Bitter Cold

by J. Joseph Wright

  “No, no,” she assured him. “I won’t.”

  “You’re a journalist. You deal with facts, not feelings or, say, visions.”

  She smiled. “Believe me. I need to keep an open mind to survive as a journalist.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like this, have you?”

  “Never,” she laughed, then turned serious. “These visions of yours. Tell me about them.”

  He sat back and sighed. “Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Okay. Here it goes…I think I’ve seen how this thing started out. A long time ago.”

  “Like when you were a kid?”

  “No. I’m talking about back in the eighteen hundreds. At least I think it was. I’m not sure. I’m no history expert.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw how it happened. Why it happened,” he watched the bright burning embers. The fire was scorching hot, causing a slight tick-tick of the metal as the stove expanded.

  “Well,” she raised her eyebrows. “Tell me.”

  “It’s sad. It really is. I-I don’t even know if I believe it myself. I thought my mind was making it all up. But it was so vivid.”

  “What, Jeff? What?”

  A lone tear snaked down his cheek. Then came another as his eyes filled. “We, we shot…we shot them. In the canyon. Lined ‘em up like pigs at the slaughter. Killed them all. Even the…” he lowered his head, sobbing.

  She waited, allowing him to regain at least a little of his composure. “What, Jeff? Tell me. Whatever it is, however painful, you should talk about it.”

  He sniffled. “Even the baby. We killed the baby. Or he did. I wanted to save it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move because it wasn’t really me,” he put his head in his hands. “I don’t know what’s going on. Tell me what’s going on!”

  “Is that what you were dreaming about? Killing babies? What the hell, Jeff?”

  He looked up from his hands. Hurt. Disheveled. All of the sudden she felt horrible.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. We’re all a little stressed out, aren’t we?”

  Jeff ignored the question. “It had to be some kind of vision of the past.”

  He raised his somber gaze and let it settle on the snowfall outside. April placed her hands on his shoulders. He yielded to her touch, lowering his head again and sighing.

  “There’s been so much death around this place,” he said almost too softly for her to hear. “So much death.”

  She stroked the back of his head, not knowing what to say.

  “It’s a curse,” he said. “A spirit from the bowels of hell brought up to take revenge on anyone who comes into that canyon. It wants to kill, just like we killed the natives who lived here.”

  “Greedy bastards,” she said. “That’s what it boils down to. Greed. When the United States came through here and conquered the Natives, it was all about greed. We screwed them over, ripped apart their families, forced them off their land, destroyed their culture. And for what? For greed. That’s what happened with the nuclear industry, too. Greedy men profiting from an unsafe and unreliable technology. Faking the science, covering up the accidents. All in the name of the almighty dollar. It’s ironic how the two evils converged here at this point, at your Dead Man’s Dump. It’s like a focal point. If your dream, or vision, or whatever is true, then that would explain a lot. Why not a curse? I’ve heard of that kind of thing before. Most of the time they turn out to be bullshit, but there’s always that one case out of a hundred that goes unexplained. This looks like one of them. The truly tragic thing is that the nuclear plant had to be built literally right next door. Like it was destiny or something. Like our greed drove some sort of gear of fate that sent us toward our own destruction.”

  Jeff straightened. She felt his shoulders stiffen. “That’s what he said.”

  “Who?”

  “The old man, the one who placed the curse. He said it would spread with our greed, and when the time came, it would use our greed to destroy us all.”

  “It looks like that time has come.”

  A distant thumping caught their attention. They both leaned toward the window and peered at the sky. It was hard to spot, but April saw a helicopter hovering a few hundred feet up.

  “Who in his right mind would be flying in this weather?” Jeff’s jaw gaped. “That’s gotta be the dumbest—”

  “I think I know,” April stepped from the window. “It’s most likely Strawn.”

  “Strawn?”

  “Yeah. Gary Strawn. He’s real high up in the NWP food chain. All I know right now is he’s scary.”

  The chopper noise faded. It was moving away. To the south, she guessed. Back to Trojan.

