Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter

by Maxwell, Flint

  “And toilet paper,” Stone added. “God knows why…” He became more animated, flailing his free arm and nearly spilling his whiskey. “If the world ended, you don’t wanna be stocked up on fuckin’ toilet paper. Seriously, if you need something to wipe your ass, grab an old shirt or some drapes. Hell, find a bank and use the cash. Money’s worthless when the survivors are trading Tylenol and batteries as currency.”

  “Oh man, is this another one of your rants?” Eleanor said. She glanced at me. “This is another one of his rants, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Looked like it.

  Stone took no notice. “They should’ve been stocking up on canned food, medicine, Pedialyte—stuff like that. But toilet paper? What the hell is wrong with people?”

  “They did eventually,” I said.

  “That was a crazy time,” Eleanor said, “definitely, but whatever happened on July 4th makes the coronavirus look like the common cold.”

  “And we don’t even know exactly what happened on the Fourth,” Mikey agreed.

  “I’m not sure if I wanna know,” I said. “Forget about the coronavirus and people hoarding toilet paper and all that. Let’s focus on Helga. Let’s give her a good send-off.”

  “Crown Apple or not, I’ll get behind that,” Stone said.

  “Thank you.” I raised my cup above my head. “Like I said, Helga showed compassion in a time when most people wouldn’t. So here’s to Helga Thompson. Without you, Helga, we wouldn’t be here. We love you, and we’re gonna miss you like crazy.”

  “To Helga!” the others echoed, and then we drank. Eleanor downed it as easily as water; Mikey took a hesitant sip, seemed to enjoy the taste, and guzzled the rest. Stone…well, Stone wrinkled his nose, and drank the whiskey like it was some disgusting medicine. When he finished, he tipped his cup toward me to show it was empty.

  “Only for Helga would I stomach Crown Apple.”

  We had a moment of silence after that, all of us keeping Helga in our thoughts. If there’s an afterlife, I wished her a good one full of peace and joy; I wished for her to be reunited with Calvin and Sarge.

  She was dead and I missed her—we all did—but it wasn’t lost on me that she no longer had to suffer. No longer had to look over her shoulder for the wraiths; no longer had to fear the dark; no longer had to fear the cold.

  In some ways, being dead was better. It was freeing.

  “Crazy,” Eleanor said after a moment. She reached for the bottle and poured herself another splash.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “How we only knew her a short time, but she was still able to touch our lives the way she did. That’s unheard of.”

  I took the bottle back, unscrewed the cap, then tipped it over and poured a little Crown out. It splashed the floor. “Yeah, she was special.”

  We sat down not long after and huddled close to the fire. As time went on, I kept getting up and finding more things to burn. There wasn’t much left. We needed the sun to make its rare appearance sooner rather than later.

  None of us slept well.

  We drank the whole bottle of Crown. Mostly Ell and me, though I caught Mikey sneaking a few gulps here and there whenever his big sis was distracted. I didn’t say anything, though. Drastic times called for drastic measures, and these were certainly drastic times.

  The clock behind the front counter didn’t work. The hands were stuck on a quarter past three, so we had no idea what the time was. I didn’t even have a guess. The blackness outside told my brain it had to be the middle of the night. I couldn’t be sure, however, with the way the world was.

  Chewy snored softly a few feet away from me. Mikey was spooning him, gloved hand resting on the back of his neck. Chewy was wrapped up in a blanket, but I could see how his body trembled. Mikey’s eyes were closed and his breathing was steady. Stone, opposite of him, the fire between them both, lay on his back, eyes slitted, peering up at the dark ceiling. Eleanor was sleeping, her head in my lap, but every few minutes she’d mumble something I couldn’t make out and her face would screw up in anguish. I hated to think of how she’d have been without the alcohol in her system to somewhat calm her.

  I had a buzz going on. My spine tingled pleasantly, until I reminded myself of how we barely had any supplies or warm clothes, of how we were freezing our asses off in an abandoned BP gas station half-buried in the snow. All that separated us from the monsters out there was a thin pane of glass and thin metal shutters.

