The Crimson Red Snow

It all began when the family dog Ricky, a Labrador retriever, started barking hysterically in the back yard. A lot of the extended family was over for our annual holiday barbecue, so it wasn’t unusual for the him to be barking so much, but there was this edge to it that I had only heard once before when a man tried breaking into the house. Nobody else seemed to notice it because they were all catching up with one another. Being primarily a loner, I was the single audience member in the frenetic opera being sung by my dog.
         Snow had already started to fall, and there was a possibility that the roads would become too dangerous to traverse for a few days. Nobody really minded it, as there was plenty of space if everyone needed to stay there with us for a few days. There was always plenty of food on hand considering that snowstorms could potentially stop people from leaving their homes for a while. My dad said he was going to buy a snow-mobile this winter in case we were in dire need of help, but he hadn’t gotten around to it, so if we were trapped there was nothing to do about it. It happened twice before that, and both times I felt completely safe.
         I stared out the window at the snowflakes which seemed to fall rhythmically. Ricky loved the snow, and I was surprised to see that he wasn’t playing in it. I try to peer back into the wooded area to see if I could get a look at the barking fool and what he was so alarmed about, but I couldn’t see very far due to the weather. All at once Ricky stopped barking and tore back towards the house, greeting my cousin Mary-Lynn, a stout blonde woman who worked as a journalist in New York, who had gone out back to take pictures of the snow as it was falling. It didn’t snow anywhere else in the world quite like it did in Colorado she had assured me once. I didn’t doubt that in the slightest.
         “Honey, you should join the party instead of just watching it,” my mom said. I was staring off into space and hadn’t noticed her walk up to me.
         “I’m fine,” I said shortly.
         “You only get to see most of these guys once a year, the least you could do is pretend to be interested,” she replied. Realizing that there was no way to change my mind, she went to go talk to Aunt Sandrine, who had married my uncle Derek at the age of seventeen and never worked a day in her life thanks to his lucrative job as a lawyer.
         My cell-phone buzzed in my pocket. When I pulled it out I got a text message from my friend Sam that read: Hey, storms getting pretty bad down here, think we’re gonna get snowed in! Here’s hoping that school will be cancelled tomorrow. Just saw an ambulance go by too, maybe someone crashed.
         I smiled and replied: Cool deal, I bet it was Sadie; she’s about the worst driver in the world, no matter how cute she is.
         I turned my attention towards my cousin Lenny, who was attempting to show off for the pretty, yet supremely uninterested looking girl Ashley he met in town before coming up here. He was trying to beat my uncle Bo, who had once been a professional bodybuilder, in an arm wrestling match. It was a pathetic match, and Ashley laughed mockingly at him, which was just icing on an incredibly embarrassing cake. Lenny was a bit of a goof, and tried to play come off as a ladies’ man. He had brought several girls over the years and none of them seemed the least bit impressed by him. It was as if they were taking a second look at him and realizing that they made a terrible mistake.
         “Want a piece of cake?” asked Aunt Beatrice, who had snuck up behind me while I was watching Lenny’s circus act.
         “I’m not really hungry right now,” I told her. She smiled and nodded, but I knew for a fact that the conversation was far from over. It didn’t matter how much of a vibe I put out, she probably wouldn’t get the message that I wanted to be left alone. Either that or she really just didn’t care whatsoever.
         “How’s school been going? Dated any cute girls lately?” she asked.
         “It’s been going fine, and no I have not,” I replied flatly. The second part was a lie at least as I had been on a date with a very cute girl named Sarah recently, though we learned early on in the evening that our personalities didn’t match well. It was worth a try.
         Somewhere off in the distance Ricky was barking again, with that same urgent tone that told me there was something out there he didn’t like. Maybe a fox had slipped through a hole in our fence again.
         “Hey, I’ve got to go check on Ricky real quick,” I told her quickly. She looked a little shot down, but seemed to believe the excuse.
         I put on one of my heavier hoodies and a pair of gloves before jogging out the back door, nearly tripping off the slippery back steps in my haste to get away from the vibrant crowd inside. I loved the snow, even though it stung when it touched my skin and chilled me so deeply that the only remedy was an hour by the fireplace. I passed by Mary-Lynn who was staring out at the scenic beauty of the property.
         “Wonder what’s up with him?” she said pointing in Ricky’s direction.
         “I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll go check it out real quick,” I said as I walked past her. My back yard was fairly large, and when you stepped into the wooded part on a day with low visibility like that one it was hard to tell there was a fence that divided our woods from the rest of the forest.
