Whiteout (Book 3): The Numbing Read online

  Eleanor snorted. “Switch me.”

  I didn’t hesitate; we switched quickly, not wanting to spend another second in the harsh weather.

  Settled in the driver’s seat, Eleanor gripped the steering handles. She looked like a natural, and she was still smiling as she revved the engine, the sound immense in the confines of the small cab. The wind howled in reply, much louder. It sent flakes streaking past the windshield.

  The snow was falling harder than earlier, the hardest I’d seen while the sun was out. Speaking of the sun, I doubted we had more than an hour left before dark.

  “Hold on!” Ell hooted. The snowmobile lurched forward, spraying white all around us. I slammed into my seat, teeth bared. The ride wasn’t smooth, or much fun, but Ell seemed like she was having the time of her life, and that made it all worth it.

  I said, “She’s coming up,” as I pointed through the foggy windshield, where I saw the vague outline of Mia’s snowmobile a few feet away. Then I noticed something else, and the strength in my hand vanished and my arm dropped heavily in my lap.

  Eleanor saw it too.

  She slammed on the brake, and for a second I thought we were going to pitch over, get crushed by the weight of the snowmobile, or become lost in the sea of white, never to be found again. Game over.

  We stayed upright, however, and I was grateful for that.

  “Is that—?” Ell began.

  I was nodding. Yeah, it was, and these were the real deal, not apparitions. The sun burned too brightly in the sky for it to be the monsters, although these were monsters in their own way.

  Still, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought most, if not all of the wildlife was dead, along with the rest of the world.

  But I guess I was wrong about that too…because a pack of wolves circled Mia’s snowmobile.

  “What do we do?” Eleanor asked. She hadn’t driven forward yet.

  I remained silent, thinking of our next move. We had no guns, no weapons that could stand up to a pack of ravenous wolves. Judging by the look of them—the way their gray and white coats were hanging off their bones like too-big clothes, and how their ribs were somehow still jutting through—these beasts were beyond ravenous.

  There’s not many things scarier than a starving, rabid wolf.

  “Why isn’t her snowmobile moving?” Ell whispered.

  I leaned closer to the windshield, cupped my hands around the glass, and squinted. Through the falling snow, I could make out Mia’s shape. She was flailing. Her fists slammed the dashboard over and over again, then every few seconds she’d look at the encroaching animals on both sides of the sled.

  “I think the engine’s stalled,” I answered.

  What else could it have been? She certainly wasn’t waiting around for us. We made a pact before setting out. If any of us were in trouble, priority number one was getting to safety. If that meant fleeing then you did what you had to do. Just like we had to save Mia.

  Despite our snowmobile’s idling engine, the wolves hadn’t noticed us. We weren’t that far back, and though the engine was quieter now, it had been roaring on our way from the storage garage. The wolves hadn’t noticed that either.

  Short of a gunshot, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anything. All they cared about was the chance of sinking their fangs into fresh meat, and the only thing separating them from dining on Mia and her unborn child was a thin pane of glass.

  I turned and looked at Ell. She knew what I was going to say next, I think. We were always on the same page.

  I said, “Rush them.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  But Ell didn’t hesitate; she rarely did. After a nod, she faced forward, gripped the handles, and revved the engine.

  A half a second later, we darted toward the wolves.

  It felt like we hit sixty miles per hour in that short distance. Impossible, I know, but the way we were slipping out of control made it seem that way. I gripped the door handle on my right so hard it hurt my hand, then I braced for impact.

  No impact came…not yet; for now, the plan seemed to be working.

  A few of the wolves snapped their heads toward us before scattering into the nearby snow-covered trees, their white-gray coats blending in with the gloom of the waning day.

  Over the half a dozen beasts, two hadn’t moved, or even noticed us. They must have been the most rabid; their jaws perpetually hung open, showing foam dripping from the sharpest of their fangs. One jumped on its hind legs and placed its large front paws against Mia’s window. She recoiled in fear, and although I couldn’t hear her screaming, I could imagine it pretty well.

