Snowblind by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

weren’t, the dispatcher would send a BOLO to all cars with descriptions of the missing. Normally the department wouldn’t react so swiftly, but in the middle of a storm like this they were more concerned with safety than protocol.
    The fastest way to the Whittier school would normally be up French Farm Road, but it was so steep and narrow and the side streets such a mess that he was sure he would have trouble getting to the top. Instead he took a longer route, past the Greenwood condo development and along the curving slope of Greenwood Avenue, which took him on a long climb to the parking lot for the baseball field behind the school.
    A two-foot-high snow wall had been left by the plows, blocking in the parking lot. Keenan swore and pulled over, flicking the blues back on and killing the ignition. He peered into the storm, barely able to see twenty feet across the snow-blanketed field. The wind rocked his car and he thought again of his warm bed.
    Then he remembered Mrs. Wexler, waiting at home for her husband and son, and the parents of the two other boys out there— idiots, he thought, but teenage boys all had a little idiot in them—and he got out of the car. Pulling his hat down around his ears and slipping his hands into heavy gloves, he slammed the door and climbed over the wall of snow, blue lights swirling around him.
    He was breathing heavily before he’d made it fifteen yards, laboring through snow already calf-deep and struggling to see where he was going. Thick flakes slipped down inside his collar. The wind knocked him around and snow stung his cheeks, but every six or seven steps he’d feel a lull in the wind and the thickness of the blizzard would diminish just enough for him to make sure he was on the right track.
    Whittier Elementary sat on the bald crest of a hill, ringed by trees. Wind sheared across the top of the hill, slicing over the baseball field, but Keenan kept going, promising himself an enormous coffee as soon as he could lay hands on one … and after he had smacked Gavin Wexler and his two idiot friends in the head.
    “Stupid kids,” he whispered, bending into the storm.
    He paused to orient himself and felt the ache of the cold settle into his fingers. The school was to his right. In a momentary lull, he saw the black stripes of the power lines that marched across the hill behind the school, and turned left toward the far corner of the field. A chain-link fence was supposed to keep kids away from the viaduct that ran down the hill in that corner, but in the winter it was the greatest place to sled. Young Joe Keenan had been there with his own idiot friends dozens of times, but they’d never done it in a blizzard at one thirty in the morning.
    A voice came to him on the wind and he looked up, peering through the snow at nothing. The cold cut deeply despite his jacket and hat and gloves, but he forged ahead, wondering if the raging wind and whipping snow had played a trick on him, if the sound he’d heard had come from some other direction. Half-a-dozen steps more, and he found his answer—a dark silhouette staggering toward him, straight ahead.
    “Hey!” Officer Keenan shouted. “This way!”
    Stupid. The guy was already heading this way. But maybe he needed to know he wasn’t alone.
    He heard the voice again, though it sounded different this time. A soft, chuffing whisper. Yet it confused him because it came not from ahead but behind and to his left. The wind drove harder, thickening the white curtain in front of him and obscuring his view of the figure in the snow.
    The storm playing tricks on me, Keenan thought.
    But then the whisper came again, so close it seemed to be right at his ear, and he felt something snag on his jacket and turned with a shout, reaching for his gun—stupid because he had gloves on.
    He stared into the storm, not breathing, heart booming inside his chest, waiting for a lull in the gale. When it came and the snow fell straight down for once instead of