         As I got closer to Ricky, I called out to him. I started getting worried when he didn’t come to me. As I walked further into the wooded area I could see his silhouette poised in a defensive stance of sorts, as if he were holding his ground. He was growling at a lump covered by snow, and as I got closer I realized that was a slowly growing red splotch on it.
         “Ricky, get away from it,” I ordered, knowing that it was probably a dead fox or elk. When he didn’t listen, I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back to the house. This process took five minutes longer than it should have because my shoes barely had any traction in the snow. I pulled him inside and closed the glass sliding door behind him. As soon as I let go he began pawing at the door, signaling that he wanted to get right back out there.
         “Hey Dad, can you come here a minute,” I yelled across the room. He excused himself from a conversation with Bo’s wife Joanna, and came over to me.
         “What is it buddy?” he asked, looking from me to Ricky.
         “I think we’ve got a dead elk or something out back. It was covered in snow but the blood was seeping through it,” I told him.
         “Alright, let’s go outside and take a look at it. Don’t say anything though, and don’t let Ricky back out there for the rest of the night. We don’t want to cause undue commotion,” he said to me, before going to grab his own jacket.
         When I brought him to the spot in the wooded area, it was apparent that the creature beneath it had sustained far worse injuries than I originally thought. The snow covering it and surrounding it was saturated with blood.
         “Good lord, looks like a bear mauled this poor bastard or something,” he said. We both knew that the bears were already in hibernation for the winter, but a coyote attack wasn’t out of the question.
         My dad bent over the lump and brushed some snow off of it, before taking a step back and rubbing his eyes. I peered at the spot he brushed off and felt a mixture of anxiety, disgust, and confusion. There, turned completely turned an ominous dark red by the blood gushing through it was the sleeve of a jacket with an arm still inside. My dad got on his hand and knees and began brushing the snow off of the person lying beneath the blanket of red snow, breathing heavily and shaking.
         When we finally uncovered the face, we were shocked to discover that the person beneath the snow, who had in fact been mauled by a coyote as his wounds indicated, was no older than ten. I felt like I was going to throw up when I saw the terrible vacant look in his eyes. He was undoubtedly dead, whether blood loss, the harsh cold, or a combination of the two had done him in.
         My dad turned to me abruptly and said, “Go inside and tell your mother to call the police. It might already be too dangerous for them to send anyone up here but we at least need to let them know something’s going on up here so they can send somebody as soon as it’s safe.”
         “Right,” I said shakily. I turned as fast as I could and sprinted towards the house, losing my balance and tripping in the process. As I hit the ground I realized that my heart rate had risen drastically. I took a deep breath and brushed myself off.
         “MOM! CALL THE POLICE!” I yelled as I got in the back door. Everybody stopped talking and turned to look at me.
         “What’s wrong?” she asked worriedly.
         “There’s a freaking dead kid in our back yard, now dial the damn number!” I replied, the edge in my voice sharpened by anxiety.
         All at once people surged towards the back door and began to bombard me with questions. I got a glimpse of my mom picking up the phone but I was quickly surrounded by twenty people talking at the same time. Mary-Lynn came in the door behind me and asked what was going on while Ricky barked manically due to all of the stress permeating the air around him. When my answers weren’t enough for them, most of them made their way outside to see the bloody mess in the wooded lot for themselves.
         “I don’t want to go out there,” my aunt Beatrice said from across the nearly empty room, slumping down into a chair by the fireplace.
         “I don’t blame you,” I told her, trying to get the disgusting image of the pale, bloodied, nearly frozen child right in my back yard.
         A couple of my other various aunts, uncles, and cousins had stayed behind to keep the kids from going outside. My little cousin Audrey, only eight years old herself, was bawling uncontrollably while her mother, my aunt Nina, was trying to console her. She shot me a dirty look from across the room. My toddler second cousins Kyle and Josh were oblivious to the whole thing, playing with their action figures on the floor. Meanwhile two cousins that were my age, Andy and Belinda, were complaining to each other about how they didn’t get to see it while all of the adults did, apparently not grasping the gravity of the situation.
         “They’re going to try to send officers up here, but they said it might not be possible for the cruisers to make it out of town, and it’s only going to get worse. They said they’d call us back if they couldn’t make it,” my mom said.
         “So what do we do if they can’t make it, leave that poor child’s body out there and just ignore it?” my aunt Beatrice asked.
