White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (4 page)

Tony
cleared his throat, seemingly frazzled by her silence. Something inside of her loved to watch him squirm a bit, to make him suffer for his unwelcome approaches. "Listen to me, Annie.” Yes, she thought as she raised her eyebrows, she was listening. “I'm one hundred percent confident of this. I've skied in much worse conditions than this. I got stuck in a blizzard on Sugarloaf one year. I almost died out there, but I kept my head on straight.” His face contorted, as if he was trying to convince himself that it was all true.

Of course
, it was a blatant lie, and wasn't he always one hundred percent confident in their dealings? Annie could recall dozens of occasions where he'd profess a similar cocksure declaration, where he convinced the higher-ups to pursue something fruitless and wasteful. He had an audience with some of the key players in the business, and they trusted him in all the wrong ways. He pissed away several major accounts by his boldly naïve initiatives, and he paid no repercussions for his botching measures. Men rarely paid for mistakes in the business world, or so Annie had noticed pretty early on, whereas, women would be thrown under the bus for even minor transgressions.

The overhead lights flickered on and off. The electricity was still hanging on, but just by a thread. It would give out any day now. When the electric went, they were better off hitting the road. Annie realized that and stared down at the cart. Her options were slowly evaporating.

He reached across the oddball sled, touching Annie's cheek with his index finger. Though he had a leather glove on, she could still feel his warmth through the material. In fact, his entire body seemed to emanate consistent warmth, and for a moment, Annie wanted to nestle inside of that warmth, but the image of Paulie and Christian kept dancing on the back of her consciousness. How did Tony manage to stay so contently warm? She concluded that he kept himself warm with his unsteady optimism; mind over matter, Tony was just that kind of prick.

"Trust me, babe."

She pulled away from his hand, securing the zipper on her parka. "
Don't call me that
."

"You didn't mind
a few nights ago, did you?"

It
hadn’t
happened. She was sure of it.

It was only in her imagination
, that moment of weakness and terror. How had he reached into her mind like that? Was he some sort of goddamned psychic? It hadn’t happened.
It hadn’t happened.
Not in this world. Not ever. She whispered, barely audible to the asshole across from her, pinching her eyes shut as not to look at him directly, "It was a lapse in my usually good judgment. Rest assured, it won't happen again, whether we get out of this mess or not. Please forget it ever happened. I beg of you." She regretted using the word “beg.” Tony was the kind of guy who took cues from misused verbiage.

He flipped
one of the ski poles over in his hands, studying it as he spoke. "Hell of a way to treat somebody that's trying to save your life, isn't it?"

"
Enough of this. Let's get home to our families and forget any of this ever happened."

Tony
was jammed up in an unhappy marriage. So he said.

He claimed
that it had been that way since the day they exchanged vows. He once admitted to Annie that he only married Amber, seven years his junior, because she got
knocked up
, as he so eloquently phrased it. He'd have never married her otherwise.

So he said.

They'd
only gone on three or four dates before his happy accident (now in the form of a seven-year-old named Todd and a six-year-old named Amanda) had changed his life forever.

So he said.

He spoke of Amber as if she had a terminal disease, as
though she was clutching the sheets on her deathbed. When he mentioned her name, deadness filled his eyes and mouth. Annie couldn't relate to the feeling, not with Christian. Her husband was a genuinely good man, and she was quite undeserving of his ways. She'd made that one mistake only a few nights ago, but it felt like it happened another lifetime ago. And now she felt like things would never be the same with Christian, not without a lot of work on both their parts.

Behind seeing Paulie and hugging him to death, t
hat was what drove her mounting desire to get back home most of all. To look into his eyes, to tell him what she'd done, to declare her horrible nature for him to judge, and to beg that they would make things work again, if they had ever worked in the first place. He might not forgive her, but that was a chance she was willing to take. All the snow and ice in the world couldn't keep her from returning to her baby, and from pulling out her heart and handing it over to Christian. It would be his decision when all was said and done, but she trusted he would be compassionate with her. She didn’t deserve it, but she would take it if she could get it.

Annie's stomach felt like it was full of cold spaghetti whenever she tho
ught of his face, and the way Christian’s features would melt into nothing when he found out what she'd done with Tony. Even though it was a single lapse in judgment, it was enough to break his damn heart. It might be easier, she realized, just to be a viper towards him once she saw him again, to drive him away by any means necessary. Much easier than telling the truth and exposing her weakness. But she couldn’t do that to Paulie; he loved his father too much. She’d never live with herself if she ruined the kid’s life. Truth be told,
she
also loved Christian too damn much. Eventually, it would break all of their hearts, one by one. 

Tony
brought her out of a woozy daze as he slammed his hand against the side of his contraption. "Let's not just go back to the way things were. I know you're thinking that, but you can't. I love you, Annie. Can't you see that?"

The way he smiled at her when he said that-- the L word, dripping with sticky rot-- made her skin prickle. The guy was slime, and that was something she'd known from the moment they met each other in the lunchroom room three years previous. He was
classically handsome and an up-and-coming ladder climber on their staff, but he didn't have half the heart that Christian did. If Christian was a lion, then Tony was a slug.

"You don't love anything."

"Of course I do," he replied, looking a little hurt. His hurt, like his proclamation of true love, was ninety percent feigned. There was a nugget of truth in every lie he told himself and others, just enough to be convincing. He loved himself, but little else. The way he stared at himself in the mirror said all that needed saying about Tony.

"Just get me home to my
son."

