by Cassie Power
He nodded.
“That sounds good. I think I know the rough whereabouts of the wood pile. There’s about twelve cord out there, which would get this place through nearly two winters, I bet. Anyway, do you like your bacon crispy? Or soggy and limp?”
She winced at the words.
“Wait. Does anyone, ever, like limp and slimy bacon? I mean, really… is that even a thing? Like, do people in restaurants shake their heads and send the crispy stuff back?”
That got a large shrug, which was expressive, even from the back. Her eyes moved down a bit, to his behind, which was being shown off nicely in his jeans. They were tight all over, but it was clear that he filled them out nicely through there.
“There’s always someone, isn’t there? Crispy it is. Good to know that we have that in common. It could make breakfasts awkward otherwise.” There was no particular tone to the words. It was just a statement. As if he expected that to be happening on a regular basis in the future.
Making a face she shook her head a little bit. It was true that she was interested in him, but that was a bit presumptuous.
“You think that we’re going to be doing that a lot, do you?”
There was a nod and he glanced back at her, his face serious suddenly.
“Yes. Even if this starts to melt today, which is my guess as to what will happen, we’re here for three or four days after that. Even if the road gets cleared. Right now, we aren’t even moving my truck without digging and there’s no place for it to go. Yours is an ice cave at the moment. On the good side, we’ll be able to get out and look around later. I have some snow shoes. A few pair. I’d stuck them in on a whim.”
She looked at his back when he turned around to pay attention to his domestic tasks. Things that she wouldn’t have really managed without him there, she realized. It really did smell good, too. Not that she was starving yet, or anything. The stew the night before was holding her over pretty well.
“I get you. So that we can go and see if we can find the frozen corpse of Bigfoot? Or those cannibals you mentioned. Really though, how likely is either one of those? There are what, two psychos that eat people in the U.S. at any given time? A thousand? The odds of meeting them are pretty slim, given that.”
He shook his head, and then shrugged.
“Not… I’ve done some research into that. Dark web stuff? Unlisted web sites that are hidden so that the authorities can’t find people too easily?” He waited, clearly not wanting to talk about the topic. Looking at the food she knew why that was too.
Crispy pork, and even eggs would be a lot less appetizing with that conversation going on.
Merry expelled a gust of air that was half laugh and nodded toward him as he craned his neck to look back at her.
“After we finish eating?”
“Deal. It’s interesting, but… Yes. Let’s hold that for later. Now…” Stopping dead, he looked at the boiling pan that held the delicious scent of coffee and went to the front door, holding a cup. One of the big ceramic ones that had contained cocoa the night before.
Moving fast he had it filled with snow and the door shut before all the heat left the room, and the contents dumped into the pan as he picked it up. The whole thing was done with a wooden spatula in his fist the entire time too. It was a thing that spoke of old skills, to Merry. A balancing of objects so that nothing would have to be put down that might get grease from cooking, or bits of food on anything. The closest work surface was actually in the kitchen.
The cup rested on the floor, next to a small bowl and several plates. Watching the whole thing happen was kind of like magic, she realized. The real kind. She couldn’t cook much at all and while it wasn’t five-star dining, Dan got everything off of the stove at once, working so smoothly that she barely noticed him rushing into the other room, to strain the ground coffee from the top of the water.
Less than a minute later they were both sitting on the sofa, holding plates with forks balanced on them and cups of warm coffee. That wasn’t really going to work, so without hesitating, past the first sip Merry bolted hers. Slamming it down like it was water and she’d just tried to run a marathon. Before she could set it down on the floor, Dan got up and got her a second cup of the stuff. That meant doing it again and getting ready to tell him that was enough. After all, there really were grounds in it, and it had been so dark that she could nearly feel the thickness of it on her tongue.
He just did the same, and then got himself the rest of what was left, doing it again, like she had.
“Good idea. This stuff isn’t a taste treat, but medicine rarely is. Getting it down fast works.” Then he sank back down and started to eat.
He had about four times more food than she did, but that was fine. She had two slices of bacon and what seemed to be three eggs. Scrambled, but since those had probably come from a can, she didn’t doubt that it was for the best that way. There was butter and some herbs used in them too, which was different than she expected, but not bad. A bit more gourmet than the coffee had been.
Her stomach jolted then, having the stuff hit her system faster than normal. She covered by eating for a while. They both had food, but while she nibbled and considered it all, Dan just consumed. Of course, he’d already been up and working that day, so probably needed the calories a lot more than she did. Given that she skipped eating too early most days, it wasn’t a vast slight to her way of thinking.
When they were done she nodded.
“I’ll get the dishes?” Not that she wanted to, but it made sense that they keep things clean, just in case Dan was right and they were going to be there for several days.
“Thanks. I’ll get the gear ready and go start digging a path.”
