White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (3 page)

“No, Daddah.”

“You sure?”

“I love the big trucks!” his son replied, not quite perceiving what he was asking of him. It was
true, the boy reveled in cars, trucks, diggers, and bulldozers. If there had been an oil delivery, he would have surely recollected it. He caught a glinting smile from Paulie. The kid’s brain was all caught up in trucks now. Christian couldn't help but smile back at the boy, but behind that smile, he couldn't help but think about how royally fucked they were.

Chapter Three

"Dan’s on the fritz. He’s wigging out, just admit it."

"There isn't a damn thing wrong with Dan. He's just as accurate as ever. This has nothing to do with Dan.
Just give me some time to figure it out, see what’s ailing him."

"Protective, are we?
Like it's your kid or something."

"Th
is station pays good money for Doppler Dan. He saw the Hurricane of Oh-Seven way before Channel 8. Channel 6 didn't even pick up on the storm patterns even when we were in the middle of it. Doppler Dan is the best in the business. You hear that, Tammy?
The best.
"

"Jack... please
listen to me. Don’t worry if Dan is a little off his game today. He hasn't been upgraded in four years, for Christ's sake."

"We can't afford the upgrade. It'll double the monthly lease.
We can barely keep our jobs lately, let alone, cutting edge shit like Doppler Dan."

"Isn't that the station's problem? Not yours. You should have
just upgraded it when we had the chance. Doppler Dan can't see two inches in front of his face."

"Stop that. Stop that talk right now."

"Have you ever tried to make love to Doppler Dan? Have you ever pleasured yourself while sitting in front of Dan? Jack, you're a
naughty boy
, aren't you?"

"I think you're having a laugh at my expense and I don't appreciate it... Dammit, Dan, you hear me? Give me the scoop on this storm.
All this fuzz, all over the screen. It doesn't make sense. It's like the signals are being scrambled. Everything is on the fritz, not just Dan. I tried to call Channel 6--the rotten bastards-- and I could barely hear them on the other end. The phone lines aren't too far away from shutting down. The ice is snapping the lines, I heard it out the window."

"I'm scared, Jack."

"Same here."

"You think we're going to lose power?"

"I can almost guarantee it. I'd say it's going to shut off any time now. The patterns of moisture are like a law of nature--the ocean evaporates into the clouds or something like that, and then the clouds move around and then they get over land and drop the moisture as precipitation. There's only so much of that stuff. Eventually, it has to stop, right?"

"You're an awful weather man, you know that? Listen to yourself. You sound like a middle-schooler describing weather patterns. You'd be screwed without Doppler Dan, wouldn't you?"

"Bet your ass I would. I don't pretend to be something I'm not."

"Jack, sweetie, I think you've made a career of
just that."

"Come on, Danny Boy. Show papa what's happenin’ out
there."

Doppler Dan chirped, its fans whirring in delight, though its display gave nothing but garbled green and black geometric shapes, intermingling like an Impressionist painting.
Tammy couldn't remember it ever looking so damned confused, so worn, and purely blitzed. Had one of the maintenance men or cleanup crews been fucking around with Doppler Dan? Was it possible that somebody was sabotaging Jack, messing with his career?

“I’ll look like an idiot if I
don't have Dan fully functional again. I’m not sure I---,” said Jack, pausing and moaning, staring down at Tammy, "what are you
doing
?"

"What do you
think
I'm doing?"

Jack let out a long exhalation, then said,
"Can we go into the other room? I don't feel right, having you do that to me... in here."

Tammy rolled her eyes.

"I know what this is
really
about. Are you afraid Dan might see?"

Tammy went back to
work. It wasn't so bad, being Jack Helford's assistant. The pay was okay, the perks were rudimentary, and it was easy work. Sure, he didn't possess an iota of knowledge about the world of meteorology, but that didn't mean he wasn't a damn fine weatherman. All the ladies out there thought of Jack when they hugged their pillows at night.

Tammy thought
very little about The Rules. It was obvious that The Rules were going to mean less and less in the coming days. The population was getting stupid, so she planned to go right along on that ride. The Rules were bending—breaking, really—and she wasn’t the only one engaging in behavior that she normally wouldn’t have.

