by Adam Vine
The way Ink dragged her to her feet and practically threw her on the dance floor made me sick inside. I didn’t know why. It was clear from watching them interact all night that she liked him. She was just so nice. She didn’t even try to resist when he whipped her around the dance floor or grinded his crotch between her ass cheeks. I doubt she’d even tell anyone if her arms bruised the next day due to his roughness.
He’s treating her like a caveman would. She’s too good for him, not to mention young. She should be with a good man, like me. Well, not me, but...
Ink surprised Iza with a spin move, swooping her from one side of his body to the other, maintaining perfect time with his footwork. They both laughed and he pulled her in close, pretending to lean in for the kiss. She closed her eyes and tilted her chin up, waiting for his lips to touch hers, but he pulled away, tapping her on the nose with his finger.
Or maybe I’m just drunk and jealous there’s no one here to dance with me the way she’s dancing with him. Of course she likes Ink. The guy’s tall, fit, good-looking, charming, and he’s even a pretty good dancer. The bastard probably practices his moves in the mirror.
Jesus Christ, I am jealous. There’s no way I could dance that well. It would take me years to learn how to do those moves. I wonder if he could teach me? At least I know I could beat him in a swordfight.
Big Ben’s dart sailed and sunk into the ring outside the bull’s eye, ending our tournament with a brutal nine-to-one streak. “Sorry, Frisco,” Big Ben said. “But I don’t think you’re goin’ to catch up to me tonight.”
I blew out a nimbus of searing, vaporized vodka and hanged my head. “Yeah, I should probably head home. Thanks for the drinks, Benny-Boy.”
“Who the fook you callin’ boy, lad? You want to get your head smashed in?” Big Ben said.
“Maybe you should, since I can’t seem to get out of it for five goddamned seconds,” I said.
Big Ben sighed and shook my hand. “Lighten up, all right? For your own sake. Tonight was a slow night – it happens. Don’t go freezin’ to death on the way home.”
I put my jacket on. “Does that actually happen?”
“Oh, all the time. People die that way every year. I think you’ll be fine, since it won’t drop too low below freezin’. Just don’t go lyin’ down on any nice, comfy snow banks.”
“I won’t. Goodnight, Benny.”
“Oi. Goodnight, fookhead.”
I stood outside the bar and emailed Kashka using the free Wi-Fi. Snow was already starting to flutter down from the fat, black-bellied clouds in scattered patches, clinging to my clothes and face.
Are you at work? I wrote.
Kashka’s reply came a few minutes later. Hi Dan. No. I am home now.
Come over, I wrote. The gesture, a desperate, pleading hall of mirrors reflecting back into the infinite darkness of the years, hung in virtual purgatory for what seemed like hours before an unread message appeared in my inbox.
Okay. I will see you in half an hour, Kashka replied.
Great. Meet me in front of my building. I’ll let you in. Half an hour was exactly how long I needed to walk home.
Kashka was waiting for me under the overhang of my building’s main entrance when I got home. She was wearing her Little Red Riding Hood coat, hood drawn tight over her face to keep out the sideways-blowing snow.
“Hey, babe,” she said. I kissed her and took her upstairs.
The sex we had was short and awful. Kashka screamed at the top of her lungs like it was the greatest sex of her life, gasping and squealing so loud my neighbors banged on the wall for us to shut up. I didn’t believe it for a second.
II
The kingdom was patchwork at best,
Woven by blood in brutal jest,
Forty years of sorrow and war,
An endless fire forged Country's core.
When Country's tribes bickered and fought,
The king crushed them with quick onslaught,
King Mirek's only clear desire
To leave his son a vast empire.
No man, woman, or child left alive,
All burned, butchered, flayed and dried,
So those who might rebel would reason,
Their kin would perish for their treason.
Arkadius raised his force by dark,
From those who’d heard the angel's “Hark!”
Orphaned boys with nothing to yield
But blood upon the fallow field.
An old man’s youth is repaid in pain,
Walls of ghosts and rust-eaten blades,
Empty halls where his demons bray
The waning echoes of his name.
