Cold As Hell

by David Searls

  COLD AS HELL

  David Searls

  First Edition

  Cold As Hell © 2015 by David Searls

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  This one’s for Jolene, Steve and Linda. We go back.

  Chapter One

  Eighteen Minutes

  The Browns were getting ten against the Colts and Peter Craig had money on the outcome—so naturally he was at the Commons, holiday shopping with the family and Uncle Buster on a late Sunday afternoon three days before Christmas. The outdoor strip mall—preferred term: “lifestyle center”—was one of the posher shopping districts in one of the city’s poshest suburbs. It was all postcard-lit with warm white bulbs strung through tall trees, the crisp air jingly with bell-ringers and friendly laughter and carols piped from hidden speakers high overhead. The early evening was bitter cold and the whole place smelled of winter spices and clean, fresh snow. Shoppers excused themselves with smiles as they bumped and jostled one another, banging boxy packages into their own shins and those of strangers.

  “Look at the lights, kids!” Ava would chirp to their two bored children after every few steps, her breath vaporizing in front of her face. And each time Peter would respond with a throaty mutter no one could hear, and a frosty sigh.

  * * *

  Goddamn, it was cold out here. His knee hurt, his fingers were frozen even through his gloves, and his nose was as brittle and snotty as his mood.

  They walked slowly past the Gap and Baby Gap, The Limited and the well-reviewed restaurants and upscale candle and fragrance “shoppes,” the theater with its mix of art films and blockbusters, the jewelry and fur stores and creameries and closet-sized boutiques with their strategically small inventories. Small in both senses of the word. If you were more than a size two, you had no reason to even window-shop. No reason to be strolling at the Commons, for that matter.

  Despite the hard cold, they walked slowly. They had to, to match Uncle Buster’s limping, foot-dragging pace, a fact that released even more frosty plumes of hot sigh into the grim lines of Peter’s rosy face.

  “What’s that, Mom?” Ellie cried out, her squeak of a voice nearly lost in the scarf at her throat and pink lower face and further obscured by the goddamn carolers caroling from on invisible high.

  She looked frozen in place with her arm extended and mitten pointing up at a train—a child-size set of railroad cars chugging silently toward them, powered by electricity and free of tracks. It pulled over to the curb, out of the way of the steady line of cars, and the “conductor” looked at them. Said nothing, just looked up expectantly.

  “Mom, can we ride?” Jack squawked in his best faintly aggrieved tone of voice, the one that suggested he’d already been turned down and was righteously indignant as a result.

  It was an odd vehicle, and odd the way it had pulled to the side of the road and now just idled there as though Peter and Ava had flagged it down. Peter wondered whether the stone-faced guy scrunched low in the front seat intended to take his riders back where he’d come—onto the Commons’ seasonally busy streets, weaving and wending his way in and out of vehicular and foot traffic. He supposed so. He couldn’t see what else could be the plan.

  “I don’t know,” said Ava, pulling out the words slowly, hesitantly.

  Her reluctance sounded rational to Peter. He figured his wife was carrying some of his own trepidations. The snow was really coming down now and the roads looked slick with hidden ice. Visibility was frosty and poor. Less than ideal weather for a ride in holiday mall traffic in a low-slung five-car electric train, that was for sure.

  “Can we, can we, can we?” took up Ellie, suddenly out of her frozen torpor. She executed a series of bunny hops that showed either her excitement at the ride idling in front of them or the need to stomp some warmth back into her bones. Probably both.

  Peter stared in confusion at one of the train cars, at the nonsensical red painted loops and curves that decorated its green surface. It seemed to be speaking to him, those hieroglyphic swoops and flourishes making up a language he couldn’t comprehend. He stepped back, bumped into a woman in a padded coat who said, “Excuse me” into her muffler in an unmistakably sarcastic tone.

  From back a few paces, the hieroglyphics resolved into a language Peter could more or less understand. Seasons Greatings, One and All, it joyfully though untypographically proclaimed. It was an old-style red cursive script that had been scrawled across the length of the trains so that each car contained only a portion of the message. Looking at only a single car was like seeing a crop circle from ground level. It would have made more sense if each car had been assigned one word each instead of the whole message being scrolled as though the artist worked from an unbroken canvas.

  And…Greatings? An inside joke or a painstakingly painted typo?

  Now Peter took in the conductor of the curious little transport. The stranger’s face was round and unshaven. He had dark circles under his eyes and crinkled flesh surrounding them. There was something mildly sinister about him, which Peter attributed to his expressionless pale green eyes and jowly cheeks and the shadowed landscape of his face. Or maybe it was the fact that he was looking at a middle-aged man who drove little children in an oversized toy train into harshly cold winter traffic for a living.

  “Five dollars,” said the man.

  “Apiece?” Peter asked, letting his aggravation show. Quick math told him it would be twenty bucks for the four of—no, even worse. Twenty-five if they could get Uncle Buster to tag along.

