to catch each crystal in a warm gaze to melt the tick of the clock so time would keep marching on. They passed another mile marker.
“Fifteen miles to the next exit,” Ariana said.
At present speed, an hour and a half. That felt like a very, very long time.
The phone rang again and Meghan answered. She listened for a minute. “We’ve got trouble, Dad.”
The Fusion was running out of gas. The driver of the Ford guessed they could go no farther than another mile or two.
“I have a spare gallon in the trunk,” David said.
His mother-in-law had insisted. A paranoid old bat, she had always said, “In Montana there could be a hundred miles between gas stations.” The biddy had maybe saved four lives...
“Kids, rip through the back seat to get into the trunk space,” David said. “What’s your name, Ford Fusion?”
“Sam.”
“Pull alongside,” David said.
“Alright,” Sam agreed. “Pass it over and I’ll stop and fill.”
“You can’t stop,” Ariana warned him. “You’ll get stuck in this stuff.”
“No choice,” Sam said grimly. “The boys can push us out.”
“It’s not just your life,” Ariana said. “Those boys are just kids.”
“It’s the only way,” Sam concluded.
Daphne and Meghan pried open a slit through the back seat and Sean pushed through, pulling the gas can back with him when he reemerged from the trunk.
“It’s not the only way,” Meghan said. “I can do it. While we’re driving.”
“No,” David said. “No way.”
“I’ll do it,” Ariana said. “Switch with me Meg.”
“No offense, Mom, but the back window only goes down so far and your top half will never squeeze out enough to reach,” Meghan argued. “Besides, I have longer arms. It has to be me.”
David and Ariana could say nothing. It was dangerous, but the alternative was to let Sam and those boys die.
Sam pulled up alongside the Impala. As the Fusion paced the McAlesters’ vehicle, Meghan swapped places with Sean. She rolled down the driver side backseat window and leaned out. The frigid, murderous wind froze her instantly. The window only opened two thirds of the way and Meg had to wriggle her way through until she was out past her shoulders, her chest pressed painfully against the top edge of the car’s window. The side of her face went numb instantly. It had gotten so damn cold!
Meghan fumbled with the gas cap as the two cars ambled on at about five miles an hour, side by side on the sleek, slick surface. Her fingers went instantly white and she felt like she was trying to open the gas cap with someone else’s hand. She turned it. Frozen. She squeezed hard with a hand she couldn’t even feel and turned, the plastic cap ripping painlessly into the numb flesh of her fingers. It came off. She pulled herself and the cap back into the car. The removal of the icy sting of the wind made her right ear and hands and cheek feel instantly full of needles. Her eyes were streaming with tears, frozen diamonds along her right temple.
“Give me the jug.”
Daphne handed it over. Meghan pushed the red jug forcefully through the gap in the window and then slid her lithe body after it. The cold erased the pain, erased the needles. It numbed her, though she could feel the dull-sharp edge of the glass digging into her breasts, sharply, making it very hard to breathe. Then she felt the pain ease up as four little hands pressed against her hips and stomach, lifting her so her weight wasn’t completely on the window’s edge. Her siblings held her up. She could breathe again and went to work with the gas.
She popped the plastic cap off the jug and let the cover fall into the cursed snow. She aimed the spout for the gas tank and her aim was true. She poured the gas into the empty tank, losing feeling in her body fast. Too fast. The Fusion swerved away and Meghan almost lost it, her arms stretching as far as she could go without tumbling out of the car. Sam steered nearer again and the spout never left the tank.
Meg’s right eye was freezing into a solid orb of ice, the arctic wind sealing it shut by icing her tears. She heard the wind blast loudly in her right ear and then she heard a pop, and then nothing out that side. She wasn’t sure her hands were still holding the gas jug because she could not feel them holding anything. She felt like those times when she had woken up in the night finding her arm tucked wrongly beneath her and fast asleep, sitting up in bed and willing her arm to rise, rise, RISE, but it wouldn’t listen. She could beat it against the nightstand and she wouldn’t feel a blessed thing. That had been scary. This was worse. Her fingers were still responding to the signals her mind was sending it, but she could tell only from looking down at her detached hands. She didn’t know when the can was empty or if it was still full because she couldn’t tell if the weight she forced her hands to hold, hold, HOLD, was five pounds or five hundred.
