White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller

White Out

Eric Dimbleby

Copyright 2014 by Eric Dimbleby

PART
I- STORMY WEATHER

Somewhere out there
—in the distance, on a street, in an alley, in the back of a cab, at the grocer, in a pub, cuddled beneath warm blankets in their beds—the men and women of the world are murmuring something ugly to each other.

Right now, they are tickling each other's minds, with quiet whispers of the change that is coming
, that is happening right now… here, there, and everywhere. They speak of it in dozens of different terms, tones and euphemisms, but they drive at the same wretched thing: mankind is about to be delivered a whole shitload of comeuppance.

The gin-soaked armchair quarterback
with the bad hair weave knows that his people are screwed. The greasy-eyed politician realizes the same. No different with the Holocaust-skinny housewife and the bratty teenager texting silly bullshit on a cell phone. The dogs even know that the world we know is about to get pear-shaped, busted, deformed, and twisted until it snaps. This supposedly noble thing we call society--this thing we call sanctity, this thing we call sanity--is spinning around the drain, ready to descend into the pipes of Hell.

The end
is delivered by chance. Or delivered by God. Whichever school of thought you subscribe to, it’s all the same damn end game. You know that already, don’t you? Bet your ass you do.

It’s not delivered by
bomb, bullet, plague, or monsters crawling from the depths of the sea.

Not by hatred
, passion, fear, or maligned decisions.

Not by meteors or meat-eaters. Not by anything that we can touch with our hands or hearts. 

Yes
sir, it’s coming hard and fast.

T
hey're talking about this on the street corner right outside your filthy window, saying things like, "Can you
believe
this snow? Weather forecast says it might last three more days. I find that hard to swallow." But deep down inside, they are swallowing it just about as hard as they can. They know what we've all known; in our genes, in our cells, since the day we were born. They know that there is a time to die for each and every person, and the laws of statistics dictate that eventually, (
one of these days, Alice, one of these days
) we are all destined to perish at the same time, by the same fate.

Somewhere out there…
a daughter is asking her father why she can't see out the first floor windows anymore. He pretends not to hear her, as he churns through answers that don't come so easily to his bluish lips. Dr. Spock never wrote a manual on preparing your children for the apocalypse. And
there it is
. There's
that word
that this doomed girl's father has been avoiding. The
apocalypse
. The mere proclamation of the word brings a rifling terror to one's gut. This hypothetical father says to his child, "It'll melt, darling. The snow always melts. Always has. We're just getting a lot of it this year."

Somewhere out there…
nestled away in a snowed-in weather station, they are mumbling the unfathomable precipitation accumulations over and over again, unwilling to accept the maddening temperatures that are being recorded on an hourly basis. It is the middle of March outside of Pittsburgh, when it should be thawing, or at least beginning to thaw. Twenty below in the middle of the afternoon. Forty below at night. One fellow notes that these are Siberian temperatures, not Pennsylvanian temperatures. They all laugh nervously, surveying their numbers over and over again, as if their eyeballs will suddenly make the numbers change to something more reasonable.

“I heard it’s snowing in the Bahamas. The fuckin’ Bahamas
,” might be heard if you listen close enough to the mumbling citizens that live in your neighborhood. Somebody will call them out as a bullshitter, but something inside of you says that they are right, and that it is most definitely snowing in the Bahamas. You might picture a frightened monkey, hoarding away coconuts, screeching wildly at the strange substance coming from the sky, wondering inside of its primitive brain if it is indeed The End.

The internet is still functional
at this point. God bless the internet, but its days are numbered. Phone lines are starting to fail, as are fiber and cable connections from one side of the planet to the other. Soon enough, television and the internet will go the way of the dodo, not without a rapid normalization in temperature and conditions.

The number one search
phrase on the biggest search engines is "
Ice Age
," followed directly by "
Brad Pitt
" and "
The End Of The World
." Other popular searches: "
Arctic Survival
", “
Will I Go To Heaven
”, “
Keeping Warm
", and "
Eating The Dead
." The world has obviously watched too many dang movies. A commentator on CNN refers to the current state of panic among these disillusioned masses as, "
A whole lot of Hestons, not enough Omega Men
."

The
frantic people of Earth speak of something indescribable changing, of something that has been right under their noses all along. They can't give it a proper label. Even "Ice Age" and "Apocalypse" seem to fall short of what is really transpiring. This fate is not deserved, though many will think it is (for sin, for stupidity, for wastefulness). It is not predicted, or even
predictable
for that matter.

It's that trailing speck of dust at the corner of your eye, always in the room though you can never look directly at it.
You know it’s there, taunting you, sticking out the tongue and thumbing the nose. It wants to drive you mad, but it is just sneaky enough never to be known.

The earth is covering
with snow and ice.

D
eeper and deeper, so mankind sinks.

