by Katie Berry
The Holy Rollers, now, they were much easier to handle. The wheelchair clients were usually quite happy to be wheeled anywhere other than repeatedly up and down the retirement home hallways. Edna knew she could park Patsy Barrington in front of a Break Five machine and she’d contentedly pump credit after credit into the machine for the next couple of hours with nary a peep.
Edna watched another vapour cloud lazily rise into the air and get gobbled up by the room’s always hungry ventilation system. She glanced out the front window of the smokehouse noting the darkening sky, then at her watch. It was 2:50 P.M.
When she’d finally verified that everyone was doing okay just a few minutes ago, she decided to have a final vape before getting ready to go out into the cold to talk with Skip at the bus. Taking another drag off of her vaporiser, she looked out the front window of the lounge toward Gold mountain and the Kootenay Glacier in the distance. What she saw didn’t please her. Waves of white ice fog were rolling off the glacier and pouring down toward the casino and the valley below. Great, she thought, not only was she trapped out here at the casino with a bunch of shuffling cast members from the Walking Dead, but now it was going to be as slippery as hell to boot. By the time she finished her vape session, it would be another grey limbo outside.
Tearing her gaze away from the front window, Edna looked to the back parking lot where the Golden Castle Adventure Bus was parked. As the daylight continued to fade away, it became hard to discern the silhouette of the van sitting on the far side of the lot, where it seemed to be parked next to a large, grey snowbank.
The driver of the Golden Castle Adventure Bus, Skip Buffer, was a man old enough to be an inmate in the retirement home for which he worked. Skip usually came into the casino for the free lunch provided for the tour bus drivers, and then he’d invariably leave as soon as it was over, heading back to the bus to sleep away the rest of the afternoon. That was usually the last she’d ever hear from him until about 4:00 P.M. when he’d stroll back in to help round up his fellow seniors.
Right now, Skip was no doubt napping behind the wheel out in the van, engine running, heater and stereo cranked. There was no way he would hear his cell phone even if she tried to call him; she knew that from experience. Part of Skip’s job description was to help make sure the residents were looked after when he and Edna took them out on excursions. She knew, to be honest, he did, sort of help, but only as far as making sure that he got the free meal that was coming his way first. Once Skip helped to make sure everyone got seated, he was off to the buffet to tuck into his complimentary meal with obvious delight. After stuffing himself with his usual prime rib dinner and three trips to the dessert cart, he usually went back out to the van to sleep it off. Today had been like any other day, and just like clockwork, about fifteen minutes before the quake struck, Skip headed back to the bus for his nap. Edna was still surprised that all the shaking hadn’t brought Skip running back into the casino, concerned about Edna and his passengers, but there had been no sign of him.
Though she didn’t need Skip to come in to start rounding up the inmates at his usual four o’clock load-up time, she did require him to help get the seniors situated in rooms for the evening inside the mostly undamaged hotel. Taking a long final puff from her vape, she blew a huge cloud at the ventilation duct and sighed again. She might as well get it over with, and let Skip know the bad news and get the ball rolling. Edna was still perturbed at having to go out into the cold and shake Skip awake. She much preferred it when he came in, and she only had to walk out the front door and into the lovely, warm, preheated bus with all of her senior charges.
There was a fire exit in the smoking room, but the alarm hadn’t worked in a while now. Edna pushed on the release bar with her hip to open the door and stepped outside. The cold air hit her like an open-handed slap to the face. Her breathe swirled around her, clouding her vision temporarily, like it were a precursor to the vaporous ice cloud descending the mountainside toward the resort.
She stood for a moment outside the door and watched with a shiver as the first wave of ice fog hit the edge of the property. It rolled over everything in an all-consuming wave, gobbling up the Adventure Bus, then the rusty Trans-Am across the lot.
Moments later, the fog devoured Edna and the Golden Nugget Resort.
Moving blindly forward into the fog, she aimed for where she’d last seen the Adventure Bus parked. She hated the fog as she always got so disoriented and turned around by it. The last bit of fading light remained in the January afternoon, providing some illumination for her, and engulfing her in an eerie, ethereal grey void.
To help guide her, she listened for the music from Skip’s stereo in the van, but she didn’t hear anything, which was very strange. It was usually thumping away. How Skip could sleep with that racket was anybody’s guess. She also expected to hear the distinctive sound of the bus’ Mercedes-Benz diesel engine running, albeit somewhat muted by the fog, but it wasn’t running either. Had it been, the marker lights for the bus would be shining through the mist, yet there was no sign of them either, and that was even stranger.
“Shit, Skip! Why did you choose today to be the one day you didn’t crank the stereo and run the goddamned engine to keep warm!” Edna cursed aloud.
The rusty Trans-Am was suddenly in front of her. She was getting close! Brushing by the car, she looked inside the rapidly frosting side window. On the passenger seat sat the distinctive blue case of a game for the PS4 video game system. She recognised it because her son played games for the same system for hours on end at home. The title on the cracked leather seat displayed an angry Orc or something like that, saliva dripping from its toothy maw, attacking some poor schmuck with a sword. Nice friendly image, she thought.
