by Jeff Strand
Barry stepped out of the way. He wanted to say, "Now you've decided this?" but there was no reason to be antagonistic when she'd finally offered to help out.
Vanessa and Trevor lifted Mrs. Anderson's body off the shelf and set it on the floor. Trevor reached out to Barry, who gave him the knife. Trevor left Mr. Anderson's body on the shelf as he cut away his clothes, rolling his body over halfway through the process.
"I assume you want me to leave his drawers alone," said Trevor.
"Yeah."
Trevor pulled the clothes away and gave them to Barry. Then he and Vanessa returned Mrs. Anderson's body to its spot on the shelf. Yeah, it was corpse manipulation that they really didn't need to do, but Barry just couldn't cope with the thought of cutting off a dead woman's clothes. That shit was wrong.
While Barry wound another layer of clothing around his waist, Vanessa returned her attention to her phone. "No change in the hostage situation," she said. "At least no new tweets from him. Hey, do either of you have a phone?"
"Sorry, nope," said Trevor.
Barry took his out of his pocket. "Yeah. Is your battery low?"
"No, I'm at 73% still. But I can use yours to try to talk to the police."
"Oh, yeah, good idea," Barry said, handing her the phone.
Vanessa called 911 as Barry wrapped a dead man's shirt around his arm. The cold was really starting to become unbearable. He wasn't sure if that was simply because it was literally freezing in here, or if the blood loss played a significant role.
"Yes, I'm one of the people trapped in the freezer at Sav-Lotz," said Vanessa. "We need to talk to somebody in charge, who can tell us what's happening. Thank you."
Barry crouched down next to Dana. "Stay with us," he said.
"I am."
"You sound sleepy."
"No."
"I'm going to do whatever it takes to keep you alert," said Barry. "If that means dancing around doing the Macarena, that's what I'll do."
"The Macarena? What decade do you think this is?"
"Give the boy some credit," said Trevor. "That's probably the most contemporary dance reference he knew."
"Seriously," said Barry, "don't die. We've been through too much crap for you to die now."
"I won't. I promise."
"I'll have Pete pinch you if you close your eyes."
"That works."
"Yes, hi," said Vanessa into the phone. "We're still trapped in the freezer, except now we're locked in here. Two of us are injured. No, he's dead. Yes, I'm sure." She gestured to Barry. "How do you put this on speaker?"
"No idea."
"Yes, we saw the tweet," said Vanessa. "We understand."
"What are they saying?" asked Barry.
Vanessa waved for him to be quiet. She sat there for a few minutes, with her side of the conversation consisting of little else besides "Uh-huh."
Finally, she said, "Thank you. I'll stay on the line."
"Are we screwed?" asked Barry.
Vanessa shrugged. "It's not necessarily that bad. But he says that he'll kill her if he sees any hint that somebody is trying to come after him, and the back room doesn't have any windows. So it's going to be really hard to snipe him. Right now they're trying to negotiate with him, but he keeps going back and forth between being willing to talk and threatening to kill her if they don't leave him alone."
"Just great," said Barry.
"For now, we can't do anything but wait."
"That's what I figured. At least nobody here is in danger of bleeding to death while we hang around. Oh, wait..."
"So if he does kill the pregnant lady, they'll take him out immediately, and we'll be saved?" asked Trevor.
"Yeah, pretty much," said Vanessa.
Trevor chuckled. "Forcing me to root for the murder of a woman with child. That's some messed-up business."
"We don't have to root for him to kill her," said Barry. "We just need them to talk this out before we freeze or bleed to death."
"I'm not sure he wants to talk this out," said Trevor. "Sounds like he's going to wait until we're all dead. Then he'll kill her. Then he'll die in a glorious hail of bullets."
"So what you're saying is that she's probably going to die anyway," said Barry. "If we leave the freezer, we'll get her killed, but quite possibly save ourselves."
"That's how it sounds to me."
"Are you suggesting that we should open the door?"