  We had a quarter of a can of bug spray left. Not much in the way of weapons. I had searched around the station for more flammable spray, and all I found were a few tiny travel-sized bottles of hairspray and air freshener. Some flashlights, too, but of the keychain variety, which generated about as much brightness as a birthday candle.

  Those might be good enough to turn a few wraiths away, but if they ganged up on us like they had on Lake Prism, we were, for lack of a better term, fucked.

  For now, though, we were okay. The ghosts of our pasts weren’t out in the snow calling our names, beckoning us. As much as I didn’t want to listen for those voices, I made sure I strained my ears for them, but besides the gentle crackle of the fire it was quiet inside the station. Most of the world was quiet now. I mean, there was no power, no humming refrigerators, no cars trundling up and down the roads, no people talking, no dogs barking, no birds tweeting, no midnight owls hooting.

  Just silence.

  Eerie silence.

  As an introverted fella, one who mostly kept to himself, I used to dread knocks on my front door and calls from unknown numbers. I avoided small talk at the grocery store and the bank—you could say I practiced social distancing before it was cool—but I would’ve done just about anything to have the chance to hold the door open for someone or mindlessly talk about the (warm) weather with the grocery store cashier. Such things would be hard nowadays. Because we lived in a world without strangers.

  Or so I thought…

  I must’ve dozed off for a bit because I didn’t immediately register what I was hearing. At first I heard it in my dream. The dream wasn’t anything special. I’m not even sure I can even call it a dream. I was in that state between rest and sleep, where your mind is conscious enough to know you’re dreaming but it continues regardless.

  In my dream, I was back home, outside, in a tank top and a pair of shorts. The sun beat down on my skin, warming me. It was summertime. The sky was blue and clear for as far as the eye could see. My father was mowing the front yard with big headphones over his ears. They weren’t connected to an iPod or a portable CD player; instead, there was an antenna on one that picked up local radio waves. He always wore them whenever he was doing yard work. That way he could listen to the Cleveland Indians baseball games.

  The sound I heard in my dream that followed me into reality was the sound of his mower, the thrumming of its engine.

  For a time my unconscious mind compensated for the location of the real sound.

  As it grew closer, so did the lawnmower in my dream. I grinned at my dad and he shouted something about the bases being loaded, then he pivoted and took the mower down the yard. But the sound I heard didn’t match with where he was going.

  I opened my eyes. Like usual, it took a moment for me to solidify where I was waking up. I partially thought I was back in the lake house that Stone, Jonas, and I had rented for the Fourth; a different part of my brain thought I was back in my childhood bedroom, but there was no scantily clad poster of a model or actress hanging on the wall.

  The metal bucket was there instead. The fire had gone out, and the embers inside glowed a dark orange. Beyond the bucket stood the shelves of snacks. Mikey and Chewy had shifted their positions. The dog now lay on Mikey’s chest, his face just visible out of the blanket, tongue lolling from between his teeth.

  I looked down. Eleanor was turned toward me, using her hands as a pillow on top of my thigh. Her eyes rolled around behind their lids, and she was snoring softly.

  The gas station. I was st
ill in the gas station. But the sound…the sound from my dream had followed me out of it. How?

  It made no sense.

  I eased Ell’s head from my thigh, and then I rose quietly. Not even Chewy noticed. The dog was out like a light, probably from all the Doritos he’d devoured earlier.

  I left the aisle and approached the window. The fog and the ice coating the glass on both the outside and inside made it difficult to see, but I tried my luck anyway. I needed to make sure I wasn’t imagining this engine-like sound.

  I poked my finger through the grating and cleared a space to see out of. Putting the shutter back up had crossed my mind, but the sound would wake the others. They needed their rest, and I didn’t plan on waking them until I knew it was a sure thing and not my imagination.

  That was when, in the far distance, I saw a flash of white light.

  My dream wasn’t far off when it came to the source of the sound. It was, in fact, an engine, but the engine didn’t belong to a lawnmower.