  Peter figured he had room for negotiation. Despite the fact that there were many other families milling around, no one else was waiting in line for the train or showing even the slightest inclination to do so. It was a buyer’s market, surely.

  The conductor seemed to study Peter for a few seconds. Then, almost as though he could read his only customer’s thoughts, he extended one hand in a ratty glove with fingertips cut out, index and little finger extended toward the clustered Craig family. “For both,” he said. “Five bucks for both of ’em.”

  Again, Peter was caught off-guard, like with his first reading of the holiday hieroglyphics on the side of the train, but this time he recovered quicker.

  “Not alone,” he said.

  “It’s a bad idea.” This came in a squeaky-hinge voice from next to him. It was Uncle Buster, his creased yellow face looking up at Peter from under a pea green stocking cap pulled down low over his sallow face, the way skateboarders were wearing their wool caps that year. It looked ridiculous on the old guy. Or comical, depending on the mood of the observer.

  Ridiculous, thought Peter.

  Ava seemed to have discovered the real issue before he did. Peter watched his wife move toward one of the cars, start to lift one foot and turn her body as though angling it to accommodate the way she planned on easing herself into the cramped seat. But after making her approach a few times, angling herself differently each time, she gave up. She put her foo
t back down in the powdery sidewalk snow and looked at her husband.

  Peter didn’t even try to position himself into one of the impossible train car seats—if his petite wife didn’t fit, he sure as hell wouldn’t. It was a vehicle made for children only, though the lead seat must have been larger than the others to fit the grown conductor.

  “Mom, we can go alone,” said Jack. “Pleeeeease.”

  The look on Ellie’s face didn’t quite match her brother’s enthusiasm at first, but then she got taken up in the way he hopped up and down and she pleaded alongside him for unattended ride privileges.

  “Don’t do it,” said Buster in a barely audible scrape.

  Which pretty much decided the issue for Peter, who wasn’t going to be pushed around by the occasionally befuddled old man in the ridiculous skater-boy stocking cap. He looked at Ava. She looked at him.

  Turning to the glum train conductor, Peter asked, “How long does it last?”

  “Eighteen minutes,” the man replied.

  Eighteen minutes? Not: “Oh, I don’t know. About fifteen or twenty minutes maybe.” The precision of this number took Peter aback slightly. Like they were discussing the punctual arrival/departure schedule of a German commuter rail rather than the estimated ride time of a shopping mall choo-choo.

  Peter turned to Ava and shrugged.

  “Don’t let them go,” reiterated their senile uncle.

  He ignored the old coot. Waited for Ava to come to a decision. When she did, it came as a mild surprise. “Can you wait for them?” she asked him. “I’ve got shopping to finish.”

  He’d wanted her to pull the trigger on the whole endeavor. Be the bad guy. He looked again at the snowy streets under the glow of the light-strung evergreens in the square and the vintage-looking black metal lamps on each street corner.

  “You’ll be careful?” he said to the train’s pilot, making both a question and a declaration of it.

  Unsurprisingly, the man barely nodded. “Five dollars,” he said, keeping his focus on the bottom line.

  Peter took off one glove long enough to paw a bill out of his wallet, which he then stuffed back in his hip pocket. He handed the fiver to the train conductor, who stuck it away someplace warmer.

  Then he said, “Get in, kids.” About as inviting as he’d get.

  Their mother commanded the twins to sit side by side, which they did, the two of them easily plopping into a seat that didn’t conform to either parent. Ava looked for and found lap belts, which Peter clicked in place over both of them. Ava put up hoods and tightened draw strings and wiped noses, ignoring the halfhearted objections of both kids to the overattentiveness.

  “Okay, ready,” said Peter as he and Ava stepped away from the vehicle. “Drive carefully.” Then he couldn’t help adding in a mildly sarcastic tone, “See you in eighteen minutes.”

  The driver might have grunted before pulling into traffic. Peter hissed slightly as he watched the slow-moving electric transport push its way ahead of an SUV the size and general configuration of an armored troop carrier, drawing a flash of brake lights.

  He could feel his muscles tightening, and not all his body’s involuntary reaction was due to the bitter cold. It just felt a little…creepy, a little…sinister to watch the twins slowly being removed from his sight like that. Taken from him. Just something he had to work out with himself as an admittedly overly protective father. His kids were growing up.

  Ava said, “Okay, so I’ll see you—”

  “—in eighteen minutes,” Peter grumped.

  She smiled up at him. Drew her coat closer under her chin and said, “They’ll be fine. But you’ll wait for them, right?”

  “Of course,” he said, though his mind immediately turned to the Browns–Colts game that would be late in the first quarter or early in the second by then.

  “Good. Because I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll call you, though.” She gave him a quick peck and turned away and headed off toward the intersecting sidewalk at a slight and nearly comical waddle. She threw a wave over her shoulder. “Bye, Buster,” she called out.

