Snow Blind Prolouge

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence     

1

As the dark winter sky inhaled the rapidly fading gas giant we all revolve around, Bruce
Kilbane had a cigarette.
         It was the snowfall that did it, brought the caged monster of five years out of him to stop his hand from shaking. His tires practically regurgitated the snow covered road underneath and he was aware of steadily floating down the road at 20 mph, twin headlights shining onward into nothingness. Every time he even thought about going faster then 20, his car immediately threw its weight back and forth and the steering wheel might as well not have existed, spiraling hard and causing every nerve in his gut to jump forward as if attempting a mass exodus out of the body.  His natural instinct was to go “Woah, woah!” as if the sedan was a wild horse bucking him off his body. 
         As far as he and the long line of traffic steadily following him along the country road were concerned, they could of left the road miles ago and been cruising north across barren cornfields to Chicago by now. What the afternoon news called “A wintry mix with a slight onset of heavy snow” had turned into what the overweight balding weatherman called “A red county winter storm alert.” He preached “Please stay indoors with your families at all costs as residents across the county are experiencing power outages and fatal ice damage. If you MUST travel please stick to main highways and plowed roads.”
         When Bruce heard this on the break room TV while he put his scarf on he sighed the sigh of a defeated man. If there was anything in the world Bruce Anthony Kilbane would rather not do, it was drive in horrible snow conditions. Like most men earning a middle class living, Bruce drove a stylish German sports car, a Saab 9-2x, which while impressing all his snubby, spying elderly neighbors with the fact that he could afford it, drove like a tin can in even the lightest of snow.  Even after the snow had begun melting after winter, if there was still some around, Bruce’s car would be carefully gliding through it. When he was just a kid, both his brother and his father were killed in a fatal accident when his fathers rusty red Ford pickup slid on a patch of black ice on an on ramp coming off I-30. The truck flew off the ramp going headfirst into the thick concrete barrier separating the highway from the thick woods. The cars front end was smashed killing both of them instantly before flying over the barrier and being torn apart by the dry dead branches of the trees, ripping their bodies apart in an unimaginable horrific manner.
         Bruce jolted his head out of this memory as the Saab hit another violent skid, causing him to breathlessly let go of the accelerator till the car slowed down and got under control. He had to stop it with these trips to the past that unreeled like movie footage in his head. Every time he began to think of his past he’d switch onto some sort of autopilot mode which was very bad with concentrated driving. He supposed it was the dull yet warm heat radiating from the front of his car making him sleepy. He switched off the heat and immediately felt the shift from comfortably pleasant to uncomfortably chilly.          His window began to frost up at a rapid rate obscuring his vision, he cursed then cranked the heat back up and rolled down his windows and yelled to himself in jubilance as he saw the familiar road sign that marked the turn to Pickett St. which would then only be a quick 4 miles home. Finally, he thought, gonna make it home, have a beer and be able to shift back into reality.
         Shift back into reality had always been something his father had said. It had become an expression he had always used in his life, referring to any moment of strenuous solo work. When he was on the cross-country team in college, he had always thought of it while running miles out into the country, he found it funny that an hour afterwards all the deeply personal and existential thoughts that struck him while he was on his own, would vanish as he wondered what to get for dinner or what to do with his friends that coming weekend.
         Yes his dad had come up with that one, as well as several others he often used to describe the painful excursions of day to day life. His dad, had he lived longer would of made a great comedian, mostly because when he talked, people related to him. He was an observation extremist.
         He had died though, unfortunately, while Bruce was simply at home eating supper, waiting for his little brother to come home so they could watch their favorite TV show. His mom was annoyed that they hadn’t come home yet and their supper was getting cold. When the doorbell rang, little Bruce Kilbane had ran through the winter dark living room and peeked out the curtains, seeing the flashing red and blue lights of a police car and wondered why the siren wasn’t on. He heard his mother scream in terror and turned to the foyer where he saw his mother collapse into a young grim faced policeman’s arms.
         There were two policemen, and one of them had been a rough old Irish bastard by the name of Denison. He walked into the house and kneeled down to Bruce, who was confused.
         “Son, I’m going to tell you some very bad news so I want you to be a big boy and not cry can you do it?” 
         Bruce already knew, he had sensed it while at dinner. His moms sobbing had only confirmed the sinking reality growing in the pit of his stomach.  A solitary tear dripped down his cheek and his legs quivered. Denison simply stood back up and nodded to him.
