White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (5 page)

"You got it, kiddo."

Christian stood up, feeling the cold ache in the small of his back. He'd pulled a muscle trying to shovel the driveway on day two of the storm. He almost laughed thinking about that now, how fruitless that activity ended up being in the long run. Nobody could have kept up with the total accumulation, even with a snow blower running twenty-four hours a day. It came down too fast, and it was still coming down faster still, inches and inches with every hour, around the clock, unrelenting.

He
popped open a can of carrots and poured some apple juice into a cup. He kept the bottles of juice wrapped in thick blankets, so that they would not freeze. They had a huge supply in the basement, but even that was starting to dwindle. He'd have to start melting and sterilizing snow, soon enough.

Nothing from Paulie.
No excited footsteps. Although, how often did one get excited over canned carrots and corn? Very rarely, especially in the four year old demographic.

"You coming?" he called up the stairs again, once he had their lunches ready. He walked to the bottom of the stairs, looking up at his
boy.

Paulie looked
as if he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see-- troubled by something that he couldn’t quite put into words, not with his limited vocabulary. Christian sensed some strange hesitance in his son, something he had never displayed before. Suddenly, his stomach soured. What the hell had the kid seen?

"What is it, Paulie?
Are you okay?"

"
Guy look sick."

"What guy?"

"Guy outside. He look sick,
so, so
sick," Paulie said. He was always worried whenever Mommy or Daddy caught a cold, perpetually asking them if they were sick or not. He still equated sickness with death. Sick animals died, and so did sick people, the boy presumed.

Christian could
hardly perceive the floating, tingling feeling in his stomach as he ran up the stairs, as if in a dream, into the bedroom. He stared at his second floor window, where a man with jet-black hair had crammed his face against the icy window. He couldn't make out his identity and didn't recognize the man at all.

He looked as if he’d been dead awhile.

Why hadn’t they heard him? Had he banged on the window? Had he cried out for somebody to let him in? Perhaps he hadn’t the strength to do that, perishing only inches away from salvation. Christian rewound his memory through the day, wondering if he’d heard a strange noise that he’d given no credence to. Nothing came to mind. They would have heard something for sure, especially with no electricity creating noise through the house. The only sounds that filled their house were he and Paulie’s voices.

"Daddah?"
Paulie asked vaguely, grabbing tight to his father's hand. They stood in silence for several minutes, staring at the rigid shape of the dead man against the window, obscured by the frost both inside and outside the window pane. Christian had no idea what to say, and even less what to do.

Christian felt his whole body surge as t
he man's left eye opened with a pop, vacant and lifeless and peering into their home from the white abyss.

Chapter Four

They
settled on embarking from the third floor window, like two burglars escaping after a big heist. Two days earlier, when Tony first spoke of leaving, they would have left from the second floor window, but that option was no longer viable. A raging easterly wind had pushed all the snow up against the building, creating a snowy slide that dipped deep down into the parking lot where the cars were wholly covered. It tapered off after the lot, and that was where Tony would put his muscle into propelling them, if they didn’t sink to their deaths immediately. Annie wasn’t sure which way it would go, even still.

Tony
insisted upon starting off with a bang, propelling himself and Annie (not to mention their homemade sled-slash-raft) off the edge of the wide steel sill of the pried open window. Instantaneously, they gathered momentum, though he gave an extra push as they transferred into the chowdery white abyss.

Annie gasped as they hit the outside air, not from the shock of their descent from the snowy incline, but from the icy chill of forty below zero temperatures, as indicated in their final temperature reading before their exit.
The wind had let up some earlier in the morning, but it returned gust by gust, minute by minute.

Throughout the morning, while they fed themselves the remaining bits of food they could uncover in coworkers’ desks,
Annie tried to talk Tony out of leaving. She thought they could wait one more day, but he wasn't having it, not with the heat and food supplies fully cashed out. There was an underlying excitement in his actions-- in his every gesture and sweeping declaration of their game plan-- that came from this deadly challenge. Annie wasn't sure if it was the element of protection he was providing her, or if it was the perilous nature of their oncoming journey. She suspected it might be a little bit of both.

Annie clutched
the edges of the wheelbarrow’s plasticized hull, trying to look straight ahead. As they slid down the hill, she prayed that the contraption would stay together. She kept picturing Charlie Brown inside of her mind’s eye; putting together a go-cart and having it break down into rubble on its maiden voyage. It was unfair to Tony, but it made her feel better privately to deprecate him in that way. When all was said and done, he turned out to be handier than he looked. As the incline leveled off and their transportation remained intact, Annie felt a new comfort settle into her gut. Maybe Tony had some value after all, slimy intentions aside.

