White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (6 page)

Tony
leaned in towards Annie, which was way too close for her comfort. She could see the plumes of her breath, encircling her head as he spoke. "I can stay with you. We'll call a tow truck and see if we can get you a jump."

"They'll have bigger things to take care of in weather like this," Annie replied.

"Well, then I guess we'll just have to camp out overnight, you and I. We can have a pajama party," stated Tony. She could feel him leering at her. There was that piggish demeanor again, that rapist wit.

*  *  *

Annie snapped out of her deep daze, bringing her mind back to the here and now, feeling the nastiness of the wind ripping into her from what seemed like all directions. She couldn't feel her face, even with several layers of fabric covering her. It was starting to feel more and more like The Purple Cat would be a good stopping point after all.

She turned a bit, looking back towards the building they came from. It was much smaller now
, barely visible through the churning tornadoes of snow that covered the distance. Tony made significant progress while she was daydreaming.

A
hopefulness sprung up in her at the thought that they hadn't sunk.
Yet.
They hadn't died.
Yet.

Annie started to think about Paulie again
, about how nice it would be to cuddle him close, both for the physical warmth and affection he could provide her. The image felt like an ungraspable dream. It seemed like--

She nearly choked on the air escaping her throat.

A dirty blonde tangle of hair, unwrapped from its ponytail, poked up through the fluffy, swirling snow. The wind caught up the stiffened locks, whirling them wildly. The long strands reached towards the sky like thin fingers, separating and rejoining, finally lying flat on the surface, then whipping again. It reminded Annie of those inflatable characters that used car lots always put out front, filling with air when a gust of wind caught it, then sputtering and deflating when the air released.

"Oh
, my God," Annie said, clutching her eyes shut again. Maybe this was the real reason he warned her to close her eyes.

She knew that
Tony could see the hair as well, as he eased off on the ski poles for a moment, then started in again, this time with a more forceful stroke, presumably to distance them from the sight.

He shoved them
by at only a three or four-foot distance from Winnie's only uncovered body part.

She
heard a muffled sound from above and behind her. She turned to look up at Tony, up his stomach and at his bemused mouth. This time, the wind seceded enough so she could decipher exactly what he was saying about Winnie: "What a fucking twit. I guess there’s something to be said for survival of the fittest."

Annie suddenly felt a degree or two colder.

PART II- STRANGERS IN THE COLD

Chapter One
 

Paulie wasn't sure what to think of the unconscious man on their couch.
All through the morning, Paulie kept circling him, looking at the man's serene face, where he scrutinized every pore. The stranger had lurched back to life enough to open his eyes, to peer into their house, but he hadn't shown a sign of life since. Christian wondered if that was what they called the “death lurch,” like when the villain pops back to life at the end of a horror movie, just to deliver the audience one more scare before the credits roll.

Soon after they dragged him through the window, Christian
commanded Paulie to go into the living room and play with his toys. The last thing he needed was for his son to see a dead man.

Thankfully, the stranger
had a pulse, but just barely. Christian hadn't taken a proper pulse in a decade or more, but he still had the general gist of it. Beyond the pulse, there was a slow, laborious breathing that slipped free of the man's chest. He was alive, but he might not last much longer. The chill of the man's bones could be felt all the way through his layers of iced over garments. Christian went right to work pulling off the outer layer, worried that he might thaw out a bit and then catch pneumonia from the dampness. He almost laughed at this idea-- pneumonia was the least of this poor bastard's problems.

The man’s shoulder appeared to be bleeding. A red, crystallized patch on his undershirt indicated something had stabbed him. He cleaned up the wound the best he could, his hands shivering the whole time as he examined it. Christian put a thick gauze pad over the wound. It looked awful, but it certainly wasn’t fatal, as long as it didn’t get infected. Once he had the wound
temporarily addressed, he bundled the man in a heavy sweatshirt from his closet, as well as a pair of gray sweatpants.