         “Moving it would compromise the crime scene, which won’t help the police get to the bottom of this mess. It’s best just to try and think of other things. Nobody goes out there, you understand?” she directed the last part at Andy, Belinda, and I. We all nodded but I had no doubt that those two would be out there the first chance they got.
         When everyone came back inside, the mood was somber. Conversations were whispered, and even Lenny was serious for once. I stared out the window at the snowflakes, which were likely covering the dead child back up already. As I looked at each one fell down from the sky I imagined them in a crimson shade. No matter what I thought of my mind always wandered back to that traumatic scene. The vacant look in his eyes stuck with me the most, as I had only seen that look in the eyes of dead animals before then. For some reason I had convinced myself that when a human died, he or she didn’t look so utterly gone.
         The day passed by, and people considered cutting their losses and making for home, but my dad reminded them that they couldn’t make it out on the roads with the visibility so low. My mom got out all the blankets pillows, and cushions in the house and pretty much everyone went to bed early. I stayed awake the longest, just staring out the window and petting Ricky who was calmer, but still occasionally whimpered in the direction of the gruesome scene. I finally nodded off around two in the morning, and dreamt of millions of red snowflakes falling from the sky, trying to cover the boy but failing to hide his endless, lifeless stare.
         It was five in the morning when we heard screaming from the wooded area, and all of us jumped to our feet and ran outside. Running back from the wooded area were Andy and Belinda, the latte clutching her profusely bleeding arm. Ricky bounded up behind them, also covered in blood, barking viciously.
         “What happened?” Aunt Beatrice cried.
         “It bit me! It freaking bit me!” Belinda sobbed. She and Andy were shaking uncontrollably, obviously traumatized by something. Her bite looked pretty deep, and was gushing blood. My dad rushed her into the house and ordered me to grab the first-aid kit from under the sink. As I reached down under the sink, I heard my mom begin to scream at Ricky, who cowered in the corner. I jogged back to my dad and handed him the kit, and he expertly began stitching the bite mark. He had been a Boy Scout when he was younger, and had retained many of the survival skills he learned during his time in the organization.
         “Those don’t look like the dogs teeth,” my uncle Bo said.
         “Yeah, I know. I don’t know what the hell bit her, but let’s not say anything just yet,” my dad replied, looking at both of us.
         “You guys were looking for the body in the back yard weren’t you?” my dad asked sternly. Belinda nodded, and looked like she was about to say something, but little more than a strangling noise escaped her throat.
         “Okay, we’d better go look around outside for animal tracks,” my dad said, motioning for Uncle Bo and I to follow him.
         The snow was still falling when we got outside, and it was almost up to my knees. It was significantly colder than the previous day, and I it penetrated my jacket, causing me to shiver. As we approached the spot in the wooded area where the child was found, there was a single howl in the distance. When we arrived exactly where the body should be, my stomach turned over and I began to shake even harder for a different reason. There was a vacant hole in the snow where the dead child had been left.
         “We must have the wrong part of the yard,” my uncle Bo said with uncertainty.
         “Nope this is definitely where we left him, and there aren’t any animal prints either. How the hell is that possible?” my dad’s voice faltered a little, a telltale sign that it was unsettling to him as it was to me.
         “We’d better keep this to ourselves. We don’t want to freak everyone out more than they already are,” I said slowly.
         “Good call. I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know if there’s some sicko out there in the woods, or if it is animals and the tracks are getting covered up… what I do know is that it’s dangerous to be outside, so we’re not coming out here again until the storm is over,” he replied. Uncle Bo nodded in agreement.
         We lied and said we found nothing when we got back inside, but urged everybody to stay in nonetheless. Nobody argued with that after what had happened to Belinda who was sound asleep on the couch. Everybody sat around waiting, some using their cell phones or reading, while others played poker and told stories about their partying years. Andy came up and sat beside me, and we both stared silently at Belinda, who seemed to be having nightmares which was understandable given the circumstance.
         “Can I tell you something? You can’t tell anybody else because they’ll think I belong in Arkham Asylum,” he whispered.
         “Yeah no problem,” I whispered back.
         “It might have just been the snowfall playing tricks on me… but I could swear that I saw that dead kid get up and bite Belinda. There was a lot of commotion, and I started running as soon as she did so I never got a look at what bit her… but I’m almost certain it wasn’t Ricky,” he explained quietly.
         “It was just a trick of the snowfall, like a mirage kind of,” I assured him.
         “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said with an uneasy laugh.
