Rusty the Snowman

[Howard10]

The snow was falling on New London, the rain having frozen into powdery flakes as the mercury fell, gave up, then froze. Children had flocked to the streets, and were now heaping the acidic drifts of powder-ice into lumps. Carefully, and with tender love, a number worked together to roll three large balls on top of each other. They found some sticks to give him arms, a few dog-coals for eyes. A mottled scarf was draped around his neck, and a father'€™s pipe was gently pushed into its head, just below the little button nose. But it still didn'€™t quite look right. A few of the mitten clad urchins ran away to go and find the finishing touch.

***

Dr Kim Drexler was hurrying along a few streets away. His feet crunched loudly through the snow, moving quicker and quicker as panic gradually mounted. Someone was following him. Someone who wanted his work, his research. Probably the same someone who had ransacked his lab earlier that day while he'€™d been at the local pub tucking in to a well deserved Christmas dinner with his assistant. He clutched the briefcase he was carrying tightly, hunched over a little further and sped up a little more. That was a decoy really. Sure it contained papers '€“ important in their own way '€“ but the real prize was hidden inside the band of his old silk hat. Four glass containers holding the sum of several million credits work.

A shadow loomed over his shoulder. Time seemed to slow to a standstill as he saw a skiff scream down towards the street, towards him, towards his work. As he turned to run, to scream, something hard jabbed him in the ribs. He looked down in horror in time to witness slight flash, a muffled hiss and his own death. This was accompanied by the quickly dispersed stench of burnt flesh. Dr Drexler lolled dead, and was thrown (briefcase and all) into the skiff as it levelled with the corpse and its attacker. The whole thing was over in seconds: no witnesses. The only evidence of his passing was an old silk hat that had rolled away into a snow drift during the commotion.

***

A few minutes later a small group of children walked past, scuffling their boots through the snow and kicking up trails of muddied destruction in their wake. One of them spotted the hat and picked it up, out of curiosity. She called to the others to come and have a look. After quickly conferring among one another, they giggled and grinned and flocked back to their snowman, who stood genially pretending to smoke his pipe in the twilight. The girl who was carrying the hat tripped on a spot of black ice and landed on the hat, already bawling crocodile tears before she even landed. On top of the hat. None of them noticed the quartet of tiny smashes in all the commotion. One of the older children picked the girl and the hat up, then set the latter on the snowman'€™s head with a smile. After a short while, they dispersed to nearby homes. That night, something magical would happen.