*
  *  *

Paulie and Christian found normalcy where they could. The electric was flickering on and off now, so they were happy with popping a DVD into the player when they had an hour or two of electricity. It was staying dark for longer and longer. Christian was sure that it would give out for good—or at least until the storm ceased—any day now. He was getting pretty sick of watching the damn puppet movie that Paulie was so infatuated with.

And when the electric returned, Christian would blast all four burners on the stovetop and get the stove’s temperature blasting up to five hundred degrees, both for warming a meal, even if they weren’t hungry for one,
and to give them a place to sit, huddled around the stove, Paulie sitting comfortably on Christian’s lap. They would tell stories to each other, basking in the fleeting heat. Almost all of Paulie’s stories began and ended with a monster that was either very happy or not happy at all. They didn’t have the most intricate plots, but the boy worked at it.

Christian’s stories always had the same formula: a little boy gets lost
in some place scary, and then he meets something or somebody magical (a fairy, a troll, a unicorn, a wizard), and the boy eventually finds his way home to his Mommy and Daddy. Christian had a very explainable urge to leave the Mommy out of the story, to have the little boy return only to his father. It was petty, but he couldn’t help but feel that she had purposefully stranded herself with Tony, no matter what her real story was.

Life was about as normal as it was going to be in their home, given the circumstances.

Normal, e
xcept for the layers of frost, building up on the walls like plaque. The house had descended into a deep freeze since the oil tank gave its last spurt, but the well-insulated house was retaining its inner warmth. In the last few hours, the icy death grip of the outdoors was reaching into the walls. The thermometer in the porch window was reading negative forty-five degrees.

A
thickening frost had developed on the downstairs bedroom's walls. That was where Paulie’s bedroom was, but they weren't using that room anymore. Instead, Paulie slept in Christian’s bed with him, conserving warmth beneath a bevy of blankets and afghans, so Christian had cordoned off Paulie’s room. They slept in the upstairs bedroom, in his and Annie's bed, where they had once conceived the child. Logic told Christian that heat rises, so the upstairs would be most ideal. That same rule didn't really apply when there was no heat to be found, but he figured it was as warm a bed as they were going to find.

One thing he’d
noticed, was that the basement wasn’t nearly as cold as the first floor. When he’d been retrieving canned goods earlier in the day, he was surprised by the relative warmth of the basement, being below ground level. In all likelihood, he’d move his mattress and all their blankets down to the basement if the temperature didn’t let up soon.

             
Christian rubbed his hands together, looking over a drawing that Paulie had finished off earlier in the day. It was a picture of their house, with crooked walls and an obtuse roof. Inside, he drew Christian and Paulie. They were both smiling, though it was hard to decipher with the childish interpretation. Underneath it, he wrote his name, but he gave it double A’s accidentally: PAAULIE.

"
My silly Picasso," he said to himself, weakly. His vision had been starry all morning, since their earlier meal (which he refused to call “breakfast”, for fear of ruining his favorite word forever). He was starting to ration their food supplies more carefully, being quite mindful of an uncertain future, so he'd held back on his own consumption for the kid's sake. No one could say how long it would be until the snow melted enough at least to let him get out of the house, even if it was to hunt down the neighbor's dog and kill it.

The neighbor’s dog
had become sort of an internal joke that he kept repeating to himself, but it seemed more and more plausible every time he thought it. The neighbor's dog was named Bucky, and he was one of many options. If the neighbors didn't chow down on Bucky first, of course. Sometimes, Christian would think about Bucky, picturing him running around the yard, fetching a bone. And in the next thought, he would picture Bucky on a wooden spit, charring over a fire. His daydreams about eating Bucky were getting more fanatical with his growing hunger. It wasn’t that they were starving. He had plenty of canned goods, enough to last them a very long time. They never kept much meat in the house, so they had burned through some bacon and frozen hamburgers during the first few days.

Christian tried to laugh
at his own silliness, but found he didn't have it in him. Soon enough, he and Paulie would go back to bed again, to cuddle under the covers and conserve their body heat until dinnertime, if they bothered with dinner at all. They would eat lunch first, though. He'd mash up some canned carrots and corn. Paulie didn't like canned carrots (raw were fine, as long as he had some onion dip), but he was starting to understand that he didn't really have a choice in the matter anymore.

Paulie
got it
, even without Christian explaining it at all.

The kid understood the dire situation they were in, though he couldn't formulate it into his own words
, not as an adult could. He could see the heavy look in Christian's eyes when his father fretted over their situation. The child knew little of pain and suffering in his limited life span, but he detected, at least on a subconscious level that it existed, and that it was closer to their doorstep than his father would have liked, and it would return again and again if things didn’t shape up soon.

He could hear Paulie, talking to himself and clattering plastic bits together
in frolic. The sound overjoyed Christian.
At least we’re still acting human.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Paulie was playing with his train set.
Christian noticed that when his son played, he was staying closer and closer to the warm bed, knowing that it was a good place to be and a good place to survive. Yesterday afternoon, Christian had even found him in the bed, playing with pieces of his train beneath the covers, even though the kid couldn’t see what he was doing. Some survival mechanism in Paulie's head was telling him that he needed to conserve his body heat, so venturing about the house the way he once did was avoided.

"Hey
, Paulie?" Christian called out. His voice sounded terrible, as if he'd been swallowing nails and tacks. Sort of like Tom Waits, but without the smoky-room vibes.

"Yeah
, Daddah?" his son replied, his feet clomping towards the top of the stairs. Christian couldn't see him, but he could hear that he was getting closer. "Lunch time?" Paulie asked, already knowing the new routine that they had fallen into since his mother's absence.