After he found some more
auxiliary blankets in the closet, he wrapped the man up tight. He looked like an Arctic mummy. There was little more Christian could do than thaw the fellow out, which was a difficult enough task in a heatless house. The morning had warmed up just a bit, to about ten degrees outside, but that was considered a warm spell these days.

He
had dragged the man down the stairs, one step at a time, hoping not to bump his head hard enough to give a concussion on top of his other ailments. With a bit of muscle that Christian didn't even realize he possessed, he leveraged the man up on to the longer of their two couches.

Christian now observed the shallow breathing,
tightened up the blanket, and took a step back, studying their unexpected houseguest. The man had thinning black hair, swirling about the top of his head like a raging tornado, frozen in place by the deep freeze. He wasn't wearing a hat or gloves, which seemed odd enough considering all the layers of clothing he had. How did one go about bundling up so much, but forgetting to find a hat or gloves? There was something off about that, but Christian displaced it from his mind.

His nose looked like it had been broken once or twice in his life.
Maybe a former boxer or an angry drunk. It was a bit crooked, but rugged, with a bit of that ruddy Irish tone. Christian would have put his age somewhere around his mid-fifties. The man was certainly quite a bit older than he, but not a senior citizen by any means. There were streaks of gray in his dark swirls of hair, but not enough to warrant an AARP card.

And the boots.
The man was wearing brown leather cowboy boots, emblazoned with a bucking bronco and a western sunset on the sides. Even with all the icy frost that covered them, Christian could smell the pungent aroma of the boots; they were well oiled and taken care of, probably a point of pride with this man. They looked authentic enough that Christian was surprised they didn’t have spurs on them.

The couch rustled as the man turned over a bit, seemingly of his own free will.
Not dead yet
,
are you?
Thought Christian.

"He
cold," said Paulie.

Christian nodded.
"He is. But it's warmer in here than out there, right?"

Paulie looked up to his father
. The boy was shivering, clutching his arms close to his body. He nodded in response, though the child’s telling eyes completely disagreed with the sentiment.

"
Like S.A.?" asked Paulie, a twang of distress creeping into his voice.

S.A. stood for Spirited Apparition, and he was a chinchilla that Annie had acquired in her college years. The strange little buggers tended to live upwards of twenty years.
Part squirrel, part rabbit, part guinea pig. Christian didn't know what to think of the animal when they had first started dating, especially when Annie would dump a mineral dust inside of S.A.'s cage; the critter would spin in circles, coating his soft fur in it. One of the oddest things Christian could ever remember seeing, even odder than air-conditioned doghouses.

In
October, S.A. had died after fifteen years of life. Christian came home to find that Annie had moved the cage out into the garage, so that Paulie wouldn't see it. She wasn't sure what to tell their son, being that it was the first time she ever had to tell her child that something he loved was
D-E-A-D
. So she let Christian ease into it with the old
he-was-sick, he's-in-a-better-place, he's-gone-but-he-loved-you
routine. Confused by the conversation, Paulie had sprinted for the basement steps, where they kept S.A. in his perpetually rattling cage. Finding that the cage was gone, he turned to look at his mother, and then his father, and then back at his mother. "He died, honey," Annie had said.

Paulie
had lost it.

Christian could still remember the feeling of seeing his boy in pain for the first time, of knowing that none of this world is permanent.
That truth is a terrible one, no matter what the age. It was as if somebody had ripped Christian's heart out and fed it to him.

And after the initial shock that he would never see his furry pet again, Paulie sta
rted asking questions like, "S.A. at grandma's house?" or "S.A. in space?" The responses became more and more difficult to formulate. Christian wanted to give his son an ounce of hope, but also a sense of reality. 

Before bed that evening, Christian
had explained that even though S.A. was gone, he'd always be able to think about him, that Paulie’s furry comrade would always be in his heart.

At this, Paulie furrowed his brow, looking down at himself. "S.A.'s in my chest?"

"No," said Christian. He couldn't help but laugh at this recollection in this strange moment, even with the half-dead, half frozen guy sprawled out on his couch.