  I saw all of this in the few seconds—which felt like an eternity—it took to rush the wolves. I thought we were going to hit them (or maybe Mia’s snowmobile), but Ell jerked the steering handles at the last second, and we began spinning out of control.

  I didn’t think it was possible, but time slowed further, yet the leafless trees whirled by my window in a black blur. Same went for the falling snow. Flakes shot by like shooting stars. It reminded me of when, in the Star Wars movies, a spaceship jumped into hyperspace. My stomach gave a terrible lurch, and I was pretty sure a few of my vital organs were thrown into places they shouldn’t have been—spleen in my boots, lungs in my neck, heart in my throat.

  Then the snowmobile came to a sudden, shuddering stop.

  I was thrown forward, and I cracked my head on the windshield, leaving behind what looked like a bloody asterisk.

  I don’t know if everything went quiet after that or if I’d momentarily passed out; all I knew for sure was that this wasn’t good.

  Not good at all.

  2

  The State of Things

  My eyes opened, but I’m not sure how long I was out. Eleanor was slumped over the steering wheel. Her hat had fallen off, and her hair was a wild mess, auburn strands pointing in every direction. Large drops of blood streamed down her face.

  “Ell?” I leaned over and shook her gently. When she didn’t move, I shook her a little harder. My mind was still spinning from the crash. Was she dead? God, I hoped I was dreaming.

  Please let me be dreaming. Please don’t let her be gone.

  “Ell, wake up!”

  I crawled over my seat and took her in my arms. The gash on her head looked worse than I initially expected. It would most likely need stitches—if she was still alive, that was—but in our current situation, stitches were probably out of the question.

  “Ell, c’mon, please be okay, please be okay—”

  Her eyes fluttered open, ripe with confusion. She was lost.

  “Grady?” she moaned. “What happened? Did I—did I hit the wolf? It’s not dead, is it? God, I didn’t want to kill it—”

  I shook my head, smiling. I couldn’t believe her sometimes. She got knocked unconscious, had blood pouring down her face, but all she cared about was the well-being of the beast that would’ve ripped our throats out in an instant given the chance.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, just happy she was cognizant.

  “Yeah, I think so.” She rubbed at her head, smearing the blood. As she pulled her hand away, she looked down at her palm and shuddered. “I’m gonna have a hell of a headache, but yeah, I’ll make it.”

  “Okay, good. Stay here. I’m gonna check on Mia.”

  Ell nodded, and I climbed out of the snowmobile. The door screeched as I threw my shoulder into it. The tree we’d hit had buckled in the metal and cracked the glass on my side, but it could’ve been so much worse.

  The wolves were gone. The noise of the accident must’ve scared the last ones away. I trucked through the snow on my wobbly legs. It came up through my pants, packed in my socks, painful against my skin. No matter how many nerves died from the cold, I still felt it. I don’t know how. A chilling possibility I’d considered on more than one occasion was that maybe this wasn’t regular snow. It made sense in a time when many things didn’t make sense.

  We
had crashed about thirty feet from Mia’s snowmobile. When I got to her door, she turned her haunted face toward me. The window on her side was raked with claw marks. How much longer would it have taken until the wolves got through? How much longer until instead of finding Mia terrified but alive, I found her dead and ripped open like the body of her boyfriend a few hundred feet back? I didn’t want to know. Hell, I didn’t even want to think about it, but it was a possibility. A very real one.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me like she didn’t recognize who I was at first. A too-long moment passed before her eyes put a name to my face and she nodded.

  “I can’t get the snowmobile started. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Engine’s busted or something. And those wolves almost got me—God!” She leaned forward and slammed the steering column with the palm of her hand, jolting the entire vehicle. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Like her voice, the sound of the hit was muted by the barrier between us.