The snow warms enough to turn to ice, and then another
arctic blast lands on top of that, and then another, and another, and another, ad infinitum. The electric lines cannot handle the burden, and soon, the phone lines will snap as well, if they haven't already. Listen close, stand by your window, and you’ll hear them snapping like God’s guitar strings.
Snappity-snap-snap-snap.
Go forward, brave human, and create fire for the second time, because you’re going to need it.

Shit happens, as a wise man once said. Shit happens, and sometimes it happens over and over again, for
days, weeks, months and years, until the eye of the beholder can no longer blink, for all the feces that is trapped beneath the eyelid.

Cue the
Bing Crosby.

Well, the weather outside is frightful...

Chapter One

A chill ran through her body, all the way from her numbing toes to her face. She could no longer remember what it felt like to be naked, having worn so many layers of Gortex and wool these past weeks. She dreamed of the day she could take a warm shower, or sip on a cup of scalding tea. Everything was frigid, sinking deep into every surface, so deep that no amount of sun could ever thaw it out. The best she could do was bundle tight and think of her sweet boy.

"We're leaving t
omorrow morning," she said.

"The
hell
you are," her husband replied, grinding his teeth into the phone's receiver, as he was known to do when confronted with stress.

Here we go
, thought Annie, releasing a prolonged breath that had been forming deep inside of her chest. She almost didn't call him at all, but that would have been unfair. It wasn't written in the cards that she would make it home safe, so she owed it to him.

No.
She owed it to her sweetie pie,
Paulie
.

The thought of never seeing
him again ripped into her quaking guts, but that was unforgivable weakness. This, here and now, staring out the window at the devastation wrought by a pissed off Mother Nature, was a moment of strength. It had to be, if Annie was going to survive this atrocity. The thickening ice on the window obfuscated her view into what was once the company parking lot, where people hustled and bustled to start and end their days. She couldn't see any of the abandoned vehicles anymore, even if she could have seen out the window clearly. She hadn't seen the roofs of the cars in more than a week.

Annie was starting to forget what reality even looked like.
This icy white winter had overtaken all of her memories as well. Life before the big storm didn’t even exist.

"Can I talk to
my Paulie? Please?" Annie asked, unwilling to engage in an argument that Christian couldn't win. No point in shoving it in his face. She'd made up her mind about venturing out into the wild storm.

"Dammit, Annie, don't change the subject." She could hear a
hint of rage creeping into his voice. He never felt rage towards anybody, only towards the situation, but it came off as nasty when he spoke in such a manner. He was a gentle man by nature. A caring man. And she hated what had become of them, shitty weather aside. They were poison in each other’s presence. It wasn’t a new thing, but it was in a full on fester nowadays.

Annie could s
ee the frost of her breath. The oil had run out two days earlier, and the remnant heat only survived due to the well-insulated offices in her building. Tony and she huddled for warmth the night before--only once--but it was a sufficient enough sign to Annie that it was time to make their way home, to their respective families.

"It's
unbearable now. I don't think we'll last much longer in this building. We've been burning old file folders in a pit out by the backdoor, but it burns up quick. Business parks don't keep stocks of firewood available, unfortunately. Food neither. If I eat one more damn bag of corn chips from the vending machine, I’m going to vomit." She hated that she sounded like a prissy sorority girl.

"You need to stay put. This'll
all blow over any day now."

Annie chuckled quietly, and the sensation warmed her for a moment. Body motion kept the blood circulating. Sexual intercourse, she had once read in one of her bored-house-wife magazines, was the best thing a near
icicle of a human being could do for themselves. She tried not to think of Tony. They had cuddled once, and she was sure that he got the wrong idea. It was about survival, and nothing more.

She parted her chapped lips, speaking into the receiver with a resolute pace and tone, "You're not seeing this for what it is, Christian. This isn't going to end. It's been
four weeks
, and I haven't seen Paulie. I can't even see out of the first or second floor windows. It's at least 20 foot drifts pushing up against the side of the building, and we're only a few days away from freezing or starving to death. Don't you get it? Can't you understand the situation I'm in?"

Annie heard him pull away from the phone, trying to mask a disdain that had, as of late, become
unbearable to them all. "We're all in this situation. This hasn't been a cake walk for me, either. Paulie is fucking terrified," he said, with an unspoken amendment of
I'll Have You Know
. On top of that, Christian never swore. If he dropped a curse, then that meant he was losing his usually well-rounded marbles. The last thing she wanted him to do around their petrified son was to lose his shit.

"You need to let me do this and be okay with it. It's the only way I'm coming home. It's only eight miles."

"Nine miles," he corrected.

"Eight and a half, actually," Annie shot back, trying to retain her composure. Compassionate as he was, Christian was also
as stubborn as a mule, and in equal proportions.

"You need to think about
your son. He told me he’d cry forever if you didn’t come home soon, and I think he meant it. You should have seen his face when he said it. Nearly killed me." And there it is, thought Annie, the sweet man with the big heart that always made everybody else feel inferior and unworthy of his love. He was so damn perceptive, so damn heartwarming, but he only did it to make everybody else batty.

