Apex Book Company

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was originally going to call this one “All the White Horses” because the inspiration for the story came from the song “Winter” by Tori Amos. Anne Stringer suggested the title I ended up using. It was better than mine, but don’t tell her I said so.

Being a SoCal native, I started picturing Death Valley perpetually covered in snow and staring out at a piece of the Pacific slated with ice. That appealed to me. I also liked the idea of telling an epic post-apocalyptic story in a very small, single camera set-up kind of way and exploding that old hat
notion of the literary sci-fi/fantasy messiah. Fuck that noise, man. I’d rather go snowboarding than save the world any day of the week.

It’s worth noting that “A Place of Snow Angels” was originally published in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest and was my first story in print. The same folks have now released my first short story collection. Now that’s symmetry worthy of prophecy, right there.

Joshua was seven when he saw the white city. It was his first deep trek across the Mojave tundra with Dedimus, hours spent listening to the snowreaver’s jets pulverize powder and ice, and somewhere under that Dedimus preaching, always preaching, about Joshua’s bond to the ever-growing winter, his
future, his responsibility. By the time they reached the Santa Monica coastline, Joshua’s ears were ringing and he was hungry, and despite the arctic chill he found he was sweating.

They stood on the shore and looked west. At first there was just the ocean, slow moving and rough-hewn gray, like unfinished sheets of steel. The frost shifted in heavy curtains above
them. Then morning broke and the tide changed. Twenty miles off the coast, the white city blazed as pure and broad as the horizon itself. There were walls, parapets, and spires that stabbed the frosty fog billows.

“Who lives there?” he’d asked Dedimus.

“No one,” the old man told Joshua. “That is the fata morgana, an illusion created by the cold. Like any worthy opponent, winter tricks your eyes, draws you into falsehoods.”

Joshua didn’t believe that, not then and not now. It must be a place of snow angels, he thought, real ones. If they lived anywhere it would be in that city, behind those white fire walls.

All his short life he’d been waiting for something, his insides told him. Dedimus said it was just his body preparing for ecoimmersion. But sometimes at night, in his dreams, Joshua saw himself astride a white horse, riding through the streets of the white city.

The winter is eternal there, and in the cold he thrives.

Joshua doesn’t mind the winters getting longer, and he wishes they’d stop asking him to save the world.

It’s Dedimus, always telling him that soon the whole of Earth’s soil will be just as frozen as California’s, telling him that he, Joshua, will grow up to save them all from it. Because of the prophecy, the one made in a laboratory at UH Manoa after the temperature inversion choked half the population of
Los Angeles to death. A child born to the New Earth, to the ice planet it was becoming. A child born in symbiosis with the new environment, manipulated through science to control it.

Dedimus is his teacher, mentor, and doctor. He’s been an old man all Joshua’s life, and he often wonders if there was ever any color in the man’s white beard. It’s just them and
Mida, his caretaker, and Hieronymus, the ashen wolfhound twice Joshua’s size. They live on an old farm buried under one of the vast Death Valley snowdrifts. Dedimus says it’s better if
he doesn’t know exactly which one, or exactly where it is. Dedimus says they have enemies, men who want to hurt Joshua. There’s a boy halfway around the world who claims to be the reincarnation of Buddha, or at least his handlers claim he is. They have their own notions about saving the world.
They’ve gathered many followers. They consider Joshua a threat.

Mida takes care of him and always has, for as long as Joshua can remember. She cooks their meals and runs his baths. There’s an ancient smokehouse set apart from the main property with a door inside of it. The door isn’t old, it’s brand new, titanium, and it leads down into a bunker laboratory. It’s
off limits unless Mida takes him there so Dedimus can perform his tests, hooking Joshua’s brain and body to the mini-biospheres, snow storms in a bottle and nuclear winter terrariums.

Sometimes Dedimus visits his room late at night. It was scary the first time, but the old man just stood there, staring at Joshua in the dark. Finally, he said, “One day you’ll walk in the sun, Joshua. You’ll watch the ice melt at your feet and the gray skies roll back forever. You’ll lead us into the light.” Then he left.

It’s the same every time. Only the words change. Dedimus stands in the doorway, a dark shape in front of soft lamp light from the hall, and stares at Joshua in his bed. He stares for a long time. Then he says, “You’ll will the weather into submission. Do you understand how strong your will is, Joshua? Can you yet?” Or, “Imagine, Josh. Imagine commanding the waters and the skies of this Earth as easily as you command Hieronymus. You’ll be our savior.”

Mida reads to Joshua a lot. From what he’s gathered, being a savior never works out well. Not ever.

This morning they came for him, the men Dedimus always warned Joshua about. Three of them, draped from head to toe in snow camouflage, invisible as they approached the farmhouse.

But not to Hieronymus.

Joshua saw the wolfhound fall on the first. They hadn’t broken cover yet, and to the boy it appeared as though Hieronymus was attacking the naked drift itself. Then white turned to red, and he heard a man’s scream. Two black rebreathing masks beneath white hoods appeared. One of them slashed at
Hieronymus with a knife, but it didn’t stop the wolfhound from going for his throat and pulling him down to the snow.

Joshua, watching through the ghost face of his bedroom’s frosted windowpane, thought for sure the third one would finish Hieronymus. Then Dedimus appeared on their old broken porch, a long black rifle with a skeletal butt like a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces slung tight against his body. One eye watched
the sighting screen affixed to the weapon’s barrel track its target. He fired a single shot. It wasn’t loud, just a pop and a crackling echo.