  Not far from where I stood, the wolves watched from a snow-covered hilltop. There were only three of them, but the one standing taller than the rest had a wild glint in his eyes, like he was waiting for a slip or stumble so he and his friends could rush down and devour me.

  I had no time for the bastards now. The sky had changed from a purplish-gray to a nearly solid black. We had less than fifteen minutes to get moving, I figured—and that might’ve been a bit too optimistic. If we trucked it, and if everything went smoothly, which happened very rarely, we might’ve made it back to the station in half an hour. I thought an hour was more likely. Again, that might’ve been a bit too optimistic. None of those estimates would matter if we didn’t fix what was wrong with the sled. I mean, we came all this way for another ride. Leaving without it wasn’t an option.

  And it wasn’t fair, just wasn’t fair at all. So I let it out. Months of pent-up anger rushed from me in a span of seconds.

  “Fuck!” I screamed.“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  I went around to the engine and kicked it hard as hell. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have. Should’ve found a piece of wood or something besides my breakable bones. The kick hurt pretty badly.

  Suddenly, a grumbling noise rippled across the momentarily still air, and a cloud of exhaust shot out of the tailpipe, and I forgot all about my soon-to-be bruised foot.

  “What?” I whispered. “Not possible.”

  “Grady! You crazy son of a bitch!” Mia shouted from the sled’s cab, voice louder. She revved the engine to life. It sounded good. Healthy. The snowmobile lurched forward. “You did it! You fuckin’ did it!”

  I didn’t mean to, but yeah, I guess I did do it, didn’t I? I thought that maybe, just maybe, someone was actually listening and things would start to go our way.

  That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

  I drove back to the station with Ell in the passenger’s seat, following closely behind Mia in case the engine decided to crap out on her again. Ell rolled her head every few minutes, and her neck cracked loudly when she did it. I kept her talking to keep her mind off of the pain. Soon enough, we’d be back at the station, where she could swallow down some ibuprofen, rest, and get right.

  About an hour later (the less-optimistic timeframe of my prediction, but hey, I’ll take it), I saw the BP sign standing high in the now-dark sky. There was no sun at all, just a wall of solid black clouds. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but if I had to guess, I’d guess it was somewhere around three in the afternoon. Maybe a bit later. The way things were, time no longer mattered, and it probably never would again.

  The trip back went surprisingly well. We saw no monsters, but because we moved along at a slow pace, thanks to the limited mobility of the snowmobiles in the deeper parts and the more-than-suggested weight they had to carry around, I swear I felt the wraiths watching us from the sides of the road. I felt that often. They stayed at a safe distance from our headlights, blending in with the blackness, but I knew they were there.

  Waiting and hungry.

  I think the scariest thing is how they knew this was their world now. They had the home field advantage. We were basically rats in a maze, and they were the scientists lording over us—studying, watching, learning the ways we thought, the ways we moved. They could wait because the cold didn’t affect them. The darkness didn’t either. They thrived in these conditions.

  Mikey had his face pressed against the glass window. I saw this as the snowmobile’s headlights passed over the building's facade. We parked them right by the door and crawled back inside. The difference in the temperature was like the difference between summer and winter. All that trapped body heat went a long way.

  “You got it?” Stone asked.

  I nodded. I was guiding Ell toward the front counter. “I need some meds for her. We had an incident.”

  “Ell?” Mikey said, worried. He came over and put an arm around his sister’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just cracked my head after a little mishap. No big deal.”

  She had somewhat cleaned off the wound, but she'd mostly smeared it around, turning the red a washed-out pink, and now the cut was leaking blood again.

  Mikey grabbed some bandages and some medicinal ointment as I searched for ibuprofen. Ell winced when I cleaned the slash and nearly screamed when I daubed the Neosporin over it.

  “It burns! Damn!” Ell said.

  “If it’s burning, it’s workin’,” Mia said. “My mom always told me that. Killin’ the germs or some weird shit.”

