MicroHorror

The snowmen were getting smarter. And their army grew daily.

At first, despite its strangeness, it was more of an annoyance than a serious threat. Snowmen, alone or in pairs, rolled up to people walking and accosted them, as best they could with their thin stick arms. A simple push bowled them over and left the snowman flailing on the lawn.

Eventually they discovered how to pull each other up. And they began collecting into groups of three and four, safety in numbers proving to be a good idea for snowmen too. Next they started using the brooms and shovels they were decorated with as weapons to harass people to stay indoors, keeping the citizenry isolated and barricaded against this winter enemy. At night they roamed the front yards like sentries, maintaining an ominous watch.

Later we discovered they were using the nighttime to build more snowmen. Soon snowmen wearing mittens learned how make and lob snowballs, actually ice balls, at passing cars and buses, cracking windows, and hitting any individual foolish enough to venture outside when a roving gang of them were in the neighborhood.

After a successful ice ball attack, as if in triumph, a faint, cold, wheezy sound came from the snowmen like some kind of otherworldly, demonic laughter.

Things got serious then. The town was under siege. That was when the snowmen upped the ante; they learned to use their carrot noses as knives, and throw, with amazing accuracy, their rock buttons. Top hats became boomerang weapons while brooms and shovels functioned as quarterstaffs and battleaxes, respectively.

No human was safe any longer. It was war–ironically, the ultimate Cold War. And the enemy could rebuild himself and make as many more troops as there was snow.

Snow. Right in the middle of this nightmare, it began snowing. The snowmen were getting reinforcements, and there was nothing we humans could do about it.

Then the snowmen got clever. While forcing us to stay inside, the snowmen disrupted the telephone system, disabled the electricity, and froze the town’s water supply and gas station tanks. Many melted that night in the attempt, but more snowmen were quickly created. All cell phones had been mysteriously in a dead zone since the snowmen appeared.

People starting dying, found frozen in the morning, mouths and lungs full of snow when they tried to escape. The snowmen were preparing for the final assault. The end was here, and it would be a cold one.

On Christmas Eve, a wind came up. Snowmen all over the city looked overhead at the dark sky in anticipation of new snow. Nature seemed to be supporting them. Our hope had run out.

But the next morning held a surprise. The wind turned out to be a warm one, blowing in from the west, and steadily raised the temperature. The clouds overhead were gone and bright sunlight streamed through, helping melt the ground snow and warm things up. The temperature climbed into the forties, and pandemonium erupted.

Snowmen rolled about in panic and various degrees of melting. Some had lost most of their faces, the coal eyes and carrots had dropped off, their rock mouths drooped in grotesque patterns, leaving them helpless. Many had no limbs left, the streets littered with flopping tree branches and desperately flexing mittens.

People came outside and stared, transfixed by the spectacle. In thirty minutes, the snowmen were gone, reduced to thick water, muddy ice and collapsed accessories. The reign of terror was over as quickly as it had begun.

No one ever spoke about those few frightening days, and people went on with their ordinary, everyday lives, putting the whole strange ordeal behind them, acting as though nothing unusual had ever occurred.

No one knew why it had happened, or tried to find out the reason, but silently, inside our safe, warm houses, we all wondered what would happen when next winter came. We hoped it would be a warm, dry one.