  “So, what do you think the next step should be?” he looked exhausted.

  “I need to finish writing that piece and then I can get it to my editor, right away. I’m going to post it to my blog, too. I’ve got a network I can get it on. By the end of the day, it’ll be on close to a thousand web sites.”

  Jeff blinked his blood-shot eyes and yawned, stretching and exposing his midsection under a white t-shirt. She noticed he had a flat stomach. Not unattractive. But she had work to do.

  “I’d better get you some coffee, then,” he yawned again. “I know I need some. You need some? Coffee, that is.”

  She snickered. “Yeah. That’d be great.”

  ******

  “LOGAN!”

  April heard Jeff yell his son’s name at least four more times while she worked. The writing went fast. She had a lot to say and little time to say it. No telling when those NWP thugs would figure out where she was. She half-expected them to come busting down the door at any time. Her fingers were flying when Jeff called for his son one last time before getting frustrated and stomping up the staircase in a huff.

  Silence. Finally. It really did help her think. She needed to concentrate.

  SLAM!

  She jumped, sitting erect and turning toward the sound. From upstairs came another crash, a door hitting a wall, then heavy, fast footsteps.

  “Logan!” Jeff’s voice was already hoarse. “Logan! LOGAN!”

  He bounded downstairs, his face red.

  “What’s wrong! What happened!” she bolted from the office chair.

  “I don’t know,” he took her by the shoulders and moved her aside so he could get into the kitchen. April followed, sprinting to keep up as he dashed to a door near the refrigerator. He yanked it open and reached in to hit the lights, revealing a garage too full of stuff for a car. Though she would have gotten lost in a second trying to find something in there, Jeff knew right where to look. He checked the far wall, searching behind a folded ping pong table.

  “He didn’t,” he grumbled, probing one more time behind the table tennis set, an air hockey table, a dart board. “He didn’t!”

  “Didn’t what?” she followed him back into the house, to the hallway closet. He opened the door and fingered through the coats.

  “He DID!”

  “What! What!”

  Jeff pulled his jacket from a hanger and threw it on. “He went out there! He took the sled and went out there!”

  “Oh my God!” April covered her mouth. “Do you think he went back down to Dead Man’s Dump?”

  Jeff shook his head, breathing heavily. “I don’t know. But I’ve got to go find out.”

  NINETEEN

  LOGAN THOUGHT HE WAS dreaming when he heard the Splatch! against his window. Half asleep, staring up at his ceiling, it made him flinch wide awake. He shook his head, trying to remember what slumbering drama playing out in his mind could have caused such a violent reaction. The so-called snow monster his dad and April were going on and on about? Couldn’t be. He didn’t believe in it. No way.

  If it wasn’t the monster that gave him the nightmare, what was it?

  Then another Splatch! on the glass. This time he saw it. A snowball disintegrated into a thousand particles upon impact. Somebody was having fun pe
lting his house.

  He peered down into the backyard for the culprit. A thorough examination yielded nothing. He looked at the clock. Six AM. Way too early. He wasn’t about to go outside and play snowball wars with anyone until at least nine. If his dad even let him go at all. Because of that alleged monster, Logan would probably be banished to the living room, forbidden from even thinking about going out.

  After a few minutes, he figured whoever it was had left. Another mischievous snowball made him abandon that theory. With a huff, he threw open the window and saw a girl. And not just any girl. He recognized that shapely body anywhere, even under a thick Columbia Sportswear jacket—Amy Mitchell.

  She waved for him to come down. He glanced left, then right, then back to her. Pointing at himself he mouthed, “Me?”

  Her shoulders shook with laughter he couldn’t hear. She nodded, her lips forming the words, “Yes, you.”

  He stepped back and took a deep breath, trying to convince himself it was real. He leaned over and peeked out again. She stood in the same spot, resting against the rickety garden shed, waiting. He decided to indulge his fantasy and go along. For now.