"Nope. I'd like to think that I've got another thirty years left in me, but they won't be very good years if I have a pregnant woman's death on my conscience."
"Well then, thank you for your analysis, Trevor. That was very helpful." Barry blew on his hands. "Still okay, Dana?"
"Never better."
"Let me know if you aren't. Sounds like we've got a long wait."
* * *
They waited for about fifteen minutes in miserable silence. Walking around was painful for Barry, but it kept him warmer, so he alternated between pacing and leaning against a shelf. His wet pants were so cold that he wanted to yank them off and fling them across the room, but he wasn't convinced that he'd be better off bottomless.
When this was over, he wasn't ever going to go near anything cold again, not even ice cream.
Pete seemed to be faring okay. Dana kept closing her eyes and scaring the hell out of Barry, but when he spoke to her she'd open them and respond. Trevor groaned a lot and massaged his joints, and though he smiled good-naturedly when Barry looked at him, it was clear that the old man was truly suffering.
Vanessa flinched when her phone rang.
"Oh my God, oh my God..." she said as she answered. "Hello?"
She immediately burst into tears. Barry couldn't tell if they were happy tears or sad tears, but unless the person on the other end had quickly blurted out "Your husband and daughter are dead sorry gottagobye," there hadn't been time to deliver tragic news.
"I've missed you so much! I was so scared! Is Cindy okay?"
She sucked in a deep breath, and then Vanessa's sobbing intensified.
Happy sobbing for sure.
Barry grinned. Finally a bit of good news.
It was kind of hard to understand what Vanessa was saying with all of the blubbering, but after a couple of minutes she assured her husband that everything would be fine, and hung up.
"His phone got knocked out of his hand," she explained to the others. "He couldn't get it back, and we're both so used to just having each other as contacts on the phone that he didn't know my actual number. But they're fine. They're both fine."
"That's great to hear," said Barry. "I'm really happy for you. Now we have even more reason to get the hell out of here."
Vanessa nodded. "I'm not going to freeze to death. I'll be walking out of here even if I look like Frosty the Snowman."
"Did you hear that, Dana?" Barry asked. "Vanessa's husband and daughter are fine."
Dana said nothing.
Barry moved over to her. "Come on, Dana, open your eyes. Open them. Look at me, Dana."
Dana remained motionless. There was no rise or fall of her chest, but maybe her breaths were just too shallow to see. Barry took her wrist between his fingers and felt for a pulse.
"Is there anything?" Vanessa asked.
"I'm not sure if I'm doing this right." Actually, he was sure that he was doing it right, but it felt better to second-guess himself.
"Do you want me to try?"
"No, I've got it." He pushed up one of her eyelids. The eye stared back at him without a soul. He pushed up the other eyelid. He was no doctor, but it was very clear that Dana was gone.
"Fuck," he said, quietly.
Pete buried his face in his hands and began to weep.
"Damn," said Trevor. "That's harsh."
"She didn't deserve this," said Barry.
"Nobody in here deserved this," said Trevor. He considered that for a moment. "I take that back. Chad and Ethan both deserved it. I misspoke."
Barry wiped a tear from his e
ye. He hoped that his sorrow was for Dana, although if he was honest, it was probably from the proof that he was one big step closer to death himself.
Vanessa picked up Barry's phone. "Sir? Hi. I understand that you're still in a tricky situation. I just wanted to let you know that there are only four of us now."
SIX
"Do you think they'll still sell this food when it's all over?" Barry asked.
"I hope not," said Trevor. He was bent over and hugging himself, and it was difficult to hear him.
"I don't mean the frozen food with blood and brains on it. Obviously they can't put that out for customers. I mean the food that didn't get touched. Technically, there's nothing wrong with it. Why waste a perfectly good pork chop just because some people died in the freezer?"
"Might be haunted now," said Trevor.
