Mountain Madness

by Daniel Pyle

  Could cold weather keep the truck from starting? He wasn’t sure. He’d never pretended to be a mechanic. He knew how to fill the vehicle with gas and which of the pedals was the brake, but he was pretty clueless otherwise. He could admit it and wasn’t ashamed. Not everybody could know everything about everything. Engines had never been one of his specialties.

  Still, expert or not, he knew he’d started the truck when it had been this cold before. Colder even. He tried the key one more time and shook his head when nothing happened.

  He wondered if maybe he ought to look under the hood.

  What good would that do?

  At least he could see if there was something obviously wrong. A broken hose or a corroded battery.

  Do you remember the snow? There’s at least a foot of it out there on that hood. You’re going to shovel it all off for what’s bound to be a useless look at the engine?

  Yes, he was. Tess had been in an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He wasn’t going to risk complications to her condition to avoid some manual labor. What kind of sorry excuse for a husband would?

  He left the keys in the ignition and let himself out of the truck. The storm hit him harder than ever. The wind had stopped gusting and seemed to be blowing with a constant intensity Warren had never experienced, the kind of thing you might see in news footage of a hurricane. He ducked his head, grabbed the shovel, and went to work.

  It was hard to judge how long it took to clean off the hood. Partly because his watch was on the nightstand in their bedroom, but mostly because he had to pause so often to huddle against the blizzard. By the time he’d finished, cleared off all but the last few patches of ice (and the new snow already covering up what he’d just cleared off), he felt cold, sore, and beaten. Like he’d been raped by a yeti.

  He ducked back into the GMC’s cab, popped the hood, and then worked on prying the thing up. Thanks to his clumsy, gloved fingers, it took much longer than it probably should have, but he didn’t dare take the gloves off, even for a second. In this weather, that would have been an open invitation to a nasty case of frostbite.

  When he wedged the ice-scraper beneath one side of the hood and finally levered it up, it popped and crunched and cracked. But it opened. Sure enough.

  He lifted the hood and ducked his head beneath.

  No. That’s not possible.

  The engine was a ruined mess. Chunks of ice hung from tattered rubber hoses and poked out of cracked fluid reservoirs. Warren wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking at, which was the oil tank and which the wiper fluid reservoir, whether that hunk of metal in the middle was the starter or the alternator. Cracked metal casings bulged in places they shouldn’t have.

  Could ice have gotten into the engine? So much ice that it distorted steel? Was that even physically possible?

  He recognized the battery (although it was encased in a block of thick ice and distinguishable only because of the red and black cables jutting from the top), a thing he’d managed to jump once or twice over the years, and he knew the coiled apparatus in front was the radiator, but it also had jags of ice that shouldn’t have been there—that couldn’t have been there—and cracked bulges with veins of frost running into (or maybe out of?) them.

  He shook his head.

  This didn’t seem possible, but what was he going to believe, common sense or his own damn eyes? He knew only that the engine was useless like this, completely worthless. Whether they wanted to or not, whether there’d ever been any kind of chance of driving out of the mountains anyway, he and Tess weren’t going anywhere now.

  He shut the hood and climbed back into the cab for the keys, but what good were the keys? The truck wouldn’t be moving from that spot until long after the storm ended, until they could get a tow truck up here to drag it back to town. Might as well leave the keys there; one less thing to keep track of, one less thing to lose in the storm.

  So he turned back to the house instead and trudged through the snow.

  What if Tess takes a turn for the worse? What exactly are you going to do then?

  What could he do except hope it didn’t happen? If they’d had a phone, maybe he could have called for help—although the chances of an emergency vehicle making it up the mountain were even worse than their chances had been of making it down, and no helicopter would have dared this weather, not even for the worst kind of emergency, let alone a broken window and a few cuts—but they had no phone; there were no cell towers this far up the mountains, and although their landlines were partially buried, there were still stretches of above-ground lines, and they never lasted long in a bad storm. Warren had tried the phone on the first day of the blizzard and got nothing but silence.

  He stepped through a drift with his shoulders hunched. Around him, the blizzard blew its freezing breath, wheezing at him.

  Laughing at him.

  5

  IN THE BACK yard, in a furrow between two drifts, the wind blew across a patch of bluish-white snow. Loose powder drifted across the top, but there was only solid ice beneath. The wind gusted, and the ice trembled. A section of ice broke loose from the rest—now less solid looking, almost mushy—and rose into the air. It was long, cylindrical, finger like. Only longer. Tentacle like. The wind blew harder still, and the tentacle curled into a stumpy question mark of a thing.

  When the wind died down, the curl of ice stayed where it was for a moment, but then it drooped, twitched, and finally stilled.

  Fresh snow fell and hid any signs of the movement.

  6

  THERE WAS A problem. Tess knew it immediately. Warren had never been any good at hiding his emotions. Even with half his face buried in his scarf, Tess knew he was worried. She saw it in his eyes, in the slump of his shoulders.