         A couple of hours later Belinda woke up, but it was immediately apparent that she was getting sick. Her nose was stuffy, and her skin was pale and clammy. She was running a fever of 101 also, and she complained of slight dizziness and nausea. Uncle Bo and Belinda’s father Uncle Mitch helped her up to my parents’ room and had her lie in bed. My dad went up and changed her bandage, remarking that the wound looked a little swollen and that it might be getting infected. Then the power went out, and the room was pitch black.
         “Hey James, Andy, go out back and get the generator running. I need to tend to Belinda, and I don’t want to send anybody else out because they’re already terrified enough as it is. You two are the quickest and most able anyway. Don’t linger out there either. I want you guys back inside in five minutes,” my dad said.
         “Alright,” I replied, and looked to Andy who nodded in agreement.
         The generator was in a shed ten feet away from the back door, but it might as well have been ten miles. The snowstorm was so thick that we could only see a few feet in front of us, and we had no way of knowing if something was out there watching us, whether it be a deranged person or an animal. I put my hand in front of my face to keep the snow from blowing into my eyes, and had Andy hold onto the back of my shirt so that we wouldn’t get separated. When we got to the shed, I heard the snap of a twig somewhere to our left. I looked around for the source, but there was nothing, at least not in my field of vision.
         “Let’s get this over with,” I told him. I pulled the metal shed doors open as the groaned in protest. We hadn’t used the generator in two years, but dad made sure to keep it operational year round just in case. I heaved a large gas canister up from the floor, and poured it into the fuel tank and then pressed the red power button on the side. The generator hummed to life, and when I turned around I could barely make out the porch light.
         “Dude, let’s get out of here,” Andy said. I nodded and shut the shed door behind us. I motioned for Andy to grab the back of my shirt but he shook his head.
         “We’ll be fine now that we can see the porch light,” he told me. As we began to walk I swore I could hear a third pair of footsteps from behind us crunching in the snow. I picked up the pace, and Andy did as well, the snow was blowing directly into my eyes, creating involuntary tears and causing the tip of my nose to sting.
         When we got up to the front porch, I turned around to tell Andy that we were home free, but there was nobody behind me. I squinted against the snow to see if he’d lagged behind, but I couldn’t see him. How had he disappeared without me knowing? There was no cry for help, no sound of struggle. He must have just got turned around somehow, I decided.
         “Andy, are you out there?” I called. The only answer was the siren call of the harsh wind as it blew past me.
         “Follow the sound of my voice.”
         Silence.
         “Andy?!”
         Silence.
         Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder, I turned around and reeled backwards, only to find that my dad had followed me outside to make sure I was alright. Ricky sat attentively at his side, letting his tongue hang out of the side of his mouth. I stood up and made for the back door, unable to stomach being outside anymore.
         “What happened? Where’s Andy?” my dad asked when we got back inside. The lights were back on, and people seemed calmer but it only lasted until they noticed that Andy hadn’t followed me inside.
         “I don’t know… we were on our way back from turning the generator on and he was right behind me the whole way, or at least I thought he was. When I turned around he was just gone. I tried calling for him but he didn’t answer,” I felt tear well up in my eyes. My dad put his hand on my shoulder as the room erupted into worry and chaos.
         “We have to get out there and look for him!” Andy’s dad, Uncle Duncan exclaimed.
         “There’s no way in hell we’ll find him with visibility like that. We need to wait until the storm dies down out there,” my dad replied.
         “Hey, don’t be a prick. What if it was your son out there?” Uncle Duncan shot back with venom on his tongue.
         “Look, if you want to go out there, then go… but you’re not going to do him any good wandering around in the snow with something dangerous out there,” my dad replied.
         “I’m not doing him any good by waiting around here either,” said Uncle Duncan, grabbing his coat and hat from the closet by the front door. He opened the back door and went outside.
         “Wait,” my dad said.
         “What?” Uncle Duncan groaned impatiently.
         “Take this,” my dad offered, pulling out the baseball bat he kept in the umbrella basket. He threw it to Uncle Duncan who caught it and nodded to him. There were probably more words to be said, but there wasn’t time to say them.
         The following couple of hours were rife with anxiety and grief. Even the toddlers could sense that something was wrong, and spent their time curled up next to their mothers. I stared out the window waiting, hoping that Uncle Duncan would return with Andy. I felt like I was responsible for his disappearance. I should have insisted that he hold onto the back of my shirt, and checked more frequently to see that he was still behind me. I let myself think that we were safe for a moment, and he paid was paying for it.
