Eric Dimbleby - White Out

It seemed like a cruel nightmare, something she could have never fathomed before this moment, but Annie reached down, biting back the bile that tried to eek its way up her esophagus. She grabbed him by the bloated, icy ankles, looking at his purple face, studying the nasty wound on his neck. Most of his head was detached, but not quite all of it. The son of a bitch had nearly decapitated his head, but had given up before completion. The sight made her go numb. She would never forget this image, no matter how long she lived.

You don’t get moving, then that won’t be very long.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to him, though she knew he couldn’t hear it. She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for—for his dying, for her not coming home when she should have, for being a cheater—but it felt good to say those words to him one last time. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, increasingly conscious of how pathetic she sounded now.

His head clunked against the cement steps and Annie could not recall a more hideous sound in her life.

Annie’s discovery explained the pungent, unnerving smell that she’d awoken to during the night. She cast it away, assuming it was rotting food, never imagining (stupid, stupid girl) that Edgar was lying about what happened to Christian. The look in Edgar’s lying eyes should have told the whole story, but she was a goddamned fool. Not to mention the fact that nothing could have pried her away from cuddling with her son throughout the night.

When she had Christian fully removed from the darkened bulkhead, exposed to the tiny bits of morning light that snuck in through the solitary window on the other side of the basement, he looked even worse than her first glimpse, through the stygian dark. Natural light always made things look worse.

He didn’t look like the man she had married. He looked like a deformed ghoul.

Annie grabbed a sheet from the closet. It was dripping wet because it had dropped off the shelf at some point, uselessly soaking up water that would not cease. It would still serve its purpose. She covered her husband’s body, whispering something that may or may not have been an insane person’s prayer, and wished with all her might that Paulie would not discover this terrible sight. It would ruin what remained of his life if he found his father’s body like this. Her boy would be screwed up for the rest of his life regardless of what happened ( but wouldn’t all the world’s children be in the same boat, if any of them actually survived? ). She wasn’t a fan of adding insult to injury.

She returned to the bulkhead. Since she had crossed the room with Christian’s body and covered him up, the torrent of water increased several times over, exponentially gushing and splashing against the hard steps. It sounded like a waterfall. The rushing sound actually hurt her aching, muddied ears, trapped within the tightly bound confines of the bulkhead.

With a deep breath inside her chest, Annie stepped up, and then reached up to the slanted bulkhead door, turning the latch that held it sealed. She tried once and then twice, to push using just her arms, but the thing didn’t move a centimeter. There was still a ton of snow on the other side of it. She might have to wait.

Wait? Wait for what? Wait to drown? Wait so that creep can come down here and finish what he started on Paulie? So he can give you a taste of that same pain, that same purposeless violence? That sicko’s got nothing to lose.

She shook the thought away, pushing once again with all her might, this time throwing her right shoulder and the side of her head into the effort. The rush of water got heavier. Gone were the drip-drips, replaced by a screaming banshee of echoing water, hollow and innocent sounding, but deadly all the same.

Annie looked back down the stairs. Paulie was stirring again. “Mammah? Too much watah?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s way too much water,” she said, not at all amused at just how much water it really was. It was more than four inches deep on the floor now, coming up closer and closer to her knees. If it kept up this pace, they’d be drowned in less than an hour, if she didn’t get the blasted bulkhead open.

She screamed out loud, thinking of those stories about women lifting the dead weight of an automobile off their pinned children. Her brain filled with hopeful thoughts of adrenaline, acting like a mother bear protecting her cubs at any cost.

“Push, Mammah,” Paulie’s wavering, miniscule voice rooted her on. The poor kid could barely speak, wincing in pain as he cheered for his mother.

And that was when it overcame her. It was a rush of energy, like nothing she’d ever felt, flooding over her body, warmly euphoric. Her entire body jolted with an incredible strength. This was it. This was that Herculean moment, presenting itself to her. This is what all those old wives’ tales had been talking about—she was certain of it.

With a grunt, she threw everything she had into the door, giving way to a whoosh of frozen air, soon followed by sloppy streams of icy snow and water crashing against her lower body, sending her to topple down the stairs.

Landing in a frigid, but refreshing pool of water, she looked up and saw the sun.

It shined through the remaining clouds. It was going to be a marvelous day.

Annie gathered Paulie into her arms.

With what she thought might be the last of her strength, Annie took one step at a time, climbing towards the glorious, golden sunlight.

The sounds engulfed him as he slept, intertwining into his occasionally rational thoughts and breaking up the places his mind dared to go. He dreamed of being on a wooden raft, where there was nothing to eat but a little boy with cowboy boots on his feet. Edgar dreamed of eating the boy and throwing his bones over the edge (he’d of course hang on to the boots), into the ocean where the sharks would pick away the last sinews and tendons, getting every last ounce of protein from his tiny corpse. Somebody, off on the ocean’s horizon, kept ringing a strange sounding dinner bell in odd intervals, no so much a ding-dong , but reminding him instead of a rushing river that could not be blockaded by dams or rocks or sandy beaches.

Something was changing. Something was coming for him.

Edgar woke with a splitting headache, as if somebody had taken an axe to the back of his skull while he was sleeping. “ Zing-a-ling ,” he stammered, folding his legs over the edge of Paulie and Christian’s bed. He couldn’t remember much from the night before, and didn’t really care to. He licked his parched lips, unbuttoning one eye, slowly, and then opening up the other. There was some alien stickiness clinging to his eyelids, something he usually felt when he drank too much. The next thought seemed vaguely familiar: the dead fellow had a liquor cabinet that would make an Irishman weep.

He supposed that was what happened. Seemed likely. Sounded just like an Edgar kind of evening. He’d had a lot of those lately, especially since the snow first came.

A hazy fog thinned out, with sporadic recollections returning to him, broken and shattered, but real all the same. A woman. She’d come through the door, asking about his boy, talking about a whole lot of bullsh—

His wife. It was the sexy broad from the pictures on the wall, the one with the pretty cans and the white teeth. He’d met her last night. He’d met his wife and now he wasn’t quite sure where she was. Shouldn’t she have been sleeping next to him?

“Christ on a bike,” he said to himself.

There was never a second chance to make a first impression. What had he said to her? What had he done? That was his new wife. The mother of his child. The matron of his heart. The reason for the season. She was a pretty one and he was expected by the Lord Almighty to treat her that way.