         He ran right out the door into the frantic snowy night, sprinted at rapid pace down his street, out of his neighborhood, down slippery icy country roads, slipping and falling over and over to only get back up and yell a nonsensical tune of language out into the night.
         Weeks later, he would be mournfully looking through his dads old things and would discover a half crumpled pack of Marlboros. This set off a chain reaction of events leading to a habit that only 20 years later, would require three different psychologists and a loving wife to give up.
         Except now I fucking need one, Bruce thought to himself as he reached for his glove compartment, the stress was too much and he had a feeling that just one wouldn’t do him any harm. When he had quit the habit, his wife had made him throw out every single pack of cigarettes he had owned, she had thoroughly searched the bedroom, his office, and his car annually for weeks before she began to trust him again.
         He knew that one day would come though where he would need a cigarette though, every smoker does. He knew that because there were times when the shit was just too fucked up and you had to go back to them. He had known that ahead of time and one day had simply bought a pack of cigarettes, and thrown them all out except for one. He kept this secretly taped along with a lighter in his glove compartment. He knew that if he ever used it he’d tell her right away, have her begin the checks again. He knew staying off of them was the best for everyone.
          He fumbled to the back while driving with his left hand, sliding back and forth along the road but keeping it steady, he felt his grip on the lighter and yanked it off of its taped spot. The lighter came flying out and landed on the floor almost under the seat. He managed to catch the cigarette before the car hit another skid, spraying huge drifts of white snow and violently cranking to the right. A car behind him honked its horn and in a brief second of terror, he thought he’d fly into the opposite lane where a car was coming.
         He managed to maneuver the car back into the right lane but it was still sliding. His heart thumped in his chest as the traction under his wheels slowly came back. He wiped sweat from his brow and realized the cigarette was still in between his fingers. He put it in his mouth absently and chewed on the end.  He waited for his racing pulse to slow down before stealing a glance at the lighter on the floor mat of his passenger seat. 
         A quick look out his frosted passenger window revealed that it was a mile until he was home, another endless mile through this. He glanced at the cigarette again with a hungry look in his eyes, almost tasting the familiar ashy warmth in his mouth.
         Suddenly loud thumping noises pounded onto the roof of his car and the car went into another violent back and forth skid. Bruce cried aloud and realized that sleet was beginning to fall as well as the endless fast falling white snow. He felt the car slide around the road; he had to make it home soon, this was going to be the most horrible weather to ever hit the state in years.
         Had he not attempted to grab the cigarette, things might have been different.
         As he clutched his precious ruby, all hell broke loose. His car suddenly lurched rightwards as his hand wrapped around the cigarette. The car weightlessly glided off towards the shoulder of the road as Bruce attempted to grab the fast spinning steering wheel. “FUCK!” he screamed as the car hit the gravel siding barrier on the side of the road and went flying down the side of the road. He felt thrown forward as the car slammed headfirst into a huge snow bank. His forehead slammed right into the steering wheel making him see stars, seconds before the airbag deployed, smothering his face.
         Bruce sat like that for awhile, listening to the engine roaring and the heater steadily blowing, before putting his foot on the brake and shifting into reverse. He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and screamed as his front and back tires sputtered without moving.
         He leaned his head against the airbag and sighed, opening the driver’s side door. He stepped out into the frosty night.
         Immediately the snow encapsulated him and he cursed as drifts of the stuff poured all over his suit. His expensive Italian loafers were soaked beyond belief as the snow went up to his knees. Immediately his car door slammed shut from the wind and he cursed again. He slogged through the deep snow a few yards and up to the side of the road. There were a line of cars driving slowly down the road and he waved his arms to all of them, begging for assistance. All of them kept driving, ignoring him, trying to get home to their houses before the storm would get any worse.
         “Fuck you!” Bruce yelled into the snowy abysmal sky. He dug into the pocket of his now drenched trousers and pulled out his cell phone.
He flipped it up revealing a picture of his wife and him on vacation in Jamaica; he smiled at the warm memory and suddenly had a foreboding sense of love and completion for his life. He felt his heart thump with the same kind of love he felt when he first saw Lauren at Northern. It was one of endless Saturday night parties and he remembered her sitting next to him on the couch, and him talking to her about school and life, feeling shy in ever telling her how he had felt when he first saw her across the room.
The memory was interrupted by a sudden blinding fluorescent light striking him in the eyes. He shielded his eyes and felt his cell phone slip from his grasp and fall into the snow. He cursed to himself then looked in the direction and saw a police cruiser with its red and blue lights on gliding smoothly across the snow a few meters away. The car slid to a smooth stop and sat there.
