This is an old one, written off of a reddit writing prompt that was about a warning to not build snowmen. It's set in the world I have a book written, and another on the way, as well as some shorter fiction. It features an appearance by the main character of the series I'm working on, Leland Byrnes.

---

Winter can come early in the mountains. We can get snow here in The Corners as early as September, though it never lasts.

All of us kids growing up would still run out to play in it while it lasted though. Snow meant that the narrow mountain roads would be unsafe for buses, so as soon as the flakes fell, freedom rang out across the hills for us.

The crisp, cold air would be split by the shrieks of all ages, throwing balls of the white at each other, or of sleds crashing into the very ditches and brush that the adults feared would be the resting place for the buses.

But all of us, every one, would be told "No snowmen! No snow angels either!"

Those early snows rarely held long enough for forts and other construction, but those were not banned. Only shapes in human form. This isn't to say that every kid always obeyed. Plenty of us did, but we'd knock them over or scratch them out once we were done.

Until the blizzard of 2024.

The Corners is known for the weird. We have our own necromancer, we have witches and even a werewolf family. There was a man that got kidnapped by aliens at a football game back in 2018.

But that blizzard? It was beyond weird. It came in late October, days before Halloween

The day started like any other snow day. Kids yelling, parents exasperated, dogs barking, and that almost crystalline air cutting our lungs. We played hard. The snow was piling up fast by the time a group of us made our way to the edges of the tree farm over in Ashe county, just down from the tri-point marker. Big, flat area perfect for snow fights. Nobody bothered kids there; the owner didn't even live on the land and didn't care as long as nobody wrecked the trees.

We erected walls and forts, piles of ammunition behind them, knowing from the forecasts that the snow would be falling all night and at least part of the next day. It was afternoon before any of us got the idea of making "sentries", snowmen to hide behind in forays outside of the bases.

We decorated them garishly and with horrific gusto. Twisted faces, demonic wings made of pine branches, horns and tails. It became a competition to see who could make the scariest guardian. But night came before we could make more than a few dozen. We tramped our way back up the hills and down the rutted paths we called roads.

And the storm came on. All that night, it fell hard. There were explosions in the night as trees froze and branches cracked. By the time morning came, I couldn't see my dad's truck in the drive. Big dodge diesel with the lift kit, and it was covered in snow. Snow that kept falling. My mom was getting scared, making ready for when the power failed. My dad was busy clearing a path to the truck, and another to the shed where our generator was set up. Me and my sister got put to work moving extra firewood to the porch. We forgot about the forts and the planned snow fight.

Had we remembered, nothing would have changed, as there was no way to reach the tree farm. The roads were piled high, drifts making walls of snow against the trees by their sides. No kid could have climbed and dug their way through that.

We forgot about all of it that day, and the next. By the time Halloween came, we had forgotten that any of it had been done. After all, the snow would have buried what we built.

There was no trick or treating that year. There were calls made and plans put in place for after the snow went away to set up a gathering at the crossroads where the general store and diner sat. Those plans amounted to naught.

Evening came on. As the light crept away, a howling rose. Not the howling of dogs, they huddled, shaking and whining in fear once the sound started. Not even the howling of Terry the werewolf, not that he was rude enough to howl that close to where people live.

No, this was a howl that scraped along nerves. It sparked it's way down the spine and into the guts, spreading terror in its wake. My little sister peed herself. I had to run to the toilet to throw up, my knees folding and my body trembling as that sound echoed through the hills and ripped at our souls.

And it did. I was young, had never thought about my soul, or anything like that. But the feeling of that wailing, shrieking howl tearing at something inside of me, something more than meat and bone proved my soul to me. I've never been able to abide arguments about the soul since that day. Mine had been molested by that sound.

The howl felt like forever. It felt like it had always been, and always would be, and the terror of facing am eternity of it was too much. After everything, six people took their own lives from that sound alone, across The Corners. We still consider them part of the body count from that night.