She finally let the can go. The wind caught it, empty, and the white took it up and away. She flipped the metal lid closed. Tiny hands pulled her back into the car. The pain came on her, a thousand pinpricks in her face and arms and chest, and she howled, a horrid, haunted sound. Daphne held her as Sean leaned over her and shut the window. She still couldn’t hear out of her right ear. Her right eye was dead and entombed in a thick layer of iced tears.
“We’ll take care of her, Dad,” Sean said, hugging Meghan close. “Don’t you worry. We’ll take care of her.”
She had done it. David felt tears slide down his eyes, a difficult mixture of fear for his daughter’s health, shame for what he had let her to do, and an intense pride at her selflessness. Sam said they could make it to the next exit now. Meg had saved them.
They passed the next few miles in silence. Sean piled clothes from their suitcase over his sister. Daphne reached across Sean and held Meghan’s hand. Ariana looked into the backseat with a sad stare that was helpless and heartbroken. They plowed on through the white. And still something was out there.
Ten miles away. One hour. They were close now. Very close. The phone rang. It was a dreadful, bleating sound, a sound that could harken no good news. Ariana answered and said nothing, only listened.
“Okay,” and she hung up. “Someone else is coming.”
David glanced in the rearview mirror, trying to stare past the blinding white and the bright lights of the Fusion. Meghan was drowsing in and out of a sickly delirium, mumbling and sweaty. Sean clutched his sister closely, willing her back to health. Daphne stared at Meghan, scared. David could see nothing behind them.
“I see something,” Ariana said.
Vaguely, deep in the white. A flicker of light, maybe. Then the shape resolved itself into the familiar configuration of dual headlights. The vehicle approached them in what would have under normal circumstances been very, very slowly. But in these dangerous and deadly conditions, the speed at which the new vehicle was gaining on them was reckless. It must have been speeding along at at least fifteen miles an hour. It was as if it were trying to get to them, reach them, running toward the safety of numbers.
Tell that to the Caddy.
“Ohmigod,” Sean whispered.
David barely heard his son’s voice over the wailing wind and the pumping wipers. But he heard it nonetheless. And he looked again into the rearview mirror and he saw. He saw it but he didn’t. Just the vaguest suggestion of a shape, of a size, and his mind filled in all sorts of details. Even if Sean woke screaming in the night until he was sixteen, even though David would be able to comfort his son, hold him, tell him that it was all right, that they had both seen, they had shared the experience, David still wished to High Heaven he had not looked into that mirror.
“Ohmigod,” David repeated after his son.
Whatever the immense suggestion of shape that loomed over the distant dual headlamps had been, it was gone. It was there and then it was swallowed back into the white. It was like the looming presence of the buildings across the street in London during the thickest of pea soup fogs. You knew where they were, how big they were, but you couldn’t say if the building was brown or brick or windowless. You just had the suggestion that something big was there. That shape had been behind the approaching car, a swirling white shadow on a wild white backdrop. It was big. It was big and then it wasn’t there.
The headlights that had been gaining with that reckless, desperate speed suddenly rushed forward, as if some unseen rocket engine had been ignited and suddenly boosted the lights. Then the headlamps went out. David saw the Fusion swerve suddenly to its right. Then David jerked their car onto the opposite shoulder without warning. Suddenly, a large red Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled by, not on wheels, but over and over on its side, like a massive rectangular bowling ball bulldozing down the lane toward some unseen ivory pins camouflaged in the distant white. The Jeep rolled past the tanker and was gone.
