Night of the Wendigo

by William Meikle

  She never got time to hear the rest of the sentence.

  The door behind her slammed hard against the restraining planks. The noise of splintering wood filled the room as a crack ran down the length of the door.

  Mina cut the call off and pocketed the phone.

  “I hope you’ve got some of those bottles made up,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to need them soon.”

  Jackie tore strips of material from cleaning cloths and doused them in gasoline before stuffing them into the mouths of a row of bottles.

  “Nearly there.”

  The door splintered and bowed as another heavy crash shook the room.

  A hole appeared near Mina’s shoulder. She had to back away as a blue hand came through and reached for her hair.

  “We’re out of time,” she said.

  The creature forced the hole in the door wider. Mina joined Jackie at the far side of the room.

  “Watch out for splash-back,” Jackie said.

  The Zippo wheel spun.

  Jackie lit the cloth wick of the first bottle. She threw it straight into the face of their attacker.

  The bottle smashed on impact.

  Flames ran down the creature’s cheeks. The air was filled once more with the smell of burning meat. Where the splashes struck the door, they stuck to it, oozing slowly down the wood, burning with a bright yellow that left afterimages in Mina’s eyes as she looked away.

  When she looked back, there was only the burning door, and no sign of the creature.

  “I’d say that was a successful test,” she said.

  She filled the pockets of the sealskin suit with bottles.

  “Take as many as you can carry,” she said to Jackie. “I’ve got a feeling we’ll need them.”

  “We’re leaving?”

  “Yep,” Mina said, nodding towards the flaming doorway. “This bar’s got an open door policy, and I don’t like the clientele.”

  * * *

  Mike wished he’d stuck to walking.

  At first driving inside the van had made him feel safer, less exposed. But progress was slow around the abandoned cars in the roads. Several times he’d been forced to back up and try alternative routes.

  Loath as he was to admit it, the white emptiness was getting to him.

  He hadn’t seen anybody since he’d left the docks; neither living, nor any of the frozen ones. He had driven over several mounds of snow that hid suspiciously firm centers, but he tried not to think about that. He could be anywhere; high in the Rockies, or in the remote northwest of Canada…it couldn’t look any more snowbound, or any bleaker, than the view out of the van window.

  At the start of the journey he’d tried calling in using the emergency radio in the ambulance, but all he got was dead air. He hoped it was the radio that was faulty. The alternative, that all emergency services were out of action, was just too awful an idea to contemplate.

  All his attention was focused on Mina. He tried to ring her a few minutes ago. He got the engaged tone, which meant she was still alive.

  He took a chance and speeded up, but only slightly.

  He didn’t get far.

  Visibility was still only ten yards. Abandoned cars littered the road, little more than larger mounds in the ever deepening snow. He crept along, bashing the dashboard in frustration.

  The ambulance was still a long way from the bar, and his speed was down to less than five miles an hour.

  He needed a distraction, otherwise he would go mad.

  He switched on the radio and managed to find a news broadcast.

  “The crisis in Manhattan is deepening. Contact with the island has been lost. Gridlocked traffic is blocking the main exit routes. The storm is defying all known laws of physics and is gathering in strength while remaining centered on Manhattan Island itself.”

  He switched channels…he didn’t need anyone to tell him how bad the storm was. All he had to do was look out of the window.

  He maneuvered the coffee flask out from the inside pocket of his suit, got it open without swerving too far off course, and poured a large cup.

  It tasted more like hot whisky than coffee, but Mike wasn’t about to complain.

  Thanks, Tom. He raised the cup in mock salute.

  He hoped the old man would be okay, back there in his makeshift bunker.

  Tom had been a stabilizing part of Mike’s life for many years now, ever since that summer’s night a year after Mike’s dad died.