But the howl didn't last forever. It was only moments. The silence after crashed against us almost as hard as the howl. Whatever had made that sound didn't stop because it was just done howling. No, we knew the silence meant it was present. We could feel the evil ring out across the world. We just didn't know what it was going to do.

They got the Jepson family first. That's what old Mr Byrnes said later, when all the police and federal people showed up.

All of them, three adults and two kids. Something had ripped the door of their house away. Inside, only trails of water leading to pools of blood and piles of meat.

They went to the Crenshaw's place next. Same thing, though they also killed their horses and pigs. At the Pope house, Jimmy escaped, he was the first to see them and live. He ran into the woods in his pajamas and house slippers. He lost three toes to frostbite. If it hadn't been for werewolf Terry, he might have died too, lost in the bitter, bloody snows. But Terry had felt that evil take root and left his wife and kids behind in their wolf shapes to come and fight whatever it was.

Terry found Jimmy stuck in a drift, tears frozen on his face. He was in his half man shape. Jimmy screamed a little before Terry scooped him up and started running. They showed up at our place maybe an hour after the howl. We are the closest to the Pope's. My dad almost shot them through the window before he recognized Terry. Can't mistake his reddish fur once you've seen him a few times, and they're hunting buddies.

Terry brought the now unconscious boy in, his voice rumbling that something bad was coming. He said he would fight it, but that we should start calling for help because he could smell blood following him.

My mom was on the phone immediately. My dad told me to take my sister in my room, and started checking Jimmy over. I was coming back when he came down the hall carrying Jimmy. He told me to stay in there with them. I should have listened. I did stay, for a while. I stayed until I heard Terry growl, and my dad start shooting.

I couldn't just hide. I ran down the hall to see my mom loading shells into my dad's shotgun. She looked at me and started to bark some kind of order, probably to go back. But she thought better of it and handed me the shotgun instead. She grabbed a pistol, the big one with the bullets bigger than my fingers. She left the safe open and told me to stay near it and bring what they asked for, and to shoot anything that wasn't dad or Terry that came through the door.

And I did. I even shoved some magazines for my dad's rifle in my pockets so they would be ready. When my dad busted back through the door, my mom moved to it and started firing. I handed my dad the magazines, and he told me to load the ones he kicked over to me as he went back. My mom stepped in and reloaded hers.

There was a deep roar of pain before my dad opened back up. I ran to the window, drawn to see what was happening.

I saw Terry clawing at a giant, bloody snowman. One with pine branch wings. Wings I had pushed into the snow when it was clean and white. Beside them, another snowman, one with streaks of white still visible here and there, was clawing at Terry, its wooden talons the same ones my cousin had tied together out of sticks. There were more. More of them sliding across the snow outside. There were three that had fallen over, but I could see the snow pouring up and filling in the bullet holes and claw marks.

I saw maybe eight of them, moving towards Terry, as he danced away from the raking claws of the two already fighting with him. Eight. There were three times that many at the tree farm. Were these the only ones that had been changed? Or were there others out there, coming this way, or finding other victims? I didn't know the answer then. I wish I had never found the answer.

But the fight was still on. My dad would take shots at the ones getting close to Terry until he emptied the magazines. My mom or me would step in his place and fire while the other was reloading. Twenty minutes like that, I think. Maybe it was longer. But Terry was bleeding bad. Werewolves heal fast, but blood loss was slowing him down and these wounds were worse than they should be. They shouldn't have been able to really hurt him at all. It was just sticks and snow

But the pebbles we had used for eyes were glowing red. And Terry's blood was being sucked up into the wood instead of dripping.

We were running low on ammunition. My dad had to switch to another rifle. Then the shotgun was out. My mom swapped to one of the two remaining pistols. And Terry was slowing down, taking more hits.

I was certain we would all die.

Until my mom shouted out "Thank the gods!"