The Good Knight knew the cost to fight,
But his heart was true, and pure, and right.
And so they marched ‘neath Zorya’s light.1
Redemption does not fear the night.
1*Goddess of the stars in Slavic folklore.
???
I AWOKE in the dark and the freezing cold. I gasped, jerking up from the stinging, crunching wetness that surrounded me. Snow? Am I outside?
It was so cold I could barely think. It took me a moment before my thoughts collected and I could take notice of my surroundings. I was lying in a snowdrift amidst an endless, frozen field. A blistering wind howled, sending snow devils to lash across my exposed face and arms. My teeth rattled violently inside my skull. I couldn’t feel my feet. Don’t go lyin’ down on any snow banks, Big Ben’s voice echoed in my mind’s ear. People die that way every year.
Where is my building? Where is City? Where the fuck am I?
I climbed haphazardly to my feet. I was lucky I’d woken up before I’d frozen to death. I couldn’t have been out here more than a few minutes. It had to be at least fifty degrees below zero. I’d never felt anything so cold.
It was too dark to see anything. I picked a direction and started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I had to find shelter. If I didn’t get indoors soon, I was going to die. I trudged across a tundra of waist-high snowdrifts, a sea of pale ghost cotton lit only by its own hideous, nascent light. My body temperature was rapidly dropping. A memory bubbled up from one of the winter trips I’d taken with the Scouts back when I was a kid. The first sign of hypothermia is disorientation. The second is paradoxical undressing. The third is the overpowering urge to fall asleep and never wake up.
I stumbled over hill after hill of smooth, dead white, nothing but darkness on every side of me. I was lost. I was certain I would freeze to death before I could find somewhere warm. That was when I saw lights twinkling in the distance, penetrating the deep, starless darkness of the tundra. They were miles away, tiny candles twinkling on the horizon, but if I didn’t reach them I was dead.
Your dream self always knows you’re dreaming as soon as you regain enough of your cognitive faculties to wonder, and I wondered. This was real. The cold was real. The painful heaving in my chest was real. And if I didn’t get inside soon, my life would really end.
Yet again, I’d had too much to drink, my inner demon had won, and I’d made a catastrophic mistake that couldn’t be undone with wishful thinking.
I had no clue where I was, but I guessed it was somewhere several miles outside the City. I’d wandered, ran, or maybe even stolen a car and drove, out past the City limits. I’d finally done it, strayed until I was too far gone, and now I was going to pay for it with my life. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t remember how or when.
At least, that’s what I thought, until I saw the corpses.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, at first. I thought the black, head-high shapes that began poking from the snow the closer I walked toward the lights were the frozen trunks of long-dead trees. They were slender and crooked, bent over as if the wind had corrupted their brittle forms.
My foot struck something half-buried in the snow and I stumbled and fell into a drift. Something hard cut my face and hands. Droplets of my blood hissed and steamed on the snow.
I pulled back and my breath caught as my gaze settled on what had cut me: the gray-green of old bones poking from rotten, frozen cloth; dark, empty sockets glaring their eternal gaze; the broken crescent of a toothless, everlasting smile.
I’d fallen into the outstretched arms of a human corpse. The bones were kept rigid by their deep blanket of frost. The corpse had been camouflaged by snow. It grinned back at me from where it lay in its tomb of hoarfrost.
All I could think was: Dead, all of them dead, preserved by the cold. A forest of the dead. Only some of them were dead before they froze. Most were still upright and walking.
Where the fuck am I? Where the fuck is Kashka? Where the fuck is my building?
I stumbled to get a closer look at the black stumps I had thought were the remains of trees, and found they were not trees, but corpses, frozen upright in standing or leaning positions. They were everywhere, dozens of them – hundreds, even. Most still had faces, their skulls covered in a fine layer of sallow skin and brittle hair, all wrapped in shining layers of ice. Some were old. Most were young. There were women and children.
I lurched and staggered to escape that mordant forest, the sour taste of vomit rising in my throat with every step. Dead. All of them. This isn’t real. This isn’t happening. It isn’t real. It isn’t real...