  Mike spent the early summer running with Brian Johnson and a small gang of followers. They’d already graduated from shoplifting to running a protection racket among the younger kids in the area. Mike didn’t particularly enjoy what they did, but it put money in his pocket, and food on his mother’s table. It was the only way he knew how to do it. In a couple of years time he’d be old enough to work legally on the dockside, but for now, Brian Johnson was the one calling the shots, the one who promised easy money and a better life.

  One summer’s night he promised them the big job, more money than any of them had ever seen. That night they crept through the docks, looking for an easy target. They found one in a cargo that had been unloaded on the dock but not yet picked up.

  Mike was making his escape, as fast as he could while carrying a Japanese stereo system, when Sam Atkins, a small, thin boy with asthma and the worst squint any of them had ever seen, fell backwards, overbalanced by the weight in his arms. The box he’d been carrying made a loud splash as it hit the water below, but louder still was the crack as Sam’s skull hit the concrete dock.

  “Leave him,” Brian Johnson shouted. “He’ll just slow us down.”

  The big boy never even slowed as he ran past Sam’s too-still body.

  Mike slowed to a walk. He looked down at the boy, then at the box in his hands. Selling the stereo would feed him and his mother for a week. He took a step away, in the direction where Brian and the other boys had fled.

  “Take one more step, and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life,” a familiar voice shouted across the dock.

  Tom stood there, hands on hips, trademark cigar stuck out of the side of his mouth. His belly had got bigger in the past year; the result of guard duty instead of dockhand laboring, but that only made him more imposing.

  Mike was lost for words. The box felt like a dead weight in his arms, but he didn’t want to put it down, as if it was invisible while he still held it, but if he put it down, he’d have to start acknowledging his guilt.

  “How’s your friend?” Tom said softly.

  He looked down at the prone body, and then had one last look at the box before putting it down. He knelt beside Sam. The thin boy’s eyes were rolled up in their sockets, only the whites showing.

  “Look’s like you did him a favor,” Tom said. “You’ve cured his squint.”

  There was no humor in Tom’s voice, only a disapproving coldness. Mike knew that tone well…he’d been hearing it more and more from his mother lately.

  Sam groaned.

  “Well, at least you ain’t got him killed,” Tom said. “Not yet anyways.”

  Mike didn’t know what to do. He looked at his prone friend, then back at Tom.

  “Help me,” he said. “Please?”

  “I thought tonight was all about helping yourself?” Tom said, but he knelt and checked on the fallen boy.

  Mike held his breath.

  “He’ll live,” Tom said finally. “But we need to get him to a doctor. Give me a hand.”

  Mike helped Tom carry the boy off the dock to the gate at the harbor entrance.

  “You’re lucky it was me on duty tonight, boy,” Tom said. “If it had been Jack Rowlins, he’d have fed you to the cops, and you’d have ended up like me.”

  “You’re the best man I know, Tom.”

  This time the big man did laugh.

  “Son…you need to get out more. I’m just a sorry sack of shit that never made it above dock hand. You’ve got brains, Mikey. It’s well past time you used
them.”

  Tom made a call from the guard box phone. He talked for several minutes before he turned back to Mike.

  “You’d best be getting on home, Mikey. I’ll be over to talk to you and your mother after my shift.”

  “But Sam. Will he be okay?”

  “Too late for you to be worrying about his welfare now, Mikey,” Tom said softly. “You should have been thinking about that afore now. Long afore now.”

  Mike spent a sleepless night, the only thing in his mind was Sam’s white, rolled up eyes.

  Tom didn’t come by that night, but then, neither did any policemen. And from then on, his mother would receive a brown envelope full of cash every other week.

  “From the docker’s union,” she said. “Your dad’s pension.”

  Mike saw Tom delivering the cash, more than once, but he kept quiet. And he stopped running with Brian Johnson.

  Until tonight.

  In his mind’s eye he saw Sam’s white up-rolled eyes superimposed on Brian’s frozen, black-lipped face. He took another long swig from the coffee, but now it couldn’t dispel the chill.

  * * *

  Mina kicked open the storage room door.

