White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (2 page)

Chapter Two

The sun shone high in the sky, bombarding the planet with shimmering rays. It wouldn’t last, and Winnie understood that by this point, it was a tease. The sun had come out a day earlier as well, only to scamper back behind the clouds.

             
It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the wind continued to whip hard against Winnie’s face. Daggers of pain shot through her cheeks and forehead.

This is the end, isn't it? Look at all that white, as far as you can see.
This might be the last thing you ever see. Don't you wish you had stayed behind with Tony and Annie?

“I need to feed my cats,” she whispered, though she couldn’t be sure if she said it out loud or simply to herself.

Your cats are dead. It’s been four weeks. Unless they figured out how to use a can opener, all four of them are lined up at the window, frozen on the back of your easy chair, waiting for their mother to come home. You should have stayed behind. They could have saved you, Winnie.

Winnie
couldn’t feel anything below her waist.

A phantom numbness
exponentially spread through her limbs, buried beneath the snow. With every labored step she took, she sank deeper and deeper, until her entire lower half was compacted in the snow, as if she'd been dropped from an airplane. It was almost an icy quick sand. She didn't stand a chance of digging herself out, not unless the sun stayed out for several hours.

And just like that, the sun disappeared. A snowflake landed on
Winnie’s nose and she clenched her eyes shut, praying for the sun to return. “My blessed Jesus Christ, I’ve always loved you and you’ve always loved me. Please turn on the sun again, make it shine. Make this all melt so I can get home and be warm with my kitties. Please protect them until I can make it there. Oh, Jesus, I beg of you.”

The sky turned dark and the vicious little voice inside of her head started to laugh at this desperation in faith.

Fool.

Now it was time to panic. "
Tony! Annie! Help me!" She called out into the gray sky, trying to crane her neck back towards the south where her co-workers might hear her and come to her rescue.

Scream, piggy, scream. Don't you wish you hadn't shoved all those double cheeseburgers in your mouth? Don't you wish you'd eaten a damn salad just once in your life? Now you're sinking deeper into this God forsaken snow, one inch at a time, drowning in
your bad decisions. Dive, piggy, dive! See if you can find the bottom. Maybe there’re some chicken wings down there. You’re sinking like a rock, but you always have been, haven’t you?

"Help me," she repeated, this time
in a scratchy, strangulated voice that she barely recognized as her own. Her energy was dwindling with every pained, frozen breath. She looked down at her chest, realizing that she could no longer feel her pendulous breasts. They’d probably frozen. Maybe they had shattered altogether. Her only real physical asset, and she was certain that her nipples had fallen off from frostbite.

Inhaling deep into her chest,
Winnie stared out at the blinding white, grappling for a bit of serenity. She couldn't move her legs or her hips. If somebody didn't come along soon (whoever the hell that might be), then this was where her body might remain for all eternity, unless Jesus himself came and dug her up. But Jesus probably had a lot of other dead people to exhume first.

When and if the
snow melted, it would expose her corpse to the survivors of this madness.

Stop it.
It's not going to end. Tony's an idiot, but he was right. This is the beginning of the end—the next Ice Age. It has begun, this apocalypse. Aren't you sad you're going to miss all the fireworks? Didn’t you always secretly dream about this day? All those lonely nights, and those never-ending weekends where nobody would know if you were dead or alive, except your mangy kittens? You craved this day, and here it is. Sitting in a big pile of snow, looking like a dolt to God above, and wishing you had a cheeseburger more than a helicopter to pull you out of this quicksand.

Winnie
always assumed, even from a young age that her obesity would claim her by the age of forty. The idea that she'd made it all the way to fifty-five years old was a miracle in and of itself. The years had been unreasonably cruel to her, but not as cruel as she'd been to herself. Her mother warned her of the path she was taking, and here it was in full fruition. Death by sinking.

A drift of white blasted across the surface of her snowy grave, catching her on the chin, stinging
like a bee. She could feel her bottom lip starting to crystallize and snap. The snow wasn't even the worst part. The bitter cold was deadly. Before she’d left, stealing away in the middle of the night like a teenage runaway, the thermometer outside her office window had registered at twenty-six degrees below zero. Not exactly an uncommon temperature for New England, but not in March.

It's going to stop
soon
, she coached herself, fighting back against the nastier half of her unraveling brain.
And when it stops, they'll come find me. And this will end. And I'll get warm. And they'll bring me home. We'll eat soup and watch old black and white movies while we recover.

The other half
giggled.

Soup?
You thick-headed piggy. You'll be dead in an hour. Deader than disco, bitch.

Winnie
clenched her eyelids shut; exhaling, though it pained her to do so. She approached a false serenity, hoping it would release her from this hell. She tried to open her eyes again, to stare at that pristine snow and ponder God, the universe, and everything in between.

But
now she couldn't open her eyes. They’d frozen shut. She tried to lift her arms, to pry them open, but found that they too were unresponsive.

“
Peepers, Jingles, Bobo, Margie,” she mumbled her cats’ names off one by one, starting to drift into some childish fantasy of walking through her grandfather's garden, where the zucchini was always a foot long and the basil was aromatic, drifting through the late spring breeze. These warm images darted through her head, just like when she went to sleep at night. Her grandfather spoke in soft whispers. He always knew the right things to say, to make her feel not so scared, to make her feel not so unworthy of kindness.

