Whiteout

by Michael Sawicki

  Fred rolled the window all the way down and stuck his head out into the frigid air. It felt like sticking your head into the freezer.

  “Mom, it’s good,” he called. “Just get back inside.”

  . . . before it decides to come back.

  “I’m doing the best I can, Freddy!” she shouted.

  “Here,” Fred said sticking his arm out with the cell phone in his hand. “Dad wants you to call him back.”

  She took the phone. “Is he coming?”

  “Yeah, he said it’ll take like fifteen minutes, maybe more,” Fred replied.

  “Good,” she said and put the phone in her pocket. She went back to brushing the snow of the truck.

  “It’s good, Mom!” Fred yelled. “Come oonnnnn!”

  The last word trailed off into a scream as they heard the low rumble. It was faint at first, but quickly grew like distant rolls of thunder. It stopped a good distance away from them in the center of the street. Its dark silhouette was visible beyond the falling snow and its diesel engine was idling quietly, contently.

  “Mom, get in!” Fred yelled, waving his arms frantically.

  “Let him sit there,” she shouted, gesturing with the brush. “What’s he going to do?”

  The engine rose to a deep roar as the plow shook violently and lurched a few feet forward, but then stopped and idled quietly again.

  “He’s playing games with us,” his mother shouted as she wiped a small clump of snow from the front bumper of the pickup. “The son of a bitch can kiss my ass.”

  As if hearing her words and acting in reply, the plow sprang forward and raced toward them. Thick, black smoke poured from its smoke stack. The steel blade scraped against the asphalt, throwing up small, incandescent sparks as it came closer and grew clearer through the thick haze of snow. Their mother, who had been facing them in front of the truck’s hood, turned her head back in disbelief to see the plow coming straight toward her.

  “MOM!” Fred and Sam screamed in frantic shock.

  The plow slammed into the front of the pickup, tossing it and sending it in a slide along the side of the road. The boys felt their world come apart and were smashed unrestrained into the dashboard. Fred cried out in pain, his head throbbing and white stars floating in his eyes like little specks of angel dust. Sam hit the dashboard heavily and fell back without a cry, knocked out cold. A moment later, Fred felt a heavy jolt as the pickup crashed with its back against a tree coming to a sudden and painful stop.

  The plow had stopped and watched. Then it shifted into reverse and backed away, going back to where it had sat previously.

  “Sam?” Fred started. He felt a trickle of blood from the gash in his lip. It flowed down to his chin. He wiped it with his hand and felt tears well up in his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried in earnest. He felt awfully close to letting the waterworks go now. He could see Sam against the passenger door, a disheveled mess with an awful laceration across his upper right cheek. He looked like hell.

  He leaned over to Sam and started to shake him. “Sam! Come on, wake up! WAKE UP!”

  Sam didn’t move, but Fred could feel him breathing. He was alive. Fred continued to cajole him until finally Sam’s eyes opened.

  “Sam! Are you okay?” Fred shouted in utter relief.

  “Fred?”

  “Yeah! How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Can you feel your arms and legs?”

  “W-where’s M-m-mom?”

  Mom? What happened to Mom?

  Fred felt his stomach literally drop like a stone. Where is Mom? It was a simple question. He last saw her in front of the pickup. He had turned away just as the plow had approached them. She had been standing there, in between the truck and the plow. She must have jumped to the side. She must have! He couldn’t bear to think the alternative.

  WHERE IS SHE?

  Fred grabbed the driver side door and swung it open, but not without a little trouble. The door was bent inward from the force of the crash. He peered up the road and could just make out the plow idling in the center about a football field away. His mom had to be out there somewhere, possibly injured, crying for help, but the wind was too loud and the snow likely obscured her from sight.

  “MOOOMMMM?” he screamed at the top his lungs, leaning out of the pickup. The wind howled vociferously, obscuring his shrill voice.

  Sam began to sob loudly. He covered his face with his hands. Without much thought, Fred slid himself behind the wheel of the pickup truck. His brother started to shout nonsense through the persistent sobbing and appeared to be going off the deep end.