They passed the twisted metal husk another hundred yards ahead, slowing to pass the contorted vehicle with agonizing slowness. There could be no survivors. David asked Sean politely not to look and the boy did not. Daphne was still in Meghan’s world and Ariana voluntarily stared into the dead white to their right, though she was deathly afraid of what she might see from that direction also. Eight and a half miles. David was sure their entire caravan would not all make it out of the white alive.
He was right.
The tanker sped up to a dangerous fifteen miles an hour. They could no longer afford the luxury of being cautious. David and Sam kept pace. At this speed, it would take them a little over a half an hour. David wanted to go faster, maybe as fast as twenty-five, but he knew that would be foolish. At anything faster than their current speed, they were almost assured of losing control and getting taken by the white. Cold, or whatever else was out there, they could not fight it. Their only chance was to keep moving. To stop, whether by choice or by accident or by lack of caution, was to die. They had come too far to die.
David was lulled into the strained concentration of the night white, following the tanker’s taillights, hands gripping the wheel in a strangled hold, his entire body reaching out to become one with the world outside, sensing the slightest slide or slip of the tires, correcting each hard push of the wind, willing the wipers to whisk away the incessant snow. David was hypnotized by the endlessness, the nothingness, the blank everything all around and behind and forward and in every direction.
Whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite.
Daphne placed damp rags on her sister’s feverish forehead. Ariana watched the map on her phone as the GPS tracked their progress at a glacial pace. Sean searched all sides through windows frosted with ice, flecked with flakes, like searching for fish swimming beneath the frozen surface of a lake.
David made sporadic checks of his rear view. He looked up once, saw all was well, then looked again not more than thirty seconds later, and Sam’s car was pin-wheeling behind him, doing two complete three-hundred-sixty degree rotations. Somehow, by some divine miracle, Sam pulled the Fusion out of it and guided the car’s momentum forward into a normal straight path again.
Meg’s phone rang. Ariana answered. She turned and looked at what David had been staring at for ten seconds. Sean turned and looked, too. Only Daphne resisted, looking at her suffering sister instead.
It was a strange sight. The temperature was cold. As cold as it can get around these parts. And the snow was coming down as hard as it had all day. But behind them was a car that looked to all appearances like a convertible with its top down, crawling coldly along the interstate. Something had taken away the Ford’s roof and most of the trunk. David still counted four people. Four very cold people.
“They’re all right,” Ari said, listening to the phone. “Freezing, but not injured. It happened fast. They didn’t see anything.”
David wondered if they could live exposed to the elements for another twenty minutes. They were so close now, mere miles away. To not make it after all these close calls...
Sam gave David a thumb’s up through his mangled but functional windshield. The glass was tilted crazily to one side and the passenger’s side glass was a basket-weave of tempered glass cracks, but it still broke the wind. Without it, Sam wouldn’t have had a chance of making it.
It was coming for them. The two cars pulled up nearer the tanker, riding protectively in its wake, nearly bumper-to-bumper. Only three more miles. Just over ten minutes. They had to make it.
The phone rang. “We have a plan,” Sam said on speaker. “The tanker driver is on board.”
“You talked to him?” David asked, then glanced at the “How am I driving?” phone number on the back bumper of the semi.
“His name is Joe,” Sam said. “He is the bravest goddamn trucker I ever—”
“Oh, Dad,” Sean moaned from the backseat.
That vague shape again. It was somewhere behind them. It was going to have one of them. The lights of the tanker illuminated the thick blizzard. The silhouette, that white on white shadow, faded in and out somewhere behind them in the distance. It was somewhere, waiting to strike. It was fast and the white was blinding. David wondered if they would even know it when it picked them off, darting from the snow in the blink of an eye. Sean stared out into the stark white, straining to see it, chasing every swirl and twirl of snow, trying to decide whether the vague shapes along the side of the road were a tree or a sign or their death.
