I was going to stand up to them, and if it got me killed, so be it.
But then I felt something on the back of my neck.
Heat. Almost painful heat.
“Holy shit,” Stone gasped.
“What—?” Eleanor added.
The world brightened.
I turned around.
Helga’s house was burning. Flames stretched out of the doorway and into the snow. More danced behind the dark panes of glass.
As we watched, the entire building soon became engulfed, and the fire’s light was so bright, I shielded my eyes.
“Look!” Mikey shouted “They’re leaving! Those fuckers are leaving!”
I didn’t look. My eyes were fixed on something else.
In the heart of the inferno, just beyond the doorway, stood a thin figure. It was Helga.
She had saved us by sacrificing herself.
As I watched her burn, she lifted a hand. Then, like everything else inside the house, the fire consumed her.
8
The Next Step
I don’t know how long we stood there watching the destruction. It felt like ages, but it also felt like only a few seconds. It reminded me of the apartment building on Swan Drive where the boy died, which seemed like years ago instead of months.
I remember crying as we watched our home burn. I remember tears rolling down my cheeks, only to be evaporated by the heat coming from the fire. The heat that felt both amazing and terrible. I remember the snow nearby melting into a small pond of slushy water. I remember the inky-black smoke curling upward and getting lost among the backdrop of the even-darker sky.
Then I remember Chewy barking. He was in Mikey’s arms. The barks, I thought, sounded happy. Hopeful, even.
“She’s dead,” I heard myself saying, “Helga’s dead.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe she was gone.
“She is,” Eleanor said.
“Wow,” Stone said. The puddle he stood in swallowed a quarter of his crutches. “That’s—I don’t know what to say.”
Mikey was crying, too. I made my way over to him and put an arm around his shoulders; gave Chewy a scratch behind a cold ear. “We did all we could.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
It had started snowing again, and we all knew it was only a matter of time before the wraiths came back for us. Perhaps with reinforcements.
We left.
Before that night, I had only ever seen a few of those monsters at once. Well, saying I’ve seen them isn’t quite right. I felt them, like I explained earlier.
By the time we left, the house was smoldering black wreckage. You could barely tell it had been a house at all. Somewhere in that wreckage was Helga’s body. There it would stay for who knew how long. That thought hurt bad. She deserved better, so much better. Like Jonas and the Harks.
Our trek out of the neighborhood was a blur. I didn’t say much, and neither did anyone else. Stone told us we had to head north if we were going to the ski resort. We were using part of the blackened front door to drag him and Chewy around. It wasn’t easy going, but we only had to make it three or so miles, which was how far away Avery’s Mills was.
On our feet were chunks of flat debris, homemade snowshoes. We made them out of the backs of chairs and doors and pieces of loose wood, tied to our feet with belts and shoestrings. These homemade contraptions didn’t work as well as the actual snowshoes, but those were nothing but ash, so we made it work.
During one of those dull days inside, Helga had drawn a rough map of where we were going now. The house once had power, but the internet router was unplugged because there was no internet to log on to. No point in wasting the juice. This meant no Google Maps, either.
We no longer had the map, obviously, but I had a decent memory of it in my head. I just couldn’t think very clearly at the moment. Stone assured us we were heading in the right direction every few minutes. His voice was the only voice. Hell, it was damn near the only sound. We heard no birds, no bugs, no cars. Besides the terrible screeching wind, the world remained shrouded in silence and shadow.
Everything was dead.
An hour or two passed, maybe longer—I’m not sure—before we got out of the trees and onto a road. By this time, the sun made a rare, unscheduled appearance. Dimmer than usual. The road was, of course, buried under feet of snow, but up ahead, through the haze, I saw the large green signs of the highway a little further down.
As we got closer to one, I made out the words written on it. Ice-covered, but clear enough, it read: AVERY’S MILLS EXIT 14B. The next one after that told us exit 14B was a half-mile away, then a quarter-mile, and then we saw the ramp. It sloped downhill.
