White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (20 page)

Chapter One

No keys.
No keys. No keys. No-fucking-keys!

She could feel her body warming again and something deep inside her told
her ravaged body to stay put, hunker down, and to fight back against her tormentors when they returned and show them the bloody hell that they had unknowingly released. Running away would only make things worse, because they would surely find her. If she ran away, they would treat it like a game. Wolves don’t know how to act like anything but wolves. There is a modicum of pride in the hunt of an innocent jackrabbit.

They’ll follow your snowmobile tracks. These guys are hunting types, probably killed their first buck by the age of ten. You think they’re going to let a pretty little thing like you escape? You think they don’t want to go for seconds
and thirds and fourths, like you’re a ten-dollar breakfast buffet, digging themselves and their filthy little nubs deep down inside of your panties? You think they won’t want to decimate anybody that can speak ill will of them to the police? They’re going to kill you, Annie. K-I-L-L… only one way to spell it, baby cakes. They’re going to rape you again and again, maybe even ten times for good measure, and then they’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill you HARD. You killed one of theirs, Annie. You know what that means, right? You killed one of their brood, and there is no greater sin to a pack of beasts.

“Where are they?” she asked The Midget
Man’s corpse (which was warm, but getting colder with every passing second), half expecting him to open his eyes and answer her. If he did, it wouldn’t surprise her. A lot weirder things had happened in the past month. “Where are the keys, you little shit stain?”

She pushed his body over
with her numb foot, feeling in his back pockets.

Nothing there, either.

Tick tock, tick tock. Here comes
the Bald One’s cock.

She wished that nasty side of her mind would curl up and die. It was the same voice that she heard when she’d cheated on Christian, the same side that came to life that time she had slashed her ex-boyfriend’s tires in college, the same voice that had plagiarized her final thesis paper in Business Management class, the same voice that once told her she should run away from her family, to get on a bus and never look back
.
It’s okay, you’ll do just fine when you don’t have to take care of that little brat and that man-child with the Buddha-belly gut and the charming smile. Yeah, Annie, get on that bus and suck the first dick you sit next to and see how much cash you can get for that little treat, and keep going until you’re in the penthouse and equipped with fake boobies and champagne and bunch of friends with similar habits.

The voice came and went, but it always spoke the same language.

Annie looked towards the window.
There was still no sign of The Shiny Bald One and his entourage, but she had a digging instinct in her stomach that they would be back within the hour. She didn’t know how she knew this. Mother’s instinct, perhaps… knowing when your child was about to take a nasty spill on the floor or bump their head on the corner of the cabinet, even well before they made the doomed movement.

The Midget Man didn’t have the keys, so Annie moved on to the kitchen and the
cluttered bar area, scanning every surface and nook for the keys. Had The Shiny Bald One taken the keys so that this wouldn’t happen? It seemed quite possible that he didn’t trust The Midget Man… who would, in fact? The Shiny Bald One was smart. Smarter than the rest of them, at the very least.

She pushed through the silver swinging doors
of the kitchen galley, scanning the short hallway between the bathroom and the dining area.
Nothing here, nothing there, nothing anywhere.
Returning to the bar, she first considered grabbing a bottle of something hard and going to town, waiting for them to return, but then she changed it up and started to think like a small person. Midget Man was easily nine inches shorter than she was, so she hunched herself over, looking around at what would have been his eye level, feeling completely ridiculous, though nobody—she
hoped
—was watching her.

Underneath the bar, she discovered a transparent bin full of dried out limes. She
rooted around in there, desperate to leave no stone unturned. Nothing, still. Behind the bar, she shifted the bottles around, looking between them. She wouldn’t drink them, though it seemed like an easier option to the current predicament.

Returning to the fire
’s side, Annie caught herself staring at the tiny blue flames that still hung on for dear life, transfixed by the sight. She next looked to The Midget Man’s corpse again, thinking she might give him another search, when she saw the key on the floor, catching a faint glint of the dying flames. It must have fallen out of his pocket when she’d speared him. It landed somewhere between his body and the fireplace during their struggle, waiting for her to come along and get free.

Annie couldn’t be sure that it was
the
key, but she had no other option at this point. She looked at the writing on the key, but it only gave the name of the key manufacturer: SECURIFLEX, and beneath that a serial number. It was her best bet. It was her
only
bet. Snatching the key from the floor, she headed directly for the front door, pulling her jacket zipped again and bracing herself for the interminable cold.

She had a new perk in her
painful trudging.

Annie kept her eyes glued to the snowmobile, just beyond her reach. Clutching the key tight in her hand, she started to pray to her suddenly revived concept of God that the gas tank would be full. That was all she needed
now, to get the son of a bitch started and find it sputter out after a few hundred yards--assuming that she now possessed the correct key.

One foot in front of the other and her mind kept quiet, no longer inciting her with rhyming limericks about
her wretched previous evening, nor her horrible brand of motherliness. She tried to recall the sound of Paulie’s voice, hoping she could recreate it and light her internal fire. She couldn’t remember his voice and Annie nearly fell to her knees in tears. Her baby was a fading memory inside of her, and she’d only just been separated from him. What if he died? Would she ever remember anything about him? Annie bit the thought in her throat and shoved it deep down inside.

The snow had drifted
considerably in the ten minutes since she’d went back inside to retrieve the key, and already the snowmobile was covered in a thin layer of white. Climbing on to the snowmobile, she ran through her father’s lessons about proper snowmobile riding. It was pretty easy, from what she recalled, but Annie had not been on a snowmobile in at least ten years, not since she was in high school. She hoped it was like riding a bike, in that you never forgot once you learned. She’d never been an expert, nor would she ever become one, but she was going to try for Paulie’s sake.