I looked over and saw the zombie, coming out of the woods from the north. I could see other shapes moving behind it. They were backlit by a purple glow.

They came out of the woods, moving through the snow. They were clumsy, but they were almost running. A few at the back looked nearly alive. One of those, lady in a pretty dress, did look alive. But right behind her was an old man. Mr Byrnes, holding his walking stick high, purple light radiating from the head of it. He's older than my grandfather, but he was walking straight and tall, dressed in black.

The zombies attacked the snowmen. Tearing into them with hands and teeth. Mr Byrnes' zombie dog helped them. Everybody at school liked to scare each other, saying that Timothy would get them if they trespassed on his land. That Timothy would come in the night and get you if you said anything bad about Mr Byrnes. And Timothy is scary. And ugly. But that night, I loved that Frankenstein dog. It would barrel into a snowman, sending chunks of bloody snow flying, and right behind that, Mr Byrnes would throw some kind of magic into the things. When he hit them a couple times, they didn't get back up.

When they were all down, reduced to crimson stains on the snow, he went over to Terry, and talked to him in a soft voice. They came over to the porch, limping. Mr Byrnes told my folks that there was only one more group of the evil snowmen left, for us to get inside. Him and Terry were going to go take care of the rest. He thanked my mom for calling him, and apologized it took so long to get here.

Then they were gone. The necromancer, the werewolf, the zombies. They just jogged into the woods, the zombies breaking through the snow as they went.

Our little war was over.

A lot of people died. More got hurt bad before Terry and Mr Byrnes got to the last house the snowmen were attacking.

Later on, Mr Byrnes told people that some kind of spirit crossed over. Samhain, Halloween, it's a time when the barriers between our world and the other places is thin. Here in The Corners, that barrier is thin all the time, so those times like Halloween make the barriers like wet toilet paper. Things can come here. Things that will inhabit dead bodies.

But they can inhabit things that are shaped like living creatures too. When those things are made with human creativity, of the materials of the land itself, it's easier for them to do. But snow is easiest because it takes less energy to move for the spirits.

Jimmy lives with his uncle now, over in Johnson County. Terry and his family come to visit us every month now. Him and my dad were already friends, but that night made us all family.

Just woke from a rather dark dream, had to get it down and into a raw form so I didn't lose it. Figured someone might like to see what comes out of my head at night.

---

"Doctor, report."

"Captain, there's nothing I can do. We're all going to die, it's just a matter of how fast the staph mutates."

"Fuck."

"Yes sir, I agree."

I walked away from his cabin, still clad in my isolation suit. It would buy me enough time to possibly give mercy gas to the crew. Then it would be my job to hit the erase button.

That is the worst part of the job. Knowing that I might have to not only kill everyone aboard, but be the one to burn alive at the end, if the mercy meds didn't work fast enough. Sure, on paper the blend of drugs pumped through the suit's air would work in seconds, but there are always variances in exactly how many.

When we took to the stars, humanity was free. But so were all the myriad microorganisms that we live with, the ones inside and out. There's no way to get rid of them all, and it wouldn't be a good idea anyway; the balance of them is part of what keeps us functional. You don't want to be in a tin can in the vacuum of space with your gut biome eradicated.

No, we had left our once salubrious blue-green orb with no idea what might happen regarding those microbes. When the first mutations happened and killed entire crews, it was a bit of a mystery. At first, it would cost more than a single crew, because communication ceasing after a report of an illness rapidly killing the crew would cause Control to send an investigative crew.

That crew would go aboard in full gear, only to discover that the mutations had already led to germs able to chew through them. It was almost always the ship's doctor that would still be identifiable, their suit dissolved before the infection could get to them. When there was anything left at all, anyway.

But, then the investigating crew would have already been coated in the voracious mutations, their suits compromised the second they stepped aboard.

A few lasted long enough to reach a planet. That's how Newterra was lost.

