The Dark Winter
Whiteout #2
Flint Maxwell
Copyright © 2020 by Flint Maxwell
Cover Design © 2020 by Carmen DeVeau
Edited by Sonya Bateman
Special thanks to Sabrina Roote
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work.
For my cat Kevin,
I miss you, buddy.
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Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
1
Blood
There was blood in the snow.
I stood about twenty feet away from the parking lot of a small grocery store, squinting against the weak sunlight shining through the clouds. My heart was thumping hard, and despite the cold, I thought I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my back.
The reason for this surge of adrenaline was what lay before me.
About half a dozen bodies were piled near the store’s entrance, the red of the blood a stark contrast to the white of the snow. There might’ve been more buried deeper, I wasn’t sure.
I thought of turning back, moving as fast as I could, but I had come too far to do that.
Still, in the back of my mind, I was wondering what had killed them. Was it the monsters that came out in the darkness, or was it some person who’d lost their mind like Ed Hark?
This much I knew for sure: it was murder…because you didn’t typically bleed when you froze to death.
Helga had told me about the grocery store. It was called Penny Wiser’s. We had been staying with her for at least a few weeks, and these were the best days the four of us had lived since the snow started falling.
I took a step toward the pile of bodies. I was wearing a pair of old snowshoes Helga dug out of her deceased husband’s closet. They were frequent visitors of Avery’s Mills, a local ski resort, when Calvin Thompson was still living. There were a few pairs, two of which were in decent condition. They looked like large tennis rackets made out of wicker. I was amazed the first time I put them on and walked outside. It made moving so much easier. Instead of me sinking and the snow coming up past my waist, I only sank down a few inches, but you couldn’t move fast and you had to be conscious about picking up your feet. If you didn’t, you’d fall on your face like I had on more than a few occasions. Tweaked my ankle in the process. It sucked.
Stuffed in the pocket of my too-short jeans was a small pistol. Hell if I knew what kind it was. All I knew for sure was that if I pulled its trigger, it would shoot, and that was all I needed to know. A ski pole was gripped in each of my hands, helping me move through the arctic wasteland. These also once belonged to Calvin Thompson.
The sun was out, but it brought no warmth. That was okay. We had learned the shadows, the wraiths, weren’t fans of light of any kind. What the monsters exactly were, we still had no idea. The term wraiths had popped into my head a few days ago, and I had mentioned it in passing conversation, and the term stuck after that.
The dictionary definition of wraith is “a ghost or a ghostlike image of someone, especially seen before or shortly after their death,” and if that doesn’t describe these evil entities lurking outside in the darkness to a T, then nothing does.
I was by myself. No one knew I had left the safety of Helga’s house. Crazy? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.
See, after a dinner of boxed macaroni and Pillsbury crescent rolls a week and some change before, Helga had approached me while I washed the dishes. The others were distracted. Stone was in the dining room, telling a funny story about him and Jonas golfing last summer. Mikey and Eleanor’s laughter echoed through the short hallway leading to the kitchen.
The pipes were understandably frozen, but we never wanted for water. We had a good amount of the bottled variety, some jugs, and a pitcher with a built in filter. If we ever ran out, we’d just grab a few buckets and fill them with some snow from outside. Boil it and store it in the fridge for drinking, bathing, or washing dishes. Yeah, it wasn’t ideal, that’s for sure, but it would work. I’d rather have had unfrozen pipes, of course, because, given the limited supply and apocalyptic circumstances, we currently bathed about once every three days, an act that made sponge baths look luxurious.
I was rinsing off a fork when I heard footsteps coming my way. I turned and there was Helga. I smiled at her. She didn’t return the favor. She looked grim and much older than she had a day or two ago. The lines in her face were deeper, her eyes drooped heavily, and her hair seemed thinner. I thought it was crazy, that I was just imagining it, but the visible spots of her scalp proved otherwise.
“Helga?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head as she approached the counter and planted her elbows on the surface. She seemed exhausted. I figured that was the most logical explanation. Every night, the wraiths outside called our names. We ignored them as best as we could, but hearing the voices of your dead relatives and friends can wear on even the sanest of minds.
“I’m gonna give it to you straight, Grady.” She paused for a moment, meeting my eyes with a hard gaze. “We’re running out of food.”
I dropped the fork I was holding in the tub of soapy water. It hit a plate and clinked loudly. “Already? I thought we had at least two weeks left, maybe three?”
Helga shook her head. “I was wrong.” She straightened and rubbed her face with her hands, then she shook her head again. “No. That’s bullshit. Damn it… Grady, I lied, okay?”
“You lied?” I repeated, unsure of what was going on.
She shushed me. “Just listen, and for Christ’s sakes be quiet. The others, they don’t need to know right now, all right?”