At the traffic light, which had fallen over and stood crookedly, another sign jutted from the snow. I walked over to it and dug until the words were visible. The sign told prospective visitors where the best tourist spots were. The tourists were gone, but we were still here, so the sign helped in our favor. Avery’s Mills was to the right, not much farther now, but we weren’t going to make it unless we rested, got out of the cold, and warmed up.
As if reading my mind Eleanor said, “Light’s fading.”
I craned my head upward. The gray clouds had grown darker, the sun behind it so dim it was almost nonexistent.
“We need a break,” Mikey said. “I can’t feel anything.”
“Me, either,” Stone said. “Chewy’s keeping me somewhat warm, but he’s cold as hell, too. We need to find shelter.”
I squinted against the haze and looked down the road in the direction of Avery’s Mills.
A tall sign stood like a beacon. I won’t say a beacon of hope, because we had lost that a long time ago. It was a gas station, green and yellow BP logo bright against the gloomy backdrop. Aside from the gas station, there was a McDonald’s, a Subway, a Monro Muffler, a bank, and a few other nondescript buildings. The gas station was closest, and that was good, because the BP seemed the most secure of the bunch. Fewer entrances, less space for the wraiths to get in, fewer windows and doors we had to barricade. Gas stations weren’t grocery stores, but they usually carried snacks. Not exactly healthy snacks, yeah, but Twinkies and Gatorade was better than starving.
“Up there,” I said. “We can hole up until the darkness passes.”
“We do a lot of holing up,” Stone said. “It fuckin’ sucks!”
“That’s how it is now,” Eleanor said. “I just wanna get out of this wind. We’ve been out here for two hours. At least. My teeth feel frozen. I probably have frostbite.”
“You and me both, sweetheart,” Stone said.
“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go.”
And we went.
It wasn’t easy. The snow was deeper out of the forest. There were no trees to shield the ground. But we did it; we got there.
Half of the awning had caved in and crushed a few of the pumps. The building was small and compact, made of gray brick with BP-green paint running around the top edges. Half the main window and that green paint were all that was visible; the snow buried the rest.
I approached where I thought the door was. Mikey came over and helped me dig a ditch for us to get inside. My hope was to clear enough space to open the door, so we wouldn’t have to break the glass. We wanted to seal in as much heat as possible. The snow was heavy with ice, packed down. Digging took a few minutes of hard work.
Once we cleared enough room, I pulled the door handle, but it was locked or frozen shut. I was unsure which. I’d bet on the latter. Didn’t matter, though, because I broke the bottom part of the door and we went in that way. I guess we could’ve not dug and instead broke the top half of the glass and entered there, but it was hard with Stone and Chewy; and we were pretty good at fitting through small spaces. Almost if we’d been reduced to rats ourselves.
The cold inside felt nearly as bad as it did outside, but it shielded us from the wind.
Some of the snow spilled in as we entered,
and I thought about refilling up the space we’d dug instead of barricading it, but at that point we were sick of being in it.
Mikey and I somehow managed to tip over an ATM. It made a shuddering thud as it hit and cracked open. Money spilled out of it, but none of us cared. Money was worthless.
“Some security that is,” Stone said, eyeing the twenties on the floor and chuckling.
“We can burn it,” Eleanor added.
Stone nodded. “Good idea.”
Never in my life would I have thought I’d be okay with such an act, but after we got situated, we did exactly that. We burned everything that was flammable, right there in the middle of the store in an empty metal bucket Eleanor found in the back. The fire was meager, offering little heat, but it was better than nothing. And in this freezing wasteland, it was damn near heaven.
We all sat close together. Chewy lay on Mikey’s lap.
Outside, darkness had fallen. It seemed blacker than usual, which could’ve been the fact that the large window next to the door wasn’t barricaded or curtained aside from the built-in metal shutter we managed to pull down, but I think it was more than that. I think the darkness was getting worse, heavier, more complete.
