Whiteout (Book 4): The City of Light, page 3
part #4 of Whiteout Series
Stone and Jonas sat on two of the chairs with cold beers in hand, laughing, bobbing their heads, and toasting to the good life. Behind them, Helga lay on a towel, catching some rays, large buggy sunglasses over her eyes. I smiled at the sight, but wondered where Mikey was in all of this. My brain gave an answer in the form of a dog’s distant barking. I turned and looked past the shoreline.
In the water, making their own waves, Mikey and Chewy splashed around, both of their hair sopping wet, both of their mouths open, tongues lolling out. Every so often, Mikey threw some kind of bright, squeaky dog toy, and Chewy launched after it.
“Grady, you said you’d play Rummy with us! Come on!” Ell called again, one hand cupping her mouth, the other shielding her eyes.
I tried to walk, but I couldn’t. The sand beneath my feet began sinking, and the smile on my face transformed into a twisted grimace of fear and pain.
What? my lips mouthed, no sound able to escape.
Above, the once-blue sky turned a violent shade of black. Gunmetal gray clouds pressed down on the horizon, strangling the sun of its warmth and light. A cold front rolled across the beach almost instantaneously, and my flesh tightened and chilled. Thunder rumbled as the dark heavens cracked open and wispy black creatures floated downward. Then, when another boom of thunder shook the sand, the sky widened and snow poured from the fracture. It coated everything in a pure, unblemished white, yet when the flakes lit on my skin, they did not melt but sizzled instead, and the stench of charred meat and burnt hair replaced the pleasant scent of the sea.
The creatures reached the shore, which was now completely buried by the snow, and made their way toward my loved ones—who, like me, stood frozen.
When I tried screaming, my jaw unhinged, and the pain radiating through my face was unlike any I had felt before.
More thunder rippled—
Ell was screaming in my ears, seemingly inches away. The warmth of her breath clashed with the harshness of her voice. “Grady! Grady!”
A nightmare.
Jolted awake, I realized the snow from my dream had followed me into reality, and we were in the throes of yet another storm. I wasn’t surprised by that, but I was surprised that something else had followed with it. The thunder. Flashes of light tattooed my vision, reinforcing the idea, but as my brain shook off the cobwebs of sleep, I realized thunder and lightning made no sense.
Then again, neither did a lot of things.
I turned to Ell, who screamed as she jerked the sled to the right. We tipped with the sudden movement. The left side rose and fell with a muffled thunk that rattled the layers of ice beneath the fresh snow.
Chewy shot across the seats, but I caught him before he could crumple against the passenger door. He yelped, which I barely heard over the engine, the thunder, and Ell’s shrieks. I won’t say I was gentle in catching the poor dog, but snagging the skin and fur on the back of his neck would undoubtedly prove less damaging than going through the window.
With the sled on both skis again, I reached for the steering wheel and guided us away from a downed telephone pole across our path. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.
The engine coughed—no, hacked—and as Ell took over, we coasted to a stop. The headlights had dimmed, and so had the lights on the dashboard, but my mind was in too much of a frenzy to think anything of it.
Besides our frantic breathing and the sound of Mia and Stone’s sled, the world around us was, for the moment, quiet.
I inhaled shakily and expelled clouds of opaque vapor that filled the cab, and I thought about the thunder. Part of me knew what had caused it, because the sound was a familiar one. I heard it many times since the world had ended.
Ell’s hat had fallen from her head. Her hair was everywhere, and a couple of strands stuck to the paths the tears had taken down her cheeks.
Absentmindedly, I reached out and brushed them away.
“I-I—” she began. “I almost killed us.”
“Ell,” I said, trying to sound calm (and failing), “it’s okay, but I think there’s someone shooting at or very close to us. We need to get moving again before something really bad happens. I can drive if—”
She shook her head, took in her own deep and shaky breath, and said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
That, I wasn’t so sure about. Still, her hand moved under its own power, going against the fear evident on her face, and tried starting the engine. It didn’t purr to life, but click-click-rattled instead.