"You do have a point. Maybe they'll discount it, like you would in a house where several murders took place. I think that's the best way to handle it. This store is going to have a lot of bad publicity from this incident, so they really can't afford to be wasting stock."
"We should steal this shit," said Trevor. "Sell it on eBay. Genuine pork chop from the murder freezer. Certificate of authenticity included."
"Now you're talking," said Barry. "We'll start our own business."
"What'll we call it?"
"I don't know. I'm too cold to think straight."
"Are you two done?" asked Vanessa.
"Nope. I can babble like an idiot or go silently crazy. Your pick."
"I think I might pick silently crazy."
"Too bad." Barry blew on his hands, not that it was doing any real good at this point. He wished that Dana's corpse wasn't lying right there where he couldn't help but look at her, but even if she'd been slender, nobody was in any position to lift dead bodies onto shelves anymore.
"I'm going to lose my mind if I have to keep listening to you," said Vanessa. "So we've got insanity either way."
"You're the only able-bodied adult left," Barry noted. "We can't really afford to have you go bonkers. I guess we'll be quiet."
"Thank you. God, I have to get out of here. I don't want anybody else to die, but I swear, if they don't take action soon, we'll have to open that door and hope for the best."
"I'm getting close to that point," said Trevor. "My old bones can't take this much longer. And I know Barry's reaching the end of his line."
"I'm fine," said Barry, lying. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The idea of just curling up and going to sleep was so very appealing, but if he did that, he knew he wouldn't wake up. He was terrified that if this continued, the thought of not waking up wouldn't sound so bad.
"You're lying."
"Yep."
"Sorry way for us to go."
"Yeah," said Barry. "I wish the psycho in there would get desperate enough to just burst in here."
"Too bad we can't use his buddy for leverage."
They sat there for a moment, while Barry pondered that.
"Are we sure we can't?" he asked.
"Think he might want his arm as a souvenir?"
"We took the approach that since none of them planned to make it out of here alive, it wouldn't do any good to use Chad as a hostage. Is that still the case? How do we know that offering one of them to Gary won't work?"
"Well, for starters, they're both dead."
"Right." Barry pointed at Ethan. "He's a mess. No way can he pass for alive. I'm not sure that's true of Chad."
"I think you just reached the 'silently crazy' point. Well, not so much the silent part."
Barry slowly walked over to Chad's body, bracing himself against the shelf to keep from collapsing. "He does look dead. Maybe he won't look dead in a picture, though."
"He will."
"Vanessa, do you have any makeup in your purse?"
"Yeah, but not anything that could make a frozen dead body look normal."
"But let's say that we put him on the floor and leaned him against the shelf. I sat next to him, put my arm around his neck, and put the knife to his throat. We took the picture from the other side of the freezer. You don't have to make him look like he's on the cover of Esquire; he'd just need to look less dead. Could you do that?"
"I don't know. I guess."
"What have we got to lose?"
"Nothing."
Barry turned to Pete. "Pete, you've been really brave during this whole thing, and I'm going to ask you to be even braver. Do you think you could help Vanessa get the bad man off the shelf?"
"That's demented," said Trevor.
"I'll help, too. Three of us can get him down, I'm sure. Are you up for that, Pete?"
Pete nodded.
Getting Chad's body off the shelf was a pain in the ass, and the strain definitely messed with Barry's stab wound. Once they got Chad seated against the shelf, it seemed impossible that he could pass for alive...but if Gary saw the picture, he'd be seeing it on a tiny cell phone display. This didn't have to be Hollywood level special makeup effects. It didn't even have to live up to the standards of a cheap B-movie. It needed to fool a desperate and probably mentally ill man who was peeking at his phone while keeping a meat cleaver to a pregnant woman's neck. They could do this.
While Barry got in place, Vanessa patted Chad's face with some tan powder stuff. "We all look like crap," he said. "All we want to do is make him look less purple."
He shared his idea for what to do next if Gary took the bait. Everybody agreed that it was an awful scheme. They also agreed that they were not in a position to be choosy about their escape plan options.