It didn’t take long to wash up, even using cold water and a hand pump. She did that first, half filling the sink with water, and rinsing while holding each dish with one hand. Then she rested everything in the drying rack to the left of the thing. The windows showed that the snow, heavy and damp looking, was still coming down outside. The flakes were huge, like they got when the temperature was too warm for snow to really exist, but it did anyway. Nearly half the size of her hand.
Each one added to the burden they faced, so not wanting to be the kind of person to slack off out of all the hard things, she got herself ready, with her coat and gloves and then tried to steel herself for the cold. It wasn’t all that bad, though her feet were going to end up soaked, she could tell. The world wasn’t melting, but it was so close to that state that her running shoes weren’t going to keep her toasty warm. Her own body heat was going to melt the snow for her as she worked.
Which was a thing she’d experienced before. Living in upstate New York had given her that, but so had Portland. Sure, that last one was from the rain, but having damp feet wasn’t going to be exactly novel in her world.
Getting to work, Merry grabbed the sturdy flat nosed shovel, the smaller one meant for digging dirt, and moved down the cleared porch carefully. Falling wasn’t going to help anyone, after all.
Then, she shook her head, really starting to understand what she was seeing. It wasn’t two feet of snow outside, but nearly four. The path that was being dug for her went down to the earth in places, but that just meant that the walls on either side were about as high as her head. Swallowing, she started to widen the thing as her new hero, Dan, did most of the real work.
His red snow shovel practically flew, with no hint of stopping. She wasn’t moving as fast, holding to a slow and steady pace, but given that most of the white being moved out of the way was his doing, she only felt sore and uncomfortable after about half an hour. Instead of half dead, like she would have been if it had been her trying to do the bulk of the work. Her back hurt from the unaccustomed effort and she wanted to stop, but didn’t. That would make her look bad, after all. Weak.
Honestly it was galling that Dan was doing that much more than she was at the moment. She wasn’t in horrible shape or anything, given that she worked out regularly
and all that. Merry wasn’t a whiner either, so kept up her part, as first an hour of pain happened, then two. Somewhere between three and four hours in, Dan suddenly turned, holding the shovel in one hand and an armload of dry wood in the other.
That got her to shake her head.
“I didn’t notice that we were here already. Time flies, I guess?”
He nodded.
“Ice trance. It can happen when you walk on snow fields, too. You just kind of lose track of the world around you like that. The mind wanders and then when something changes, you jump.” He started to move past her, which meant she had to move out of the way.
Squeezing past one another, bodies touching. Except that it wasn’t flirty or even fun at all. Just contact that reminded her how sweaty and gross she had to be at the moment.
Dan headed straight to the front door, a thin dusting of snow on the path that had been cleared. Thankfully the falling white stuff from the sky had already stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky, between areas of high, fluffy white. It was actually pretty. That surprised her a bit, since Merry didn’t normally bother to notice things like that in her world. She was too focused on making sure the team had a decent place to sleep and food that wouldn’t leave them with diseases.
It took more work to get the wood, but she dumped off her shovel after the first load, since it was awkward to carry around, and kept going back into the covered wood area, until Dan waved at her to stop.
“That will give us about four days. Unless it gets really cold. Anymore than this and we’re asking for a house fire.”
She tried to stretch, her back killing her suddenly. Worse, seeing her do that, Dan nodded.
“We can fire up the big tub? It will take more digging to get that opened up. I can do it. Can you watch the fire for a while?”
She sighed, knowing that it was going to be too hard to go anywhere at the moment. She might be strong, mentally, but there were limits to what her body was willing to do and at the moment a nice hot soak sounded lovely. It was probably a sign that her city ways were catching up with her.
“That would be great. I can wait. You must be exhausted. You were up all night and did most of the work out there.” He’d also made breakfast.
Dan shrugged, and made a bit of a face.
“I’m fine, for now. Let me see…” Then the man grabbed the red shovel and walked away. It was, annoyingly, a spritely thing that didn’t show any hint of aching or being sore at all.
It was, she realized, a lot easier to keep a good fire going than it was to start in the first place. She didn’t even need to put all the wood it would take in at once, the thing being plenty warm, even when smaller.
She didn’t really think about anything for a while, which was a bit strange. Part of her should have been worried about being stuck there. The crew would be frantic with concern no doubt. They were close, for coworkers. Then, most of them were kind of dedicated to their jobs and didn’t have anyone waiting for them at home. So, they kind of substituted each other for a real life that way.
Digging out her cell phone she tried to see if there was any hope of contacting anyone, but there wasn’t. Not inside. Outside was probably close to impassable too, so other than trying out some snowshoes and traipsing around the countryside hoping to find a hot spot, there wasn’t a lot she was going to do that way.
Just in case, she tried looking for one right there, going from room to room. That didn’t take long, the dim interior showing her that there was simply no service there. It was totally dead, meaning they were as isolated as if they’d been trapped inside a log cabin a hundred years before. Even during the day, with decent windows, the clouds kept the inside of the house dark and gloomy as she moved. Rather than let that get to her, she formed a plan.