  “Sh-sh-she’s d-d-d-eeaaadddd!”

  “SHUTUP!” Fred suddenly screamed. “Shut the fuck up!” He turned the key in the ignition as tears began to roll freely down his face.

  “We’ll be okay! Alright? We’ll find her!” Fred screamed. “Everything will be fucking okay!”

  The engine of the old pickup truck stumbled momentarily but wouldn’t fire.

  “Come on!” Fred screamed, shoving the key back and forth in the ignition. Each time the engine cranked weakly but wouldn’t catch.

  Fred looked up and stared at the plow. With an almost hypnotic pull that held his gaze, he could almost make out the figure of the driver through the plow’s windshield. There was something wrong about that figure behind the windshield, something inhuman that Fred could not pin down. Suddenly, through the thick falling snow, Fred noticed the plow’s side window roll down. Transfixed, and with Sam now watching too, Fred saw a black-gloved hand emerge from inside and then point directly at him. Curling the index finger back and forth, the driver seemed to signal them to come closer. Terrified, Fred watched as it then slipped back inside and the window slowly rolled back up.

  Sam’s sobbing had grown into a disgusting frenzy of hysterics and he suddenly shoved open the passenger door and climbed out of the pickup.

  “What are you doing? Get back inside!” Fred shouted.

  “We need help!” Sam cried as the wind blew snow in his face. He wiped it, along with the blood and snot from his nose, with his sleeve.

  “Get back inside, Sam!” Fred shouted as he kept an eye on the plow.

  “NO, NO, NO!” Sam cried like a baby. “I don’t wanna die!!”

  “You’re not going to die! Dad will be here soon!”

  “But where’s Mom? She might be hurt!”

  “I don’t know where—”

  Fred paused thinking that the plow had started to move. He thought he had heard its engine rev up, but it wasn’t the plow. It was another vehicle. He looked into the rearview mirror. Through the rear window he could see Vince’s truck, busting through the snow drifts toward them.

  “DAD!” Sam shouted.

  “I told you he’d be here,” Fred cried. He felt like a weight had been lifted off his chest. They weren’t alone anymore.

  The SUV stopped next to their stranded and heavily damaged pickup. The passenger door opened and their father climbed out. He hurried over to their truck. He pulled open the door and found Fred’s thin, pale face staring back at him. Sam leaned against the passenger door, looking at him with agonized eyes.

  “Jeez! I thought you got stuck, not in an accident!” their father shouted. “How the heck did this happen?”

  “It was him!” Sam shouted, pointing at the plow sitting a few blocks down the center of the road.

  Charles hadn’t even noticed the plow. He looked in its direction, trying to make out the number on the door post. The falling snow made it difficult to see anything clearly at that distance.

  “Where’s your mother? I want to know what happened here!” Charles shouted.

  Fred tried to restrain himself, but he couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down his face. He then mumbled in between sobs: “I don’t…know where she…is! The p-p-plow c-c-crashed into us! Mom…was…standing outside…in front of us…when the plow came and…”

  “JEEZUS! HOW ON EARTH—” C
harles barked, his face contorted into a sneer. “Both of you get out! Get inside the truck with Vince!”

  Both Fred and Sam got out of the pickup and hurried over to Vince’s truck. They climbed in the back and waited for their father.

  “You boys okay?” Vince said as he looked somberly over his shoulder at them. He was smoking a cigarette. The smell of the smoke was oddly comforting to them. It nicked away at that feeling of complete desolation when it had been just them, alone in the pickup and facing something they couldn’t completely understand or control.

  “I think so,” Fred finally replied.

  “Your face, Sammy. You’re all cut up!” Vince said. “What the heck happened?”

  Before they could answer him, Charles climbed back into the passenger seat of the truck.

  Vince looked at him. “Where the heck’s Ellen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Charles looked at the two boys. “Who has the cell phone?”

  Fred looked at his father. “I gave her the phone before…”

  Vince’s face lit up. “Well, shit…She must out here somewhere! Try calling her phone!”

  “I did…no answer.”