When Vanessa was done, Barry placed the knife against Chad's throat. "Can you tell he has a broken neck?" he asked.
"His head is at a weird angle, yeah."
"What about now?"
"I think that's okay."
"Does he look even remotely alive?"
Vanessa shook her head. "His eyes are glazed over. It might not show up in the picture, but you can tell he's dead from the eyes."
"All right." Barry thought for a moment. "We can improvise."
He slid the knife blade low across Chad's forehead, just over his eyebrows. Chad didn't bleed much, but Barry had plenty of his own blood to spare, so he dabbed his fingers against the wet cloth and put some blood streaks down to Chad's eyes. Though this certainly didn't make him appear alive, it might distract from his glassy-eyed corpse stare.
In a day filled with things that Barry would have never expected to do, mutilating a dead body was pretty high on the list.
Perfect. Well, not perfect, not even close, but better than waiting for the situation outside to resolve itself.
Barry got back into position. Vanessa stepped as far away from him as she could, then took a few pictures. She walked back and held up her phone. "What do you think?"
Actually, it looked okay. It wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny, but how much scrutiny would it receive? As long as the Internet wasn't instantly filled with people shouting "FAKE!!!" this might work.
"Do you think people will say it's fake?" Barry asked.
"Oh, yeah. But even if it were real people would say that it's fake. If I were him, it might fool me."
"Might?"
"Might."
"That's as good as we're going to get."
"Do I just tweet it?" Vanessa asked.
"I don't know. Is it better to have the police forward it to him?"
"Twitter would be more public. These guys are all worried about the message they're sending to the nation, so if he knows that the whole Twitterverse knows we want to trade hostages, he might be more inclined to go for it."
"Might?"
"Might."
"That's as good as we're going to get," said Barry.
"You two are just adorable," said Trevor.
"He's probably getting thousands of tweets," said Vanessa. "We may have to send it a few times to make sure he sees it." She tapped away at her cell phone. "I'm in the freezer with Chad. He's still aliv
e for now. Want to trade?" She looked at Barry. "How does that sound?"
"Sounds good."
"Sent."
"Cool. I'm part of the social media generation now. Can't say I'm not jumping in with both feet."
The next step was to...wait.
His not-so-brilliant scheme had distracted Barry from the chill, but now that he was back to sitting around, he honestly wasn't sure what he'd do if this plan did work. Have a hunting knife vs. meat cleaver battle with the guy? He was in sorry, sorry shape.
"Anything yet?" he asked a couple of minutes later.
"A few retweets. I don't know if he's not checking or if it's lost in the noise. I'll keep sending it." She looked over at Barry's phone, then picked it up and held it to her ear. "Hello? Yes, we are crazy. We've got to do something. Look, the guy in the picture is in bad shape. No, the other one. We can't stay in here. Yes, we have a plan. No, it's not a good one."
"You probably shouldn't tell him," said Barry. "He'll try to discourage you."
Vanessa told him, and he did indeed try to discourage her.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Barry asked for the sixth time if there were any updates.
"No," said Vanessa. "But he hasn't tweeted anything new. It's getting retweeted like crazy. He'll see it."
* * *
Fifteen minutes after that, Barry's teeth were chattering too much for him to ask for his tenth update.
Everything was cold. He couldn't feel his fingers. Couldn't feel his toes. He was almost certain that his crotch had frostbite. He hadn't tried to move in the past few minutes, and wasn't sure if he even could.
He decided that he'd better try.
He grabbed the shelf, which didn't hurt his fingers because he couldn't feel them, and tried to pull himself up.
Nope. Couldn't do it.
He was going to die.
"Trevor...?" he asked.
"Yeah?"
"Can you stand up?"
"Hell no."
Barry thought of a comment about how, since they had some free time at the moment, this was a fine opportunity for him to prepare his last will and testament. But he couldn't speak the comment, just think it. And he didn't think it very clearly.