by Andrew Gille
“This is about pop?”
Colin snickered at my Michigan word for soft drinks, “We call it soda Mason, but yeah, RC, Royal Crown Cola, it tastes better than Coke or Pepsi.”
“I know you’ve said that before. I’ve had to drink Diet Rite at your parties instead of Diet Coke for over a decade now.”
“Oh, we make Diet RC now, you just haven’t been to Minneapolis for a while.”
“Who did we meet in Vladivostok then? Who was the big guy, my beeg friend?’”
“Well I told you he is with Rosneft a petroleum corporation in Russia.”
“Yes, you said that, seems irrelevant to a pop company.”
“Soda, yeah he also has the biggest bottling and distribution network in Western Russia, we sealed a deal to provide RC to Vladivostok and most of the Siberian interior that night.”
“And, you couldn’t tell me this why?”
“Cause it doesn’t go public until, well maybe it is now. I didn’t want you to buy stock and be accused of insider trading. A tip like that would be too hard for me to resist, I know that I wouldn’t want to know that kind of thing.”
“What?” I said flabbergasted, “How on Earth would I have bought stock out here? I have no links to the United States, my phone doesn’t work here, I don’t even know how to address something if I wanted to send a postcard!”
“I don’t know, payphone to your broker?”
“Is there a payphone out here in the Siberian wilderness? I don’t have a broker Colin! Lon Andersen manages my finances!”
“Payphone call to Lon Andersen.”
I cringed, I’d been kept in the dark, thinking this was some kind of arms deal or at the very least an illicit software trade. Instead, I had wondered what was going on the entire time because Colin thought I was too greedy to be trusted with a stock tip on pop.
“I…wouldn’t…do…that.” I growled, gritting my teeth, “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“You also never asked, so I assumed you didn’t want to know. You seemed kind of out of it Mason. You got really mad at me before for expressing what I thought about your mental condition, so I’ll just keep it to myself now, but I don’t know, maybe think about getting looked at, you haven’t been yourself.”
“Yeah, I’ve been sleep deprived, pulled out of my element and exhausted, now you can add terrified to that.”
“Yes,” Colin said dismissively. I knew he was thinking that these were reasons that people with the onset of dementia use to excuse their lapses in memory and other signs of their deteriorating mind.
“So we’re back to saying I have dementia? Am I dreaming up these massive footprints, am I hallucinating that our sleds were ripped to shreds by something ten times stronger than us? Maybe it is a figment of my imagination that we’re stuck out here walking back to the cabins?” I said raising my voice.
“Well, no, I saw the footprints, the sleds are destroyed, but I don’t have enough information to make a guess about what is going on. I certainly didn’t invent a conspiracy theory about a foreign government or my business enemies doing some psyops mission on us to assassinate me. I guess you’re talking about Pepsi, coming here with their Pepsi commandos, wearing Bigfoot suits and stranding us out here, so we die of exposure. That would be the most clever thing they’ve done since Mountain Dew Red Mason.”
“You don’t have to mock me,” I said bitterly, Colin gasped.
Again, it was an overreaction which should have been a scoff or silence. I looked at him, his eyes were wide with terror. He said nothing and instead pointed ahead on the trail. I looked and saw what had scared him.
There, slightly off the trail was a body, clearly a human body, freshly killed. Blood had sprayed out onto the snow, the person had been attacked on the trail, and they’d been moved only a short way to the side of the trail. I began walking toward the corpse in a daze, in a state of shock, not aware of what I was doing and I recognized the jacket and pants as being Anatoly.
“Oh my god,” I said almost in a whisper.
Something had chewed most of his face away and gnawed at his neck. I distinctly remember thinking that it looked like bloody cole slaw. One of his legs was missing, and this appeared to be where the arterial spray had originated, his left arm had been gnawed down to the bone, and much of it was also eaten.
Stranger still, he had been arranged after death so that his corpse lay in an east-west fashion. His arms had been placed on top of his chest so that it almost appeared that he’d been posed like a dead man in a coffin. I took a trance-like interest in the corpse, and I unzipped his jacket. I never heard Colin yelling at me to leave him alone although he claimed that he’d later protested what he thought was the desecration of his friend’s corpse. As I pulled the zipper down, it revealed a vertical cut on his body. He’d been gutted, where his entrails had gone was not immediately apparent. What I could tell was that his body cavity had been packed with snow.
Then I noticed the footprints, in the area in which he’d been attacked, there were massive footprints everywhere, then one set, that led to his final resting spot. He had apparently been carried here as there was no sign that he’d been dragged.