Sitting around the fire now, Mikey buried his hand into a bag of Doritos. He pulled out a few chips and fed Chewy. The dog crunched them happily. Stone munched on a Ho-Ho and sipped on some vodka. Booze was the only beverage in the joint that wasn’t frozen solid.
Me, I wasn’t too hungry. A candy bar sounded good, but when I tried biting into a Milky Way, it nearly chipped my teeth. I pushed it close to the tiny fire we sat around, hoping the heat would thaw it enough to make it edible.
“I miss her already,” Mikey said around a mouthful of Doritos. “Poor Helga.”
“Me, too,” Stone said. “She was a cool person. Funny, caring, nice.”
I cleared my throat. “More than that. She inspired us. She gave us hope.”
I hadn’t told any of them of the doubts Helga had or what she confided in me a few days before her death, and I didn’t plan on it. There was no reason to, really.
She saved us. Without her burning down the house, without her sacrifice, we would’ve never gotten away. We’d be frozen corpses or insane murderous things, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. The latter wasn’t exactly people. So what were they? Monsters wearing the flesh of people, maybe? Whatever it was, wasn’t normal.
I remember seeing Ed Hark right before he killed Jonas. I remember how he wasn’t wearing any heavy clothing, how parts of his face had been windburned, maybe frostbitten, and how he hadn’t seemed to care. I remember him grunting, looking at me with his dead eyes. I remember how he pulled the trigger of the gun without hesitation. That wasn’t human.
“You’re right, she inspired us,” Eleanor said. “Helga was a hell of a woman.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of one gloved hand.
Before I stood up I planted a kiss on Ell’s cheek. Her flesh burned my lips like dry ice.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I went to the liquor section in the back and scanned the supply for Crown Royal. They had three flavors in stock: normal, vanilla, and apple. I grabbed the apple. It had a heavy security tag on it to deter people from stealing. I ripped it off and pulled the bottle from the destroyed box. Near the beer were those plastic red cups, and, if you’re like me, you probably know them from high school and college parties. They reminded me of playing beer pong with the Three Musketeers, before we became the Two Musketeers.
I opened the package of cups, took out three, reached for a fourth, hesitated, then figured to hell with it. Mikey loved Helga as much as any of us. If I poured him a shot of Crown and he drank it, no cops were going to come around and throw me in jail. Like everything else, most of the boys in blue were dead.
“What are you up to, man?” Stone called from the fire. “If you’re gonna play with yourself, at least do it where we can’t see you!”
“Hilarious,” I mumbled.
They couldn’t see me from where they sat, and they probably didn’t have enough energy to stand.
I mean, I barely had enough energy to do this, but I was going to do it no matter what.
For Helga.
I came back to the circle a minute later with the four red plastic cups and the bottle of Crown Royal in my hands.
Stone sneered at it. He loved whiskey, but to him, Crown Royal was like holy water to a demon. Add to the fact that this was apple flavored, and I thought Stone would’ve rather cut off his own hand than drink it.
“I know, I know,” I said, “you hate the stuff.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” he replied.
Mikey and Eleanor were looking at me with curiosity. Chewy, though, took this interruption as an opportunity to shove his snout into the bag of Doritos. No one noticed besides me, and if they did, they didn’t care. There were plenty of chips and other snacks to go around.
“Hear me out,” I said, passing the cups to the others.
Stone peered down his nose at the amber liquid inside. He swished it around, showing his bottom teeth in a grimace.
Eleanor sniffed at hers. “That smells really good. What is it?”
I handed Mikey a cup.“Whiskey.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, he’s too young to drink,” Eleanor said.
“Oh relax, Ell. You’re not Mom,” Mikey said. “Dad let me drink on more than a few occasions. I still remember the first time he gave me a beer. It was at the family reunion in Atlanta.”
Eleanor’s eyes widened and her lips parted in surprise. “That was, like, five years ago. You would’ve been—”
Mikey cut her off. “Twelve, yeah.”