I nodded, but there was an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, like a skeletal hand was squeezing my internal organs.
“I lied…because I’ve been so lonely since the snow—no, since Calv died. Then you four showed up and you weren’t crazies or some weird ghosts of my imagination, and I was worried that if I told you how much I didn’t have here, you’d all leave.” She paused, cleared her throat. “Now, I ain’t fishing for sympathy or trying to rope you into doing something you don’t wanna do, understand?”
I nodded again.
“Only reason I’m telling you this is because you seem to be the most levelheaded of the bunch, and I thought you could help me break the news to them. They follow you. They respect you. Me, well, I’m just a lonely old lady who happened to be home when you came a-knockin’.”
I understood loneliness. Loneliness and I had become pretty good friends in the months after the apartment fire the boy died in, but I was angry. I didn’t like being lied to or led astray, which was exactly what Helga had done. Thankfully, the anger passed a few seconds later.
I like to think I’m not a complete idiot. I knew if it wasn’t for Helga, we would’ve been dead a long time ago; and though we had only known her for a few da
ys, I thought of Helga as family.
And family looked out for one another.
Helga suddenly threw herself forward and into my arms, hugging me tightly, her usual confident and tough image shattered.
Shocked, I hesitantly patted her on the back, where I could feel the knobs of her spine sticking out of her flesh.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s okay,” I replied. “We can fix this.”
She had begun crying, her voice shaky. “We’re gonna starve, and it’s all my fault.”
“No, we’re not. We’re gonna be fine.” I parted from Helga and took a step away. “How much food do we actually have?”
She cleared her throat and wiped the tears that rode the wrinkles on her cheeks. “Not much…”
“How much?”
“Two days, maybe three if we stretch it out.”
“That’s what we’re gonna have to do,” I said, which was what I thought we were already doing.
“You really can’t tell the others yet,” Helga said.
“They deserve to know.”
“They’ll never look at me the same.”
“They’re gonna find out when we run out of food,” I said. “Seems sooner than later.”
“Maybe we won’t run out.” Helga straightened. A smirk curled the corner of her top lip and lit up her face. She was starting to seem like her old self again.
I arched an eyebrow, thinking I knew where she was going. “How?”
“The other houses. We can raid them when the sun comes out.”
“If the sun comes out,” I corrected.
“I can go as soon as there’s light. If the houses don’t give me nothing, then I’ll walk the mile into town and raid the market. Come back, fill up the freezer and pantries, and the others will never know.”
“No,” I said. “No one’s going out there the way it is now, not even if there’s sunlight. I know from experience just how fast those things come when the sun disappears.”
Helga went on. “And I know my way around the neighborhood. But most importantly, I know how to handle one of these.” She patted the butt of the handgun sticking out of her pocket.
I smiled. “I know you do, Helga. For now, let’s just forget about it. We’ll have this conversation in a day or two.”
The laughter from the dining room continued. If you didn’t look outside, you would’ve never thought the world had ended.
I could hear that Stone was at the punchline of his story. The part where a drunken Jonas tried to hop in their moving golf cart. Jonas, of course, mistimed his jump and ended up belly-flopping in a nearby sand trap. The part Stone always left out was how Jonas busted his face on a forgotten golf ball. His bottom right canine tore through his lower lip. He said he barely felt it, thanks to the booze. Yeah, I knew the story well, and any other time I would’ve loved hearing it again, but Jonas had only been gone for less than a month. The wound his death left on my heart was still too fresh. I missed the hell out of him.
“Okay,” Helga said as she turned for the door, “but this is my mess and I’m gonna clean it up.” She left me in the kitchen, disappearing upstairs.
Later that night, while the others slept, I slipped outside and raided the two closest houses. I was armed with a flashlight and a gun, and I felt like a burglar. I got into both houses easily enough. The first house only had some dog food. I picked it up and asked myself if this was what it would come to, eating Purina. Then I went on to the other. Like the first, it was empty of people, but it seemed like someone had been there in the last few months. The trash can was half-full, there was a newspaper on the kitchen table, and car keys hanging by the garage door.
I raided the cupboards and the refrigerator, scrounging up every last bit of food I could find: two packs of frozen bacon, stale bread, a quarter of a jar of peanut butter, a jar of strawberry jelly (blah), cans of Campbell’s tomato and chicken noodle soup, a dozen bottled waters, and a two-liter of Sprite.
It wasn’t much, not nearly enough to get us through to the end—if this ever ended. We’d be lucky to make it last one week, let alone a few, but it certainly helped.
When I went back to Helga’s, my heart thundering in my chest, my eyes bolting in every direction, ears pricked up and waiting to hear the dead boy’s voice, I noticed the sun was poking through the gray clouds. I stared at it for a long moment, wondering if I should make my way to town and to the market. Try my luck. But as I stood there watching the light, the clouds swallowed it and it was like dusk again. I decided another time would be best. I was happy with what the house raids had resulted in…for the most part.