Walking past the car, she entered the grey limbo once more.
A large dark shape suddenly loomed in front of her.
The van! Thank goodness! She knew the fog could get so thick sometimes that you could lose track of your hand in front of your face. Or as Skip liked to joke, made it harder to spot than a pensioner at the casino a week before the government pension cheques came out.
Edna approached the van, the front end chrome shining slightly in the greyness -- a welcome sight. It appeared Skip had parked the van right next to a huge pile of snow, plowed up throughout the winter and pushed off to the side. Why in the hell did he get so close to that, she wondered. Always cautious with the van, Skip never wanted some careless motorist to scratch the finish. He always made sure to keep it well away from the other vehicles in the parking lots of whatever venue they were visiting. The man was obviously losing it!
There seemed to be something wrong, though. The van was rocking from side to side and up and down, the mound seeming somehow attached to the large Mercedes. This wasn't a thing that piles of snow were accustomed to doing to tour buses in her experience, at least not in the Kootenays. As she stood transfixed, something seemed to ripple from beneath the surface of the grey mountain of snow at the driver’s side window of the Adventure Bus.
She suddenly realised it wasn’t snow mounded up, but instead dingy, grey fur. A monstrous creature was trying to burrow its colossal snout into the driver’s side window of the van in front of her. Thick muscles undulated along its back as it pressed its angular head deeper into the vehicle to feed.
Edna jammed the back of her hand into her mouth to stifle a scream. She wasn’t the focus of the enormous creature’s attention at the moment (Skip had that honour), and she wanted to keep it that way.
The monster’s muzzle was wedged into the driver’s side window of the van, filling it completely. It worried away at what was inside like a dog trying to get at a bone full of marrow. It pulled and twisted its head violently back and forth through the shattered window, trying to extract its meal from the van.
Edna watched in horror as the animal finally yanked the object of its desire out of the driver's side window. With a final huge pull, it freed the gore-streaked, bottom half of Skip from t
he van. The top half no doubt already being digested in the beast’s stomach. The huge predator reared its head up into the air and caught the remains of Skip Buffer in its mouthful of stiletto teeth. It crunched and swallowed, chunks of viscera and blood spraying everywhere.
Edna stood stunned, not knowing what to do. Though her BC Worksafe manual gave great advice about assisting those in peril, nowhere inside did it include any reference to helping extract co-workers from the maws of nightmares that had been made real.
The noise the creature made as it ate was beyond belief. Edna moved her hands from her mouth to the side of her head and covered both ears. She didn’t notice the blood dripping down the back of her hand, drawn by her teeth as she’d tried to stop from screaming. Now with both hands over her ears, she backed up, the bile rising in her throat.
Edna O’Toole suddenly wished for a third hand to cover her mouth to stop the spew of vomit and the scream of terror, both of which she felt imminently forthcoming. She kept slowly backing away, hoping the fog would hide her presence.
But she couldn’t hold it back any longer, and the scream that she’d been bottling up tore free from her lungs. She was quite surprised by the sound that came out, startling herself almost as much as the bear. It wasn’t a scream so much as a high pitched ‘Eek’, as if she were a large mouse who’d just spotted an even larger cat. It was not overly long, but it was loud enough for the creature to stop in the middle of its last juicy mouthful of Skip and turn its gargantuan head to gaze directly into her eyes; they gleamed with a hunger that seemed infinite.
Edna shrieked again, but this time, much louder, and much, much longer.
Then there was only the sound of her ragged breathing as she stumbled across the parking lot through the mist. She hoped to see the flashing neon signs over the entrance, or maybe the slot machines twinkling away in the bright, heated lobby, but instead saw only greyness.
Her breathing came faster and faster as she lurched frantically forward, looking for any sign of lights ahead in the murk. Her life might end right here, right now, if she got lost and couldn't find the casino.
There was a deep rumbling noise. It could have been the sound of her own breathing caused by years of nicotine abuse, but she didn’t think so. Either way, she knew that the beast was coming for her and the thought made another panicked scream well up in her throat.
Salvation suddenly appeared in the impenetrable fog, and the casino's lights shone brightly before her. Like a moth, she flew toward their welcoming glow, but she didn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t look back, knowing that if she did, it would be the end of the line for Edna O'Toole.
The entry doors to the Gold Nugget Casino were on an electric eye system that opened when a patron approached the door. Edna ran toward those doors, expecting them to open automatically; however, the thickness of the fog combined with the fading daylight had affected their sensors, and they remained closed as she rapidly approached.
She slammed face-first into the glass doors with enough force to crack the glass and rebounded off them, landing hard on her back.
Ears ringing, she smiled slightly, staring up at the ceiling of the entry canopy, mesmerised by the multicoloured lights overhead that blurred into twins and triplets above her. They looked so very pretty, she noted dreamily.