Which is why every ship's doctor is now implanted with the button. A few attempts were made to use a command code to initiate, until a crewman decided to sabotage it in fear, demanding the doctor find a cure.

Now, the button is inside us. If we die, it triggers, and the ship's engine will go boom. Makes crews very protective of their doctors, and lead to intensive psychological screening for every doctor willing to risk death between the stars after a couple snapped under the stress of carrying the button.

Normally, the doctor will have time to initiate the sequence code via a series of blinks. Sometimes, the eyes are destroyed too soon, and the button triggers after death. From first blink to boom, you have about thirty seconds to slap the suit's mercy bolus before the anti-matter erases anything and everything.

The worst part is the dice roll of it. You never know when the mutations will occur, only that they will, if the mission is long enough. The shortest time it has been recorded as starting is ten days, the longest a year. Not great odds.

So we try hard to keep ahead of things. Daily tracking of shifts in the biome, via swabs and samples. Sometimes, you can find an outbreak of the Hungry as it's starting and either delay the end, or very rarely, stop it until the staph mutates again. You find it soon enough, and maybe it hasn't spread beyond the origin point. You can wipe the area, including any crew, and maybe get all of that wave. You get lucky like that, and you can initiate a round of antibiotics and a full sanitization of the ship.

You get lucky like that, and if you're lucky enough to be close to a rely Fleet Control station, there's a possibility of the chemical regime to fully kill your entire flora, and if you get that lucky, the difficulties involved are pleasant compared to the Hungry. But the chances of being close enough to a station for that are literally astronomical.

---

The Hungry is inevitable. In zero gravity, even with the best shielding possible, there are stray bits of radiation bouncing around. You get enough of them hitting, and the bacteria we carry mutate. They're always mutating anyway, but it gets accelerated. It is staph that eventually becomes Hungry, eating anything and everything, shifting into thousands of variations that will attack anything except some metals. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually find a way to eat those. But it tends to go after organic compounds very early in the process, so nobody has lasted long enough to see it happen.

Oh, we tried to find ways to avoid it. But it only takes a single damn bacteria shifting for the process to start. Even nanobots failed; we couldn't adjust them fast enough to keep up.

---

I got back to sick bay, looking around the isolation units to see everyone had died while I was talking to the captain. Only ensign Torres was recognizable. His face was quickly being eaten, the line of it moving visibly across him.

I walked to the command console and entered the codes to initiate the mercy gas for the crew, and began my inspection patrol with the backup injections for anyone the gas didn't work fully on. Sometimes, you get weird drug resistances and crew will still be alive. There's rumours of a few people that not only didn't die, but the sedatives and euphorics weren't entirely effective, so they died awake, if not exactly fully aware.

Fifteen minutes later, I had verified everyone was gone, no need for injections. I went into an isolation unit, sealed it, and unzipped long enough to have one of my carefully hidden cigars that the captain pretended not to know I had. Then I zipped up and started blinking.

Of mice and men

Boot. Advanced armored infantry. Two years special technologies. One year xenobiology fast track. Six months variable gravity training. Six months special xenoacclimation crash course.

That's the minimum to be considered for Project Gojira. United Sol Forces created Project Gojira in response to our accidental first contact with the Sleekit, our name for the ultrasonic shriek of a name of the diminutive, rodent like peoples of Kapteyn b.

We first attempted to colonize the planet, with it's compatible atmosphere, stable tectonic activity, and rich soil.

Almost all life on land was miniscule. Insects rarely big enough to see as more than a cloud during breeding swarms, mammal akin to mice, shrews, and similar sizes, with some degree of visual similarity as well. There were large predators on land, but they typically avoided the rich plains best for our agricultural needs.

The real life was in the sea. Man sized and larger mammals, like small elephants with trunks specialized for spearing and sucking up coastal mammals. Amphibians roughly the size of ponies that would wade ashore for hours at a time, snaking meters long tongues into the borrows of the land life. And more, Kaptayn b ran high to large sea life, with dozens of examples that fed either at the coast, or could move inland for days or more during their annual mating seasons. These life forms were the largest on Mousehole, the unofficial nickname of the planet. The initial scouts gave it a different name officially, but Mousehole is what everyone uses, even the natives.