She could remember
just what her father said, almost verbatim, as if he was whispering in her ear.
Just remember that you’re in control of the rig. Don’t let it control you or it’ll fling you off and crack your neck before you even know what’s happened. Speed isn’t your friend on these bad boys, keep your head low and maneuver strategically. You get going too fast and you’re liable to---

A sound in the distance.
A terrible sound. The worst sound imaginable.

It was unmistakable--a
snowmobile approaching slowly. It was working through the snow at a diminished rate, probably from the depth of the snow. But it was coming, all the same. Fast or slow, it was coming, and in her exact direction.

Annie turned the key
and the snowmobile started on the first try. It wasn’t like in the horror movies where it took five or six tries before it finally clicked over. Finally, thought Annie, fate was working
for
her and not against her. “Thank God.” She reminded herself that if she was spared from another—
moment
—with the slimy bastards and their slimier members that she would go to church every Sunday for as long as she lived. She’d make Christian and Paulie come with her as well. They’d sing the damn songs. They’d read the damn verses. They would cheer, shout, and jump up and down,
Halle-freakin’-llujah.

She turned back toward
s the sharp curve of the road, where the awful sound was coming from. Now she could see the snowmobile, tiny and growing larger as it approached. She had at least a couple of minutes before it arrived. Could the rider see her by now? The only hope was in the fact that there was only one snowmobile and not three of them.

Don’t run, Annie.
It’s only one of them.

Annie revved the engine with the handle grip, pushing forward a few feet. She had her bearings. She could do this whole snowmobile thing, no sweat.

Annie, stop. Stop. Don’t act like a coward or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. The others aren’t coming yet. Listen close--you can only hear one engine so he must be way ahead of the other two. Take this
motherfucker
out. Grab that gun. Annie, get your gun. Annie, get-your-gun. Annie, get your fucking gun!

Annie froze, pondering all the instincts that were telling her to flee, while simultaneously weighing those against th
at terrible, monstrous mother-slash-whore-slash-semen-dumpster that lived inside of her, those brutal pulses that told her to
kill-kill-kill
, to make up for what they’d done to her, though that could never be fully healed. Annie was sure that she would die with thoughts of it.

Turning the ignition off on the snowmobile, she braced herself.

She palmed the gun that was tucked into her jacket pocket. She’d never shot one before, but she’d seen it plenty of times in the movies. Charles Bronson. Clint Eastwood. Steven Seagal. She pictured all of them from her memories, taking stances and positioning their arms nice and stiff, coolly wrapping their fingers around the trigger. There would only be one chance, as the approaching snowmobiler would be off and shooting with return fire only seconds after the first bullet hit (or more likely,
missed
) him.

A voice came from afar, from the
approaching snowmobiler. The tone of that voice didn’t seem alarmed at all, and in fact, it had a pitch to it that almost implied a sense of whimsy or joking.

That’s because he doesn’t know it’s you. He thinks you
’re Midget Man. Crouch low, just like when you were looking for those keys. Crouch low and teach this creep a lesson once he gets close enough. Act like that short stack, and let him get nice and close, and then you shoot his fucking face off. Do it, Annie. Do it.

She drew the
insulated hood tight on her jacket, pulling the drawstring, hoping to conceal her face for the most part. Crouching on the opposite side of the snowmobile, trying her best to look comfortable and short and breast-less, she felt partially shielded by the drifts of snow that her enemy combatant was toiling through. Now she could hear his voice more clearly, “Where’s the bitch? Didn’t kill her did ya’?”

Annie contemplated responding for a moment, but resisted
that urge. Even if she masked her voice, it would not buy her much time. The snowmobiler would be close enough to shoot at… any second now. Playing quiet was a smarter move than exposing herself as a fraud.

You’ve always been a fraud, though, haven’t you?
As a wife. As a mother.

“Shut the fuck up,” she whispered to herself.

“You hear me?” his voice echoed. It wasn’t The Shiny Bald One and it wasn’t The Yeti, based on the general shape and size of the body and the sound of the voice. It was The Chuckle Machine, who she had only heard disturbed cackles from thus far. Unless it was somebody else altogether, which might be a blessing.

No. It was The Chuckle Machine. No such luck for another wayward, terrified stranger in the cold.

On the back of his snowmobile, it looked like he had large cardboard boxes strapped into place, most likely filled with groceries or supplies of some sort. Or maybe guns. They had said something the night before about Pepper’s purported arsenal, which would only make them more dangerous to her and to the world in general.

And all Annie had
at her side was a dinky six-shooter that made her feel like an ill-equipped cowboy. It was small and silver. She always expected her first gun to be bigger than this one, to be something closer to what Dirty Harry might have brandished. She wasn’t even entirely sure that this one was real. Maybe The Midget Man couldn’t be trusted with a real weapon, so Mister Shiny had given him a beginner pellet gun or even a child’s toy. Annie pictured herself pulling the trigger and just like with the Wiley Coyote, a little white flag would come out the barrel, unfurling to reveal the word
BANG!

She used her left hand to pull back on the little nub at the top, like they did in the movies.
The
hammer
? Was it called the hammer? She seemed to remember Christian calling it that once, like it was the thing that clubbed the bullet and sent it flying.

Speaking of bullets… sh
e wasn’t even sure that the thing was loaded, and in fact, had no clue how to verify it one way or another. The only true test for whether it was loaded was to cock back the
hammer-thingy
and pull the trigger. If it made a bang and the bastard’s head exploded, then it was loaded. If it didn’t, then—Annie chose not to think about that scenario. Instead, she reached the gun out in his direction, narrowing her left eye as she aimed it at the approaching chuckler.