I noticed rocks that had been placed near his head, feet and on both of his sides along with strange runes written in the snow.
“What the hell happened here?” Colin asked, his mouth agape.
Thoughts I was unwilling to speak aloud raced through my mind. I believed that the creatures which now pursued us had sacrificed Anatoly to some primitive god and then partook in a sacred feast of his flesh in some sort of bastardized communion involving the eating of human meat. I had the ominous feeling that the sacrificial altar was being watched by those who had committed this travesty in the name of their terrible deity.
I said a prayer as Colin looked on, asking God to deliver us from the worshippers of this man-eating god and protect myself and Colin from the dangers that now beset us on all sides.
“We need to get out of here,” was all I was able to say afterward.
We walked silently for what I thought was perhaps an hour as the sun dipped below the horizon. The visions of Anatoly’s body were still fresh in my head and anywhere but my home in The United States was too close to the scene we’d just witnessed, but I knew we’d need to make camp for the third time since the snowstorm that had initially separated us.
“Do you want to make a fire?” Colin asked.
“Don’t you think that will just give away our position?” I asked.
“We’re going to die anyway, why not die warm?” Colin said.
I agreed with his fatalist sentiment and gathered the dry wood I could find with the help of a Maglite I had in my pack and piled it together near the embankment. We easily lit the dry timber with the help of a lighter and a hexamine fuel tablet I still had from the Russian MRE. Colin surprisingly had not eaten his. He was at least generous enough to share its contents with me, we opened it up and devoured it. After cooking the MRE’s, our appetites had returned. I had noticed that I was getting a little light headed and I needed some kind of fuel for the long march ahead of us.
“Anatoly died well,” Colin said as the light of the fire illuminated his face.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Eaten by some weird yetis, there are worse ways to go. I worried so much about dying alone in a nursing home, not knowing who anyone around me was. I thought about how lonely it must be when you’re trapped inside of a brain that no longer remembers even those you loved the most,” Colin said somberly staring into the fire.
“I put so much money into finding cures for Alzheimer's and other deteriorative brain diseases. I guess maybe I should have put some money into yeti prevention,” Colin chuckled. I laughed at his levity as well.
He continued, “You know, when Grandpa and I would visit Grandpa Charles, he thought I was Kristoff. Kristoff had been dead for 20 years by then. I wondered if it was cool for him to get to talk to Kristoff again.
I wondered if I looked different to him. I wondered a lot of things about how he thought. There’s some thought that patients with dementia should be lied to, it’s called therapeutic fibbing. Grandpa Charles says, ‘Glad to be here with you Kristoff, its been so long since we last got together,’ rather than tell him for the twentieth time that Kristoff is dead and that I’m his great-grandson, Colin, we could have just said, ‘Yes, Kristoff is here to see you, let’s have lunch together.’ Some people think it lessens the confusion and pain of the disease. Hell yes, that’s what I want, I want people coming in and telling me, ‘Hey is it great to be at Disneyland today?’ Just tell me that shit you know? I’m going to get a lawyer to write something up that says they have to lie to me!”
I laughed, “Maybe they could tell me that aunt Diane is really my high school sweetheart Laura Konetter.”
Colin laughed now, “I will tell you that!” He said now looking over at me.
“Love your Aunt Diane, but I should have married Laura Koenetter,” I admitted.
“Really? What’s she doing these days?” Colin asked me.
“The head of Oncology in Grand Rapids,” I said.
“Wow, a doctor, you could be flying me to Russia,” Colin joked.
“Yeah, she just wasn’t interesting, always buried in her books. I guess that got her where she is now though. Her husband is a twit, I met him at a class reunion,” I said.
“Yeah, what’s he do?”
“Get this, the guy teaches yoga. He was her personal trainer in the 1980s or something. Obviously didn’t have any qualms about having a less than professional relationship with his clients and now he owns a yoga studio that Laura keeps afloat.”
“Living the dream.”
“Yes definitely,” I said.
“I get it, man, I tried to date Oprah once. I was pretty infatuated with her, despite our age difference. I was coming down to Chicago back then, I had that apartment in the Hancock Building. We were both in the same circles if it hadn’t been for that Steadman Graham, I might have snuck in there. I thought that she and I had a good rapport. You think that I’d be running around Russia trying to close deals for a cola company I kind of own if my wife was the billionaire founder of Harpo Inc.? No way.”
“Oprah Winfrey? I’d heard a rumor about you two, I never actually believed it.”