The first wave of colonists sent reports of unusually persistent infestations of one species. The mouse like critters would make ruin of food storage, and had been caught chewing or otherwise attempting to destroy comm gear.

The colony had sent requests for pest control poisons, which mandated a visit from a biologist.

Darla Gaines is credited as the first contact with the Sleekit, as well as their common name. Upon seeing one of their leaders climbing her leg, she spoke the famous line of the poem. Then she saw that leader hold up a tiny piece of paper with writing on it.

Humans were no longer alone in the universe. It took the Sleekit time to determine our intent. They used that time to study much of our technology, often from the inside.

It was only luck that had the initial colony farm a quarter mile away from the closest underground city. Far enough they didn't feel us to be an immediate threat, close enough their rapid fire brains could study us with ease.

Sleekit are smart. Not just smart for their size. It's difficult to directly compare intelligence between aliens and humans, but the prep files I was given said that their equivalent of an idiot could still out math most humans.

They are also excellent engineers. But they have the limit of their size. This placed a degree of difficulty in manufacturing that left them with very little military development. Their weapons tended to be of little use against their natural predators unless they fought, and died, in the thousands to stop just one of what they called monsters.

Their early warning systems were excellent though, and they breed like the mice they resemble. It did result in a form of limitation to their technology beyond survival needs. They couldn't build up because their monsters would destroy entire cities with the flick of a tentacle. Burrowers by nature, they built down, and built defensively.

Until they met us. Their warble for us is something akin to "least dumb monster", though the official files say it's "smart kaiju" instead.

Once communication was established, our species found a beneficial working agreement with ease. A simple fighter like me can't begin to understand what they do, but Sleekit are apparently superior with manufacturing semi and super conducting materials, particularly for computing. We can produce better alloys than they could do anything but dream of. Now, every human ship has a secondary set of crawlways for our not timrous friends.

Me? I'm just here to keep them safe from the monsters. I'm contracted for ten years. I guard the entries to their tunnels from the predators that held them back for so long.

The job isn't easy. Because of the need to not ruin the ecology, I can't just kill the kaiju as they come. I have to kill only as the absolute final option. A few species are easy enough, they're vulnerable to one sedative or another. The rest just aren't. The reptile and octopus like kaiju in particular don't seem to respond to any external chemicals.

I once wrote a letter home and told my sister that the job was like wrestling bears with roid rage, only the bears had even bigger teeth and tentacles with mouths at the end. I call those Cthulpoohs, because they really like the honey pot that is a Sleekit city.

I go out in the USF modified power armor at least once a month, the trademarked giant lizard emblazoned on the chest.

The Sleekit have gunned the suit up far beyond the standard issue. Guided needle rockets with neurodisruptive electronic pulse warheads, aka headache bombs. The "hot peppers", a subdermal stimulation warhead needle missile that generates a heat field beneath the skin that's supposed to be like bathing in pepper spray if you were all eyes.

Even force indicated, special targeting custom fighting flyers. I'm pretty sure they made the name up after it was designed, but F.I.S.T.Cu.F.Fs are impressive. Nothing like hitting the deployment button and having a rocket powered fist leave the arm of your suit, punch an octoturtle, and fly back to you.

All of this to protect the ability of our allies to freely access their traditional breeding grounds.

Yours in kinship, Lt Regis K. Ong, supervising officer, planetary Gojira forces, Mousehole, Kaptayn.

Winter can come early in the mountains. We can get snow here in The Corners as early as September, though it never lasts.

All of us kids growing up would still run out to play in it while it lasted though. Snow meant that the narrow mountain roads would be unsafe for buses, so as soon as the flakes fell, freedom rang out across the hills for us.