The man stirred
again, coughing a raspy mist into the air. He sounded like his lungs were crystallizing, which in all likelihood, they were. "Gonna die, Daddah? Like S.A.?" Paulie asked, tears welling up in his eyes. Christian was just grateful that it wasn't cold enough to freeze those tears.

"Not if I can help it," said Christian, knowing that if the weather didn't break soon, Paulie would be witnessing a lot more dead bodies before he
eventually lost his own life. Christian's stomach wrenched at the thought, throwing out a silent prayer that this insanity would end soon. "Let's leave him be," he said, patting his son on the shoulder.

He wondered where
Annie was, and if she was making any progress like she'd hoped.
She could be dead by now
, he thought, picturing himself dragging her body in through the upstairs window as his next trick. Stretching her out on the carpet while he begged her corpse to awaken, all while Paulie screamed bloody hell in the background, watching his father pump on her chest in an attempt at resuscitation, cursing this cock-sucking Ice Age and all the hell that it brought to their doorstep.

Christian shook his head from side to side. The
arctic air was getting to him, making him think frenetic thoughts, ones that didn't belong inside his head.

Chapter
Two

The man sat up straight, gasping for air as if he hadn't taken a breath in years. His lungs fought for air inside of his chest. Christian thought he might wheeze his way to the pearly gates right then and there, judging by the sound of those painful gulps. "Daddy," Paulie said, gasping at the sight of the man coming back to life, resurrecting himself on their hideous brown couch.

The man
turned his head, carefully studying the room around him, and looked at Christian. The fellow’s eyeballs were huge inside of his head, bigger than cantaloupes. "Howdy," said Christian, kicking himself for sounding so awkward.
Howdy? Who the hell says howdy to somebody who just came back from the dead on their living room furniture?
The guy was going to think Christian was a moron.

With a slow nod, the
icy traveler placed both booted feet on the floor, now sitting in the upright position. He looked back and forth between Paulie and Christian, exhaling a long plume of more normal sounding breath. The stranger on their couch wiped away some icy snot from beneath his nostrils, shaking his head from side to side, as if to shake the death away from his body, which had been clinging to the tendrils of his soul only moments earlier. Christian wasn't a church-going type, though people always assumed that, because of his given name, but he swore that this was the closest thing to the whole Jesus-slash-Lazarus story he'd ever witnessed. He initially gave the guy’s odds at two or three days at the most, and here he was-- living and breathing and readying himself to stand up.

Introductions were in order.

"I'm Christian. This is my son Paulie. We found you outside the window. I think you were just about on death's door. Not sure if you remember anything at all."

The man nodded, almost testing his neck muscles as he did so, unsure if they still operated as they once did. A vacant look filled his eyes. For all
this man on their couch knew, he was certifiably dead. Maybe he thought this was heaven. Maybe he thought it was hell. If Christian had to label it one or the other, he would have picked hell.

"Are you hungry?"
Christian asked.

The man
shook his head while he rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. They were so chapped that they bled a bit when he did this. Christian was pretty sure that a hefty tug would have pulled them right off his face, if given enough oomph.

"You probably need to use the bathroom
."

"He did pee-pee in his pants," Paulie
(a blush creeping into his cheeks) commentated to his father. That observation was true, but Christian didn't want to embarrass the frozen fellow. During his seven hours of unconsciousness (or
death?
Hadn't the poor schmuck
died
?), their visitor had urinated in his pants. It wasn't much more than a small dark spot on his crotch, but it was enough to be noticed. He wouldn't bring it up to the man, even if his son didn't have an appropriate filter not to.

Christian kept his distance from the blank-faced
wanderer, pointing towards the kitchen. "Bathroom is through there. I put some fresh clothes in there for you, too. You're a bit bigger than me... hell
,
a whole lot bigger than me
...
but I think they ought to fit you. They're from my college years, when I drank way too much beer." Christian chuckled to himself, hoping that the man on his couch would respond with some free-hearted banter of his own, but he said nothing. Expressed nothing. Their wordless guest was just a blank shell of a man, with nothing to say.

