Eric Dimbleby: White Out

“Jack… please listen to me. Don’t worry if Dan is a little off his game today. He hasn’t been upgraded in four years, for Christ’s sake.”

“We can’t afford the upgrade. It’ll double the monthly lease. We can barely keep our jobs lately, let alone, cutting edge shit like Doppler Dan.”

“Isn’t that the station’s problem? Not yours. You should have just upgraded it when we had the chance. Doppler Dan can’t see two inches in front of his face.”

“Stop that. Stop that talk right now.”

“Have you ever tried to make love to Doppler Dan? Have you ever pleasured yourself while sitting in front of Dan? Jack, you’re a naughty boy , aren’t you?”

“I think you’re having a laugh at my expense and I don’t appreciate it… Dammit, Dan, you hear me? Give me the scoop on this storm. All this fuzz, all over the screen. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the signals are being scrambled. Everything is on the fritz, not just Dan. I tried to call Channel 6—the rotten bastards—and I could barely hear them on the other end. The phone lines aren’t too far away from shutting down. The ice is snapping the lines, I heard it out the window.”

“I’m scared, Jack.”

“Same here.”

“You think we’re going to lose power?”

“I can almost guarantee it. I’d say it’s going to shut off any time now. The patterns of moisture are like a law of nature—the ocean evaporates into the clouds or something like that, and then the clouds move around and then they get over land and drop the moisture as precipitation. There’s only so much of that stuff. Eventually, it has to stop, right?”

“You’re an awful weather man, you know that? Listen to yourself. You sound like a middle-schooler describing weather patterns. You’d be screwed without Doppler Dan, wouldn’t you?”

“Bet your ass I would. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not.”

“Jack, sweetie, I think you’ve made a career of just that.”

“Come on, Danny Boy. Show papa what’s happenin’ out there.”

Doppler Dan chirped, its fans whirring in delight, though its display gave nothing but garbled green and black geometric shapes, intermingling like an Impressionist painting. Tammy couldn’t remember it ever looking so damned confused, so worn, and purely blitzed. Had one of the maintenance men or cleanup crews been fucking around with Doppler Dan? Was it possible that somebody was sabotaging Jack, messing with his career?

“I’ll look like an idiot if I don’t have Dan fully functional again. I’m not sure I—,” said Jack, pausing and moaning, staring down at Tammy, “what are you doing ?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

Jack let out a long exhalation, then said, “Can we go into the other room? I don’t feel right, having you do that to me… in here.”

Tammy rolled her eyes.

“I know what this is really about. Are you afraid Dan might see?”

Tammy went back to work. It wasn’t so bad, being Jack Helford’s assistant. The pay was okay, the perks were rudimentary, and it was easy work. Sure, he didn’t possess an iota of knowledge about the world of meteorology, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a damn fine weatherman. All the ladies out there thought of Jack when they hugged their pillows at night.

Tammy thought very little about The Rules. It was obvious that The Rules were going to mean less and less in the coming days. The population was getting stupid, so she planned to go right along on that ride. The Rules were bending—breaking, really—and she wasn’t the only one engaging in behavior that she normally wouldn’t have.

Like Doppler Dan, she felt a frizzy tick in the back of her processing unit, something that she couldn’t put her finger on. It wasn’t just a weather event that they were experiencing. She was certain. The snow was just a catalyst to something bigger. Tammy couldn’t recollect the last time she’d been in a church, or had even cast a second thought in the purported God’s direction, but she could sense something bigger at work. Not necessarily bad, but different from anything she’d experienced before.

Jack was married. That was a Rule. Jack was her boss. That was another Rule.

“Fuck the rules,” she said, as Jack tucked himself back into his pants and led her away from Doppler Dan’s prying eyes.

“It’s all about distribution of weight. Winnie didn’t understand that, and that’s why I bet she’s dead by now. Usually, the snow gets compacted by cars and footsteps. The only thing compacting the snow is the sheer mass of itself, as it gets deeper and deeper. The upper four or five feet worth will be loose enough to sink into if we’re not careful about it. We’ll sink into it like a stone if we don’t distribute our weight evenly. Simple physics.”

Tony’s plan seemed ridiculous, especially as he amassed the materials to construct what he referred to as a “bitchin’ snow raft.” She’d chuckled at the idea, more out of a nervous sensation that they should stay put and wait a little longer to see if help would come. Tony was hard at work formulating the plan all week, searching through the supply rooms for items to build his “bitchin’ snow raft.”

Annie stared at the contraption he’d created. She tried not to laugh, for it might very well be the thing that stood between her and death, if he was on point about its integrity. Tony, during one of his quiet stretches where he wandered off into the lower levels of the building, had put together a pair of skis and the hull of a wheelbarrow. He managed to remove the undercarriage and wheel from the bottom of the wheelbarrow, bolting wooden blocks into place beneath. Then he’d secured the device deeper still, into a pair of red, white, and blue skis. It looked as if he’d removed the bindings from the skis, to create a flat surface to append his raft-slash-sled to. A long piece of plywood was screwed into the skis as well, to help support the weight of the wheelbarrow’s hull, as well as their collected body weights.

“I found some industrial strength bolts in the supply room. Just about ripped my palm open cranking them in by hand though. After I drilled the holes into the skis, the power drill was pretty drained. All the backup batteries were already dead, too. Next time we see Harry, remind me to flick him in the nose for not keeping those charged,” said Tony. Harry was the maintenance man for the building, who was more often found snoozing with a newspaper spread across his lap than repairing the perpetually leaky toilets.

She studied the cart. The bright yellow wheelbarrow wasn’t metal, so it wouldn’t hold in the cold as much, something she’d be grateful for. Instead, it was some sort of lightweight plastic polymer. She still didn’t understand how they were going to transport themselves eight miles in this hodgepodge carriage, but she assumed Tony was one step ahead of her.

Smirking at the sight of the thing, she asked, “Where the hell did you get a pair of skis?”

“Eddie from accounting. He keeps them in his office, tucked in the corner. I think he does cross country skiing during lunch or something. I’ve never seen him actually do it, so maybe he only intends to. Lucky for us, right?”

Speaking of lunch , thought Annie. Her stomach grumbled at her. If her stomach had lips, it would have been pouting since Saturday. They wholly raided the vending machine during the first week, and then they started scrambling through people’s desks, pulling out anything edible. Most people kept at least a candy bar in their work areas. Winnie had an entire case of peanut-butter filled pretzels in her office. She reluctantly shared them with Annie and Tony, but they ran out the day before. The bizarre thought that Winnie had given up on life because she ran out of snacks suddenly torqued inside of Annie. She wasn’t sure if she was about to laugh or cry.