Then Bob jumped out of the forklift and pressed a big green button, starting the compaction sequence. I fell to me knees at the sudden and overpowering sense of being crushed, like I was in the compactor too. I put my hands to my head to make sure it wasn’t really happening, that my skull hadn’t imploded. It felt squeezed to tiny ball, a sopping, gelatinous gob. Same with the rest of me, from my neck to my toes it felt like something huge and heavy was pulverizing me, compressing me to a sheet of paper. All this happened as the compaction machine did its job, and while gut-wrenching shrieks came from the freezer. If I wasn’t already seething in agony, I was sure it would have curdled my skin. Shannon and Bob both had to cover their ears and back off. Bright electric flashes, accompanied by red bursts of what looked like flames, brightened the dark steel mill. Terrible grinding and growling and shaking. Steam rising. The horrible smell of burnt electrical systems. Bob rushed to the control panel and swished some smoke away. The compactor lurched. The metal walls caved in with a heavy BANG! Then the doors opened back up, revealing Gramma’s old freezer, now nothing more than a lump of flattened scrap.
“There,” Bob wiped his hands as if it were a job well done. But I knew it wasn’t over. The pain hadn’t subsided a bit, and I was shaking and coughing too much to say anything. Shannon knew by taking one look at me. The freezer wasn’t destroyed. Not yet.
“Finish it,” she said firmly. Bob eyed her for a second, then nodded. Without looking, he hit another big button. A clank, a whirr of a giant motor, and the conveyor belt squeaked into motion, bringing the lump of unrecognizable metal out of the compactor’s jaws. Another clank and squeak, and a thick door opened on a large metal casing. A roaring glow indicated the giant vat was incredibly hot. Molten. I even felt it from fifty feet away.
Another agonizing wave struck me, and this time I fell flat on my back, drooling, scratching at my head, beating on my own stomach. It felt like a thousand fire ants were under my skin, and a thousand more were in my brain, my throat, my intestinal tract. As the freezer got closer to the oven, the closer I felt to my own death. The freezer might be destroyed, but it was going to take me with it. I’d resigned myself that. If I had to, I would die. To end this. To make sure no one else died. But that was before I was forced to endure this suffering. The pain was off the charts. No comparison on God’s green earth could come close. My very cells were rupturing, boiled from the inside out, and I was transforming into a madman because of it.
Then came the moment I’d been dreading. I thought I could handle it. Thought I’d be able to control myself as I watched the freezer’s destruction. I was terribly wrong. There came that instant when I was no longer myself. Someone or something, as I was reeling in pain, shoved me aside and took over my body. I stood quickly and shouted at Bob to stop. Shannon must have seen the evil in my eyes and rushed to get in my way, but I flicked her aside and tackled Bob to the ground. Then I got to my feet quickly and pressed the button that halted the conveyer. The crushed remains of the freezer sat inches from the glowing vat of liquid metal, and a euphoric feeling flushed over me.
“NO!” Shannon blindsided me. At the same time, Bob punched me in the mouth. All that did was make me more unyielding, and I took them both by an arm and swung them together. In the confusion, somehow, Shannon had pressed the green button, and the conveyer was squeaking into action, rolling the freezer once again toward its doom. That brought on another shot of searing pain, along with another rush of power, and I hastened to turn the machine off yet again, when someone else tripped me down. Looking up, I saw a man I didn’t recognize, though his burnt overalls and dirty hardhat told me he worked there.
“Bob?” the guy looked confused. “What’s going—”
Before he could finish, I had him by the throat. He gurgled and his eyes popped out and was about to suffocate when a blow to my head forced me down again. Shannon screamed. Several more footsteps approached. Suddenly, there was a gang of millworkers bearing down on me, and I took them all on. Punching and kicking and biting. No holds barred, and I was winning. Then Shannon screamed again. I shot my attention at the conveyer, at the freezer, just as it toppled over into the frothing, glowing sea of liquid fire.
I can’t begin to tell you the sensations. For one brief moment, I thought for sure I would burn up just as the freezer was burning. Melting down. Every part of me evaporating. The pain was more than any human should have to bear. Stupefying pain, enough to make even the most levelheaded person a raving lunatic. Then, a second later, one merciful second, and the worst feeling in the world passed like a scent in the wind. For the first time in days, maybe in years, I felt finally at peace. That freezer’s deadly reign was over.
6.
That was the night I guess you could say when my life really began. Even in all those years of therapy, I’d never gotten myself to the place mentally where I was confident and free. Free from the thought that somehow, someway, that freezer would one day show up on my doorstep. I’d always known. Deep inside I knew. And that dread never allowed me to fully feel alive, to jump into life with both feet. Shannon confessed to me, after a long night of talking, that she’d always felt the same way. Ever since that life-changing event with my gramma and my mom back those eight years ago, neither one of us were the same. But now, now we together took an oath to change. To be the parents and the lovers and the human beings we were meant to be. I guess you could say that night in the steel mill was our rebirth. And we were bound and determined to make the most of every second of every day.