  She didn’t say anything until he’d made it all the way inside and shoved the door closed. It took him two tries to do this; the snow had spilled through the doorway and formed a kind of wedge, and he had to push on the door with his shoulder to get it to latch.

  Bub got up from his bed and limped over to Warren, and Warren scratched him on the head before pulling off his outerwear.

  “Too much snow? Are we stuck?”

  Warren wiped layers of melting snow and ice off his face and flicked the mess to the floor. “I don’t know. Probably, but I couldn’t even get the truck started to find out.” He unwound his scarf, dropped it to the floor, and pulled off his cap. His hair—almost entirely gray now, but still fairly thick—had matted and taken on an oily, unwashed look, although Tess knew he’d showered just that morning. She’d picked his damp towel off the floor.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  He turned his palms up and raised his eyebrows. “You know me. I normally don’t know a cracked block from a loose fuse, but I took a look under the hood, and…”

  “And what?”

  He stepped out of his boots and joined her at the fire. He moved the items from the second chair to the floor and sat down with a huff. Bub followed him, circled the area in front of the fire for a second, and then curled up at Warren’s feet.

  “Have you ever heard of an engine freezing?”

  Tess shook her head, felt a twinge in her neck, like a cut opening back up, and decided to try moving as little as possible. “No,” she said. “Like the gas?”

  “Not the gas. I think it has to get a lot colder for that to happen. I mean the actual engine. The mechanical parts. Like the battery and the fuel injector and whatever the hell else is in there.”

  “No, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Is that what happened?”

  He rubbed his hands together and held them toward the fire.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what happened. There was ice everywhere in there. The tubes were cracked and broken, the fluid tanks were destroyed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the thing had been…sabotaged.”

  “Sabotaged? With ice? Who would do that?”

  He looked at her and took a deep breath. “Outside of a b
ad Batman villain, I have no idea, which is why I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  She twisted in her chair, leaned toward him. “Hold on a second. What if someone did. For whatever reason. I know you don’t believe I saw a person through the window, not really, but what if there was someone out there? What if they’re still out there? Did you check for footprints?”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “No, I forgot. I’m sorry. But I can guarantee you there’s no one outside. It’s nasty out there. I mean really nasty. Almost unbearable. No one could last more than a few hours in that mess without freezing to death. Maybe not even half an hour.”

  “Then maybe they haven’t been out in it the whole time. Maybe they’ve been hiding in the shed.”

  He shook his head. “I was just in the shed. Nobody’s been out there but me and Bub.”

  “The garage then.”

  He turned his chair to face hers and leaned forward on her knees. “But why would anybody do that? Break the kitchen window? Freeze—somehow—the truck engine? Why not just break in and rob us or kill us or whatever it is they have in mind? Why just…mess with us?”

  She turned back to the fire. She didn’t have an answer to that one.

  “Plus,” Warren said, “there was snow on the hood.”

  “Huh?”

  His eyes were wide, like he’d just solved some kind of problem.

  “Yeah. Snow on the hood. A lot of snow. And no footprints anywhere around it. Whatever happened to the engine, it happened before the snow started. Or at least before the storm really got going.”

  “That was four days ago.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. Nobody would have frozen the engine and then waited around for four days to break the kitchen window just to…what, scare us?”

  Tess said, “Nobody sane anyway.”

  He nodded his head and flapped a hand at her, a gesture that said, I’ll give you that one.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Warren sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s getting dark out,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much we can do except cover the kitchen window, put an extra blanket on the bed, and try to stay warm until morning.”

  “And then?”

  “In the morning, I’ll check around the house and in the garage, make sure there’s not some psycho stalking the place.”

  “And then?”

  He laughed. “Let’s get to tomorrow first and go from there.”

  Before she could say anything else, Warren got up and put another log on the fire. The flames wrapped around the new wood, flickering, licking. Tess sat still and enjoyed the heat.

  “I’m going to tape up the window,” Warren said. “Back in a jiff.”

  When he was gone, something slid down the side of her face. At first, she thought it must be a tear—although she wasn’t exactly teary—but when she reached up and wiped it away, her finger came back with a smear of red on it.

  Blood.

  One of her cuts had reopened.

  She wiped up the blood with the towel Warren had brought her earlier, folded the towel in half, and then folded it in half again, hiding the blood from sight, pretending she’d never seen it at all.

  7

  YOU KNOW THE feeling you get when someone shoots you in the back with a cannonball? Warren had it.

  He should have known shoveling the snow off the GMC after hauling around firewood after fighting his way through snowdrifts all day would take its toll, but he hadn’t felt the muscle twinges until he came inside and warmed up. Maybe the pain was just now setting in, or maybe the blizzard had numbed him to it. Either way, it was here now, coming in long, agonizing waves.

  When he found an old piece of cardboard in the utility room, he decided to go with that over the trash bag. It would be harder to fit into the window without some cutting, but it had some kind of slick coating on one side and would probably hold in more heat and hold out more cold, wind, and snow. He took it and a roll of duct-tape into the kitchen and went to work.