It wasn’t exactly diabolical or important, but it made a certain amount of sense.
She’d go and soak in that tub, after it was warm enough, then borrow some snowshoes and try to work her way up a hill. If she could get above the tree line and away from any kind of valley, that might help. It also might not. They were about as far from society as you could get without actually risking those nomads, she mused. Not that they were real.
The idea was interesting however. After all, thinking of a society that ate other people for food was hard to imagine. It took too long for people to grow, and they weren’t that large once they did, for one thing. Then, hunters weren’t farmers, so the work of feeding them wasn’t a thing they had to worry about. Up north, in the arctic circle, there was so little that she really could see the idea of groups that would eat anything they could being possible.
The other portion of the idea was the one that didn’t really work for her.
There was no way that an entire group could hide that kind of thing in the real world. People would go missing and that would send up bloody red flags. You might take one or two a year, if you were careful and moved a lot, but if there weren’t a lot of people around, then it would be a lot more obvious when they vanished.
Serial killers really only managed to stay hidden away because they lived in areas where people vanished all the time. Tens of thousands each year did, from large cities. Hundreds of thousands, really, but only about twenty or thirty thousand just never showed up again. Some would probably have just changed their names and walked away from their old lives. The rest were just gone forever.
That line of thought didn’t leave her feeling better for some reason.
The FBI had stated more than once that they believed there were only two or three hundred serial killers in the U.S. at any given point. Even if the bad guys managed to take out one person a month, that was only about thirty-six thousand people that should have vanished each year. Most of them got nowhere near that. Not from the reading she’d done on the topic. That study had been for their exposé on the Zodiac Killer’s ghost.
When they’d gotten to the place he was supposed to be haunting, where another crew had supposedly gotten some really good electronic voice phenomenon stuff, they managed to find nothing. That was normal enough, so no one had really been all that concerned.
It had left her with a lot of data however, that now was coming back to her and clearly didn’t all fit. If the U.S. alone lost twenty-odd thousand people a year and no one ever saw them again, then someone was removing them. True, it could all be alien abductions but if she had to bet, the idea of sick people killing and maybe eating them all was far more likely.
That reminded her to ask about what Dan had found on the Dark Web. She’d heard of the concept of course, but hadn’t really done much with it, since it didn’t really overlap with the paranormal. Not as far as she knew. A black market, where the worst people went to buy and sell things that no one should want. Drugs and kiddie porn, mainly, if she’d heard about it correctly.
Not that going to look at it wasn’t interesting in theory. It just hadn’t come up in her life, yet.
She thought about numbers and shook her head more than once. Really, the idea that only twenty-thousand people a year really vanished was probably too low. They had to go somewhere however and that idea sickened her a bit.
If nothing else it meant that the numbers they saw from the police and FBI about how many murders happened each year were incredibly low. It made sense that they wouldn’t assume that every runaway teen or person walking away from their world would be called a death. Since they weren’t. That so many weren’t accounted for at all was frightening however.
She jumped when Dan came back in, thumping a little as he moved through the door. Then she smiled. After all, if he were a creepy killer, she would have already died. That or had other things happen to her that weren’t in her current plans.
So far, he was… Amazing came to mind, actually. Wonderful, strong and useful. More than she was being.
Even his deep voice was pleasant. It thrummed inside of her a bit. Tickling at places that most people just couldn’t.
“It’s all ready. It to
ok a while for the fire to get it warm enough. I have some towels in my gear. One of the things I’ve learned over time, you can never have enough towels. Rope is pretty useful as well, but if you have to choose…” He moved to a large, vaguely green and very old looking canvas pack and opened it, digging for a bit before he held up two rather nice looking blue towels. They looked fluffy, like something that would be found in a nice hotel, instead of some kind of efficient camp towel.
Standing up again, Merry felt really stiff. Already. It got her to wince, thinking about what was coming for her.
“I’m not going to be a happy camper in the morning tomorrow, am I? I work out, too. I swear. I guess I need to do more?”
Then she hobbled a bit as she went to get more clean clothing, the stuff she had on being a bit damp. Her hair was too, from the snow fall, which left her feeling awkward and unkempt. Dan had been in the same state, but his hair was totally dry already. It wasn’t fair, but she nodded at him.
“Are you joining me?” The words just popped out, and she nearly took them back, then realized that she didn’t want to. She liked him, and soaking in a dark, or at least dim, room alone would be boring.
The man froze for a second, and then smiled, slightly.
“I had figured on taking the chance to go look around.”
Merry tilted her head, which showed that her neck was a bit sore from the earlier work.
“I was planning to go and look for cell service hot zones after this. We can add that and searching for footprints at the same time, right?”
Then, seeming pleased enough by the idea, Dan moved to unpack some clothing of his own and two more towels.
