The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,48

it.

This man—he wasn’t his father. Grey remembered now. It wasn’t just the belt he was using and it wasn’t his father who was using it; his father had been replaced by this man, this man named Kurt who’ll be your daddy now, and by this feeling of being torn up inside, the way his real father had torn himself up in the front seat of his truck on the morning it had snowed. Grey couldn’t have been more than six years old when it happened. He awoke one morning before anyone else was up and about, the light of his bedroom floating with a glowing weightlessness, and right away he knew what had called him out of sleep, that snow had fallen in the night. He threw the cover aside and yanked back the drapes of his window, blinking into the smooth brightness of the world. Snow! It never snowed, not in Texas. Sometimes they got ice but that wasn’t the same, not like the snow he saw in books and on TV, this wonderful blanket of whiteness, the snow of sledding and skiing, of snow angels and snow forts and snowmen. His heart leapt with the wonder of it, the pure possibility and newness of it, this marvelous, impossible present waiting outside his window. He touched the glass and felt the coldness leap onto his fingertips, a sudden sharpness, like an electric current.

He hurried from the window and quickly drew on jeans, thrust his bare feet into sneakers, not even bothering to tie the laces; if there was snow outside, he had to be out there in it. He crept from his room and down the stairs to the living room. It was Saturday morning. There’d been a party the night before, folks over to the house, lots of talk and loud voices that he’d heard from his room, and the smell of cigarettes that even now clung to the air like a greasy cloud. Upstairs, his parents would sleep for hours.

He opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. The air was cool and still, and there was a smell to it, like clean laundry. He breathed it in.

Grey. Look.

That was when he saw it: his father’s truck. Parked like it always was in the drive, but something was different. Grey saw a splash of dark red, like a squirt of spray paint, on the driver’s window, darker and redder because of the snow. He considered what he was seeing. It seemed like it might be some kind of joke—that his father had done something to tease him, to play a game, to give him something funny and strange to see when he got up in the morning before anybody else was awake. He descended the stairs of the porch and stepped across the yard. Snow filled his sneakers but he kept his eyes locked on the truck, which gave him a worried feeling now, like it wasn’t the snow that had called him out of sleep but something else. The truck was running, pushing a gray smear of exhaust onto the snowy drive; the windshield was fogged with heat and moisture. He could see a dark shape pressed against the window where the redness was. His hands were little and he had no strength but still he’d done it, he’d opened the door of the truck; and as he did, his daddy tumbled past him and onto the snow.

Grey. Look. Look at me.

The body had landed face-up. One eye was pointed up at Grey, but really at nothing; Grey could tell that right off. The other eye was gone. So was that whole side of his face, like something had turned it inside out. Grey knew what dead was. He’d seen animals—possums and coons and sometimes cats or even dogs—broken to pieces on the side of the road, and this was like that. This was over and out. The gun was still in his daddy’s hand, the finger curling through the little hole the way he’d showed Grey that day on the porch. See now, see how heavy it is? You never ever point a gun at anyone. There was blood everywhere too, mixed in with other stuff, like bits of meat and white pieces of something smashed, all over his daddy’s face and jacket and the seat of the truck and the inside of the door, and Grey smelled it, so strong it seemed to coat the insides of his mouth like a melting pill.

Grey,