White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (21 page)

He was less than twenty feet away, with no other snowmobilers in sight
yet. “Put that away!” he shouted, still not putting together that it was somebody besides The Midget Man crouched beside his snowmobile.

She made eye contact
with him in the next breath, and she held herself still, training the weapon on his chest. A head shot had too many chances of missing. If she went for the midsection, and if she was off by a hair or two, it would still do some damage. The chest, she remembered hearing in a movie, was the strategically smart move.

It felt empowering to
train her weapon on him and she suddenly understood the macho surge of it all.

The Chuckle Machine put it all together just as Annie pulled the trigger.
“Fuck!” he cried out, jerking the handles of his snowmobile away from her, towards The Purple Cat. Her bullet whizzed by him, but she hadn’t missed by much. And in one moment, she turned from John Wayne back into the scared wife-and-mother who had just held a gun for the first time. She’d missed him, and there most likely wouldn’t be a second chance. “Shit, shit, shit,” she said, looking down at the weapon, pulling back the hammer a second time. There had been a bullet in the chamber, but there might not be another one if The Midget Man only loaded one bullet at a time.

She aimed at The Chuckle Machin
e, who was cursing and moving farther and farther away from her on his gas-powered chariot. He’d maneuvered on pure gut instinct, seeing that he’d been duped by her pretending to be somebody she wasn’t, and he wouldn’t be duped again.

Her thoughts moved in slow motion, just like her hands and fingers:
This is really your last chance, sweetie. He gets off that snowmobile and you’re a dead woman.

She pulled the trigger a second time, wincing as the blast pierced her ears and made her jolt in terror.
The Chuckle Machine dropped from his snowmobile with a powdery thud, sending a spray of fluffy white snow into the air around him. His snowmobile continued on, slowing down as it drifted towards the side door of The Purple Cat, where a wall of snow and ice had abutted up against the building.

She couldn’t tell if she’d killed him, but he wasn’t moving. He was either playing possum
, or he was dead. If he had simply been injured, he would have been howling in pain. Annie was sure that the bullet had clipped him near the shoulder, but it could have very well got him in the back of the neck or the heart. The moment of impact had been a blur, though it was a moment she was sure she’d never forget.

Regardless of whether he was alive or not, Annie felt like a certified bad-ass.

She spun the chamber, taking note that there were still four bullets left. Annie sent a silent thank you into the air, in the general direction of The Purple Cat, thankful that the Midget Man had fully loaded the revolver.

Annie was so proud of herself, wishing Paulie and Christian could see her.

Exhaling a breath that she felt like she’d been holding for nearly an hour, Annie couldn’t help but smile. “Got you, didn’t I?” she called out, pointing her weapon towards the snowy bank that The Chuckle Machine’s body landed in, right next to the revving snowmobile that continued to run though it had nowhere else to go. She kept the weapon pointed, just in case he lurched and came back to life again. “
Who’s laughing now
?”

She pulled herself up on to the snowmobile again, turning the ignition.

As she started to push her way through the cumbersome snow, she calculated how long it would take her to get back home. It would take at least a few hours at the current rate. With Tony’s “manual” rig, it would have taken at least three more days, but the snowmobile was a vast improvement, as long as the gas didn’t run out on her… and as long as it didn’t sink into the fluffy upper layers and get stuck, which it begged to do with every inch it traversed.

The low hum of her snowmobile was soon accompanied by another one, that of two more chugging machines far off in the distance, barely audible but
coming-coming-coming
towards her all the same. Soon enough, they’d find the body of their two companions, and soon after that, they would begin the hunt.

They would find her tracks and they would follow them to the ends of the earth, because that was the kind of men they were. Vicious scoundrels never let anybody harm them, not without serious repercussions.

“Come and get it,” Annie whispered, twisting the throttle on her snowmobile. The fervent gusto inside of her felt feigned and a bit uneasy on her, but the two previous kills had enlivened her into some new frame of mind that she had never known before. There was something addicting about it--
killing
was easy when you had somebody special (
two
special somebodies, in fact) to get home to.

Chapter Two

The snowmobile wasn’t as big of a pain in the ass as she thought it would be. It seemed to clamber through the snow as if it wasn’t bothered by the heavy drifts at all, though it occasionally churned when she passed over a particularly nasty lump. After pulling into a straightaway towards the center of town, she felt herself settle into the rhythm, becoming one with the machine that she could never have imagined herself riding on. Only a couple weeks earlier, she’d been complaining about the lukewarm nature of her café mocha. Now she was running for her life, driving an alien vehicle through the hellish tundra that was her hometown, hoping that her pursuers would kill her before they raped her, and not the other way around.

             
She tried to imagine what their reaction would be when they came to the bodies, disbelieving that she had killed not just one, but two of their deviant cronies, leaving them to waste away in the frost.

             
It might have been something like this, she imagined:

             
“That bitch,” The Shiny Bald One might have shouted, and so he might have kicked his snowmobile and bent down next to The Chuckle Machine to get a closer look, finding that he was dead.

             
“You don’t wanna see what she did in here,” The Yeti might say next, standing in the doorway of The Purple Cat, his face going ghost-white at the discovery of his vertically challenged comrade’s body. Or more likely, The Yeti might just growl, showing his teeth and stomping his massive bear claws on the snow, gnashing his teeth and praying for blood. His speaking seemed to be something closer to a guttural animal sound, at least inside of Annie’s head.

             
“She won’t get away with this,” he might say, sounding like a borderline clichéd villain from a cartoon. The Yeti would come stomping through the snow, crying and throwing his big, hairy arms around in the air. He might not even get on his snowmobile to pursue. He might get more pleasure in stalking his prey by foot, trudging through the snow like his hunch-backed ancestors.

