“You have ten seconds to let them go before I start counting. If you do, I might let you live. But I’m blowing this place either way.”
Ransom’s lying. He’s going to kill them. I can tell by the way he looks almost happy.
Erik nods at the other man. “Turn them loose.”
I grab Sky’s hand and help up some of the children. They look dazed, as if they aren’t really sure what’s happening. The ones with bandages on their arms lean against the stronger children as we inch our way between the men locked in a standoff.
I stop in the doorway and look at Ransom—the man who saved my sister and all the other children stumbling down the corridor now.
The man who’s half crazy and all hero.
“Thank you.”
He nods. “Thanks for reminding me there’s always a way to right a wrong. Now get out of here.”
We run through the passage and the sadistic surgical room, into the mouth of the tunnel that led me here. We’re only a few yards away when the deafening sound of the explosion hits.
The concrete around us rumbles, and I can see the fire consuming the building in the distance.
For a moment, I can’t move. I stare at the flames that keep us locked in the shadow of a life only some people remember. Fire has always represented pain and sorrow for me. A sad sort of imprisonment none of us can escape.
Today, it represents something else.
Freedom.
A tiny girl with knotted curls is sobbing. “I don’t know how to find my way home.”
A boy with dark-brown eyes glances around. “Me either.”
Sky squeezes my hand and looks up at me, her eyes the shade of blue I remember. “My sister knows the way.”
I study their tear-streaked faces and I think about my father. The way he led so many down here to safety; the way I’m about to lead only a few back up now. I think about the price he paid for it, and what he said to me the last time I saw him.
Be brave, Phoenix.
Today I was braver than I ever believed I could be.
Today I changed things.
Sky is still staring up at me. “You know the way, don’t you, Phoenix?”
For the first time, I know I do.
SNOW
DALE BAILEY
Dale Bailey is the author of eight books, including The End of the End of Everything, The Subterranean Season, and his latest, In the Night Wood (John Joseph Adams Books). His story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series. His short fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, has been nominated for the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards, and has been reprinted frequently in best-of-the-year anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
They took shelter outside of Boulder, in a cookie-cutter subdivision that had seen better days. Five or six floor plans, Dave Kerans figured, brick façades and tan siding, crumbling streets and blank cul-de-sacs, no place you’d want to live. By then, Felicia had passed out from the pain, and the snow beyond the windshield of Lanyan’s black Yukon had thickened into an impenetrable white blur.
It had been a spectacular run of bad luck, starting with the first news of the virus via the satellite radio in the Yukon: three days of disease vectors and infection rates, symptoms and speculation. Calm voices gave way to anxious ones; anxious ones succumbed to panic. The last they heard was the sound of a commentator retching. Then flat silence, nothing at all the length of the band, NPR, CNN, the Outlaw Country Station, and suddenly no one was anxious to go home, none of them, not Kerans and Felicia, not Lanyan or his new girlfriend, Natalie, lithe and blonde and empty-headed as the last player in his rotating cast of female companions.
On the third day of the catastrophe—when it became clear that humanity just might be toast—they’d powwowed around a fire between the tents, passing hand-to-hand the last of the primo dope Lanyan had procured for the trip. Lanyan always insisted on the best: tents and sleeping bags that could weather a winter on the Ross Ice Shelf, a high-end water-filtration system, a portable gas stove with more bells and whistles than the full-size one Kerans and Felicia used at home, even a Benelli R1 semi-automatic hunting rifle (just in case, Lanyan had said). The most remote location, as welclass="underline" somewhere two thousand feet above Boulder, where the early November deciduous trees began to give way to Pinyon pine and Rocky Mountain juniper. Zero cell-phone reception, but by that time there was nobody left to call, or anyway none of them cared to make the descent and see. The broadcasts had started calling it the red death by then. Kerans appreciated the allusion: airborne, an incubation period of less than twenty-four hours, blood leaking from your eyes, your nostrils, your pores and, toward the end—twelve hours if you were lucky, another twenty-four if you weren’t—gushing from your mouth with every cough. No-thank-yous all around. Safe enough at seventy-five-hundred feet, at least for the time being—the time being, Lanyan insisted, lasting at least through the winter and maybe longer.
“We have maybe two weeks’ worth of food,” Kerans protested.
“We’ll scout out a cabin and hunker down for the duration,” Lanyan said. “If we have to, we’ll hunt.”
There was that at least. Lanyan was a master with the Benelli. They wouldn’t starve—and Kerans didn’t have any more desire to contract the red death than the rest of them.
All had been going according to plan. Inside a week they’d located a summer cabin, complete with a larder of canned goods, and had started gathering wood for the stove. Then Felicia had fallen. A single bad step on a bed of loose scree, and that had been it for the plan. When Kerans cut her jeans away, he saw that the leg had broken at the shin. Yellow bone jutted through the flesh. Blood was everywhere. Felicia screamed when Lanyan set the bone, yanking it back into true, or something close to true, splinting it with a couple of backpack poles, and binding the entire bloody mess with a bandage they found in a first-aid kit under the sink. The bandage had soaked through almost immediately. Kerans, holding her hand, thought for the first time in half a dozen years of their wedding, the way she’d looked in her dress and the way he’d felt inside, like the luckiest man on the planet.
Luck.
It had all turned sour on them.
“I’m taking her down, first thing in the morning,” he told Lanyan.
“What for? You heard the radio. We’re on our own now.”
“You want to die, too?” Natalie asked.
“I don’t want her to die,” Kerans said. That was the point. Without help, she was doomed, anybody could see that. There wasn’t a hell of a lot any of them could do on their own. A venture capitalist and a college English professor and something else, a Broncos cheerleader maybe, who knew what Natalie did? “Even if it’s as bad as we think it is down there,” he added, “we can still find a pharmacy, antibiotics, whatever. You think there’s any chance her leg isn’t going to get infected?”
Grim-faced, Lanyan had turned away. “I think it’s a bad idea.”
“You have a better one?”
“How are you going to get down, Dave? You planning to use the Yukon?”
Kerans laughed in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d even say that.”
“What?” Lanyan said, as if he didn’t know.
“You were the best man at my wedding. Hell, you introduced me to Felicia.”