  I wasn’t sure what it belonged to, actually. Whatever it was, it was gliding along the topmost layer of fresh powder with ease.

  This wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t a hallucination. Sure, it could’ve been the wraiths, I guess, but my rational mind put that idea to bed pretty fast. The wraiths transformed into our greatest fears. Sometimes they changed into our dead loved ones and called to us in their phantom voices.

  But I’d never seen them change into an inanimate object. That’d be…well, that’d be dumb. Maybe a bit funny, too. Even if they did transform into the occasional vehicle, could they have manifested a light like the one I was seeing? We had no idea what these monsters were, but we knew they feared light. We knew it destroyed them, or at least deterred them, so why would they turn themselves into their own weakness even if they could? It just didn’t make sense.

  This had to be real.

  I hoped…

  “Guys,” I whispered. “Guys.”

  No answer.

  This time, I practically shouted. “Guys!”

  Stone jumped. Across from him, Chewy shot off Mikey’s chest, knocking the poor kid’s breath from his lungs. In the sudden madness, Eleanor’s eyes opened and somehow stared at me in serenity.

  “What the hell, Grady?” Stone mumbled. “I just fell asleep.”

  “Listen,” I urged.

  “What—?” Eleanor began.

  “Quiet, just listen.”

  The motor’s noise continued its approach, growing louder and louder. Mikey cocked his head. The others looked on in uncertainty.

  “Is that an…engine?” Stone asked.

  “I think so. C’mon, check it out,” I said. “There’s a headlight.”

  He reached up. “Help me.”

  I pulled him to his feet then did the same for Mikey and Eleanor. Chewy was too busy sniffing around the trash from the various snacks we had eaten. Together, the four of us went to the window. Now that they were up, I lifted the shutter and swiped a bigger spot for us to see out of.

  The light hovered in the distance, still about half a minute or so away. I could’ve been wrong, however. In this darkness headlights might’ve been seen for miles, but I didn’t think the road stretched on that far.

  “A car?” Mikey said.

  “No way.” Stone was shaking his head. “No car’s getting through that snow. Not even the freshest layer on top. And all that hard-pack beneath—it might support our fat asses, but it sure as hell ain’t supporting a car.”

  “Maybe it’s a tank,” Eleanor said. “Just plowing through everything.”

  “Like it’s actually touching asphalt?” Stone asked.

  Eleanor shrugged.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “There’s gotta be like a dozen feet of snow out there.”

  That was an exaggeration. There were piles and piles of snow, but twelve feet was overkill. Then again, in my mad dash out of Helga’s house I’d forgotten to bring my tape measure.

  “Plus,” Stone continued, “a tank would be a lot louder than that.

  “I think this is a dream,” Mikey said. “None of it’s real.”

  “That’s more believable than it being a car,” Stone said. “It’s probably—”

  “How about I go and find out?” I stepped toward the door and threw the hood of my jacket over my head.

  Ell grabbed my arm. “You can’t go out there. It’s dark.”

  “I’ll bring a flashlight.” I didn’t bother putting on my makeshift snowshoes. Tying them to my feet took too long. “Whatever it is, it’s coming toward us, and it might be able to save our lives.”

  Eleanor’s argument ended there. I was right.

  Mikey said, “I’ll come with you, Grady.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “I got this.”

  “Let him freeze his balls off by himself,” Stone told Mikey.

  Eleanor grimaced. “Lovely.” Stone shrugged.

  “Not much colder out there than it is in here,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Cold wasn’t what I had to worry about; it was the monsters.

  Mikey helped move the empty ATM out of the way, and then I crawled out of the station. Fresh snow already filled most of the path we’d cleared by the door. Despite the awning over the building, the harsh wind made sure the flakes went everywhere they weren’t supposed to.

  Outside, the motor grumbled louder, almost with an earth-shaking intensity.