Like Doppler Dan, she felt a frizzy tick in the back of her
processing unit, something that she couldn’t put her finger on. It wasn’t just a weather event that they were experiencing. She was certain. The snow was just a catalyst to something bigger. Tammy couldn’t recollect the last time she’d been in a church, or had even cast a second thought in the purported God’s direction, but she could sense something bigger at work. Not necessarily bad, but different from anything she’d experienced before.

Jack was married. That was a Rule. Jack was her boss. That was another Rule.

“Fuck the rules,” she said, as Jack tucked himself back into his pants and led her away from Doppler Dan’s prying eyes.

*
* *

"It's all about distribution of weight. Winnie didn't understand that, and that's why I bet she’s dead by now. Usually, the snow gets compacted by cars and footsteps. The only thing compacting the snow is the sheer mass of itself, as it gets deeper and deeper. The upper four or five feet worth will be loose enough to sink into if we’re not careful about it. We'll sink into it like a stone if we don't distribute our weight evenly. Simple physics."

Tony
's plan seemed ridiculous, especially as he amassed the materials to construct what he referred to as a "bitchin’ snow raft." She'd chuckled at the idea, more out of a nervous sensation that they should stay put and wait a little longer to see if help would come. Tony was hard at work formulating the plan all week, searching through the supply rooms for items to build his “bitchin’ snow raft.”

Annie
stared at the contraption he’d created. She tried not to laugh, for it might very well be the thing that stood between her and death, if he was on point about its integrity. Tony, during one of his quiet stretches where he wandered off into the lower levels of the building, had put together a pair of skis and the hull of a wheelbarrow. He managed to remove the undercarriage and wheel from the bottom of the wheelbarrow, bolting wooden blocks into place beneath. Then he’d secured the device deeper still, into a pair of red, white, and blue skis. It looked as if he’d removed the bindings from the skis, to create a flat surface to append his raft-slash-sled to. A long piece of plywood was screwed into the skis as well, to help support the weight of the wheelbarrow’s hull, as well as their collected body weights.

“I found some
industrial strength bolts in the supply room. Just about ripped my palm open cranking them in by hand though. After I drilled the holes into the skis, the power drill was pretty drained. All the backup batteries were already dead, too. Next time we see Harry, remind me to flick him in the nose for not keeping those charged,” said Tony. Harry was the maintenance man for the building, who was more often found snoozing with a newspaper spread across his lap than repairing the perpetually leaky toilets.

She studied the
cart. The bright yellow wheelbarrow wasn’t metal, so it wouldn’t hold in the cold as much, something she’d be grateful for. Instead, it was some sort of lightweight plastic polymer. She still didn’t understand how they were going to transport themselves eight miles in this hodgepodge carriage, but she assumed Tony was one step ahead of her.

Smirking at the sight of the thing, she asked,
"Where the hell did you get a pair of skis?"

"Eddie from accounting.
He keeps them in his office, tucked in the corner. I think he does cross country skiing during lunch or something. I’ve never seen him actually do it, so maybe he only intends to. Lucky for us, right?"

Speaking of lunch
, thought Annie. Her stomach grumbled at her. If her stomach had lips, it would have been pouting since Saturday. They wholly raided the vending machine during the first week, and then they started scrambling through people's desks, pulling out anything edible. Most people kept at least a candy bar in their work areas. Winnie had an entire case of peanut-butter filled pretzels in her office. She reluctantly shared them with Annie and Tony, but they ran out the day before. The bizarre thought that Winnie had given up on life because she ran out of snacks suddenly torqued inside of Annie. She wasn't sure if she was about to laugh or cry.

Tony
kept talking, as if he couldn’t keep a lid on his mouth. This whole experience was actually thrilling to him. Annie was starting to wonder if he was worrying about his wife and children at all. In fact, she couldn’t recall him making a single cell phone call home. He said, "I watched this thing on Siberian fur traders a couple months ago. Do you know they live out in the woods, in fifty below weather for about four months straight? They trek through the woods in snow as deep as their waistline. Skis help to distribute the weight for anything that hasn't been packed down by something like a snowmobile. If we get on my raft here, it'll distribute the weight enough to keep us on the surface. We’ll sink if we stay still, but I don’t plan on stopping for anything at all."

