Eric Dimbleby - White Out

When she had it mostly excavated—clawing at the snow around the snowmobile like a dog trying to bury a bone—a nasty feeling inched into her chest, one that she’d seriously miscalculated something in her escape plan.

She looked at the steely cold ignition, wondering how she could have been such a dolt.

Because she hadn’t known that Midget Man had a snowmobile. The knee-jerk reaction was to run away from the lodge, to get as far away as she could. She hadn’t thought about keys, or anything of the sort, only to remove herself from the dead man’s presence, as she would have done near any dead man.

They were probably tucked away in his pocket.

Why hadn’t she searched him? At least to pull his identification so she could know the real name of the man she’d killed, of the man who had raped her. Something to bring to the authorities. None of that, though, had gone through her head. “Dummy,” Annie said to herself, breathing with a shaky wheeze, looking back at the front door of The Purple Cat. It was only about half the distance of a football field from her, but it had taken every inch of strength to travel that distance once, let alone there and back again. The ever-deepening snow was an exhausting bugger. Suddenly, she missed the luxury of Tony’s sled, which was nowhere to be found (most likely buried much deeper than the Midget Man’s snowmobile).

Summoning her strength, she trudged ahead, pausing every few steps to catch her breath.

One step, two step, three step, four. Five step, six step, raped like a whore.

Not funny , thought the other side of Annie’s brain. Not funny at all. She was right. It wasn’t funny, but still she snickered madly, as though she’d never properly laughed previous to that moment.

She kept her ears attuned to the sound of approaching snowmobiles (for when the other monsters were done with whatever terrible thing they were doing to the man they called Pepper), but still she laughed, louder than the whipping wind, louder than the all the screaming children (all of whom sounded just like Paulie) inside of her head.

No keys. No keys. No keys. No-fucking-keys!

She could feel her body warming again and something deep inside her told her ravaged body to stay put, hunker down, and to fight back against her tormentors when they returned and show them the bloody hell that they had unknowingly released. Running away would only make things worse, because they would surely find her. If she ran away, they would treat it like a game. Wolves don’t know how to act like anything but wolves. There is a modicum of pride in the hunt of an innocent jackrabbit.

They’ll follow your snowmobile tracks. These guys are hunting types, probably killed their first buck by the age of ten. You think they’re going to let a pretty little thing like you escape? You think they don’t want to go for seconds and thirds and fourths, like you’re a ten-dollar breakfast buffet, digging themselves and their filthy little nubs deep down inside of your panties? You think they won’t want to decimate anybody that can speak ill will of them to the police? They’re going to kill you, Annie. K-I-L-L… only one way to spell it, baby cakes. They’re going to rape you again and again, maybe even ten times for good measure, and then they’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill you HARD. You killed one of theirs, Annie. You know what that means, right? You killed one of their brood, and there is no greater sin to a pack of beasts.

“Where are they?” she asked The Midget Man’s corpse (which was warm, but getting colder with every passing second), half expecting him to open his eyes and answer her. If he did, it wouldn’t surprise her. A lot weirder things had happened in the past month. “Where are the keys, you little shit stain?”

She pushed his body over with her numb foot, feeling in his back pockets.

Nothing there, either.

Tick tock, tick tock. Here comes the Bald One’s cock.

She wished that nasty side of her mind would curl up and die. It was the same voice that she heard when she’d cheated on Christian, the same side that came to life that time she had slashed her ex-boyfriend’s tires in college, the same voice that had plagiarized her final thesis paper in Business Management class, the same voice that once told her she should run away from her family, to get on a bus and never look back. It’s okay, you’ll do just fine when you don’t have to take care of that little brat and that man-child with the Buddha-belly gut and the charming smile. Yeah, Annie, get on that bus and suck the first dick you sit next to and see how much cash you can get for that little treat, and keep going until you’re in the penthouse and equipped with fake boobies and champagne and bunch of friends with similar habits.

The voice came and went, but it always spoke the same language.

Annie looked towards the window. There was still no sign of The Shiny Bald One and his entourage, but she had a digging instinct in her stomach that they would be back within the hour. She didn’t know how she knew this. Mother’s instinct, perhaps… knowing when your child was about to take a nasty spill on the floor or bump their head on the corner of the cabinet, even well before they made the doomed movement.

The Midget Man didn’t have the keys, so Annie moved on to the kitchen and the cluttered bar area, scanning every surface and nook for the keys. Had The Shiny Bald One taken the keys so that this wouldn’t happen? It seemed quite possible that he didn’t trust The Midget Man… who would, in fact? The Shiny Bald One was smart. Smarter than the rest of them, at the very least.

She pushed through the silver swinging doors of the kitchen galley, scanning the short hallway between the bathroom and the dining area. Nothing here, nothing there, nothing anywhere. Returning to the bar, she first considered grabbing a bottle of something hard and going to town, waiting for them to return, but then she changed it up and started to think like a small person. Midget Man was easily nine inches shorter than she was, so she hunched herself over, looking around at what would have been his eye level, feeling completely ridiculous, though nobody—she hoped —was watching her.

Underneath the bar, she discovered a transparent bin full of dried out limes. She rooted around in there, desperate to leave no stone unturned. Nothing, still. Behind the bar, she shifted the bottles around, looking between them. She wouldn’t drink them, though it seemed like an easier option to the current predicament.

Returning to the fire’s side, Annie caught herself staring at the tiny blue flames that still hung on for dear life, transfixed by the sight. She next looked to The Midget Man’s corpse again, thinking she might give him another search, when she saw the key on the floor, catching a faint glint of the dying flames. It must have fallen out of his pocket when she’d speared him. It landed somewhere between his body and the fireplace during their struggle, waiting for her to come along and get free.

Annie couldn’t be sure that it was the key, but she had no other option at this point. She looked at the writing on the key, but it only gave the name of the key manufacturer: SECURIFLEX, and beneath that a serial number. It was her best bet. It was her only bet. Snatching the key from the floor, she headed directly for the front door, pulling her jacket zipped again and bracing herself for the interminable cold.

She had a new perk in her painful trudging.

Annie kept her eyes glued to the snowmobile, just beyond her reach. Clutching the key tight in her hand, she started to pray to her suddenly revived concept of God that the gas tank would be full. That was all she needed now, to get the son of a bitch started and find it sputter out after a few hundred yards—assuming that she now possessed the correct key.