She cursed the unrelenting
cold that crept through the scarf she’d wrapped around her face and neck. Only her eyes were exposed to the cold, and even that was enough to terrify the hell out of her, feeling a glassiness pervading her sensitive eyeballs. Tony warned her to keep her eyes pinched together as much as possible, to avoid any damage. He'd brought along a pair of goggles from Eddie's office, but he needed those so that he could see where to steer their ship. Annie had the luxury of closing her eyes, though part of her wondered if she'd ever open them again if something awful happened to them. It was better that way, she decided. If you can’t see death coming, then there’s no time to worry about it… it just takes you when it’s damn well ready.

As their momentum diminished to null, she turned to look back at
the steep grade of the snow drift that had plastered itself up against their building. Now Tony was chugging along, putting all of his upper body strength into the ski poles, bending his knees to reduce any resistance from the wind. Almost right away, he was working his ass off, and for that, Annie appreciated him, no matter what their history looked like--both personally and intimately.

They couldn’t have been moving more than
one quarter a mile an hour, but they weren't sinking in and drowning in the icy tomb either. She tried not to think of Winnie. Annie clenched her eyes shut again. Better that way. Much better.

Tony
shouted something as they lunged, inch by inch, through the snowy deep of the parking lot. She couldn't make out his voice, for all the blasting wind that was attacking their front side, but she caught the word "cars" somewhere in that distant mumble. She presumed that he was observing the fact that all the cars were buried right beneath them, completely useless to them.

Annie
pictured her vehicle, buried far below her.

She still had an iced coffee
sitting in the cup holder, and the irony of that seemed to tickle her for a moment. Closing her eyes tightly, she could envision all the trash on the floor of her little hatchback-- fast food wrappers, unread mail, a magazine or two, stained coffee mugs, and cough drop wrappers. This winter had brought her the nastiest chest cold she could ever remember experiencing, and she still hadn't cleaned up the remnants of that delirious spell. In fact, her breath still tasted like cough medicine, even after more than four weeks' abstaining from the bloody rotten stuff.

She hated the car, and so she showed it as little respect as possible. In fact, t
he damn car had caused all these issues for her. Not the storm. Not Tony. Not Christian. Not herself. She'd be home with Christian and Paulie if it wasn't for the car completely screwing her over.

Annie couldn’t help but relive that first day, wishing she had picked out a different path. That wouldn’t help her, obviously, but she could still replay it, if only to learn something for next time. Assuming
that is, if there
was
a next time.

*  *  *

It started snowing on a Monday morning, right after Annie arrived for the day. It was a typical Monday morning, wintry and bleak. But this was northern New England, so snow was just a part of everyday life during the winter. On that particular morning, she went about her usual routine; running weekly numbers for the sales staff, checking in on some of the larger clients with her charming demeanor, and brewing coffee in the kitchenette. She did a little of everything on Monday mornings. By Wednesday afternoon, she usually attained more clearly defined tasks that would spring up during the first half of the week. Every week started with a whimper and ended with a bang.

By
noon, Annie noticed that most of the staff had slithered out for an early lunch. Many of them didn't bother returning, as a couple additional inches accumulated in the next hour. If their supervisors were okay with them sneaking out on a regular work day, regardless of the weather, she wasn't going to stop them. It wasn’t her place, anyway. Someday, it would be, but not on that day.

Annie
had bigger fish to fry, so she'd wait right up until the last minute to escape the storm. She'd secured a meeting with the Chief Financial Officer for four o'clock. He was a difficult man to pin down, and when you did achieve that success, one had to make the best of it. Annie had been working on a side project with her cube-neighbor, Freddie Hanson, since early July. The project had all but fallen apart after some early hurdles in their data collection (mostly due to some technical issues at one of the associate firms on the west coast), but Annie adeptly figured out a way to right the ship and keep the project in motion.

Garrett, the CFO since the Reagan administration,
was willing to hear her out, to observe her findings and act if necessary. Annie was secretly certain that this would be the notch she needed, to propel herself to a new position. If she could show old Garrett Johnson the very "creative” and perfectly legal accounting she’d contrived, it might just be her ticket to ride. It was all based on a legal loophole that the tricky brains at the IRS had failed to close. It was clearly stated and well documented, completely on the up-and-up, and if it was as solid as she believed it to be, it could save the company a hundred thousand dollars in the first year alone, with even larger windfalls in later years.

Two o'clock
came, and she stared out the window, chatting briefly with Tony about how she needed to get some better snow tires over the weekend. They observed the grim parking lot, growing anxious with every flake that descended. There were only a handful of cars remaining. One of them belonged to Garrett, so her meeting wasn't canceled just yet. She emailed him, asking for an earlier audience due the inclement weather, but he hadn't responded.