“Jesus…”
“They start ‘em out young down South, huh?” Stone joked.
“Guess so,” Eleanor agreed.
“Don’t act like Mom never let you have a sip of her wine,” Mikey argued.
Eleanor shrugged, smiling, and then she waved a hand. “Well, I guess one won’t hurt, but if you think I’m gonna be holding your hair back while you’re puking, you got another thing coming, buddy.”
With a slight shake of the head, Mikey flipped his hair from his brow and grinned. “Ditto.”
I motioned for everyone to get up. “All right, I wanna say a few words.”
Stone frowned. “Really? You’re gonna make the crippled guy stand?”
As Eleanor and Mikey rose, I rolled my eyes at Stone. “Says the guy who could probably beat me in a footrace.”
I offered him a hand, and he took it. Once on his feet, he leaned on a single crutch, wobbling. His other hand held the cup, which he continued sneering at, although not as morbidly as before.
“You got a point there, Grady.”
I said, “Probably beat me.” Back to the matter at hand, I raised my cup. “Helga told me her favorite drink was Crown Apple. Before she caught the ‘Big C,’ in her words, she’d come home from her job at the bank and have a glass of Crown. Not apple, mind you, that wasn’t out until—”
“2014,” Stone interrupted. “A dark day in the lives of many a whiskey fan.”
“Overdramatic much?” Eleanor teased.
Stone shook his head. “Nope, not at all.”
“Okay, 2014. I trust Stone on that,” I continued. “Not that it matters. Anyway, Helga would come home after a long day of standing on her feet and unwind with some whiskey. But then she got cancer, and the meds they had her on during chemo weren’t supposed to be taken with booze, so she refrained. I remember her telling me that was almost as bad as finding out she had cancer. A joke…I think, but I digress. Once she got off the meds and got her health back, she rekindled her love of Crown, eventually expanding her horizons beyond the basic flavor. She determined that she liked the apple the best, even more so than the plain.”
I made a show of swirling the whiskey in my cup and inhaling its aroma, like one of those stuffy people you’d see at a win
e-tasting event.
“Get on with it,” Stone said. “If I’m gonna drink this crap, I have to just down it. The longer I think about it, the longer my stomach has to make up its mind about turning on me…”
“Gross,” Eleanor whispered.
I held up a hand. “Ignore him.”
Stone scratched his eyebrow with a not-so-subtle middle finger.
“Classy,” I said. “Now, back to Helga. She told me she wished the apple flavor had been around when Calvin was alive. He loved everything apple, and I’m not talking about electronics.”
No one laughed, they just kind of stared at me like I was an idiot.
“Let’s pretend I didn’t make that joke.”
“That was a joke?” Mikey asked seriously.
“Yikes,” Stone whispered.
“Leave him be,” Eleanor said. “He’s trying his best.”
“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “Digressing again… Now, I’ll somewhat agree with Stone here on it not being the best whiskey out there, but it’s not terrible. And I wanna honor Helga by sharing a drink with the ones who cared about her, and the ones she cared about. Without her, it’s no secret that we would be dead. Plain and simple. She took us in when she didn’t have to.”
“You actually kinda…broke in,” Mikey said.
“Kid’s got a point,” Stone echoed.
I thought about that a moment before giving my answer. “Well, Helga had guns. If she wanted, she could’ve blown us all away. Wouldn’t have been a dumb decision, either. How would she have known our true intentions?”
“She didn’t,” Eleanor said.
I raised my index finger. “Exactly! She trusted us when I’m betting millions of other people wouldn’t have. Given the circumstances, with those things out there, more people would’ve pulled the trigger than wouldn’t have.”
“Really?” Mikey asked.
It wasn’t him being facetious or anything like that. I thought it was genuine curiosity or youthful innocence. “Yeah, man. Think about the whole coronavirus scare at the beginning of the year. Remember how the grocery stores and places like Walmart and Costco were selling out of soap and hand sanitizer and bottled water?”
Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter Page 11