  “An elegant way of putting it, no doubt,” Stone said. He unscrewed the lid of the ibuprofen and shook two pills into Ell’s outstretched hand. She downed them with a gulp of water. After that I got her bandaged up. It almost covered her eye.

  “You look like a hospitalized pirate,” I told her.

  “Still cute though, right?”

  “Beautiful as always.”

  “You’re gonna make me sick,” Stone said.

  I shot him the bird as I guided a wobbly Eleanor over to our middle aisle campsite.

  “You should lie down. Get some rest.”

  “As if I had a choice,” Ell teased and stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Hey, I can be caring too.”

  “Yeah, I really picked a winner, huh?” she said sarcastically. I helped her down to the floor and got her all situated. Tucked her in. Fluffed her sweater-pillow. I was very motherly. Is it weird to say that about my girlfriend? Probably…but it was the truth.

  Mikey worked on getting the fire burning a bit brighter. Cold usually prevented that; still, it was worth a shot. A black scorch mark already tattooed the ceiling from the constant heat. We inhaled a lot of smoke and other bad stuff from what we torched, but it beat freezing our asses off. The risk was worth the reward.

  “You gonna read me a bedtime story too?” Ell asked.

  “I mean, if you want… I don’t know that many off the top of my head, but I guess I could make it up as I go.”

  “Oh,” Stone said from the front of the store, “you don’t want that. Trust me. Grady’s a shitty storyteller.”

  “For once I agree with Stone,” I said.

  Ell’s eyelids were heavy. She was beat—I think we all were. That’s the thing about the cold: it steals not only your warmth, but your energy too.

  I leaned closer to Eleanor and kissed her on the corner of her mouth. “Get some rest. You’ll feel better in a few hours.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  With that, she turned over, leaning on the side the bandage wasn’t on, and closed her eyes. Didn’t take long either. About two minutes later, she was snoring softly.

  Chewy, wanting to comfort her, curled up around her feet, fitting into the curve of the back of her bent knees like a missing puzzle piece. I went and covered the dog with a knitted sweater, and another few minutes later, his snores blended with Ell’s.

  The others were still at the front of the store, talking in low voices about th
e wolves.

  “I didn’t even fuckin’ see the bastards,” Mia said to Stone. “I was just sitting there minding my own business when all of a sudden I heard a snarl. It sounded like a damn werewolf.”

  “Werewolves are the worst. That’s terrible,” Mikey said.

  “Is it?” Stone added as I grabbed one of the thawed bottled waters and leaned on the counter next to him. Mikey and I gave Stone a look like we were waiting for the punchline of an inevitable joke. He joked a lot, if you haven’t already realized, especially in serious times—and these were nothing but serious times. Mia even flashed him wary eyes. She’d only known Stone a handful of hours and she was already catching on.

  No joke came, however. Instead, Stone met our stares and smiled a little.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The wolves, man,” he almost shouted.

  I shushed him and motioned behind me where Ell slept, though I doubted anything short of a meteor striking the road outside would’ve disturbed her.

  “Sorry,” Stone said. “But you know what this means, right, the wolves?”

  I didn’t; neither did the others. Like the rest of my body, my brain felt sluggish—all thanks to the cold.

  “It means not everything’s as dead as we thought!” Stone exclaimed. “There’s still life out there besides unlucky bastards like us.”

  “Yeah, but for how much longer?” Mia asked.

  “Probably until the wraiths have their fill of us,” Mikey added, his face as grim as his statement. “Then they’ll move on to the other life forms.”

  Ignoring this depressing debate, Stone said to me, “It also means that the pile of bodies outside of the grocery store was most definitely eaten by wolves. Not the monsters.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mia asked.

  I filled her in about my supply run and the crazy guy waiting for me inside Penny Wiser’s and all the dead bodies outside not long ago, glossing over how they were missing when we left.

  Gloss or not, Mia still shuddered when I was done telling her.