It was dead.
And I feared we were next.
2
The Theater
The shots had stopped for a few minutes, and in that few minutes, Stone pulled the other snowmobile up next to us, then swung around so its headlights illuminated a good portion of the surrounding area. The logic was that as long as we stayed in this bright circle, we were safe.
As I stepped out into the snow, prepared to either try to get a quick view of what was wrong under the hood of our sled or move into Stone and Mia’s, the whipping wind momentarily knocked me off balance. I stopped myself from face-planting—gee, wouldn’t that have been the cherry on top of this fucked-up sundae—by clinging onto one of the side mirrors and waiting until the gale passed. Outside in that terrible cold, seconds felt like a millennium, minutes an eternity, and although my bones seemed frozen, I made myself crouch so as not to be a blatant target for any shooters.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if there was a shooter. I thought so, but if someone wanted us dead, wasn’t now the perfect time to pump us full of lead? The silence said that we were in the clear, but my intuition said get the hell out of here, don’t risk it. I mean, why shoot at a moving target—albeit, a fairly slow moving target—and then lay off the trigger when said target stops? It didn’t make much sense. Regardless, I couldn’t stand out here any longer. If it wasn’t a bullet that did me in, it would be the cold.
Head down against the wind and trudging toward Stone and Mia’s snowmobile, I sank a little deeper with each step until the white nearly came up to my waist. Again, as I usually did whenever I had to travel by foot through the snow, I thanked whatever entity in charge of the universe for the base layer of ice under the fresher powder that prevented me from being swallowed entirely.
Stone cracked his door open. The tip of his nose and part of his cheeks had turned reddish and chapped, lit up by the glow of the flashlight Mia was holding.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“What?
“That thunder,” I said. “Gunshots, I think.”
“No shit?”
I shrugged. “That’s what it sounded like. Seeing as how I’m able to stand out here without taking a slug to the back, I don’t think we were the prime targets if gunshots were the case.”
Stone pulled his hat down around his ears and scratched the back of his neck.
“Doesn’t mean I wanna keep standing out here, though,” I added, hugging myself to suppress a shiver.
“Is the sled dead?” Stone asked.
“Yeah, Ell got so scared when we heard it, she almost flipped us trying to get away. Soon as we stopped, the engine cut out on its own.”
“Like it did at the ski place,” Mia said, nodding. “Told ya we shoulda got that taken care of.”
Stone closed his eyes. “The snowmobile repair shop isn’t exactly open now, is it?”
I wondered if there even was such a place before the blizzards.
Mia flipped Stone off. “Wouldn’t have hurt to give it a look and try to fix it.”
“With how little Grady and me know about engines, we probably would’ve made it worse.”
“Good point,” Mia agreed.
“Can we save the conversation for another time?” I asked. “I am, to quote Stone here, ‘freezing my nuts off’.”
“What do you wanna do?” Stone asked.
“I think we’re gonna have to pack it in for the day. Find shelter, hope for some sunlight, and do what Mia said we should’ve done a while ago—fix it.”
“If we can’t?”
“Then we’re S.O.L.”
Stone glanced at the dashboard. His eyes lingered on the gas gauge. It hovered around a quarter of a tank, and he and I both knew what that meant. It was the last quarter of a tank we had left without siphoning the bit from the other snowmobile. Unless the engine miraculously fixed itself, or a wealth of mechanical knowledge struck one of us like a lightning bolt, siphoning was exactly what we’d be doing.
I think maybe it was how I was raised—by a father who prided himself on being an average Joe, and whose blunt honesty you’d appreciate even if it hurt your feelings; not to mention with the help of a grandmother who possessed the kindest soul I ever had the honor of being around—but I tried my damndest to never tell a lie. Not to anyone, but especially not to Eleanor.