         “There’s no use in waiting around for them to come back. I could actually use your help with something. Belinda won’t open up to us about what happened to her. She’s getting sicker and sicker and I need to make sure she didn’t get bitten by some disease ridden animal. Her bite is black and swollen now, so she definitely has some kind of infection,” Uncle Mitch began.
         “What do you want me to do?” I asked numbly.
         “I think she’d be more likely to open up to you than to us. She’s always had a bit of mistrust for adults, like any other teenager really. It would really help me out if you could do this. She isn’t contagious, or else we’d all have it by now,” he explained.
         “I guess I can try to talk to her, but I’m not making any promises. I barely even know her,” I told him.
         “Every little bit helps,” he offered.
         When I got up to my parents’ room, Belinda looked worse than before. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she was drooling out of the corner of her mouth. There was a bucket next to her to throw up in, though I doubted that she had the strength left to turn towards it. The bite was bandaged but it was obviously infected, and the discoloration was spreading beyond the original wound. She coughed weakly as I sat down in the chair that had been set up next to her. She looked at me out of the corner of a bloodshot eye but said nothing.
         “How are you feeling?” I asked.
         “I’m doing great, really. Aren’t I just glowing,” she said with a sarcastic smile. She was trying to play tough but she didn’t have the strength to pull it off.
         “You’re going to get better,” I told her.
         “Do you really believe that?” she asked.
         “Of course I do,” I lied. I had never seen someone so sick in my entire life, and it had spread through her in just a matter of hours.
         “They sent you in here to figure out what happened to me right? I heard about Andy, by the way, and it isn’t your fault,” she wheezed.
         “That’s debatable, but yes, they sent me in here to figure out what happened,” I admitted.
         “I’ll tell you, but I can’t tell them. They wouldn’t believe me, or they’d say my mind is wandering due to the sickness. To be fair it’s been hard to keep a grasp on things,” she said, following a series of phlegm heavy coughing fits.
         “What do you mean?” I asked.
         “That boy that died out there he’s dead, but his body isn’t,” she said. She entered another coughing fit.
         “That doesn’t make sense,” I told her. She weakly lifted her hand and her skin almost seemed transparent. I could see all of the veins in her arms, which were slowly being blackened by the infection coursing through her body. She pointed towards the window, and cracked a wistful smile.
         “He’s out there, waiting for you to slip up. Waiting for you to make a stupid mistake like I did, because it isn’t like they say it is in the movies, these creatures know how to hunt. Just because the body is human doesn’t mean the soul is,” she rambled.
         “How can you expect me to believe all of this? How do you even know all of this?” I asked incredulously.  I thought the sickness was getting to her head after all.
         “He taunts me when I sleep, and when I’m awake I swear I can see him in every shadow. He’s not going to stop until he gets us all, but you have to keep fighting… you have…,” before she could put the last word in she threw up blood, vomit, and black liquid all over herself. I stepped back from her just as Uncle Mitch walked into the room.
         “Go downstairs and get your father,” he said. His voice was forlorn, and I knew that he was accepting that his daughter was dying. The sickness had grown this bad in a matter of hours, and the nearest hospital was thirty miles away through a blizzard.
         Belinda passed away around five that evening after a series of seizures overtook her. After Uncle Mitch got to say goodbye they placed a blanket over her and a few prayers were said. My mom tried to get in contact with the police to tell them what had happened, but the blizzard was causing too much interference for a cell phone, and the land lines weren’t working. I again found myself staring out the window, but instead of imagining crimson red snowflakes I was replaying her last words over and over in my head.  Then as we were about to go to bed, a figure came stumbling up to the back door. Uncle Duncan had returned from his search, but he was limping badly, and to my horror, I realized that his arm was missing.
         “Holy shit, what happened? Guys clear some space we have to get him on the table,” my dad said.  Everyone did what he said, but it was apparent from the moment he stepped into the light that he was a dead man.
         “Good lord,” Aunt Beatrice stuttered.
         “My.. Son… Monster…,” Uncle Duncan muttered softly.
         “Shit he’s going to bleed out here,” my dad said, frantically pacing, trying to decide what to do. Uncle Duncan was spitting up blood, and his veins too were black like Belinda’s. I was about to open my mouth to point it out when he began to spasm. After a brief struggle to keep him alive, his heart stopped, and for the third time in two days I was greeted by the vacant stare that accompanied death.
         “That’s it, I’m freaking out of here. I’d rather take my chances driving in this blizzard than sit here and die. There is some weird shit going on here man, and I did not sign on for this,” Lenny said, his voice panicked and shaky.