"
In case you haven’t noticed, I'm not a Siberian fur trapper," observed Annie. It was true; she was the furthest thing from tough, and she loathed the bitter cold. She often regretted choosing to live in New England because of that. But there wasn't really a choice in the matter at this point. Her livelihood was on the line.

"We'll be fine. The first stretch
I’ve got planned for us is only a couple of miles. If we can make it to The Purple Cat without incident, then we'll be all good. They'll have all kinds of supplies there and a big old fireplace. We can wait it out through the rest of this storm."

The Purple Cat was a
n atrocious idea, especially for the sake of her teetering marriage, and it wasn’t the first time Tony had surfaced it. She pictured that roaring hearth in the bar, with Tony spreading out a thick blanket, raiding the wine cellar. It was not something that Annie wanted even to think about. The bastard was always on the hunt, only thinking with his engorged phallus.

She didn't want to go to The Purple
Cat, not to rest or get warm or to raid their food supplies, although a warm meal might calm her nerves. Annie just wanted to be home, with her baby boy, warm and cuddling him close to her. The idea of hanging around an abandoned restaurant didn’t settle right with her, especially assuming other people hadn't gotten the same simple idea, that being,
“go where the food is.”
Tony wasn’t the only one to think that way. A typical restaurant had enough food to feed an army. It was quite possible that they would encounter an actual army.

That aside, she couldn’t help but air her skepticism about the mode of transportation.
"Are we going to test this thing out first? What if it doesn’t work?" She asked, squirming for a way to get out of leaving behind a relatively safe environment. In reality, she was terrified of what was left of the world, of what lurked beyond the iced over windows. Her eyes couldn’t bear to look at the ice-laden mess that her planet had become since last she was outdoors.

An air of confidence overtook
Tony’s facial features, almost to the threshold of cockiness. It reminded her of her father for a moment, and the comparison nearly made her squirm. "I guarantee this will work. It warmed up a bit this morning, not enough to melt it, but enough to harden the surface just a tad," Tony said. “That might be our saving grace. If we’re going to leave, it should be today.” He tapped his hand on his jury-rigged snow sled. “It’s sort of like a pontoon boat. You’ll sit in the carriage like a pretty princess (Annie resisted the urge to make a gagging noise), and I’ll stand on the back, right behind you, and shove us around with the ski poles. I’ll be right behind you.”

Putting my crotch in your face
.
He hadn't said those words, but Annie imagined the tableau: the heroic stagecoach driver with the gargantuan bulge in his knickers, pushing the pair through treacherous, ungodly conditions, saving her life and brain-washing her with his proud codpiece staring her in the eye the whole damn way. She promised herself only to look ahead of them, to keep her eyes on the road. That is, if she decided to go with him at all.

"
I don’t see it happening. How are we better off than Winnie was when she went traipsing out into hell?"

“
Because you've got Tony on your side.” Annie loathed when people referred to themselves in the third person. “I won't let anything bad happen to you. And hell, if the sled thing doesn't work, I'll put you up on my shoulders and march you all the way to The Purple Cat. And I’ll even cook you a nice dinner when we get there. I make a kick-ass chicken parmesan. Or eggplant parmesan, if they have any eggplant on hand.”

There it was again. He
did not intend to bring her home. Of course he didn't. That was where he would lose her forever, once she was near Christian’s sphere of influence again, trying to make everything better the way Christian always did. If this was indeed
the end of the world
(as many of the pundits were preaching before the cable lines went out), then this was Tony’s last opportunity to secure Annie as his end-of-the-world plaything. Annie wished that she was just being paranoid, like a petite teenage girl walking alone in an unlit parking lot, but she knew that there was something seedy about Tony’s intentions. There always had been; it was all spoken through his sharking eyes, caressing every inch of her body whenever he felt the urge, standing over the top of her cubicle (
look how tall I am!
), smiling and asking her how her weekend was (
I went bungee jumping!
), slurping on a cup of cold coffee out of his kitschy “Hang In There” mug (
I can slurp on
your
desperate little kitty, too!
).