Once, while in the tenth grade, I found an iPod Nano in the school parking lot. It was a little scratched on one side, but otherwise brand spankin’ new. This happened a month or two after a Christmas when iPods were all the rage. Unfortunately, such gadgets didn’t fit into the Miller household budget, which I understood, even at the age of fourteen.
Well, I found this thing, picked it up, and powered it on. I expected nothing but a blank screen after some careless owner had dropped it on the concrete and left it to the Ohio cold for God knew how long. Sure enough, however, the screen lit up and the buttons and wheel worked perfectly.
There were only three songs in the music library. “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, “Gin & Juice” by Snoop Dogg, and “99 Luftballons” by NENA. I reasoned these were all songs that would eventually find their way onto my own iPod if I had gotten one for Christmas. So this had to be a sign, right? Finders keepers and all that?
Not exactly.
I pocketed the iPod, and marched on up to the front office to turn this two hundred dollars' worth of technological genius into the lost and found. What fourteen-year-old kid in their right mind would do that? Well, I won’t lie, it was a hell of a struggle. Many thoughts ran through my head at the time—thoughts of how I could get away with it, how I could only use it at night, never in front of the other students or, God forbid, my father. Hiding it from him would’ve been easy, but if he saw it…he’d ask where it came from, and since I was unemployed and he knew I spent the little cash I received from distant relatives for my birthday on either comic books or trips to the movies with Stone and Jonas (rather than saving it for college like he wanted me to), he’d know I was full of crap. On top of that, I thought about how if the roles were reversed and it had been me who lost an iPod that my hard-working father bought, I would’ve died of guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment. Then, of course, there was the fact that lying, just the idea of it, tore my insides to shreds.
I remember the secretary (I’ve forgotten her name; it’s been awhile, sue me) behind the desk gasping and raising her hand to cover her mouth, and how her eyes gleamed with mischief for a moment as she no doubt thought about keeping the gadget for herself. The mischief faded as fast as it came, however, and she said, “Wow, thank you for your honesty, Mr. Miller. If no one claims it in the next two weeks, then according to policy, it’s yours.”
The glumness within me burned away as endless fireworks of hope ignited and burst through my interior. I walked home with a pep in my step, unaware of the cold winter wind turning the tops of my ears beet red (back then, in hindsight, that thirty degrees and dusting of snow was nothing compared to what came after July 4th, 2020). What followed was the longest two weeks of my young life. Well, thirteen days, because one day before the ownership passed to me, some eleventh grader claimed the iPod. Yeah, it sucks, majorly sucks, I know—but not every story gets a happy ending.
Anyway, digression aside, I stayed as honest as I could for as long as I could, almost abstaining completely from even the white lies, though some slipped through the cracks here and there. They always do, but those don’t count, do they?
The big lies, however… I told none of those until Eleanor asked me how much fuel we had left outside of our dead sled.
“We’re fine,” I told her, hating myself and hoping I sounded more convincing than I did to my own ears. “No worries.”
“Yeah?”
“I promise, dear.” A smile stretched across my face; it felt genuine enough.
Eleanor bought it, and I hated myself for the time being.
But a few minutes later, after another barrage of shots shattered the cold silence, and I saw the guy with the assault rifle clutched against his chest charging through the hazy curtain of falling snow, our lack of fuel suddenly seemed like no big deal.
I was reaching for Ell’s hand with my right. I cradled Chewy, wrapped in his blankets, in the crook of my left. Ell squeezed my fingers hard, and she yanked me down just as a spate of gunfire rippled through the air. I turned my head, seeing the man rushing toward us. A terrible fear stole over me, icing over my joints more than the actual cold had. Though the man held the gun with the muzzle pointed upward, my fear refused to leave. All it would take for him to kill us was a slight shift of his aim.
The sound of the shots rattled my eardrums, but I still heard him shout, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone, you fuckin’ shadows!”