  “This was a bad idea,” Uncle Buster mumbled into the blustery night air as soon as Ava had disappeared into the frigid evening.

  “Uh huh,” said Peter.

  Chapter Two

  Iris with the Green Eyes

  And then it was only he and the old man, at which point Peter realized how ridiculous it had been for him to have promised his wife he’d wait right there for the kids. Right there in the arctic air. In the heart of the polar vortex, as the meteorologists were calling it that year in a more professional and listener-appropriate term than “cold as hell.” Though that was the more accurate term.

  Peter flexed his left knee, trying his best to restore some of the circulation. He was dying out here. He hadn’t noticed the temperature drop quite so much when he’d been distracted by conversation with his wife and kids and the stone-faced train conductor, but now that it was only he and his quiet uncle standing there in a brilliant white sheet of snow, he felt chilled to the bone. So cold it hurt. There was no way he could wait right here and freeze his nuts off for the next eighteen minutes next to a man who hadn’t exactly been a brilliant conversationalist, even in his less fragile years. Not when the Browns were getting ten against the Colts and he had a small investment on the outcome. Not when he knew that the availability of toasty heat and several wall-mounted flat-screens were beckoning him from the inside of the bar behind them.

  No-brainer.

  “I’ve got an idea, Uncle Buster,” Peter said in his cheeriest voice, though his lips were already so frozen and chapped that his words came out tight and overly enunciated, like a mid-stage drunk. “Why don’t we get out of the cold? We’ll step into the bar behind us—the Gridiron—and catch a few minutes of the game. Browns and Colts. What do you say?”

  The Gridiron Sports Bar was an upscale drinking establishment on the corner of two intersecting snow-covered streets of the charmingly artificial village. A couple of large windows showed little more than the image of multiple television sets displaying helmeted men, some in ghastly orange and brown uniforms and all with breath vaporizing out of faceguards.

  Call it heaven.

  It was only when Peter Craig got the door open and was stepping through it that he noticed his confused uncle wasn’t following. The old man still stood on the sidewalk with his stocking cap pulled low over his unruly white thatch of hair. Not moving. Just studying the street before him and hunching low against the steady flurry of snowflakes so big you could almost pick out each unique pattern.

  Peter sighed. He stepped out of the inviting warmth of the doorway and let the glass door swing shut.

  Out here, it felt even colder than it had been just seconds before. How could that be?

  He let out one of his best vaporized sighs. “Uncle Buster, you can’t stay out here. Okay? You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  Peter jammed his hands into his pockets and squirmed deeper into his long wool overcoat. He quickly scanned the street. If he saw the train and his kids, he swore he’d flag them down, end the stupid ride early and get them all warmed up in the Gridiron while they waited for Ava. Surely the place served hot cocoa and popcorn and would be at least mildly welcoming of young children. Jack was starting to like football, after all. Maybe he’d enjoy watching the game.

  “Uncle Buster…”

  “I’m waiting,” the old man said.

  “You don’t have to wait for the kids,” Peter said in an exaggeratedly patient tone of voice. “Not out here. We’ll step in the bar right behind us and wait for them there. There’s a big glass window. We’ll come get them in—”

  “Eighteen minutes,” Buster murmured. Proving that he’d at least followed and retained a portion of the prior conversation.

  “Yes, eighteen minutes a while ago. But now it’s…”

  Peter stopped to pull his phone out of his pocket and stare at the time display on the monitor. It was 6:42, wh
ich meant…

  Which meant what? Peter realized for the first time that he and Ava hadn’t mutually observed a starting time when the trip duration had come up. So how could they accurately know when the train was expected?

  “Jesus.” Peter expelled a burst of carbon dioxide into the night air. He couldn’t help the flare of irritation he suddenly felt toward his wife, whom he held more responsible than himself for neglecting the details of drop-off and pick-up. That was her job.

  “Things are not as they seem,” Buster said. His cracked lips barely moved. His sallow expression gave up nothing. Snow settled in his white eyebrows and on the tip of his nose, but he let it settle.

  Peter let out with another loud sigh. “That’s right, Buster,” he said with unreserved sarcasm. “I’ll be in the bar if you come to your senses.”

  Then he wheeled and headed once more for that blast of welcoming warm air and those giant mounted flat-screen televisions.

  * * *

  The interior was clad in polished cedar, lending it the aroma of a pricey new closet or a ski lodge, not a sports bar. The blond wood and high ceilings and exposed ductwork and iron trim gave it the appearance of a converted warehouse, though the Commons had been newly constructed on the bones of a low-slung sixties-style mall a decade ago. Nothing vintage here except by design.

  There were three separate bars in the vast space and television sets everywhere you looked. All were tuned to the Browns–Colts game.

  Yeah. This would do nicely.

  Peter found a single stool in the shortest bar and eventually got the attention of an attractive but harried-looking bartender who blew stray strands of hair out of her line of vision before giving Peter a tired smile.