"
My son is the
only
thing I'm thinking about."

She could feel the hurt in his
extended silence, transporting through the crackly phone lines, weeping through the receiver in utter silence. It was cold of her to imply that she wasn't thinking of him, but maybe there was some truth to it. Even without the purported end of times, she rarely thought of him. Never did she step away from her computer, draw in a deep breath, and wonder what he was doing. Maybe most couples were that way, when they were so engaged in day-to-day parenting and economic survival. Maybe this unwarranted hatred wasn’t so strange after all.

Hate. Yes. From a certain perspective, she hated his fucking guts.

It came and went; hate then love then love then hate times three.

Two days of hate, one day of love, one day of hate, four days of love. Though she flipped and flopped on an emotional rollercoaster, she couldn’t quite get a handle on what she was really thinking or feeling. The night before, she’d dreamt of pushing Christian into an oncoming train, awaking to feel a painful guilt all through her being, wishing she could take back those subconscious thoughts that plagued her.

He didn’t deserve it. The shithead. The saint.

When the hell had
she
become such a horrible person? This wasn’t the little girl that kissed her mother on the cheek every morning. This wasn’t the same girl who won the spelling bee in third grade. That girl was dead as a doornail.

"Listen...," she trailed off
, still a bit fazed by how nasty she sounded, though she had no conscious control over that side of herself. "Tony has a really solid plan, so he says. It's not fool proof, but it's the best chance I've got if I don't want to die out here."

“
Tony.”

“Yes,
Tony.”

“Of course. Is Winnie still there?”

"She left
last night, in the middle of the night. We couldn’t stop her. She was losing it, Christian. I doubt she made it far."

A fabricated
image of Winnie paused inside of her mind for a moment, of the chubby woman with the ruddy pink cheeks, trudging along the top layer of soft snow, sinking deep, up to her waistline, moving no more than a few feet per minute. In this mental recreation, the secretary disappeared into a copse of trees, blubbering hysterically. Within the first four hours of her doomed escape, she probably got hungry.

She won't last long
, Tony said, upon discovering the mottled tracks from the third floor window. He crudely guessed out loud that,
she'd either die of a heart attack or drive herself mad
,
whichever came first
.
Either that, or she’d try to eat her arm
, he barbed. Annie hadn’t found that very funny. He was a cold-hearted bastard like that.

They
would have tried the best they could to talk her out of it, but she'd left in the middle of the night, inching away.
Frosty little lemming
, he called her. Tony had called out the window for her, hoping that she was within earshot. Annie wanted to trek out into the blasting snow to find her.
It is better to conserve our warmth and survive another day
, Tony replied.
She was a depressed old spinster, said
Tony, staring out the window at the footprints of their former coworker, adding,
She was probably two years shy of a heart attack, anyhow.

“Poor
Winnie,” mumbled Annie, biting back tears. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry because Winnie had most likely died, or because of the terrible things Tony said about the woman behind her back, both pre and post mortem.

"I see," replied Christian.

Silence.

"So
it’s just you and Tony?"

Annie nodded
, staring at a patch of carpet on the floor, noting that it was frayed from years of wear and tear. Everything broke down on a long enough time line, carpets and marriages alike. She suppressed the urge to sigh, whispering into the phone, and said, “That's right. Tony and I.”

He'd never liked
Tony. And why would he? The guy was a slithering creep. Christian had once observed the way Tony looked at Annie during an office Christmas party. Ever since then, the mere mention of Tony’s name on Annie's tongue would turn Christian's usually pleasant face sour.

If only he knew the half of it
, Annie thought to herself, fighting those perpetual guilt pangs that seemed to amplify with every miserable fucking day that passed.
If he only knew
about the cuddling the night before
.

And the fucking.
That’s the real reason you won’t scorn your husband’s name, isn’t it? Isn’t it all about the guilt? All about the fucking and sucking and all those other things that you can’t even admit to yourself?

Annie clasped her hands to her mouth, hoping to pin something in place that she wasn’t quite sure was there.

"So I assume Tony has a brilliant fucking plan?" Christian asked, dubiously. His voice was on the verge of crumbling into tiny shards of pain. She felt sorry for him, even though she continued with her nasty demeanor.

She didn’t know his plan at all, but it sounded pretty believable
to say it, if only to convince her husband that it was all well in hand. "He does. I think it'll work. The snow won't get us, but the cold will. We have a plan for both." Annie bit her lip so hard that she felt it might burst if she went any harder.

Christian held his silence.
She realized that he didn't even want to hear the plan. "Here," he said next, tossing the phone about in his hands, "let me put Paulie on for you."

Paulie’s squeaky voice
came to life on the phone, declaring his longing for his mother (in not so many words), and Annie could not help the tears that flowed from her eyes. As the tears started to freeze in place, crystallizing at the curves of her cheeks, she wished that she could listen to his sweet little voice forever, and that she would never have to go out into the Hell that had sprung up all around her.