  He tiptoed downstairs, knowing exactly which steps to hit in order to keep the creaky old wooden boards from making a sound. The best route to the back was through the garage, so he snuck into the kitchen and slipped out that way. The door leading out back had a window. Before he opened it, he took one final look, just to make sure he wasn’t crazy. She was still there. She looked impatient, her hand on her hip, sighing big puffs of steam which shrouded her face in a mist and made her look even more sensual.

  Her golden hair seemed to flow over her shoulders endlessly. She liked to have her bangs sit on top of her sapphire eyes just a little, giving her a playful look no matter what kind of mood she was in. Her older sister, Candy, had the same exact hair, the same exact eyes, but Amy pulled it off so much better for some reason. Part of it had to do with her sparkle, the playful dimples in her cheeks which got even bigger when she laughed. Also, it was in the way she looked at Logan. It made him feel like he was the only person in the world. Most of all, though, it was her body. At age fifteen, she had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. Her hips curved inward at the waist in a nearly impossible angle, giving her the perfect hourglass shape. Her lips had curves, too. He’d spent an entire summer lying next to the pool at the Mitchell’s house staring at her profile, watching those lips.

  He watched them now, through the garage window, her breath surrounding her in a cloud, like she was a dream. Maybe she was. If so, he didn’t want to wake up. He wanted to see how far the dream would go, so he opened the door. Amy saw him and gave him a fragile smile.

  “Come on,” she half-whispered. “Get your sled and let’s go.”

  “Wait up,” he grabbed his Flexible Flyer and hurried to keep pace. “What’s the rush, anyway?”

  She slowed to let him catch up, though she avoided looking in his direction. “I just wanna get in some sledding, you know, before anyone else comes along and ruins the hills for us. Guys with ATVs around here, and motorcycles, too. Like that Dexter kid,” she observed him out of the corner of her eye, then looked straight ahead again. “That was pretty nasty yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  Logan nodded. “It was over the top.”

  “Like, the guy lost his foot. Literally. They couldn’t find it. Like, what the hell? Don’t you think that was kind of, like, bizarre?”

  “Well, yeah, kinda,” he trudged beside her. “I think the cop said it was mangled so bad it wasn’t recoverable or something.”

  The breeze found a way to whisk her hair in her eyes. She brushed it aside. “I don’t know, Logan,” she kept walking, staring into space. “I just don’t know.”

  He stayed silent for a few paces. They made it to a break in the trees. Amy stopped at a broken fence and breathed heavily. He thought he heard her speak, or maybe it was something else, a whimper, a sob.

  “What’s the matter, Amy?” he stepped closer and raised his hand over her shoulder, but didn’t have the nerve to touch her.

  “Logan, tell me the truth,” she looked him in the eyes. “I mean it. Tell me the truth, okay?”

  He glanced away, then back to confront her stare. “I-I guess.”

  “I want to talk about your dad. I heard what he said to the police. Him and that woman, that friend of his.”

  “Oh, no,” Logan put his forehead in his gloved hands. “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did. Listen. I gotta ask you. Do you think they were, like, telling the truth? I mean do you think there really is, like, some sort of-of thing in the snow that might be capable of doing something like that? Like biting off and eating a kid’s foot?”

  He giggled. “No, of course not.”

  “Tell me the TRUTH!”

  He snapped straight, sucking in his gut like a soldier at attention. Exhaling hard, he loosened and watched the wind blow the powder into grooved textures along the white ground. “The truth? The truth is I don’t know. I just don’t know what to believe. I’ve never known my dad to lie about anything, so I just don’t know.”

  Amy started walking again, continuing deeper into the woods.

  “Does your dad joke around a lot? I mean, does he like to scare you and stuff like that? My dad’s always pulling pranks like…” she stopped as if she’d caught herself saying something wrong.

  Logan tried not to stare. “Well, yeah,” he looked at his feet. “Actually no. He used to. When-when I was…before my mom died, he used to be really funny. Joked around all the time. Not anymore”

  Silence, interrupted only by the soft crunching of their boots in the delicate snow, the occasional Whoosh! of wind through the tree tops, and the distant caw of a lone blackbird.