When he was little, Joshua held a ripe tomato in his hand and, for no other reason than it felt so soft and yielding, squeezed it as hard as he could. It was like that, what happened to the third man’s covered head.

Now, laid out in the snow, perfect white clothes turned to bloody rags, their masks are gone. The faces, spice-colored with wide, dead, almond eyes, are Asian; Chinese, Dedimus says as
he searches their ghillie suits. Each one has a crimson stick with an electrified tip. They’re also carrying digital recording equipment.

“These men were planning to torture you,” Dedimus tells Joshua. He holds up one of the candy-red cattle prods. “They would’ve used these things to burn your insides with electricity until the pain broke your will, then turned their cameras on and commanded you to renounce your title as savior. All this after they killed me, Mida, and Hieronymus, of course.”

“Dedimus, don’t tell him things like that,” Mida pleads.

“He needs to hear it!” Dedimus screams, and his eyes are as wide as those of the corpses stiffening in the snow at his feet. All the blue seems to have gone from them, leaving only angry black cauldrons. There’s spittle in his Santa Claus beard. To Joshua he looks like someone else, someone Joshua has never met before.

Mida’s crying now. “He’s just a boy.”

The next morning, the blood from Hieronymus’ wounds has formed several tiny creatures frozen solid in the snow. They’re red and raw and unrecognizable; Mida calls them fetuses. To Joshua they look like the shrimp she uses to make gumbo, before she puts them in the boiling pot. When he asks Dedimus
about them, he says that Hieronymus is a very special dog, one of the last wolfhounds, a protector. The Hydra Strain he’s been injected with ensures that if he’s killed there will be new wolfhounds
to take his place, born from his blood.

For the first time, Joshua wonders about all the things they’ve injected him with since he was a baby. For the first time, the first time ever, he’s afraid.

This morning he woke up and Mida was gone. Joshua knew it as soon as he opened his eyes, knew it by the absence of the cinnamon and searing flesh breakfast smells that seduced him into waking so many mornings.

“She lost her faith,” is all Dedimus will tell him, no matter how many times he asks, how hot his tantrums run. “She lost her faith.” That, and, “You have to pack your things now, Joshua. We’re leaving. I’m taking you someplace new. Someplace safe.”

“Where?”

“A place that’s still warm. One of the last places.”

“I wanna ride my board. One more time. Before we go.”

And he knows Dedimus would say no if it weren’t for Mida, for what he’s done to her, whatever that may be.

“One hour,” Dedimus says. “Hieronymus will go with you. Don’t make me come looking.”

Joshua nods. Dedimus won’t need to look for him.

He sits on a ridge overlooking the farm, Hieronymus resting on his haunches at the boy’s side.

All the times Dedimus talked about will, Joshua never told him he already knew how strong his was. It didn’t matter. He had the farm, and Mida, and his snowboard. He didn’t care about the rest. Now Mida’s gone, and the farm isn’t his home anymore.

Dedimus always said when the time came to will the winds, he’d feel everything. He’d feel himself spreading to the four corners of the Earth. He’d feel himself in every crystal of precipitation,
in every tidal wave, in every atmospheric swell. It would be complete symbiosis with the ecosystem.

It’s not like that at all. It’s like something Joshua holds in his hand. It seems absurd that this should be something he wields like a toy, but that’s exactly what it’s like.

The storm comes on quickly, turning the sky above the drift into a gray and black maelstrom that swirls and constricts and focuses. It becomes the great finger of Boreas descending to rub out the split-wood farmhouse. Within seconds the snowfall buries every door and window. The walls creak and quake like a dry husk ready to burst. Then the thrashing air currents begin to crystallize. Ice dive-bombs the side boards, stripping whatever’s left of their virgin coat. Instead of rebounding to
Earth, each bullet-hard bit is sucked into the eye of the storm, a swarm of frozen fairies flocking to form a glacial hammer that’s now poised above the dark slates of his home.

Through the white pestilence, Joshua thinks he sees Dedimus at the porthole that looks out from the rafters of the farmhouse. There’s a dark hole in the middle of his beard. It’s his mouth. It’s a scream trapped with him, entombed all around him. The old man punches through the glass, punches
with his bare knuckles and wriggles his arm free to the elbow, candy-striped with blood and sugarcoated with bits of broken glass. Then the roof belches its collapse like an angry drunk,
and the walls come tumbling down right after it.

Joshua knows Dedimus is gone because the storm dissipates. The sky’s fury is just a vague memory of still, gray clouds. And, for just a moment, an ultraviolet blade cuts through them to fall on the remains of the farmhouse.

Hieronymus is strong enough to pull the sled by himself. Joshua doesn’t need a whip to drive him or reins to steer him. The wolfhound will never tire, never succumb to the cold. Dedimus made sure of that. He’ll draw Joshua across the tundra to the edge of the western winter lands, and when they
reach it, there’ll be an ice floe to carry him across the dreary waters to the white city under the frost, to the place of snow angels. Dedimus would chastise him. His faith was just science spoken in an ecclesiastic tongue. But Joshua’s proven he knows more than Dedimus did.

Besides, he thinks, if it’s not real, if the white city really is just a fata morgana, then he’ll make it real.

Order The Next Fix from Apex Publications.