Eric Dimbleby - White Out

If The Yeti hadn’t crushed Tony’s windpipe with his boot, then the next dropkick would most definitely achieve that end. Though Annie didn’t believe in God, not since she was a child, she couldn’t help but say a silent prayer for the mangled mess on the floor, squirming with hope of a mercy that would not come—not from above, and not from below.

The Yeti brought his massive boot down on Tony’s throat again, this time with a slow, methodic crunch that seemed to last an eternity. The giant of a man wrung his meaty paws together, delighted by his destruction. His bearded face looked like that of one of those dog-faced boys that Annie remembered seeing in old carnie photos from the twenties and thirties. His eyes were sunken deep into his skull, the only sign of humanity that existed on his furry face. The hair all over his head, cheeks, chin, and jaw was curled in little ringlets. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like his overgrown beard was peppered with gray hair.

“Tony?” Annie asked, holding back on a whimpering sound that hung at the back of her throat. It would not escape, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. “Tony—are you okay?”

It was a moronic question, really. If he wasn’t already dead, he would be so soon enough.

The Yeti looked over at Annie, grinning as he pressed his boot into Tony’s throat a third time. A raspy, rattling breath choked inside of Tony’s throat. He was still breathing and Annie considered that a miracle, though she wondered how long the misery would last.

“Your boyfriend won’t be okay, prissy pants. He won’t be okay ever again. And I’ll make sure of that,” said The Yeti. His voice was high-pitched. The typical big-man-little-voice syndrome, Annie thought to herself, trying not to laugh as the man that would be her lover grappled at his decimated windpipe, struggling for a wheezy bit of air.

The man kneeling at Tony’s feet cackled and hooted at The Yeti’s devious comment. In that moment, though she should have been thinking about escape, Annie labeled him as The Chuckle Machine.

“I promise we’ll leave this place and never say a word about this,” she begged.

“I said shut your mouth, bitch,” The Midget Man whispered, right in her ear. She could smell that he was wearing a pungent aftershave, something cheap and offensive. It seemed odd to be so focused on hygiene at a time like this. Tony hadn’t even shaved in the three weeks since the storm started, let alone applying after-shave. The Midget Man surely had a screw loose, or he didn’t quite understand the gravity of the storm outside. “Your boy toy don’t sound so good,” he added, giggling at the terrible sound coming from Tony’s mouth. It was the most painful sound Annie could ever remember hearing.

Outside The Purple Cat, the wind whipped hard now, howling against the roof and the eaves. It was well after midnight now, and Annie suspected that it would be a long time until sunrise, if she even survived that long. Stop thinking like that , she kept telling herself, but it didn’t do much good.

“Ease back a bit,” advised The Shiny Bald One, looking up at The Yeti with dead-serious eyes, that wolfish expression returning in spades. Shiny’s whole facial expression was something stony and unflinching, as if he was unable to emotionally respond to anything in one way or another. He might have been a cowboy in an old spaghetti western—all business, very little talk, ready to brandish his six-shooter when the shit hit the fan. Annie was confident that he was the de facto leader, and so she pleaded with him directly. In movies, you always begged the leader for mercy.

“I know it wasn’t right, coming in here without asking. We were going to die out there.”

“You bet your ass it wasn’t right. Shit’s changed, in case you haven’t noticed,” said The Shiny Bald One, who now stood up from Tony’s crumpled body. She could see Tony’s left hand fingers spasming now, as if they were trying to resuscitate his entire being. Annie heard another rattled breath come from Tony’s mouth.

Still alive. Barely alive, but still alive all the same.

“We staked a claim here about a week ago. You’re not the first bozo to come through, and you won’t be the last. Shit hits the fan and everybody goes flocking to the food. We figured that out ourselves, but we figured it out first, you see? That’s the difference between men like us and spoiled brats like you and Handsome Dan over here. We’re smarter than you, and that’s why we survive.”

“Help us survive, too. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

The Chuckle Machine erupted again, still not saying anything but letting his pleasure loose into the air. His hair flew about his head wildly, thin black strands that looked like they’d been dipped in grease. He reminded her of a drug-addled gangster from a classic Hollywood movie, as there was something fully off kilter about him. A real cuckoo bird, somebody like Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo might have called him.

“You’ll make it worth our while?” asked The Shiny Bald One, repeating it back to her in a mocking, girly voice, even batting his eyes as if he was some sort of six foot tall doll in a pink dress. His lips pulled back to reveal a perfect set of teeth, radiating in the fire light.

Any minute now, she was sure that The Shiny Bald One would howl.

The Midget Man was breathing heavily against the back of her neck. His aftershave violated her nostrils as he started to rub up against her, getting bolder with each thrust. It made the hairs on her arms stand up on their ends. “You fellas mind if she makes it worth my while first?”

The Yeti and The Chuckle Machine remained silent, looking over at their leader for approval, but The Shiny Bald One gave the verbal go-ahead, finally confirming himself to Annie as their true figurehead. “Have fun, but clean her up when you’re done. Don’t leave it messy for the rest of us.”

So the three monsters watched Annie and The Midget Man. Their bulbous eyes were the most horrible part of all; vapid stares and licking lips, sipping on booze and smoking unfiltered cigarettes while The Midget Man went to the moon and back again.

Pain.

The uneasy terror of an all-encompassing pain that would not go away surged through Annie, sending shudders up her spine and into her neck. She could barely remember what happened to her, but her body was well aware. Throbs and yelps from every muscle, from every cell in her body. She felt ruined, left out on the floor’s slab like a hunter’s slain conquest.

Through a swollen eye, she craned her neck up at the roaring fire. The Shiny Bald One kept The Yeti on fire patrol, commanding him to stoke and feed the fire regularly with a seemingly endless supply of wood. It licked at the edges of the hearth and something deep inside of Annie wished those flames would reach out and swallow her whole. She wished it would burn her until the pain went away. She didn’t want to know the feeling of being alive anymore.

Her body was no longer her own.

It belonged to them .

All her life, she was told by her hippie-lovin’ liberal parents that her body was a temple, never to be sacrificed to any whim or bad judgment. It was to be honored and kept well if she were to avoid the rigors of aging. Her parents voices’ felt like they were screaming in pain now, drifting through her memories in a more vivid light than she could remember the past hour, though she was glad she couldn’t remember any of it.

The smell of urine kept wafting in and out of her busted nose. One of them, presumably the monstrous Yeti, had finished his rendezvous by pissing all over her backside. The smell of his bitter urine now mixed with the salty, coppery smell of blood that was clotting around her face. She wished she had the strength to cry out to them, to beg that they at least let her put her underwear back on, to give her back an ounce of dignity before they fully destroyed her.