         “I’m going too. There’s no way in hell that I’m dying with a family I don’t even know,” Ashley agreed.
         “You can’t seriously be planning on going out there?” Aunt Beatrice asked in disbelief.
         “I’m not sitting around here anymore, if anybody wants to come with me I have room for three people.”
         Lenny and Ashley were the only two to leave. I heard the car start in the driveway and I silently prayed that they somehow make it out okay. I ran to look out the front window as the car pulled away, and watched the blizzard swallow the car. The red snowflakes were pushed to the front of my mind again as I wondered how many more people would die before the nightmare ended.  We moved Uncle Duncan into my parents’ bedroom with Belinda, and as we stood there and said our farewells to him, I couldn’t help but feel like my house was slowly becoming a morgue.  Nobody got much sleep that night except for the children who had been emotionally drained from the day’s events.
         The next morning when I woke up there was a soft thumping coming from upstairs. Ricky began barking forcefully, waking everyone else in the house up as well. After a double checked head count, I came to the realization that everyone alive was downstairs. I could almost hear the phrase “They’re dead but they’re body isn’t,” whispered in my ear. We gathered at the bottom of the stair, and watched as Uncle Bo and Uncle Mitch slowly climbed the stairs to see what was making the noise.
         “It’s… coming from in there,” Uncle Bo said, pointing to my parents’ room. A collective gasp escaped from us. Uncle Bo slowly turned the door handle, readying his fists for whatever was on the other side of the door.
         As the door handle reached the full of arc of its turn the door flung open and the body of Belinda collapsed on top of him, except it wasn’t just a body, it was thrashing against him and trying to… bite him. I stared in awe at the horrific scene playing out in front of me. Uncle Bo tried to fend off the undead monster that was just centimeters away from sinking her teeth into his shoulder. Uncle Mitch was so shocked to see his daughter moving, that he didn’t notice Uncle Duncan who grappled him to the ground with his remaining arm. Uncle Bo screamed as the teeth sank into his shoulder, and the monster that was once Belinda ripped a large chunk of muscle and flesh away from him. As my dad ran to find something to stop them with, Uncle Duncan clawed Uncle Mitch’s face, slicing and I heard him scream and clutch at his eyes which had been slashed as well.
         Aunt Beatrice sank to the ground and began crying. My dad rushed up the stairs with the revolver he had bought in case of a home invasion, he took a deep breath and shot Uncle Duncan in the chest. He hesitated for a second, but continued to chew away at Uncle Mitch who now had bites on the neck, cheek, and hand. I nearly threw up when I saw Uncle Duncan pull a piece of soft tissue from him. My dad took another breath and placed the gun against Uncle Duncan’s skull. When he pulled the trigger, Uncle Duncan went still. He turned and put the gun against Belinda’s head as well, and did the same thing. Uncle Bo, who had sustained less damage forced himself to his feet and limped down the stairs, while Uncle Mitch had passed out from the blood loss. My dad did his best to patch them up, doing a fairly good job on Uncle Bo, but the damage to Uncle Mitch was extensive.
         “I can put two and two together here, you guys need to seal me off somewhere, before I end up repeating what they did to me… before I hurt Audrey,” his daughter was tearing up, which in turn made everyone else tear up, including my dad.
         “You don’t know that you’re going to end up like them Bo,” my dad pleaded.
         “I know for a fact, that if you thought you were going to be a danger to your own son that you would do everything you could to protect him,” he replied.
         “Yeah… you’re right. I would. Are you sure this is what you want?” he resigned.
         “Honey, you can’t just leave me here. If you go in there, I go in there!” Aunt Beatrice she said putting her hands on her hip.
         “You need to take care of Audrey. There’s no way that I’m letting you leave her alone in this world. You owe this to me; to her,” Uncle Bo replied.
         “Dad, no, please don’t do this,” Audrey cried.
         “I have to sweetheart, because you need to make it out of this alive, and give your mother those grandchildren she always wanted. Be strong for me, okay?” he replied. She nodded slowly, and hugged him tightly.
         “I love you daddy,” she said.
         “I love you too,” he told her.
         “Bring Mitch too. I doubt he’s going to wake up, but if he does, it isn’t very likely that he’ll go in to isolation as easily as me. Put him in there now, and if he does come back to consciousness, I’ll make sure that he understands how important it is for him to stay away from everybody,” he said, returning his attention to my dad.