  “Drive up there further,” Charles said, gesturing toward the plow.

  Vince started to drive slowly. “I wonder who that could be. Looks like a city plow.”

  “Be careful.”

  “This guy…he didn’t have something to do with that…did he?” Vince said suddenly. It started to come together in his head. The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together. “He didn’t do that to them, did he?”

  “He did! He did do it! He tried to kill us and he probably killed Mommy!” Sam screamed and started to cry again.

  “SHUT UP DAMMIT!” Charles barked. “NOBODY HAS BEEN KILLED! NOT YOUR MOTHER!”

  Sam quickly shut his mouth but continued to sob to himself. Vince quietly drove the truck further up the snowbound road and muttered to himself, “Can’t believe this.”

  “Stop! Over there!” Charles shouted. “Jeezus! That’s her!”

  A short way up the road, off to the right was the body of a woman. It was just beyond the edge of the road. She didn’t move or look up at them.

  Vince stopped the truck.

  “You boys stay put. We’re going to get your mother,” Vince said.

  “But the plow!” Fred shouted.

  “Don’t worry about the damn plow! We’ll take care of this soon enough!” his father shouted, pulling his hat down tight.

  Fred and Sam were left alone in Vince’s truck, watching the plow. Fred looked at the cab of the plow truck and noticed the dark figure, barely discernable through the windshield. Something was wrong with the thing sitting behind the wheel of that plow. He’d already felt it before, but he was more certain now. There seemed to be something missing. Something that made it inhuman.

  Charles led the way as the two men struggled through the snow to Charles’s wife. She lay sprawled out a few yards off the side of the road, between a few trees, looking awfully vulnerable, like some rag doll that had gotten picked up and beaten by some mischievous kid who wanted to exact revenge on his sister by destroying her precious doll collection.

  “Does she look alright?” Vince called from behind him.

  Many years ago, when Charles had been about the same age as his two sons, he had been walking home from school and encountered a boy and his dog. The boy had been kneeling over the dog, clearly in some sort of distress. Charles stopped, seeing the boy and the dog a few yards down, beside the road. A deep feeling of dread had swallowed him and he had started to turn around but the other boy had noticed him and peered up. The boy had looked at him with a defeated expression that sent a chill down Charles’s spine. The boy had been weeping. He knew in that instant what had happened.

  Charles had walked over to the boy, dropped his backpack and kneeled beside the dog. It was in bad shape and that was greatly understating it. Charles’s stomach churned. He asked the boy what had happened even though it was blatantly obvious. The boy told him he had been walking with his dog beside the road, the dog a little ways ahead of him, when some guy, some drunken bastard, had come from the other direction and hit poor Rex Head on. Yeah, it was bad. Rex’s spine looked like it was twisted in an unnatural way. Blood seeped from its ruptured abdomen. Shit excreted from between its mangled rear legs. There was no hope for the poor thing. The dog howled and howled, staring up at them with bewildered eyes. The wait was pure torture, especially for a kid at that young age. To Charles it had felt more painful than going to his grandfather’s funeral the previous year.

  The dog had died in their presence. Five, maybe ten minutes later a car came by and stopped. Soon after the fire trucks and then the police came. Rex was gone, though and it made no difference. His final bitter moments were forever imprinted in Charles’s mind.

  Now Charles had to face that old ghost again. This time it was not a dog he had hardly known, but his wife. As he struggled through the snow drifts, he prayed that she was in better shape than Rex had been.

  “Charles!” Vince shouted.

  Charles turned around and saw Vince, a good distance behind him, looking somewhere up the road. Immediately, he knew what it was. He could hear the throaty growl of the diesel engine.

  “The plow!” Vince shouted. “He’s coming!”

  “Go back to the truck!” Charles shouted and then finally, reaching his wife, he knelt beside her. “Ellen!”

  She didn’t move. Her face was white, almost as white as the snow. He put his hand up to her nose and felt a weak breath. He put his hand to her neck and felt a pulse. There was no time for anything else. It didn’t look too bad, no missing limbs, no blood or anything. But she needed help.