To that end, we both agreed to close up shop for a little while. Shannon took some time off from the salon, leaving Shelly in charge, and I parked the Burger Buggy in the driveway. We packed the gear into the Subaru and took Brenton on his first real camping trip. I mean, we’d gone camping before, but this time we really meant to rough it. Get away from civilization completely. No parks. No facilities. No luxuries of any kind. I even left the cell phones behind, so we had no GPS or link to the outside world. It was our way of cementing the glue between us as a family, and Brenton loved it.
After driving a half a day, we ended up in a remote part of the Three Sisters area, a mountain chain in Central Oregon. There we found a lake with absolutely nobody around, and decided to make it our home for the next week. I tried getting Brenton to go swimming with me, but he was much more interested in nature, and wanted me to identify every leaf and insect and animal we saw. Most I knew. Some I had to make up. But I always had an answer for my boy, because he looked up to his father, and I never wanted to disappoint him.
We spent even longer at our campground than we’d anticipated. It was great fun, and the days melted into one another. Shannon, by the campfire, spent a few nights reading Treasure Island to Brenton, and after that he insisted we build a fortification around our tent, just as Jim Hawkins, Doctor Livesey, and Captain Smollett used to fend off the cunning Long John Silver and his band of pirates. We spent hours and hours playing, me pretending to be Silver, and Brenton playing the part of Jim. Shannon got into the act too, and took on the role of a sea monster, just to add a little flair that wasn’t in the original novel. We did that for days, never once seeing another soul, until Shannon opened the cooler and announced we’d run out of food.
Reluctantly we crawled out of our make-believe world and reentered the land of the living. Leaving our camp unattended, we all piled into the Subaru and struck out for provisions, not knowing where to go or how to get there. Going mapless and without any sort of electronic intervention was a little unnerving at first. But we got used to it, and soon, on a narrow, hilly and winding back road, we found a rustic country store.
The place screamed old, but it looked new. New white paint with red trim. The second I stepped on the porch steps, though, I really did believe it was ancient. Every stride I took it creaked and groaned like an old man with arthritis. I was almost afraid to walk in, thinking maybe I’d break through the floorboards. Brenton had no such fear, and rushed inside to the giant d
isplay of candy along one wall, shelves and shelves of glass jars stuffed with colorful delights. Jelly beans and fudge and peanut brittle and bubble gum. A kids dream. And a dentist’s nightmare. Shannon and I just laughed and let him ogle while we perused the sparse grocery aisles, snatching up eggs, bacon, milk, bread and lunch meats. Despite the slim pickings, we managed to find what we needed.
“Just look at this store,” Shannon kept saying over and over, taking great delight in the quaintness. After eight years of living in suburbia, she was enjoying the trip back to small-town America.
“Daddy! Mommy!” was all Brenton could say, ogling the soda counter and dazzling at all the jars. Shannon shrugged at me and finally gave in.
“Okay, you can have a few things,” she said to Brenton’s jubilant little dance.
“But only because your birthday is coming, Squirt,” I added with a wink, and then found myself in the back aisle, staring at the bait section. Fishing must have been the pastime in those parts, because they had just about anything and everything you could want as a lure. Minnows and smelt and worms and even salamanders. They had tons of the stuff, several coolers and refrigerators stocked to gills, and as my eyes perused them, I caught sight of something that made my hair stand on end.
I hadn’t thought about Gramma’s freezer the whole time we were on our trip. The great outdoors, the isolation from civilization—it was a nature’s remedy for what ailed me. I truly thought the whole thing was behind me, behind all of us. Until that moment. Stuck between a glass cooler and an open bin of smelt was the object of my torment, the object of pure evil and death and hunger. The thing that demanded whoever owned it become a servant to the gods of the underworld. Gramma’s old Frigidaire, I swore it was. It was the same exact size, shape, color. It was square and small and opened from the top. And, when I looked a little closer, I swore I saw blood dripping down the front panel. Then, as I became a statue, staring at this abomination, the freezer let out a groan that sounded like a bear. In one heavy scrape, it lurched for me, and the lid swung wide, revealing a vision I’d seen too many times, both in reality and in my nightmares. Endless blackness. A bottomless pit leading straight to Hell, the edges coated in blood and bones and flapping flesh. A thousand severed extremities reaching out to drag me to my unending suffering.
I tried to force out something—a cry for help, a whimper of desperation. I seemed paralyzed, powerless to do anything but watch. And listen. I heard voices of the undead. The same voices as before, when I was under the freezer’s control, chastising me, vicious slurs of hatred and contempt. So much unmitigated anger, all directed at me:
How could you? You destroyed the freezer…you putrid bag of pus…do you know what you’ve done…DO YOU!
Finally my vocal chords snapped into use, and I shouted so loud it popped my own ears. The demented souls inside the freezer, down in that bottomless and bloody chasm, delighted in my vocalizations, and their verbal condemnations grew even louder than my shrieks. My clothes felt tight against my back, and that’s when I became aware that several fingers and toes and sloppy bones had latched onto my jacket, pulling me in. I shifted my weight and tried to fight, but it seemed my strength was gone. My life was gone. All I saw was the black hole now, and all I felt, beside the pure hatred, was an unyielding force taking me down.