Bruce waved his arms before pushing his ungloved hands into the snow and feeling around for his phone. The freezing burn of the snow made him bring his hands right back up and shake them wildly.
“Need a lift?” a familiar voice spoke to him, and Bruce turned to find a pale looking police officer standing right behind him. How was he so fast? Bruce thought before reaching out his red throbbing hand. “Bruce Kilbane, boy am I lucky or what?”
“Yes sir fella, this storms gonna eat the entire damn city, I was just getting ready to go home to my wife, I saw you go off the road and I knew nobody would help you. Everyone’s trying to get home as quick as possible, I bet nobody shows up at their jobs tomorrow.” The policeman spoke with a thin Irish accent as they shook hands and Bruce thought he sounded really familiar, but put it out of his head. “I sure as hell won’t, forget about my car can you give me a ride home? It’s not that far from here.”
“Sure as hell will Bruce, you live off of Pickett Street right?” Bruce suddenly felt a weird sense of terror deep in his stomach and felt some sort of wild sense of déjà vu. He looked deep into the old cop’s wrinkly face and suddenly felt like he was going to pass out.
The cop was Officer Denison, the old Irish cop who had come to Bruce’s house that winter night so long ago and told him that his father and brother had both been killed. He saw that face in every horrible nightmare he had had about that night way back in the day, he saw that face in every cigarette he smoked, and it took every fiber of his being to not scream.
Officer Denison had been shot and killed when Bruce was 15. It had been in the city news for days. While he was out patrolling in one of the god forsaken urban barrios on the other side of the city, a young teenage gang member had shot him three times in the stomach, the fatal third bullet piercing through his heart and killing him instantly. The teenager had done it as an initiation; he was currently serving life in a maximum security prison upstate somewhere.
Yet here was the old Irish bastard himself, and to his horror Bruce discovered that there were three adjacent bullet holes in the breast of the cop’s uniform. At the thought, a crimson spray began to shoot out and mist in the cold air. The cop smiled at Bruce revealing a mouth of rotted teeth with maggots feasting on them
Bruce’s legs wobbled and he groaned, yet he somehow found the strength to talk. “Say officer, how does that car drive so perfectly in the snow?” Bruce said, feeling his sanity leaving him and freezing to death in the snowy air.
Denison, or whatever the monster standing before him said nothing and tilted his hat down, then back up and Bruce screamed out loud for real this time.
His father was standing before him, or what he could tell was his father. The man’s forehead was collapsed inward, with fractured pieces of skull bursting out in a starburst pattern. The bottom half of his chin was torn wide open revealing the bottom of his skull which was stretched out in a grimace.
“You killed me Brucey, you killed me. You know how much pain I’m in right now?”
Bruce fell to the ground and pure insanity overwhelmed him. He stretched his arms out to the deformed zombie in the police uniform. “I’m sorry daddy! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to die that night, I didn’t mean for you to die! I loved you!”
His father slapped him across the face coldly and Bruce immediately began to sob. “You can’t cry now boy, you know how long death is? Do you know how long I’ve cried while watching you smoke those goddamn cancer sticks? Do you know how long I’ve watched you kill yourself?”
“Daddy I’m sorry! Please dad, I never wanted it to happen. I…” “Shut the fuck up boy! A real man never cries, he moves on with his life, he accepts things. He doesn’t hide behind this false self-abusing pleasure you indulged yourself in for 20 years!”
Bruce cried uncontrollably as Denison/his father walked over to a frozen tree and looked at it for a few seconds, before snapping a sharp thick branch off of it. Bruce pounded his fists into the snow as tears spilled from his eyes. His father walked back over to him and put a cold lifeless hand on his shoulder. “There there boy, don’t cry. I overreact sometimes; you know I love you right?” Bruce nodded through tears as his father patted him reassuringly. “Everything will be a lot better now son. I promise.”
His father lifted the branch like a golf club and swung it as hard as he could. Bruce felt immense pain give away to immediate dislocation as the branch ripped cleanly through his neck, the last thing he saw were spidery purple veins flopping around spraying red blood like wild fire hoses as he flew away from his body, he felt a sense of vertigo as his vision flew around and around at a funhouse rate, noticing the flashing blue and red of the police car suddenly turning off as he flew face first into a snow drift.
He thought about that picture on his cell phone, of how much he loved his wife, and how much he had loved his parents and his brother. His last thought was of realization that whatever had killed him wasn’t his father; he realized that faraway somebody was going to explain to him what this monster was.
Before he could think about who, his consciousness ended, and he was dead.