White Walker by Richard Schiver Read Free Book Online

warm flesh of his cheeks, melting into
tiny pools of water that froze on contact with the wintry air.
    Suddenly he was a part of the storm, swirling across
the frozen landscape like a wild thing un-caged as a strange
exhilaration gripped him. He was impervious and nothing could stand
in his way. He was an irresistible force of nature unleashed upon
an unsuspecting world.
    Everything stopped. The wind ceased it restless
casting about. The snow, still falling in sheets, dropped straight
to the ground in a vertical path.
    May I come in? a sinister voice whispered in
his mind and Teddy realized how alone he truly was. Nipping at the
heels of that realization came the fear of what this stranger
represented.
    The White One led them astray. The voice of
his nanny whispered in soft counterpoint to this creature’s simple
request.
    Would he lead them astray? The question
filled him with remorse.
    Of course, came the answer unbidden from the
black depths that surrounded him.
    Time ground to a halt as the two men gazed across
the intervening space at one another. One a leader of sorts, the
other a taker of souls. Teddy had what the other wanted and with
that realization came the terrified cries of a group of children.
The cold was driven away by the memory of a raging fire that seared
his flesh and served to break the spell the stranger had placed
upon him.
    Teddy staggered back as the wind howled in his ears
and as it did he heard a forlorn voice crying out with rage at his
refusal to permit it access.
     

Chapter 11
     
    Kevin was becoming quite annoyed with the customer
he had on the line. Her company had purchased the latest smart
phone and she had been tasked with setting the phones up to access
the company’s servers, which contained any number of closely
guarded national defense secrets. As soon as she began describing
her problem, Kevin understood what the real issue was. She didn’t
possess the capacity to operate a phone that was smarter than her.
With a sigh, he settled into what he knew was going to be a long
procedure as he took her step by step through the process of
properly setting up the phone to securely access the company’s
servers. Apparently someone who thought they knew what they were
doing had tried to do it for her, and it was all screwed up. But it
wasn’t that person’s fault, hell no, there was definitely something
wrong with the phones.
    He was in the middle of explaining how to open the
settings screen when the phones went dead. There was no brief
sputter to warn him of what was about to happen. One moment the
airhead, as he had come to calling her privately, was describing
what she was seeing, and then she was gone. Replaced by the faint
hiss of a dead line.
    It was a sound that made him think of desolate
landscapes beneath low gray clouds. A forlorn place where all
dropped calls waited to be picked up again. He’d never considered
himself an artist, but three days earlier he’d broken down and
picked up the supplies needed to try his hand at painting. His
sister had always been after him to do something more with his life
than work and watch television. There was no wife or children to
occupy his free time. He’d dated a few times but had always found
the prospect of dealing with someone else’s emotions less than
desirable.
    Slipping his headphones from his head, he glanced
over at Leslie in the next cubicle.
    “I think the phones just went dead,” he said.
    Leslie, who had just finished her call and was
entering the last of her contact notes before the next call came
in, stopped what she was doing and tried to connect to an outside
line. She looked back at Kevin and shrugged.
    “We’ll have to get Teddy to look at it. Maybe it’s
just a computer glitch,” he said as he pulled up his Internet
browser and discovered that he could still get online. He pushed
himself up from his seat and looked out across the sea of empty
cubicles.
    Cody looked up as Kevin got up from his seat.
    “I think