“Eddy, honey! What’s wrong!” Shannon squeezed my shoulder, and that was all it took. As soon as she touched me, a light began to shine bright at the bottom of that black, black tunnel. The brightness spread up the sides, washing away the red stains and the severed body parts, leaving in their places a clean, albeit a little fishy, plain old freezer. Night crawlers and crickets and turkey livers replaced arms and legs. A little frost on the walls replaced the dark red stains. Once again, it was just a bunch of bait in an old, squeaky country store.
The freezer went back to normal, and my vision of the netherworld had left me, but that didn’t end my panic. All I could do was stand there, shaking and staring. And all Shannon could do was try to comfort me with soft kisses and gentle hugs. Brenton, for his part, never even noticed a thing. He was too busy counting jawbreakers and sampling jelly beans. Good thing too. I never wanted him to see his father like that. Ever.
7.
After the incident in the old market, we decided to pack up our camping gear and head home. Brenton wasn’t too happy about leaving his fort, but we told him we had to get back so we could celebrate his fifth birthday at Pep R Onni’s Pizza Pie Palace. That made him change his tune. I just wanted to get out of the area. I knew what I saw in that freezer was just a hallucination, but that didn’t make me feel better. What I needed was to get busy. Get back to work, and life. Put the whole murderous past where it belonged—in the past. Little did I know, this was just the beginning.
The minute we rolled into Beaverton, I noticed a peculiar lack of traffic on the streets. And when we got to our neighborhood, the signs of desertion were even more prevalent. I mean, there were cars in the driveways and lights on in the houses, but, strangely, everyone’s blinds were drawn and their porches empty. It wasn’t too late, about 5 pm, and yet we saw no signs of kids playing, no neighbors trimming their hedges or mowing their lawns or chatting over their picket fences. At first it unnerved me. Shannon even said something about it. We were tired, though, and all any of us wanted to do was get in the house and sit on a comfortable chair for the first time in over a week.
Brenton, still buzzing from his bag of pre-birthday treats, scurried to the living room and plopped in front of the TV while Shannon and I did the minimal amount of unpacking we absolutely had to do. We’d barely managed to haul in the cooler when Brenton started shouting.
“Gramma’s on TV! Gramma’s on TV!”
Shannon and I exchanged perplexed looks as we made a beeline to see what he was talking about. When I saw my mother’s picture in full HD, I almost went into cardiac arrest. Shannon told Brenton to go to his room as she turned up the volume. He didn’t move, and we all stood there, transfixed on what was being reported.
“Police aren’t releasing much information on their suspect, but they’ve acknowledged the bizarre similarity between the recent disappearances in Beaverton and the heinous murders Brenda Mitchell committed back in 1996. At that time, Mitchell went on an inexplicably violent rampage of murder, killing over seventy people in the course of only forty eight hours. With so many going missing now, police can only speculate if this might be a copycat in our midst. Newsstation Seven will have breaking news on this story as it develops.”
“What the f—” I didn’t even have a chance to finish my sentence when there was an arrogant rap at the front door. When I opened it, I thought I was going blind. Lights, from every direction. Every news outlet in Portland was camped on my front lawn, along with what looked like the entire Beaverton Police Department. Cops and cameras and satellite linkups and neighbors on their stoops, murmuring to each other.
A man stepped toward me. Suit and tie. Cropped hair. Sullen eyes. He flashed a badge, identified himself as Detective Marty Monroe, then put his wallet back in his breast pocket.
“You need to come with me, Eddy. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
8.
“We know it was you, Eddy! Admit it! Confess right the fuck now, or we’ll make sure you fry!”
Monroe and his partner, Giles, took turns working me over verbally. They had it all worked out, knew exactly what I’d done, when and to whom.
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about!” my pleading gaze went from one detective to the other. “Please…tell me what’s going on!”
“What’s going on is you’ve taken over where your mom left off, haven’t you, Eddy?” Giles, the surlier of the two, got in my face. “People are going missing like crazy around here lately, and it’s all because of you! You’re a killer, aren’t you? Just like your mother!”
“No!” I put my head in my hands.
“Yes!” Giles got even closer, then Monroe pulled him ba
ck.
“If you’re so innocent, then where have you been for the last week?”
“Camping. With my family.”
“That’s what your wife said. But where’s the proof? You have a receipt from the campground? Any witnesses see you there? Anything?”
That’s when I realized our mistake of camping in the wild. We didn’t stay at an official park, and paid cash for our gas and groceries, so we had no paper trail of our vacation. No way to back up my alibi. Of course, the cops only shook their heads at that.
“How convenient,” Giles nudged Monroe.
“Eddy,” Monroe chewed the inside of his cheek. “We know it was you. This all started back on the fifteenth at the Regal Theater…the night you were selling hamburgers and hotdogs from your truck.”
I just lowered my head, trying to contain the burning in the pit of my gut. They were onto me. And then, Monroe played his ace.
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 12