  As I cut through the snow, retracing our steps from earlier, I thought maybe the engine did belong to an army tank. I pushed past the snow-crushed end of the awning and the flattened pumps. It wasn’t easy. I seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the landscape with each step.

  A couple minutes later, I reached the pole which held the BP sign up. This close, I could barely make out the logo in the darkness. Still, excitement beat out the fear and pain.

  The sound grew closer, the blinding high beams burning my retinas wonderfully.

  I waved the flashlight above my head with a smile on my face.

  It wasn’t stopping. Not even slowing down.

  I pushed off from the pole and stumbled into the road. I tripped, landed face-first in the snow, and thought to myself I’m gonna get flattened by a tank. Or it’s gonna bury me and I’ll suffocate.

  But I got up a few seconds later and began waving my arms again. I’d be damned if I was going to let this chance pass us by. All I cared about was getting the vehicle to stop, I didn’t care who was behind the wheel. It could’ve been Hitler’s reanimated corpse, and I still would’ve nearly froze to death trying to get his attention.

  The headlight swept over me. There was no way the driver hadn’t seen the strange man in the middle of their path.

  I squinted against the brightness. It was no tank. Not a car or an SUV, either. It was an enclosed snowmobile, some kind of weird winter vehicle. I had never seen one before, and for a second I thought it had to be an apparition, but then I saw the person behind the windshield. It wasn’t a doctor with a large needle or the decrepit corpse of a dead boy who would forever haunt my dreams. Not even Hitler.

  It was a young woman, and she looked as scared as I did.

  “Please stop!” I shouted. “Please!”

  The whine of the engine suddenly wound down as the snowmobile slowed and halted about twenty feet from where I was standing.

  I smiled, all teeth, and would’ve jumped in the air if I had been able. Instead, I kept my hands up to show I wasn’t a threat and approached the snowmobile.

  The black cab over the top of it looked like the cockpit of a helicopter, but it was streamlined and sleek, almost like something out of a science fiction movie.

  As I got closer I saw the snowmobile wasn’t how I’d imagined. It was wider and instead of having two seats, one in front of the other, its passenger seat was beside the driver’s. It reminded me of those weird electric cars you used to see on the roads, the ones that would be obliterated if they got into a regular run-of-the-mill fender be
nder.

  There was nothing in the passenger’s seat besides a backpack. I shined my flashlight at the driver. She was younger than I originally thought, younger than Eleanor. This woman might’ve been closer to Mikey’s age, barely a woman at all. She was bundled up in a heavy winter coat, multiple scarves of bright colors, and fluffy earmuffs that covered half of her head.

  “Thank you for stopping. Thank you so much!” I shouted through the window.

  She eyed me warily.

  “I’m real,” I assured her. “Look.” I took the flashlight and shined it right in my face, making sure to keep my eyes open. It hurt like hell, but it seemed to get the point across.

  The woman nodded to her right, at the passenger seat. “Get in.”

  I went around the back, opened the door, and entered. It was considerably warmer inside than out but not by much. The woman reached for the wheel and the vehicle jerked forward.

  “Hold on, I don’t wanna go anywhere. Not yet,” I said. I cocked a thumb over my shoulder toward the BP. “I’m not alone. My friends are waiting for me. We heard you coming and thought you could help us.”

  The woman chuckled.

  “What?” I asked.

  Shifting in her seat, she unzipped her coat. “Shine your light on this, pal.”

  I did. I don’t know what I expected to see, but it certainly wasn’t that.

  The woman was pregnant. Very pregnant.

  “Yeah,” the young woman said, “if anyone needs helpin’ it’s me.”

  “Wow. How far along are you?”

  She rubbed the swell of her belly. “Eight months, and man, I feel like I’m gonna pop any friggin’ second.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “South,” she said. “Out of this snow. Away from the ‘rages.”

  She pronounced ‘rages like rahjes.

  “Did you say ‘rages?”

  “Yeah, man. ‘Rages as in mirages. What, you haven’t seen them?” The woman arched an eyebrow. “I know I’m pregnant, but I sure as hell ain’t crazy.”