  He didn’t believe there was someone outside—it was just too…well, unbelievable—but as he cut the excess from the cardboard and taped the square to the frame over the broken pane, he thought he heard something in the snow beyond. Something like a voice, like a whisper, calling his name and chuckling.

  Except that was just the wind. Of course it was.

  Ice and snow blew against the cardboard, a thousand tiny drumbeats. Warren doubted the cardboard would hold up for long, but a little while was better than nothing. He was pretty sure he had some plywood in the garage. In the morning, if the cardboard was showing a lot of wear and tear, he’d go out and cut a wooden replacement.

  He applied one last layer of duct-tape, smoothed it down, and dropped the rest of the roll on the strips of cardboard he’d cut off. Pain crept up his back, starting just above his butt and ending beneath his ears. Part of him wanted to twist and try to stretch the muscles, but he knew if he did that he might throw out his back, and this would be the worst time for that to happen. He had to be there for Tess, ready to re-bandage her wounds if need be, ready to hold her if the pain got worse.

  It won’t. Quit thinking the worst.

  It probably wouldn’t, but it might.

  Either way, he was no good to her with a ruined back, lying in bed like some bedridden old geezer, so he kept himself as straight as possible, didn’t do any unnecessary twisting or stretching, left the cardboard scraps and the watery mess of snow and ice that had blown inside right where they were. Cleanup would have to wait for later.

  In the living room, he found Tess hunched over the fire with the poker in one hand and a piece of wood in the other. Bub sat on the floor beside her, his tail wagging, his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth.

  “I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear right now,” Tess said. “But this is the last piece of wood.”

  The wood. Crap.

  Warren sighed, drooped. “I forgot,” he said. Just thinking about going back outside zapped the last of his energy. He imagined the freezing wind blowing more ice and snow against him, trying to blow its cold air right through him.

  “I could get it,” Tess said.

  “I’m sure you could, but there’s no way I’m going to let you.”

  “I don’t mind. I—”

  He put up a hand and shook his head. “You’re hurt. You need to save your energy.”

  “I know, but you’ve already been out there twice now.” She pushed the last log into the fire and positioned it with the poker.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “One more trip won’t kill me.”

  “It won’t grant you eternal life either.”

  He laughed and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. “You stay here and keep warm. If I’m going out into that mess again, I’m going to need you to warm me up when I get back.”

  She pulled him close and gave him her own kiss, this one longer and much wetter than his had been.

  “Maybe I will,” she said, her eyes narrow, coquettish.

  He laughed again. “Aren’t you in pain?”

  “Just a little. And nowhere that counts.” She took his hand and guided it up her inner thigh.

  “You perv,” he said. But he gave her a squeeze and smiled at her surprised yelp before he took his hand back.

  He found his snow gear strewn across the floor by the front door and pulled it on. It was cold and damp and nasty feeling.

  “This isn’t exactly high up on my list of favorite days ever,” he said.

  “Mine either.”

  He told her again to stay put, stay warm, and then he left the house through the back door, thinking of warm, moist places and trying to carry the thought with him through the chilling wind.

  8

  ON THE SOUTHERN side of the house, Warren had buried a yardstick in the snow to measure the accumulation. He hadn’t been around to see it in over a day, and he wasn’t here now, but as the sun slipped behind the moun
tains (not that anyone could have seen this happening through the blizzard, of course), a fresh batch of snow blew in and covered the 24" mark.

  An outdoor thermometer hung from a nearby tree, angled so you could see it from the house. The storm had covered it with uneven layers of ice, but the dial was still barely readable. If you’d looked closely right then, and for long enough, you could have seen the needle slide past the -10 degree mark (not labeled, but there all the same, a thick, black line between the 0 and the -20) and toward the negative teens.

  In the branches above the thermometer, a cloud of snow lifted into the air and wafted away from the tree, floating improbably against the wind. Chunks of ice slid across the branches and the trunk, melting, re-solidifying, forming long, serpentine tendrils. Some of these appendages wrapped around one another, braiding together, melding into larger, thicker structures. One of these larger tendrils pulled away from the tree, wavered for a second, and then whipped out and knocked the thermostat from the tree. The instrument fell to the snow below, sent up a puff of white powder. Two small tendrils slithered down the tree after it. They fell on the dial like predators on injured prey. One of the things lifted into the air and slammed back down into the thermostat’s face, cracking the plastic and burrowing into the space beneath. Several more tendrils dropped out of the tree and joined the first two in their attack.

  When they had all but pulverized the thermostat and most of the pieces of plastic had disappeared beneath the ongoing snowfall, the tendrils slid back up the tree and merged together. A mess of protrusions formed at the end of this new grouping, like a dozen jointless fingers. They clacked against one another, snapped and clicked and cracked. The tentacle curled up on itself, sprang into the air, and grabbed hold of a branch higher up the tree. It curled around this branch and stayed there for a long time. When another tendril slid out the branch to join them, the larger tentacle grabbed it and crushed it into a dozen little bits.