White Walker by Richard Schiver Read Free Book Online Page B

and Cody
pulled the door open. After moving Teddy into the building, Kevin
turned and walked back across the small dock to the opposite side.
He searched the falling snow for the person he’d seen earlier.
    “Are you looking for me?” A gravelly voice whispered
on his right and Kevin nearly jumped off the dock. He spun around
to confront the stranger, who stood a mere ten feet away.
    Too close , Kevin thought as he took several
quick steps back to open the space between them.
    “Who are you? What do you want?” Kevin said. He
sensed that the stranger was smiling beneath the filthy scarf that
covered the lower portion of his face, a smile that never quite
reached eyes that glittered with a harsh light in the shadows that
shrouded his features in darkness.
    “You know who I am.”
    Kevin shook his head even though he knew, on an
instinctive level, that what stood before him couldn’t really
exist.
    “I have to get back inside,” Kevin said.
    “May I come in?” the stranger asked and for one
terrifying moment Kevin imagined himself allowing the stranger
inside the building. Something his grandmother had told him when he
was younger suddenly blossomed in his mind. She was nearing ninety
when he was a boy of ten, a small woman, yet far from frail, who
had buried most of her small family already. Two sons and a
daughter, along with her husband, had passed before her and it left
her bitter to the point many people no longer came to visit, adding
to her bitterness.
    “If they gotta ask to come in,” she’d said, “don’t
let them. They’re only there to cause trouble.”
    Kevin shook his head as he backed across the dock.
When his shoulders came against the door he said, “I’m sorry, but
this is a restricted area.”
    “Of course it is,” the stranger said, tilting his
head to the side much like a dog cocked its head when its owner
spoke to it. “But it’s so cold out here.” The comment was so out of
character with the stranger’s actions.
    “I’m sorry,” Kevin said as he continued to shake his
head, “company policy, and all that.” He finished with a helpless
shrug.
    “Of course, I understand.”
    But he didn’t really, did he? Kevin didn’t
understand any of it. The storm that had come up out of nowhere on
a sunny day, even surprising the national weather service, whose
last report had been spring-like weather with temperatures in the
mid-forties.
    The stranger reached out and dropped his hand on
Kevin’s shoulder. His grip was strong, his fingers like ice, and
Kevin felt a numbing cold burrowing into his chest. He yanked open
the door, ripped his shoulder from beneath the stranger’s hand, and
stumbled into the short hallway as his eyesight started to dim.
    The cold spread across his chest like a raging fire
feeding on a ready supply of fuel. Kevin coughed, the frozen flesh
of half of his lung tearing away under the sudden movement, sending
daggers of pain racing across his chest ahead of the icy line that
slowly marched across his body.
    He fell to his knees as the door slammed shut behind
him, drawing the attention of the others who were huddled around
Teddy’s prone figure.
    “What’s wrong?” Leslie said as she left Teddy’s side
and ran down the short hall to drop to her knees in front of
Kevin.
    The line of cold enveloped his heart, stopping it in
mid-beat, and his eyesight slowly dimmed as the blood pressure in
his body, no longer driven by a beating heart, dropped. As the
darkness claimed him he saw them, the children, standing around
him, watching him die.
    He saw a stocky young boy with blonde hair, holding
his own shoulder as he nodded at Kevin with a knowing look. There
was a pair of twin girls no more than seven with matching pigtails.
An older black-haired girl and a redheaded boy with a spray of
freckles dotted across his nose. Behind them stood a young woman,
no more than a child herself, charged with the care of these
children. Her face set in a mask of determination. She