So I went back inside, careful not to wake anyone.
I stripped off my many layers, and sat down by the fire with my hands out. Stone was snoring on the couch behind me. Mikey, Eleanor, and Helga stayed upstairs. Sometimes, when it was really quiet, I could hear Eleanor calling out for her mother and father. Both of them were dead. Dad killed Mom, and then I killed Dad after he killed Jonas in an insane rage brought on by the wraiths.
I leaned back, wrapping my arms around my knees, and closed my eyes.
The wind whistled over Lake Prism, rocking the house, and not long after, I heard the dead boy calling my name. He sounded sad that he’d just missed me.
“Fuck off,” I mumbled as I lay down. “Fuck off.”
That all happened about a week before I went out again, this time to the market where I’d find the pile of dead bodies in front of it. It was six in the morning. I was dressing myself in what seemed like a million sweaters before shrugging into Calvin Thompson’s old winter coat. The coat was too narrow for my shoulders and it smelled like moth balls, but it was pretty damn warm. I could’ve done a lot worse.
As I was zipping myself up, I heard the familiar clatter of Stone’s crutches.
“Where are you going?” Stone asked me. He looked alert, as if he’d been awake for a while.
I wracked my brain for a believable lie, but found nothing. Like I’ve said before, lying to Stone was useless.
“For the last few mornings I’ve heard you get up, Grady. At first I didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. Maybe you had a bad dream or you needed a glass of water or had to piss—whatever. But then I saw you looking out the window and jotting stuff down on your notepad and it hit me… You’re going out there, aren’t you?” Stone’s jaw flexed as he gritted his teeth, waiting for my answer.
“Can’t get anything past you now, can I, Detective Stonelock Holmes?” He didn’t laugh at my lame joke attempt. That was a bad sign. So I steeled myself and said, “Yeah, okay, I’m going out. I’m gonna get us some more supplies. Helga told me there’s a market in town, less than a couple of miles away.”
“Grady, going out in this is suicide. Going out alone is just plain dumbassery.”
“Either that or we starve.”
Stone crossed the living room to the little foyer I was standing at. “Why do you always wanna be the hero, Grady?”
“I just want us to survive until this all blows over,” I said.
Stone sat on the bench by the door, where all our shoes were piled. He grabbed a pair of boots and began putting them on.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He paused, looked up at me with surprise. “What does it look like, dude? I’m not letting you go by yourself. Why should you get all the fame and glory?” He chuckled. “The notes you’ve been taking, they’re about the sun, right? You’re documenting when it comes out and how long it stays, yeah?”
He was right, of course; Stone was a smart fella. I had in fact been doing that for the better part of a week, even before Helga came to me and told me we were running out of food.
Of the days the sun had come out, it stayed around for an average of twenty-two minutes. Not bright sun, mind you, but enough to keep the monsters away.
Twenty-two minutes was not exactly a long time. I doubted I’d be able to get into town in that window with al
l the snow, cold, and wind slowing me down, but that was a bridge I’d cross when I got there. A bridge I’d cross alone.
I said, “Stone, I’m going by myself. That’s that.”
“No, you’re not. That’s that,” he replied. One boot was already on. He began working on the other one.
I knew there was no convincing him otherwise. Stone was going to follow me out into the frozen world, where ghostly monsters awaited to either turn us into rage-filled killing machines or murder us with our own fears. I also knew I couldn’t have that. I’d rather die alone than take my best friend down with me. So I figured I had two options: knock Stone unconscious and get as far away as I could before he woke up or…something much worse.
I chose the latter, because it seemed the surest way to keep him in the house, to keep him safe. I’m not proud of myself for doing it, either.
He was lacing up the second boot when I cleared my throat, looked him square in the eye, and said, “Buddy, if you come, you’re just gonna slow me down.”
Stone’s face went blank. I saw his usual confidence slough off him like a layer of dead skin. “Oh... okay,” he said in a defeated voice that broke my heart. “I see how it is.”
He tore the boots from his feet and threw them in the pile of shoes. Then he pulled himself up and stormed out of the living room, leaving me standing there feeling like the biggest jackass in the world.
It had worked, but man, I hated myself for it.
So there I was, standing before the pile of bodies outside the market. The sign was barely readable, obscured by the snow and thick sheets of ice. PENNY WISER’S.
Why anyone would ever name their store that was beyond me. It immediately brought up terrible images from my childhood.
Like I’ve said before, I stayed at my grandma’s a lot back then, and she was pretty lenient about what I watched on television, mostly because she only knew how to turn the thing on and flip through the channels.
Whiteout (Book 2): The Dark Winter Page 1