It wasn’t long before I saw the tracks, maybe a half mile or less. The distant lights were bright enough to cast fickle shadows on the snow, and between those shadows, a trail of sunken boot prints carving its way between the corpse-trees. I momentarily considered the possibility the tracks could be mine, but I was sure I hadn’t changed direction. Those far, glimmering lights were still ahead of me.
A howl echoed somewhere in the near darkness, feral but distinctly human. I held my breath, waiting for it to repeat, my fight or flight instinct dumping hot scores of adrenaline into my veins.
Something’s over there. I didn’t want to see what it was, prayed that it hadn’t seen me, either. But I was so cold, and if there was a living thing on the other side of that hill, that meant there might be shelter, too. Sinking to my knees, then my stomach, I crawled quietly as I could up to the ridge and lay prone in the snow.
A hundred feet down the gentle slope of the valley, a cart lay waylaid under the piling drifts. Its cargo, including a dozen or so dead passengers, were scattered around it in a grim tableaux.
A bipedal shape was scouring through the wreckage. It wore a loincloth, a fur coat made of dead animals stitched together, and strange plates of mismatched translucent armor that looked like they’d been salvaged from a prism junkyard. A white shadow rising from the hoary ground, half snow, half man.
The Snowman hurdled rather than walked, was crude and ineffective in its movements as it dug and searched for potential spoils, a tight ball of pale muscle and paler hair. The long, human-looking femur it carried in its hand dragged lazily behind it in the snow.
I considered calling out to it, but something about the creature stank of hostility. I thought about retreating down my side of the hill, but I’d still be exposed. My own tracks were everywhere, and my strength was draining fast. Very soon I would stop feeling cold and start feeling tired. I’d begin to hallucinate my temperature was rising feverishly when in fact it was nearing its fatal bottom line, and strip naked before laying down to slip away into the cold sleep of death.
I had two options, neither of which involved going back. I could wait for the creature to leave, then crawl into the cart and hope its meager shelter would provide me with enough warmth to keep from freezing to death until the sunrise; or, I could try to sneak up on the creature and kill it, at least knock it unconscious, so I could take its fur jacket.
I decided it simply wasn’t possible to wait. I’d either freeze to death before the creature found what it was looking for, or it would come back this way, find my tracks, and hunt me down as I grew weaker and weaker.
I had to kill the Snowman, and fast. If I didn’t, I was going to die. Whatever fallout I might face, legal or otherwise, I would have to deal with later.
I descended the valley slope, careful not to make any noise. The creature moved toward the opposite side of the cart. I seized my chance and crouch-ran the rest of the way down the hill, taking cover behind one of the cart’s huge, upturned wheels.
I could see the Snowman through the gaps in the cartwheel spokes. It halted next to one of the corpses, clicking its tongue with satisfaction through thick, white clouds of breath: click, click, click, hnnnnh.
The corpse was short, that of a small child, no older than six or seven at the time of death. One of the corpse’s arms was frozen upright, eternally reaching for a pair of larger corpses lying farther out that I assumed were its parents.
Click, click click, hnnnh.
The Snowman hoisted its bone axe over its head and brought the blade down in a swift slash, hacking off the dead child’s arm. Brittle, frozen flesh shattered like glass. The Snowman stepped over the severed arm, lifted its loincloth, and let loose a powerful stream of urine.
Click, click click, hnnnh.
The steaming liquid doused the frozen meat for several endless minutes. When it ceased, the creature tossed its axe aside, squatted, and started eating.
He thawed it, I realized in horror.
Gray meat separated from bone with a decrepit, audible crunch. Parts of the arm were still frozen, but that didn’t slow the creature’s appetite.
I wanted to be back home, in my bed, with Kashka’s sleeping face nestled under my arm. It’s amazing how quickly you can come to want something you once despised when the shit hits the fan.
I didn’t see any way out but the plan I’d already made.
I grabbed one of the spokes of the broken cartwheel and started quietly working it loose. The ice had sealed the broken spoke to its splintered base, but with a little muscle, it gave. I took my time, trying not to make any noise.