             
The Shiny Bald One would probably light up a cigarette. Annie had seen him smoke one after their “rendezvous,” but he didn’t seem like the type that smoked regularly. It was a treat to him and not an addiction. As he pulled on his smoke, he would say something like this to The Yeti: “Bitches like this, ruining the world for the rest of us. I bet she was a cheating whore. We didn’t do anything to her that she didn’t want. Looking like that, coming into our house like she owned it. She might as well have just gone along with it. Ain’t that right, my friend?”

             
The Yeti would have surely grunted in satisfaction, going right along with whatever was said. He might have thumped his hairy paws against his broad chest.

             
“You want a second slice of that peachy pie, big guy?” The Shiny Bald One would ask next. “Maybe you can even rip her in half when we’re done, like you did with that phonebook that time.”

             
The Yeti would smile.

             
“Whores get treated as such. Always been that way, always will be.”

             
Annie almost burst into tears at this false tableau that her over-tired mind had constructed. She twisted on the throttle a bit harder, though the machine would not respond in equal measures.

             
Far behind her, she could still hear them approaching, getting a bit closer with every listen. They might not have said those things, or even surfaced those terrible thoughts about her (did they know what she and Tony had been doing just before they arrived? Had the bastards
watched
their sins?), but one thing was for sure: they wouldn’t let her go.

             
Annie hummed to herself, trying to remember an old Pretenders song that she kept hearing on the radio, the one about
using her hands
and
her fingers
, and
using her
something else altogether, but that she was going to
get her way
and make some random fella
hers
. The song only served to distract her as she pushed past the sign that she recognized at once, which indicated it was one point three miles until Town Hall.

She was thankful that she was lighter than they were. Her pursuers were larger guys, both in the muscular and structural sense. The only place that he
r smaller frame would benefit her was in a chase situation. Her snowmobile hopped along the surface of the snow once she had a decent amount of momentum. She could feel it grinding beneath her, digging into the fluffier snow and then sliding along the top of the crusty snow.

She couldn't really tell where she was going. The afternoon darkened after a temporary burst of sunlight that managed to push through the grey clouds that loomed overhead. She continued in the direction that Tony had described, tow
ards the patchier tree lines of Route Fifty-Five, where she usually had her major shopping ventures for home goods, bulk groceries, and household repair projects. They had all the “big box” stores on one main drag, but that didn’t mean there was any reason to stop there. Those places were pointless in this new world. She wasn’t all that sad that they would be out of business forevermore.

The wind gusted, obfuscating the view in front of her, though she knew that she was still on Route Fifty-Five for the time being. In about ten minutes, she’d be turning onto Valley Road, or so she presumed. Up seemed down and down seemed up, but she felt confident that she was moving in the right direction.

The only path she was sure of was the one that took her away from The Shiny Bald One and The Yeti. They hadn't seen her eyeball to eyeball, but they surely heard her snowmobile racing away. Annie still wasn't sure she'd killed The Chuckle Machine—so she didn’t fully exclude him from the chasing posse--but she kept it as a high probability in the back of her mind. Sometimes there was something to be said for wishful thinking.

When they found the body of The Chuckle Machine, they would have checked in with The Midget Man before taking to the snowmobiles, so that might have dragged their pursuit out a bit
, but only by minutes. Maybe a quick discussion on what they planned to do to her when  they caught up to her, and maybe a quick scan around The Purple Cat to make sure she hadn't set a trap, hiding in the shadows, waiting to kill off the rest of them. It wasn't the worst idea in the world, but Annie hadn't the time or confidence to consider such a bold option.

She decreased the throttle
so that she could better survey the sound patterns from behind her. The moment the humming din stopped, she heard the sound of two engines. Definitely two—no more, no less. It was barely audible, but they were still in motion for sure. They had hopped back on to their snowmobiles and now they planned to kill her, both for revenge and for sheer delight. They wouldn't go as easy as they had the night before.

Easy.

That was funny, thought Annie. They hadn't gone easy
at all, but they probably hadn't gone as far as they could have. She thought they might seek to rectify that if they ever caught up to her.

You know they're gonna catch you. And even worse, Annie, they might get close to you and then hold back
for the right moment, for that golden kill. Then you'll lead them home, and they'll get back at all three of you. They'll want to even out the numbers, kill for kill. They'll take you in exchange for The Chuckle Machine. And for The Midget Man... who? Christian? Paulie? Or maybe one of them will be the principal and the other will be interest.

Annie pursed her iced-over lips, scraping away the layer of frost that had overtaken her goggles. In the first struggles of getting through the
bloated snow, she came across a pair of shiny pink goggles hanging on the steel neck of the handlebars, right above the front headlight. If she didn't wear it, she'd most likely be blinded by the onslaughts of wind and snow. She was only going five more miles or so, until she was finally home, but a lot of damage could be done in a short window of time. The wind alone was treacherous.

Don't go home
, she told herself again.
Keep the fight away from your house, away from Paulie. Turn around, Annie. Confront them. Confront the shit out of them.

She revved on
the throttle harder again, putting all of her effort into her cold wrists, taking care not to garner so much velocity that she'd careen out of control and plant her face on the spiky branch of a tree, just like her father had warned her as a child. She could only see the tops of the trees, as most of the trunks were buried deep beneath the accumulation, so she'd thankfully hit the bushy parts near the top. Still, it would probably break every bone in her body or spear her like a bluefish tuna.

Don't go home, Annie. Take them out before they chase you to the ends of the earth. You know they will. Dogs like these don't loosen
up their jaws so easily.