I waved at Stone and Mia. “Go! Get outta here!” I yelled. There wasn’t enough time for us to make a clean getaway with the man so close. Their snowmobile stayed where it was, and the passenger’s side door opened. Mia leaned out into the snow with tears of fright in her eyes.
“Come on! What the fuck are you waitin’ for?”
More shots roared through the dark.
Rising, I pushed Ell toward the sled’s open door just as the man stopped about thirty feet away.
I remember thinking this was it. I remember waiting for the sudden warmth of my blood leaking from a bullet wound in my side or my back. I remember anticipating a puff of singed feathers from my winter coat floating in the air, mixing with the falling snow. I remember being so scared that my brain rendered movement impossible, but I also remember seeing Ell crawling toward the snowmobile and Mia’s terrified face, and me moving, going against my brain because they were in danger.
Even if I didn’t want to be brave, I had to. I had to for them.
A torn ski mask covered most of the man’s face. Tufts of messy facial hair pushed through the rips in the mask, and he wore a heavy beige coat with some military insignia stitched over one side of the chest—I wasn’t sure which branch. His eyes looked almost as wild as his beard, and on his head was a dented and scratched green helmet. The helmet’s clasps framed his face and flapped wildly with his frantic movements through the snow. Then he stopped and began patting his pockets. A few seconds later, he was fumbling with a fresh magazine. I reckoned we had about fifteen seconds before he was locked and loaded and another barrage of rounds sprayed from the rifle. And who was to say that he would shoot up in the air this time and not at us, especially now that we were so close to one another?
I knew there was only one way to beat him. I had to get the gun out of his possession, because if I somehow managed to get in the snowmobile and Stone took off, the man wouldn’t stop. It might’ve pissed him off all the more. It wasn’t like our mode of transportation went from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds or anything like that. In fact, we’d probably be lucky enough to get over fifteen miles per hour, with all the added weight and fresh snow on the ground slowing us down.
My logic was that if I got shot and died but managed to pry the gun away from the man long enough for the others to get free, then it wasn’t a big deal. The others would still be breathing. Mia would have a chance to deliver her daughter. Stone would watch out for Ell. It would all be okay.
So I climbed up from my prone position, grunting, and pushed away the negative thoughts.
“Grady! What are you doing?” Ell screamed after me as I began heading toward the man in a labored, limping charge.
“Just go! Get somewhere safe!” I shouted back, but the wind snatched away my words and I doubted she heard me.
“Wait—”
Stone understood, though. He revved the sled’s engine and it lurched forward, eventually swallowed up by the darkness and falling snow.
I had taken a beating at the hands of Bob Ballard, both when he woke me in the middle of the night by pressing a sharp blade to my neck, and when I managed an escape from the binds around my wrists to fight him to his death. I had failed to act fast enough then. But here, with this man dressed in a soldier’s uniform, I went all in.
Because I’d be damned if I was going to lose anyone else I cared about.
The man’s eyes widened enough to fill up the holes of his ski mask. I was only about fifteen feet from him at this point, and sensing his fear like a rabid wolf, a new strength flooded my arms and legs. The snow’s resistance suddenly felt like nothing more than thin grass. I picked up even more speed; it felt like I was running downhill.
The man leveled the rifle at me, aimed, but this time he was too late. I threw my shoulder into him. The military coat and the beard disguised his frailty. He was nothing but a bag of bones. Upon impact, his sternum bent inward and possibly cracked. The gun pinwheeled above as we went to the ground, a tangle of limbs. Snow engulfed my vision, but I flailed and connected with him more than a few times. Grabbing handfuls of fabric, I pulled myself on top and cocked my arm back, ready to strike as soon as his covered face presented itself.
The man lurched. His head shot up through the snow, his beard crusted white, and I plowed my fist downward. But halfway through my swing, a sharp pain under my chin caused all the strength to go out of my arm. I felt icy metal parting my own stubble and digging into my flesh. The man had moved so fast, I didn’t even see him pull the knife from the holster on his belt.