  “Stay right behind me,” she said to Jackie. “I won’t be hanging about.”

  She threw another lit cocktail through the opening, waiting only long enough for the first of the flames to die back before jumping through after it.

  The corridor near the door was empty. There was another door farther down the opposite corridor.

  The one we should have taken.

  Mina ran for it. It squealed as she tugged on it, and screeched open…only to reveal a wall of tightly packed snow.

  “It’s no-go this way,” she told Jackie as the other woman danced between sputtering flames to join her. “Our only way out is through the front door.”

  “Maybe we should stay here,” Jackie said. “It seems to have gone quiet.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” Mina said.

  She motioned down the corridor where three hulking figures were backlit by the light in the bar.

  “Show-time,” Mina muttered. “Ready?”

  “No,” Jackie replied. “But I was on the track team in my senior year, so try to keep up. I’m not stopping.”

  They lit a Molotov each and threw in tandem.

  The whole far end of the corridor went up in a whoosh of bright yellow flame.

  When Mina’s eyes adjusted, she saw the three figures slumped together, one on its knees, the other two fallen over on top of it, all three still burning fiercely where the cocktail mixture stuck to them.

  Black oily smoke boiled across the ceiling. The walls on either side of the burning figures burst into flame.

  They’re blocking the corridor!

  “Come on,” Mina shouted. “Time to go.”

  She ran straight for the burning figures, hitting them shoulder on and forcing her way through.

  She let out a yell of triumph as she emerged, unscathed, into the bar proper.

  She turned back to see what happened to Jackie.

  The archaeologist almost made it past the burning barrier. One of the prone figures, still burning, shot out a hand and grabbed her by the calf. Jackie fell and screamed in pain. The creature pulled her backwards, towards a face of black, burnt flesh.

  “Help me,” Jackie shouted.

  Mina couldn’t throw another cocktail, not with Jackie so close.

  She stepped forward, and tried to prise the creature’s grip away from the archaeologist’s leg.

  The flesh of the fingers was both hot and cold. Burnt flesh slid away from ice cold bone as Mina peeled them away from Jackie.

  Two of the fingers snapped off, falling to the ground looking and smelling like overcooked pork sausages.

  The remaining fingers and thumb squeezed harder.

  Mina couldn’t get them free. Jackie screamed in pain again.

  “Don’t leave me,” the archaeologist shouted as Mina jumped up and headed along the bar.

  “No fear of that,” Mina said.

  What was left of Bob the barman lay in a pool of his own blood, blue eyes staring accusingly. Mina didn’t have time for recriminations. She lifted the discarded shotgun, having to wipe a smear of cold congealed blood from her palm onto the legs of the sealskin suit.

  She scooped a handful of cartridges from the bar, just as Jackie’s screams rose to a new level of intensity.

  The creature was managing to drag Jackie across the floor to where it lay pinned under the other, still burning, bodies. Around them, the fire had taken hold of the bar. Oily flames ran up the walls.

  Mina smelled gasoline.

  A small puddle ran from the left-hand side of Jackie’s body…when she fell she must have broken one of the Molotovs. Any closer to the flames, and Jackie would be going up with the creatures.

  Mina stepped forward, trying to find somewhere calm amid the turmoil, somewhere she would be able to load the gun without her mind racing and her hands trembling.

  “Oh god, it hurts,” Jackie screamed.

  Mina got both barrels loaded at the second attempt.

  She stepped up close and put the muzzle against the creature’s still burning head. Even as she did so the milky-white stare melted, revealing a pair of blue eyes, pupils as small as pin-pricks. They didn’t as much as blink when she pulled the trigger and blew the whole top of its head halfway across the bar.

  Jackie kicked out.

  Finally the hand’s grip failed and fell away from her. She shuffled backwards until she was backed up against the bar.

  Mina saw tears glisten on her cheeks. Jackie’s eyes were wide and round, fixed on the flames that had now taken hold of the far end of the room, and on the now almost unrecognizable bodies that burned there.