The crisp, cold air would be split by the shrieks of all ages, throwing balls of the white at each other, or of sleds crashing into the very ditches and brush that the adults feared would be the resting place for the buses.

But all of us, every one, would be told "No snowmen! No snow angels either!"

Those early snows rarely held long enough for forts and other construction, but those were not banned. Only shapes in human form, and only right around Halloween. This isn't to say that every kid always obeyed. Plenty of us did, but we'd knock them over or scratch them out once we were done.

Until the blizzard of 2024.

The Corners is known for the weird. We have our own necromancer, we have witches and even a werewolf family. There was a man that got kidnapped by aliens at a football game back in 2018.

But that blizzard? It was beyond weird. It came in late October, days before Halloween

The day started like any other snow day. Kids yelling, parents exasperated, dogs barking, and that almost crystalline air cutting our lungs. We played hard. The snow was piling up fast by the time a group of us made our way to the edges of the tree farm over in Ashe county, just down from the tri-point marker. Big, flat area perfect for snow fights. Nobody bothered kids there; the owner didn't even live on the land and didn't care as long as nobody wrecked the trees.

We erected walls and forts, piles of ammunition behind them, knowing from the forecasts that the snow would be falling all night and at least part of the next day. It was afternoon before any of us got the idea of making "sentries", snowmen to hide behind in forays outside of the bases.

We decorated them garishly and with horrific gusto. Twisted faces, demonic wings made of pine branches, horns and tails. It became a competition to see who could make the scariest guardian. But night came before we could make more than a few dozen. We tramped our way back up the hills and down the rutted paths we called roads.

And the storm came on. All that night, it fell hard. There were explosions in the night as trees froze and branches cracked. By the time morning came, I couldn't see my dad's truck in the drive. Big dodge diesel with the lift kit, and it was covered in snow. Snow that kept falling. My mom was getting scared, making ready for when the power failed. My dad was busy clearing a path to the truck, and another to the shed where our generator was set up. Me and my sister got put to work moving extra firewood to the porch. We forgot about the forts and the planned snow fight.

Had we remembered, nothing would have changed, as there was no way to reach the tree farm. The roads were piled high, drifts making walls of snow against the trees by their sides. No kid could have climbed and dug their way through that.

We forgot about all of it that day, and the next. By the time Halloween came, we had forgotten that any of it had been done. After all, the snow would have buried what we built.

There was no trick or treating that year. There were calls made and plans put in place for after the snow went away to set up a gathering at the crossroads where the general store and diner sat. Those plans amounted to naught.

Evening came on. As the light crept away, a howling rose. Not the howling of dogs, they huddled, shaking and whining in fear once the sound started. Not even the howling of Terry the werewolf, not that he was rude enough to howl that close to where people live.

No, this was a howl that scraped along nerves. It sparked it's way down the spine and into the guts, spreading terror in its wake. My little sister peed herself. I had to run to the toilet to throw up, my knees folding and my body trembling as that sound echoed through the hills and ripped at our souls.

And it did. I was young, had never thought about my soul, or anything like that. But the feeling of that wailing, shrieking howl tearing at something inside of me, something more than meat and bone proved my soul to me. I've never been able to abide arguments about the soul since that day. Mine had been molested by that sound.

The howl felt like forever. It felt like it had always been, and always would be, and the terror of facing am eternity of it was too much. After everything, six people took their own lives from that sound alone, across The Corners. We still consider them part of the body count from that night.

But the howl didn't last forever. It was only moments. The silence after crashed against us almost as hard as the howl. Whatever had made that sound didn't stop because it was just done howling. No, we knew the silence meant it was present. We could feel the evil ring out across the world. We just didn't know what it was going to do.

They got the Jepson family first. That's what old Mr Byrnes said later, when all the police and federal people showed up.

All of them, three adults and two kids. Something had ripped the door of their house away. Inside, only trails of water leading to pools of blood and piles of meat.

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