Her physical being struggled for a moment longer
, trying to pry her eyelids open by sheer will power. When she gave up that struggle, she felt much better, from frozen toe to frozen eyes.

Night night, piggy.
Night night.

Her grandfather still smelled like crushed mint leaves when he gave her the warmest hug she'd felt in a long time.

*
  *  *

"Daddah?"
Paulie asked, looking up at his father with glassy eyes, looking like he might burst into tears at any moment. "When’s Mama coming home?" he asked.

Christian
forced a smile. "Mommy will be home soon, I promise. She's still stuck at work."

Still stuck at work.
Now isn't that amusing,
thought Christian. The word “convenient” also drifted through his thoughts, but he tamped it down, wishing he could crush that nasty word into a fine powder and flush it down the toilet.

She stayed late on the night that the storm started
, claiming car problems. By midnight, she declared herself trapped until the morning came. By the next afternoon, the tone in her voice had shifted, and Christian could detect it immediately. A worm had turned inside of her, and it had nothing to do with the weather.

And on the second day, it got worse, and on the third, even worse still. Inch by inch, her excuse
s piled up like crystal snowflakes, burying the woman he once loved. He could picture her, nuzzling with Tony in the mailroom, or sitting on the Big Boss Man's desk, hand delivering each other naughty memos.

It was all in Christian's head, of course. She wouldn't dare do that to their family, no matter how much they bickered
about how they defined their family now. She wouldn't ever harm her son, even if harming her husband came very easily to her when the opportunity arose. They'd “stay together for the kids,” no matter what happened between them. It was an unspoken mandate, something that could not be broken, not even by Tony, with his smooth jaw and six-figure salary.

The heating vents ticked their warming sound, something Christian had grown incredibly attuned to since the storm began
.
That
tick-tick-tick
continued to keep Paulie and him alive for one more day. There was two more weeks’ worth of oil by Christian’s estimate, judging by the position of the little red indicator on the tank. They'd just received a delivery of heating fuel right before the storm. The oil was delivered on Annie's day off from work, when she'd taken Paulie to his yearly checkup. They usually topped off the tank, so it was actually a bit odd that there wasn’t
more
in the tank. They weren’t penny-pinching these days, so it never hurt to have a full tank of heating oil.

"
Daddah, I's cold," said Paulie, rubbing his tiny hands together.

For a four year old
, he was a tough cookie. This was the first time the kid had complained about the plummeting temperatures. The typically curious boy couldn't see out any of the windows, blocked by piles of compacted white, and he hadn't seen his mother in several weeks... but he just kept on keeping on, tough as nails. Christian remembered a flashback from his childhood, of being denied an icy pop by the ice cream truck man, because he'd been short a nickel. He could remember, in his vivid mind’s eye, rolling around on the sidewalk, thumping his fist against the cement, begging for the icy pop, as the tinkling bells of the truck drifted deep into his neighborhood.

Paulie was cut from a
n altogether different cloth. If anybody could survive the storm of the century, it was he. “We'll warm up and bundle together in a little bit, right after lunch. I've got some nice black beans for you.”

His son
made a face, expressing his concern with eating black beans for the tenth lunch in a row, but it was the only staple that they had an overabundance of. Still, Paulie didn't complain. He wanted to, but he understood the shit show that his father was dealing with. Paulie was perceptive, and that instinct would serve him well in adulthood.

Christian promised himself that the first thing he'd do when the snow let up
, was to buy Paulie a Happy Meal. And they'd probably never eat black beans again. They’d eaten so many that they would probably never even go down the aisle in the grocery store that had black beans again, not unless they really needed something.

Leaning over close to his father, Paulie kicked his legs off the edge of the couch
, staring down at his feet. "My toes," he said.

"They're feeling
sorta funny?"

Paulie nodded.

"Like numb?"

Paulie looked up at his father, unsure of
what the word
numb
meant.

"Let me turn the heat up a notch," Christian said, walking across the living room, adjusting the thermostat
a single degree, from fifty five to fifty six. He kept the thermostat at seventy usually, but once they entered the second week of limited electricity, he turned it way down. He could hear the vents kicking into high gear, blowing that lovely warm air into their home. As long as the tank stayed full, and as long as the electricity stayed on, they’d be just fine. "That oughta do it."

The vents kicked louder now
, sputtered, and died. Silence filled the house.

“Dammit,” said Christian, looking over at Paulie. He hoped he hadn’t heard the cuss.

Now that Christian thought hard about it, he didn't remember seeing any new bills from the oil company. They typically received a bill within a week or so, although that was around the time that the storm first started. The mail deliveries were admittedly becoming more and more sporadic, but thanks to Skipper (their faithful mailman for more than three years), it was still coming. No way could he have missed it.

He told Paulie to hold tight while he went downstairs and checked on the tank.

Upon arrival, he found that the red indicator was still in the same position, hovering around the half tank ticker. Unscrewing the plastic covering, he leaned in closer to look at the bobber. He twisted it with his fingers and then it bobbed up and down again. A bit of rusty dust came off the neck of the bobber when he did this.

It settled at the bottom of the gauge. The bastard thing had been rusted in position.

Annie hadn’t called in the delivery. Annie had screwed them.

“Remember when you went to the doctor a few weeks back?” he asked his son
once he was back upstairs. Paulie nodded, smiling. For some reason, the kid loved going to the doctor. The only child Christian had ever known like that. “And do you remember if the big oil truck came that day? The silver and red one with the big hose that they hook up to the house?”