  She’s in shock, Mina realized. And if I don’t get her moving, we’re both going to die here.

  She put the shotgun on the bar, leaned down and took Jackie by the shoulders, looking her straight in the eye.

  “You’re doing well, kid. But I need you to help me here. My mother’s always saying that spending time in bars will be the death of me. You don’t want her to be right, do you?”

  Jackie managed a pained half-smile. She tried to speak, but it turned into a sob.

  “Besides,” Mina continued, trying to keep things light. “How could it get any worse?”

  The bar lights flickered twice and went out.

  * * *

  Ewan Toms had reported from Canada when ice storms had frozen power lines solid and brought metal pylons crashing to the ground. He’d filmed penguins in Antartica in the depths of winter as the wind swept over fifteen hundred miles of snowfield, and he’d fallen legs first, through thin ice into an Inuit fishing hole while doing a documentary on global warming in the Arctic.

  He’d never been as cold as he was now.

  He stood with a soundman, a cameraman and all their equipment, in an elevator cab on the top floor of the Empire State building. The cab door had frozen open. No amount of pulling the doors or pushing on the floor buttons had any effect.

  A snowstorm raged just beyond the open door. Only the fact that the cab was recessed six feet under an overhang providing them with a scant measure of protection.

  Then the lights went out.

  The building’s emergency system kicked in, but here in the cab that amounted to a single red bulb overhead that lent a pink glow to everything.

  “Anything from HQ?” Ewan asked the soundman.

  Doug Caplin shook his head. He tapped at the hands-free system hooked to his ear.

  “No. Nothing for ten minutes. Just dead air.”

  “If you’re going to do something, do it quickly,” Eric Mann said. “I think my balls are about to drop off. If that happens, you can coat me in chocolate and call me a Popsicle, ‘cause life won’t be worth living any more.”

  Eric the camera man was the least well-prepared for the conditions. Doug and Ewan had some time to g
et ready earlier, and had dressed accordingly, but the cameraman had either been too late, or had chosen to ignore the warnings, and was paying for it now. He wore a leather airman’s jacket over a pair of blue denims. Normally tanned and fit-looking, his skin at face and hands had taken on a grey, lifeless tone. He was squashed as tight into the corner of the cab as he could get, with the other two men trying to protect him from the brunt of the weather.

  “Can’t we just get out of here?” the cameraman said, his teeth chattering behind lips that were rapidly turning blue. “I heard you were the expert on macho survival shit? We could use some of that expertise right about now.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Ewan said. “I’ve never been stuck on top of a building in a blizzard before. Have you?”

  Doug hit each down button again in turn, and then started over at the top.

  “Would you stop doing that,” Eric said. “And try the phone again.”

  Ewan had tried the emergency phone five minutes earlier. At first he’d got a very drunk man singing “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” but the man had been cut off mid-chorus. That phone too was now dead.

  Doug confirmed it with a shake of his head when he put the phone back on the cradle.

  “Come on, Ewan,” Eric said, almost screaming to be heard above the wind. “Think of something.”

  Eric looked at Doug.

  The soundman shrugged.

  “You know the rules as well as I do…never leave a safe position to look for something safer.”

  “Newsflash sports fans,” Eric shouted. “I’m nowhere near safe. If you’re feeling so fucking secure, how about lending me your coat?”

  Ewan came to a decision.

  “Try to keep him warm,” he said to Doug. “I’ll see if there’s another way down from here.”

  Before Doug had time to protest Ewan stepped out of the elevator cab.

  The wind hit him as soon as he left the protection of the overhang, threatening to cut him in half, even through his layers of protective clothing.

  He shuffled sideways, going with the wind. There were two other elevators on this side of the building, but the doors to both were firmly iced shut. He let the wind take him to the corner, having to fight to stop himself from being blown against the safety railings that marked the edge of the viewing area.