  “Logan, I wanna go to Dead Man’s Dump.”

  “What! No! We can’t…I can’t. No!”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not! My dad said not to go down there. You heard him. He said it was dangerous.”

  She sounded sarcastic. “You said you don’t believe in that shit.”

  “I said I wasn’t sure. But I’ll tell you one thing, I really don’t wanna take any chances.”

  “Okay,” she waved her hand dismissively. “That’s fine. If you don’t wanna go, that’s fine. Then just go home, baby boy. Go back to bed.”

  She turned and ran, lifting her knees high in the deep snow. Logan followed. On the trail leading to the Dump, he finally gave up on his sled, dropping the rope and sprinting to catch her. His chest pounded. His forehead burned with sweat underneath his stocking cap. The pit of his stomach felt like a hole had been drilled through and his entire insides were draining into his bowels.

  “Amy! Wait!”

  She wouldn’t. He knew he had to catch her. Though he hadn’t seen what his dad and April had seen, he knew something was wrong in that canyon. It scared him. He didn’t want to admit it to Amy or to himself, but it did. That terror had him sprinting, faster and faster, until he came within reach of her jacket. Stretching, he clutched the nylon. When he got a handful, he straightened his legs and plowed to a stop, forcing her to halt with him.

  She let him pull her close. Then she spun around, stared, and gave him a long, wet kiss. It seemed to last forever. He kept his eyes open and so did she. Deep blue. Almost too blue. He knew they weren’t fake contacts like many girls wore. He’d been looking at those eyes all his life. But this morning, from two inches away, they looked bluer than the afternoon summer sky. They trapped him in their spell. Enraptured, all he managed was a slobbery, dull-witted hum as she pulled her lips from his.

  Motionless, he stood there, still feeling her soft skin on his, smelling her fragile, sweet scent. He held it in, not wanting the moment to end. But it did. Like all moments, it had to. When he caught his bearings and came back to the reality, Amy was gone.

  During his frantic search, he realized she’d done exactly what he feared. The Dump was only a few yards ahead, and she’d no
t only made it there, she’d gone in.

  His feet moved without being commanded. No reaction time, no delay—just a dead sprint to the canyon. There he saw her, already halfway down the steep decline, struggling to stay on her feet in the slick ice. At the bottom sat Dexter’s broken-down motorcycle, tilted on its kickstand, almost unrecognizable under the several inches of snow that had fallen since last night.

  “Amy! What’re you doing! Don’t go down there!”

  “I have to, Logan! I have to!”

  “Why?”

  “Just get down here and help me!”

  “Help you what!”

  “Just get down here!”

  He scanned the chasm, paying close attention to the shadows, the recesses in the canyon walls, the dark areas in the snow. Nothing stood out as unusual. It looked barren. A few evergreens, a lot of rock, but not much else. Everything was blanketed in a thick, smoothed layer of white, a world made of marshmallows. The bright winter scene whisked away his bleak thoughts of fictitious snow monsters. He was, after all, alone with the girl of his dreams. The girl next door. Older, a little dangerous, and wildly feminine. And she wanted him.

  Full of self-confidence, he lifted his foot and dropped it on a frozen chunk of ground. His boot slipped out from under him and he landed on his ass. His forward momentum took him sliding, then spinning, then rolling heels-over-head straight at Amy.

  When Logan got to within a few feet, she let out a yelp before pitching to her left. Logan crashed headlong into a drift. Amy dove sideways into the powder.

  “You asshole!” she giggled. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you? You tried to hit me!”

  He lifted his snow-saturated arm. “I was trying to miss you, honest!”

  “Liar!” her voice echoed. They shared a laugh, neither of them in a hurry to get to their feet. Amy was happy, at first. Gradually she became silent, staring at the rugged canyon wall. Her face was sullen, years older than just fifteen.

  “Amy? What’s bothering you? Seriously. What’s wrong?”