The ground quivered as something heavy approached where she lay, and terror snapped her from her reverie as she remembered her dilemma. She tilted her head back and looked out into the fog from her upside-down point of view. There was no sign of the beast, yet, but knew she had only seconds before it was upon her.
Without warning, the entry doors whisked open at her feet. She quickly flipped over onto her belly. Still feeling far too dizzy to stand, she used her forearms to turn herself around. She flip-twisted one-hundred and eighty degrees and dragged herself into the airlock portion of the casino’s entry vestibule. At her back, the earth moved with each and every step the beast took as it plodded toward her position.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
VanDusen pumped round after round into the giant cat, until his shotgun was empty, the four shells the gun held now only smoking casings on the ground. The cat wasn’t moving anymore, thank God, but then again, neither was Chance. Looking down at Chance’s decapitated body, he said, “Sorry about the gun jam back there, Ray.”
Thanks to the Versa Max’s three-plus-one, vented, gas-assisted semi-automatic nature, Reggie was able to rapid-fire the four rounds in contained at the prehistoric furball in less than five seconds. The first round of ammo found its mark and blew chunks out of the cat’s hindquarters. Because of the predator’s savage movements, the second two shots missed slightly and blew chunks out of Chance instead, but by then Ray hadn’t been moving very much anyway, so Reggie didn’t feel too bad about his panicked lack of marksmanship. The final round in the Remington had hit the cat in the head, removing the top half of its brain-pan along with both its ears.
Reggie’s ears were still ringing from the blasts, and the only sound he heard in the cavern now was his own ragged, adrenalised breathing.
But for just a moment, as he took several more huge gulps of moist cave air, bells ringing in his ears from the blasts, he thought he heard something more.
He paused, listening intently as the ringing gradually faded away. Toward the far corner of the calving glacier, another deep bass rumble echoed from the cavern's darkened recesses.
The glacier grating against the rock perhaps, he wondered? He held his breath, listening to hear more, but the sound didn’t repeat.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he felt around in his coat pockets for the box of extra shells he’d brought along for the Remington. They weren’t there. They must have fallen out during the earthquake when he, along with everyone else, had been running for their lives.
“Shit!”
VanDusen didn’t drop the shotgun, but instead removed the Maglite from the muzzle, slinging the Remington back over his shoulder. He wanted to hold onto the gun in the event he could find the box of shells somewhere nearby, or as a last resort, use the damned thing as a club.
At the back of the cavern, the low rumbling came again. Definitely not the glacier. Hopefully, it was some rock, loosened by the quake settling into place somewhere back there, but he knew he was lying to himself.
Reaching into his jacket holster, VanDusen felt renewed confidence when he confirmed that his 9mm Glock 17 was still there. Groping along his equipment belt, he felt the two spare magazines still attached that he’d brought along for the Glock. Including the magazine in the pistol, there was a total of fifty-one shots available. But he knew if there were any more surprises in these caverns, this might not be enough firepower to defend himself. The Glock was able to pump out a lot of bullets in a short time, but their stopping power against whatever else might be in this cavern would be minimal, especially if any new surprises had hides even half as thick as the cat's had been.
He retreated toward the entrance of the cavern, the bioluminescent algae on the walls not giving him enough light to see farther back toward the glacier. As he backed up, Reggie fitted a rubber combat ring from his utility belt to the barrel of the Glock. He then attached the ring to the back of the flashlight and grasped the 9mm utilising the rubber ring. He held the light between the index and middle finger of his left hand, lining it up underneath the muzzle of the handgun with his right. It allowed for spot-on targeting and deadly accuracy. Now armed and ready, he shone the light toward the back of the cavern, as far as it would probe. “It’s like the goddamned black hole of Calcutta in this place,” he muttered.
As his light explored the darkness, the rumble came again, followed closely by another, slightly different noise, yet still somewhat similar to the first.
The Maglite picked up a quick glint of reflections near the back corner, where the glacier scraped against the cavern’s wall next to the ledge, shoring off chunks of itself.
Something was coming his way.
He watched four
dancing specs reflected in the beam of his flashlight. Scratch the ‘something’, he thought, it looked like two things rapidly approaching. The glowing specs became more substantial and brighter, and Reggie felt the blood draining from his face as he realised what was behind the innocent reflections dancing so merrily in his light’s beam.
Now almost at the exit to the tunnels, VanDusen stopped, unable to take his eyes or his flashlight from what was approaching. After several more long seconds, his worst fears were realised -- coming toward him was not one, but two creatures.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! Cubs?” he said aloud. “That piece of shit bear is a bitch, and she has cubs?”
Though Reggie had never seen their mother, he was still stunned at the size of these creatures. The cubs were both more massive than any grizzly or polar bear he had ever seen. Each looked to weigh almost a tonne, and they seemed well fed. He wondered if mama bear had been keeping them plump with the little two-legged snacks she kept finding excavating about her lair.