“Believe it, if I had a little better game in my twenties or maybe was a little older, I think I would have pulled it off.”
“Steadman cockblocked you though?”
“Yep, she has too much history with that guy, I could not get in there. It would be like getting between Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn, they’re inextricable, you’re not going to win trying to get in there.”
“Stop,” I said as the hair on my neck suddenly stood up. I heard crunching in the snow to our left. I turned to scan the area. I saw nothing until I looked up above the area where I thought I’d heard the noise. There I saw it on top of a hill above us. When it noticed us looking at it, it suddenly disappeared out of sight.
“Did you see that?” I asked Colin.
“See what?” was his response, clearly, no.
I scanned the area in which I had seen the movement. I swore it was antlers and fur. The movement was not that of a deer either. It did not bound off, it sunk down like a man squatting behind brush. I was staring into the comparatively bright sky above the shadowy hills as the sun had already set. All I could see were silhouettes. There again, was it branches moving or…no, it was antlers.
“Stand still,” I urged Colin.
“What is going on?” He said to me not understanding the gravity of what we faced. I couldn’t believe he was so stupid having seen the footprints by his dead friend. He should have known what I thought I was seeing.
Suddenly a loud howl came from the area of the antlers. A massive man covered in fur stood on the horizon. Then two more followed behind him. Before us stood three gigantic bipedal creatures. The yell echoed through the forest, it was not a sound that the human voice could produce. It was piercing, guttural and animalistic.
Colin began running, and I saw the creatures that stood upon the hill start their descent.
I ran through the snow, chasing Colin, barely able to see him in what was left of the dim sunlight. I felt branches and bushes crashing around me. I tried to keep in Colin's footsteps because I figured his younger eyes could navigate in the dark better than mine and if he were moving through an area, I would as well. I saw a clearing before us and a slight descent, I could hear the footsteps behind us, I could smell the scent of urine and wet fur. Colin ran out into the open, then disappeared.
I ran out into the clearing and heard the sound of rushing water, then before I could react, I stepped out into thin air. I tumbled down a steep embankment, snow only slightly cushioned my fall. I avoided sharp branches and boulders as I tumbled head over heels down the hill. I could hear Colin trying to scream, but the wind being slammed out of him as he fell.
We landed, and I heard him groan in an extended and labored exhalation of pain. I wiggled my feet and hands ensuring that I could still do that after the violent fall. Then I rolled onto my side, looking up as I grimaced in pain, attempting to get the air back in my lungs. The man standing above us on the steep embankment screamed as I made a low sucking sound trying to get air back into my lungs. The scream drowned out the noise I made even to my own ears although the creature was several hundred yards up the hill. Then I saw what caused his angry cry.
Another of the beasts was impaled upon a tree, it was a mourning cry for his companion. The third furry figure appeared on the horizon and began to scream as well. Then I felt someone grab my shoulder and pull me to my feet. It was Colin, he urged me to run with him.
We sprinted along the river, rocks spit up from Colin's boots hitting my face as my lungs burned and my heart threatened to explode.
I felt his hand grab my jacket and suddenly I sat in complete darkness. I could hear Colin's labored breath as I attempted to recover from the run as well. We said nothing as we both sucked in deep breaths. Suddenly, my eyes adjusted and I could see the light illuminating Colin's face, I turned 180 degrees, and I could see the light of the outside. We had found a cave.
I sat down in the dirt attempting to quiet my breath, soon all I heard was the rushing of water. Colin and I said nothing for a long time as we waited to hear any approaching footsteps.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Night Three
“DOESN’T YOUR SCOPE have a thermal setting?” I asked Colin my voice echoing off the walls of the cave, scaring me and causing me to lower the volume as my sentence progressed.
“The batteries died yesterday, and the charger is back in the cabin. I don’t even have iron sights so I might as well shoot from the hip with this thing. It’s nearly useless for any kind of long-range shot. Plus the bullets don’t even stop these things. Their fur just absorbs the bullets.”
“They have really matted fur, it is like some kind of super strong weave when I bumped into it, it was like hitting a tangle of ropes. Our bullets are soft lead, if we had some full metal jacket rounds, we could probably penetrate that fur and kill them.”
“Do you have any full metal jacket rounds?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought we’d need hunting rounds for bear, all I have is soft lead, and I emptied an entire magazine into one of them. It just pissed it off. Maybe we could get more of them to fall onto trees, that seems to kill them.”
“Yeah, it seemed dead, and they seemed upset about that,” I stated.
“No doubt, I am sure they are looking for us, and now they want revenge,” Colin surmised.