Standing up from the couch, the man teetered back and forth for a moment. Christian lunged forward at first, hoping he could catch him if he fell, but the man steadied himself
on his own. "Easy there, fella," Christian said, speaking to his houseguest like one would a horse.

The
silent stranger put up his hands, gesturing to keep a distance. He closed his eyes, breathing slowly. It almost sounded like he was counting beneath his breath. "One, two, three...," but then the man fell quiet again, taking his first step towards Christian, then changing direction towards the kitchen, as Christian indicated a moment earlier.

"We'll stoke a fire in a few so we can
get you warmed up. We've been conserving the firewood, but we can make an exception for a weary traveler," Christian said, trying very much to sound folksy. In reality, he ended up sounding more like a desperate asshole. It had been several weeks since he had any adult contact, save for the window-to-window conversations between the neighbor, Marianne, who lived next door. It would be nice to sit down with another adult, to talk about this ridiculous shit-storm that the planet was thrown into.

The man nodded, walking through the kitchen. His legs wobbled as he walked.

When the bathroom door closed, Christian said to his son, "Go down in the basement and get one of those logs in the red and white packages. We'll get a fire going for our guest."

Paulie's eyes lit up. They'd been rationing logs to an extreme. Christian hadn't broken out any of the logs yet, still unsure of how long the storm would last.
It’ll last forever
; he kept thinking, whenever he considered how goddamned cold he was. It might just last
forever
.

While the boy was downstairs fetching the log, Christian opened up a can of minestrone soup, dumping it into a steel pot. Once they had the fire going, he could heat the soup up over the flames, just to take th
e cold edge off it, at the very least. It was cold enough that any heated food went icy cold on its own in less than a few minutes. Warm was the new hot.

The bathroom door opened
and the stranger walked out, offering his hand to Christian.

"Thank you, sir.
Name's Edgar. You saved my life."

"Well, I didn't really...," he started to reply, shaking Edgar's frigid hand
gladly.

"
No. Listen here, friend. You saved my life. I owe you one. How can I help out?"

His eyes
dug right through Christian, as if they were laser beams with a trajectory for his brain. An unbridled intensity radiated from Edgar, as if he was about to plop down on the floor and do one hundred pushups. He was a bit of a portly man, but not entirely out of shape. He had strong hands, as Christian discovered in Edgar’s overly masculine handshake, but there was also a quiet softness to him. There was something welcoming about that mixture.

"Maybe you can help Paulie get
a fire going?" Christian pointed towards the cabinet directly across from the kitchen table. "Middle drawer, there's a grill lighter. It's one of those fake logs, so all you have to do is torch the bag and it'll catch."

Edgar gave a furtive
nod, staring longingly at the soup can that Christian threw in the garbage bin. "You gonna tell me your name?" he asked, and Christian felt his stomach plummet. The tone that Edgar asked it in was particular nasty; battery acid dripping from his tongue. When the silence became uncomfortable, Edgar started to laugh heartily, in a way that only a man who came back from the dead on a shit-brown couch could laugh in the moments following resurrection. He clapped his hands on Christian's shoulder. "Christian, right?"

Once again,
Christian’s stomach plummeted another couple of inches inside of him, if that was even possible. Paulie was coming up the stairs now, clutching the phony-baloney log to his chest, smirking at the heavy man standing in his kitchen. Edgar was clutching his bearish claw on Christian's shoulder.

"
Don’t worry, my friend. Your name’s on your bathroom towel," noted Edgar, laughing even deeper, his raspy chest still chiming in to remind Christian of the man's return from the dead.

That was when Christian relinquished the stick up his ass and joined in with the laughter. Soon, Paulie was laughing
along with them both.

"Come on baby, light my fire," Edgar said to Paulie, patting
him on the head. "Little man, how about you show Big Edgar how to light a fire properly? I'm fixin' to learn something new."