Then it came. It was not as fast as David had thought. He saw the shape, punctuated by the sharp repeating retort of gunshots. He looked to the newly convertible Fusion and saw one of the boys had a pistol. But he wasn’t shooting at the white shape, big as a building behind them. David was pretty sure that wouldn’t have done anything but waste time and bullets. The boy blew six jagged holes in the truck’s tanker. Gasoline spilled out by the gallons.
A shadow in the white closed in, fast, but not so fast that David had no time to react. He steered the Impala to the far side of the emergency lane as Sam pulled to the very left side of the interstate. The truck driver began to slow, and just as its very back end blocked out the view of Sam and his passengers, the place in the tank where the boy had shot holes erupted into fire. Someone in the Fusion had tossed a burning bottle of alcohol against the semi’s hull. Then the trucker braked hard, just as the thing that had been out there rushed forward.
It happened quickly, but Sean watched it all. It was like a live action comic book. Sean couldn’t see what the white-on-white phantom was, only that it was big. His mind filled in pictures of albino dinos and towering alabaster apes. But it was not those things, or if it was, he did not see it clearly enough to confirm it. Sean just watched as the semi-truck fell back and slid to a halt. The two cars kept going, David now plowing his own path through deep snow. The semi slowly faded behind the veil of white, like a great sidewalk chalk picture being gradually erased by a gentle rain. The truck cab faded into two pinpricks of its headlamps and the bright spot of its burning tank.
Sean saw it lift up, into the air, twenty, thirty, then forty feet, hover there, then fade. A few seconds later a bright light flashed like the sun, once, quickly, but not where Sean had been looking. He thought it seemed farther away, much farther, and higher, maybe as much as ten stories in the sky. But the white had a way of twisting your senses. Of hiding the truth. Of erasing what you had always thought was fact.
The Fusion and the Impala made it to the next exit. They found a hospital. Ariana was with Meghan. The eldest McAlester offspring had been treated for exposure and frostbite. They were considering amputating a pinky. She would probably not hear again out of her right ear and her right eye had suffered permanent damage. A doctor came out and briefed them on the condition of Sam and the boys. One of the kids lost an ear to frostbite and Sam was going to have a nasty case of pneumonia. But they all lived. They had survived the white.
“What is happening?” David asked the doctor.
“They shut down the next town over,” the doctor said.
David nodded. “The exit was closed.”
“There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” David asked, unsure if he wanted an answer.
The doctor shook his head. “Some locals said they were up there. We admitted them just before you showed up. What they were saying— They had to be delusional. Maybe it is a gas leak. Or some bio weapon malfunctioned.”
“What did they say?” David prodded.
“Crazy shit,” the doctor said. “We put them in the psychiatric ward.”
“Crazy shit,” David mumbled. “Yeah, we’ve seen some crazy shit.”
Daphne and Sean both nodded solemnly.
David turned away. He stood between Sean and Daphne, staring out the third story of the hospital’s windows. The snow had let up considerably over the last five hours since they had arrived at the hospital, ceasing almost completely in the wee hours of the morn. They could see for miles in all directions as dawn dashed across the horizon. The snowfall receded to only the faintest fog in the distance.
What gargantuan demons had stalked them in the night? What monsters had been roaming in that blind blizzard?
As they waited, a single white flake fell silently out of the sky and slapped against the window. Sean reached out and touched it, the heat from his thumb transferring through the pane and melting it into a tear that slid slowly down the outside of the glass. Another flake joined it. Then another. Then many more.
It was getting colder.
Sean reached out and took his father’s hand. David squeezed it.
David waited for Daphne to curse.
“White,” she swore.
They were all three pale as ghosts.
THE END
...But it doesn’t have to be—the terrifying blizzard continues in the novel Horrorfrost www.amazon.com/Horrorfrost-Edward-Newton-ebook/dp/B084YXLLRV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ABLODD3HRFUC&keywords=horrorfrost&qid=1587344659&sprefix=Horrorfr%2Caps%2C440&sr=8-1
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