Once I had it free, the wooden beam I held was as long as my arm, about the same dimensions as the wooden swords we used to practice forms with in kendo class. I held the makeshift bokken in a high samurai grip, and rose.
The Snowman must have heard me, because he stopped eating and turned around, intently sniffing the air. That’s when I realized he was blind.
His eyes had been cut out and sewn shut. The stitches were still there, fat strips of crisscrossed leather all crusted with frost. His gray, mottled skin clung loosely to his bones. His belly was scored with deep, old scars and patches of wandering cancer. When the Snowman opened his mouth to breathe, his rotten teeth formed a string of yellow blades sprouting from black, rotten gums.
Click, click, click, hnnnnh.
The Snowman dropped the half-finished morsel and fumbled in the snow for his bone axe, touching his lips with his other hand, then stuck his fingers in his mouth and bit down hard. A big, juicy chunk of his own finger came off. Hot blood flowed down his knuckles. He chewed it, swallowed, and grunted.
Click, click, click, hnnnh.
The Snowman took another bite of his finger, and another step in my direction, as if he was trying to decide if I was prey worth pursuing, or just another random noise of the tundra. I tried my best to mute the sound of my breath and the violent shivering of my body, but the closer the Snowman got, the more impossible that became.
There were a dozen other wounds littering the skin of his hands and forearms. The patchwork sleeve of ancient scars told me he’d been eating himself for a long time.
He gave a low growl and lurched suddenly toward me, the distance between us vanishing. Time slowed. The Snowman raised the bone axe over his head to brain me, and my instincts responded. I was sure I was dead. But my hands disagreed.
I thrust the broken spoke up to deflect the Snowman’s strike, and his weapon slid off it like water. Years of practice guided my hands as I followed the momentum of the block with a downward cut, smashing him on the forehead. I put all my force into the last six inches of the wood, like I’d done a thousand t
imes in class, a textbook head strike that connected perfectly.
If I had struck him with a real sword, the Snowman would have been cut in half from forehead to aorta. As it was, the cartwheel spoke was still heavy enough to deliver a killing blow. I felt the impact travel up my arm, the makeshift sword shivering in my grasp, and a deep depression formed where the creature’s forehead had been, quickly sponging with blood. He fell backwards into the snow and did not move again.
I didn’t stay long enough to find out if he was truly dead. I took his bone axe and shoddy fur coat, throwing the string of rabbits, possums, and mice over my own shoulders, and ran.
Blood thundered in my brain and ears. My lungs felt like they’d been scraped raw. It had been so long since I’d been in a fight that I’d forgotten the feeling that comes after one.
West Coast Invitational. Jaime Jimenez, #41. Cast the sword like a fishing rod. Cut with the last six inches of the blade. The memories came to me jagged and divorced.
A heavy sense of guilt followed. Whatever the creature was, I’d been wrong to kill it. What if, as vile as it seemed, it had a family, children? What if it had only been trying to feed its young?
It attacked me first. I was defending myself. Oh god, Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
A howl split the air somewhere nearby in that macabre forest of human trees. The Snowman wasn’t a scavenger; he was a scout, I realized. A member of a hunting party. They heard me kill him, and now they’re going to come for me.
The distant gang erupted in a chorus of echoing, hollow screams that rang over the tundra like the cries of men charging to war, half a dozen, no, a dozen, no, a hundred strong. My legs felt like they would snap under me with every step, but I ran, and ran, and ran toward those distant, bobbing lights until they weren’t so distant anymore.
Snow and sleet battered my face. At the top of the next ridge I dared to look back. I instantly regretted my mistake. The shallow valley was swarming with fast-moving shadows all scoring brutal spider web tracks in the ghostly canvas of the landscape. They loped on all fours in strange, snaking lines, following their noses and only changing direction when they got too close to each other. They moved erratically, full of anger and bloodlust as they scoured the snow for what or whoever had slain their comrade. Their harsh cries carried above the storm like an eldritch wind.