         We locked both of them  in there, and at the insistence of Uncle Bo shoved furniture in front of the door. He did the same from the inside just to be sure that he couldn’t get out. Sure enough, after a couple of hours in the room Uncle Bo said he was having the symptoms. Aunt Beatrice sat outside the door, talking to him the whole time, remembering how they first met, and their first date.  Finally he stopped speaking and she came back downstairs.
         Four hours later the thumping began, as their walking corpses tried to find a way out of their imprisonment. It was terrifying, and I felt my heart leap a little with each thump. Eventually I became numb to it in the same way that I had become numb to the image of the crimson red snow. Nobody ate, and nobody talked anymore. All of us were tired, but we feared that sleep would just find us waking to another nightmare. My dad began to hold the gun firmly in his hands at all times, partly so the kids didn’t accidently grab it, and partly because it seemed to make him feel like he was in control, but in truth there was no control anymore, just mindless chaos as death lead to more death.
         At approximately four that afternoon, Aunt Sandrine and Uncle Derek went into the guest bedroom together. When they hadn’t returned two hours later, we went in to check on them, only to discover that they’d made love one last time before killing themselves together with kitchen knives which they had stabbed deep into their eyes to make sure the brain was destroyed, so that they wouldn’t come back. We closed that door and left them there together, hand and hand, free of the hell on earth they had been subjected to with us. Aunt Beatrice spent the rest of the day praying for those that had passed away, and praying that nobody else would.
         Then, just before it was time to go to sleep, Mary-Lynn screamed from the kitchen. We all ran into see what was wrong, discovering her sobbing on the floor while holding her toddlers’ toys in her hands.
         “They’re gone. I don’t know how it happened. They were just right here, but now they’re gone,” she cried.
         “They can’t have gone far,” my dad assured her. It was an empty promise, considering everything else that had happened over the last couple of days. As we searched every nook and cranny in the house, hope dwindled of finding the twins. Mary-Lynn gave up the search after three hours and began mourning her children in the kitchen, yelling at anybody who tried to go near her. She began saying prayers loudly, which freaked out Audrey. She put a vice-grip on my hand as we sat there listening to the poor, broken woman. My dad and mom were determined to find them though, like if they could that it would make up for every other person that hadn’t been saved the past few nights. They gave up at midnight, resigning to the cruel fate that had been dealt to poor Mary-Lynn, who had loved the very snow that now wished to emotionally damn her for the rest of her life.
         Everyone managed to fall asleep that night including me, but it was short lived on my part because around three in the morning I began to hear strange noises upstairs. I opened my eyes slowly, partially expecting to see the little dead boy standing over me, ready to sink his teeth into me and turn me into a monster. I listened closely, trying to get to put words to exactly what it was I was hearing… scraping? It was almost as if someone was… MOVING FURNITURE!
         “Shit! Dad wake up someone’s moving the blockage we put upstairs!” I yelled, already hopping out of bed, and running to wake up Mary-Lynn. But when I got to the kitchen, where she had decided to spend the night, she was gone. There was a knife lying on the ground with blood on the edge of it, droplets of which had been dribbled on the floor.
         My dad was already halfway up the stairs when the door upstairs flew open, and Uncle Bo and Uncle Mitch came staggering out. He pulled out the revolver and shot Uncle Mitch, managing to get a direct shot to the skull, causing hundreds of little shards of bone and bullet to incinerate the brain. The second shot didn’t work out very well as he missed Uncle Bo by a wide margin. Uncle Bo came tumbling down the stairs and knocked my dad to the ground with a disgusting crunch. My dad’s right arm was twisted at a weird angle.
         He reached for the gun with his left hand as Uncle Bo crawled up over top of him, and he managed to get the gun just in time, placing the gun directly against Uncle Bo’s head. He pulled the trigger, but was met with nothing but a dull click. I screamed as Uncle Bo sank his teeth into my dad’s wrist, but he simply grimaced at the pain. He dropped the revolver, and in a seamless motion I picked it up and began pummeling Uncle Bo with it. Finally, after ten or eleven hits I felt his skull crack, and two more after that his skull caved in and he was finally still. Then, Mary-Lynn stood at the top of the stairs, holding another gun I had never seen before. She was aiming directly at us, hand as steady as could be.
         “I got this after the twins’ father left me because I didn’t want to rely on a man for safety any more. I’ve carried it in my purse ever since,” she explained.
         “What the hell?! Why are you doing this?!” I screamed at her.