Three o'clock came and Annie was pretty sure she wasn't going to make it home without a lift from somebody.
Tony offered to stay behind in case she needed him, but she was averse to that scenario, as she was aware of the way he looked at her when she passed by. He was most certainly an "ass man," tried and true. Something in that was flattering.

Winnie
was still in the office. Her station wagon parked right next to Annie’s car. Good old Winnie was always good for a favor. That is, if Winnie’s car was any better at traversing the snow. She’d been bragging about her new snow tires recently, something that Annie took note of.
Always take note of any and all options,
her father used to say.

As she approached Garrett's office, ready to fire
financial theories on all cylinders, she saw a scrawled note pinned to the door:
All meetings cancelled for today. Head home and drive safe! –Garrett.

The bastard.
His goddamned car was still in the parking lot!

How could the weasel pull
such unprofessional bullshit on her?

Didn't he check his
fucking schedule? Didn't he have
any couth
about him?

Annie was on fire,
fully ready to eviscerate anybody that came near her. She could feel her face flushing with an unpleasant warmth, as if she’d been drinking too much wine, but was absent of that type of euphoric feeling. When Tony approached her, he asked if everything was all right, and she laid it all out with such rapid fire that she couldn’t keep up with her own words: "That
cocksucker
left me hanging here all day, thinking we had a meeting. This is what happens to me. This is what happens to
women
in this company. I go above and beyond to protect us (listen to me saying
us
, like they care about my ass) from a serious monetary loss and this is how he repays me? I swear the men in this company treat us like doormats.”  She scowled at Tony, but he wasn’t shaken by her comment as she expected him to be, probably because he was just like the rest of them.

She bit at her lip, staring at
Tony’s mug, and then dug in deeper, “He can’t give me the courtesy of a cancellation? Even my four-year-old son would know it’s not nice to cancel on somebody without telling them in person. Jesus Christ… I emailed him twice today. You know he saw that damn email, right? I bet you he read it and didn't feel like he needed to reply. You know why? Because I don’t matter, that’s why. I’m a peon. I’m a cog. I’m a fucking puppet. This is what I get for being a loyal servant to this place, to this goddamned
boy’s club
. I get stuck in a snow storm, that’s what I get."

“Come on now, it’s not so bad here
is it? At least we’re warm. Sleep it off before you go storming into his office tomorrow morning. You don’t want to piss Garrett off. Bad idea for your career.” Tony hadn't seemed too interested in fueling her well-justified anger. Instead, he changed the subject as she glowered at him, as though he was the reason for all her problems, even though she very well knew he wasn’t. "Do you want me to walk you to your car?" Tony asked.

"Yeah, thanks," she
said, grateful that he was at least attempting to be a gentleman amongst pigs. She was careful to walk behind him, instead of in front of him. She loathed the thought of his eyeballs on her backside. Why, she wondered, were all men pigs? What was it in their brains that made them strive for the bottom of the barrel?

So t
hey had trudged through the first layers of snow, Annie fretting the whole way that it was unsafe to drive. Tony agreed with her in an almost unconvincing manner. She wondered why he hadn't escaped yet, and he offered up an explanation that his car was currently in the shop. Tony intended to call a cab once the snow let up a bit.

"I
’d be glad to drop you off at your house," Annie offered (hoping he would
not
accept, for several reasons) as they brushed the thickening layer of snow off her windshield. She only had one brush, so Tony used his forearm to brush away the opposite side. Maybe he wasn’t such a pig after all.  But still, she couldn’t forget the way his eyes regularly surveyed the crack of her ass.

“No way.
My house is out of the way for you. You get home safe and I’ll be just fine. The taxis will be running again once the storm eases up. I’m fine.” Annie didn’t argue with him, though she was sure he wanted her to. When somebody denied help, Annie had always found that usually they were just being polite.

Once they had the bulk of the snow off, Annie opened up the driver's side door, slipped into the seat, and turned the key.
Nothing. She felt an immediate rage welling inside of her, seeping out of her through steamy breath. Of course, her car was dead. She was ready to blame everything on Garrett again, the bastard bean counter without any respect for his peers. The discourteous cunt. It was all his fault, every last bit of it.

She looked up at the interior light, which
she now realized she had left on. When she first arrived in the morning, it was dark outside. She was looking for a bit of peppermint gum in her purse, which she found. The traitorous nub of gum had lasted about a half an hour in terms of flavor, but the light had stayed on all damn day. If she had stolen away in the afternoon, like the rest of her presumably warm co-workers, she'd be home. After a ten-hour day, there was little hope for even a twinge of battery power.