  “Vince, get the truck over here!” Charles shouted and looked back. He was horrified by what he saw. With startling revelation, he saw that they were going to need more than just medical help out here. He pulled out his cell and started to dial the police.

  “What are you doing?” Sam cried.

  “Don’t you see?” Fred shouted. “The plow’s going to go after them. We have to distract it!”

  Fred climbed over the front seat and got behind the wheel of Vince’s truck. He could see them further up the road, his father off the side of the road, tending to his mother and Vince standing right on the road, exactly where the plow was heading.

  “NOOOOO!” Fred screamed, slamming the gas and spinning the wheels before the truck finally reeled forward. He could see the plow moving, scraping up the snow, pushing it aside and going for the kill.

  He could see Vince, caught in his tracks, not sure which way to go, his feet slipping in the wet snow. He had no chance. The plow took him down without a hint of hesitation. His body flopped against the blade, his head splitting and falling apart like a large cherry in a shower of red juice. His limbs flailed about, like a lifeless doll. Then he was gone, buried somewhere under the snow.

  Fred had gotten the SUV about half the distance up to the plow when it had taken Vince down. He stopped and stared in disbelief. Sam was hysterical.

  “OH MY GOD! NOOOO! OHHH, NNOOOO!!!!” Sam screamed.

  Fred tried to keep whatever he had left of his sanity together. He stayed calm. He had to. He could see the plow was backing up, preparing to go for his parents. He had to do something, whatever it took, to get the plow away from them.

  He suddenly opened the door and jumped out.

  “Hey! You! You fucking son of a bitch!” Fred shouted, waving his arms in the air. The plow suddenly stopped. “Yeah, you! Come on, you fucking bastard.”

  He could see his father, off to the side, kneeling next to his mother, stranded. It would have to be him. What he did now would decide if they survived.

  “COME ON, BITCH, LET’S GO!”

  If the plow hadn’t heard him before, it certainly did now. It pounced forward and headed toward him. Fred quickly jumped back into the truck and slammed the door closed.

  “WH
Y DID YOU DO THAT?” Sam shouted between bursts of hysteria. “WE’RE GONNA DIE!”

  “SHUT THE HELL UP!”

  He locked in his seatbelt and made sure Sam did the same. He jammed the truck into reverse gear and started to turn it around. It was moving painfully slow. The heavy snow was holding it back, like slick glue.

  “Let’s go motherfucker!” Fred screamed and slammed the wheel as hard as he could. He finally got it turned around and started moving forward just in time to see the plow in the rearview mirror, growing bigger, coming closer and closer.

  He feathered the gas, keeping the throttle just below the level where he felt the wheels would spin and felt the truck slowly pick up speed. The plow stopped growing in the rearview and he felt, for the first time, that they might have a chance. He squinted through the windshield, trying to stay calm and make sense of the surroundings. All he saw were trees and more trees, enclosing the road from both sides. Then he saw it. He immediately knew what it was, but wasn’t sure whether it would work. But there was no time to think and in a desperate last move, he swerved the pickup onto a small open clearing between the trees and forced it through the deep snow. But the plow quickly closed the distance and rammed the truck in the back, lifting the rear wheels off the ground and causing it to flip over on its side.

  They were both tossed helplessly about inside the truck, only their seatbelts keeping them from being thrown around completely unrestrained. The tumble seemed like it lasted an eternity but it came to an abrupt stop. After a few minutes Fred could hear Sam’s muffled sobbing.

  “Sam, are you okay?”

  It was dark and he could barely see his brother’s dark figure, suspended up above him in his seat. The truck lay on the driver side.

  “Sam, stay still. I’m going to take off my belt and climb up.”

  “O-okay.”

  Fred was in worse shape than he realized. As soon as he started to move, he felt as if someone was stabbing him in the ribs. He moved his arms and grimaced as hot pain shot across his chest. He carefully unbuckled the belt and pulled his legs out from beneath the dash. He stood up on top of the driver side door and reached past Sam to unlock it. He might have tried to push it open, but Sam was in the way.