         “He told me that if I got rid of the strongest one, that I could see my kids again. That I could go out into the snowstorm and be with them. I know he isn’t lying, he showed them to me. The rest of you are all going to die, but me, I’m going to live with my babies forever,” she said, her voice with a hysteric tone.
         “He’s lying to you Mary-Lynne. Whatever’s out there isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t trustworthy,” my dad said from where he lay. In response she fired a shot, barely missing his head.
         “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!” She screamed. I could hear Audrey crying from somewhere to the right of me.
         “He’s going to kill you the same way he killed the others, and you’re sitting there and letting him do it,” he continued.
         “SHUT UP!” she said, this shot catching him the leg. He bit back a scream, clenching his teeth tightly.
         “You know what the worst part is? You’re literally about the nicest person in the world, and he was able to ruin you. What hope do we have?” he laughed grimly.
         “That’s it, I’m done with your shit, you weak little asshole,” she said, storming down the stairs with the gun raised. As she got to the bottom step she started to pull the trigger, but at the same time my mom came at her from the side and tackled her to the ground. Then, there was the sudden horrific sound as force of the fall cause Mary-Lynne to pull the trigger, firing the gun directly into her chest. The gun went skittering across the ground towards me, as my mom clutched at her heart. I screamed and picked up the gun, walking right up to Mary-Lynne and putting it against her temple.
         “Don’t kill her… this isn’t her fault. Anybody would do anything to get their child back, and she just happened to be a little too gullible,” my dad said.
         “Fine… then she goes out into her glorious snowstorm,” I said through gritted teeth. I motioned for her to move to the back door.
         “He’s going to get all of you, I promise that. You’re dad is as good as dead you little chickenshit kid,” she told me. She opened the back door and began to walk outside, I took a deep breath, aimed at her leg and pulled the trigger.
         “I really hope you find your damn kids out there,” I said spitefully, before slamming the door behind her and locking it.
         I rushed over to my mom’s side but she was already gone. I cried ruefully as my dad did all that he could to crawl over to me. Aunt Beatrice rushed to my side and hugged me to her chest, and for the first time I was glad to have someone around. Audrey sat down by my side and held my hand.
         “You have to her… and me… one last favor buddy,” my dad said.
         “I can do it to mom, but you’re still alive, I can’t do it to you. Maybe not everybody gets sick off it. Maybe there’s a slight chance…” he put a finger to his lips, and I felt the tears stream down my face.
         “We are so proud of you.  Whatever’s out there is completely wrong. I was never the strong one, you are. You can survive this, I just know it. You’re going to need to take care of your aunt and cousin for me okay? When the snowstorm stops you guys get in the car and drive as far away from here as you can. Never come back here,” he told me. Tears were streaming down his face as he crawled up next to my mom.
         “Take Audrey and go in the other room. Do not let her out of your sight for a second. Cling to her,” I told Aunt Beatrice. She kissed my forehead, picked up her daughter, and walked into the kitchen, singing a lullaby softly.
         I put the gun against my mom’s forehead, looked away, and pulled the trigger. My arm felt numb, and my eyes were blurry.
         “I love you Dad, so much. I know I didn’t show it enough, but I really do,” I told him.
         “I know you do, and I love you too. Now go on, the longer you wait the harder it’s going to be,” he said, and closed his eyes.
         “Bye Dad,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
         I didn’t sleep that night, but I made use of my time awake to say goodbye to them. I dragged my parents upstairs onto their bed and laid them there together hand in hand. I said prayers for them, and promised them I’d be the best man that I could be. I stayed the whole night in there with the gun held firmly in my hand, making sure that they didn’t somehow come back. When morning light finally came, the snow had stopped. I hurried down the stairs and woke up Aunt Beatrice and Audrey. We packed a bag with enough food for a few meals and a case of bottled water and hopped in Aunt Beatrice’s old minivan. Ricky came along too of course; more or less the last remnant of my home.
         As we drove down the road, I couldn’t help but fall into another crying fit. I wished that I’d had the time to bury them, give them a proper funeral. I knew that they wanted me to get away from that evil place, but part of me wanted to stay there, and get trapped in that endless blizzard as well. I looked out the window at the snow on the ground.
         “James?” Audrey piped up from the back seat.
         “What is it?” I said, trying to sound tough.
         “I lost my dad too,” she said, and interlocked her fingers with mine. For the first time since the blizzard, I smiled. I closed my eyes and pictured the snowflakes, and thankfully they were no longer that terrible, crimson red.