D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (11 page)

That’s the big kicker, isn’t it? That’s all the tomatoes, right there. Eventually it all comes down to whether you have the guts to hold your breath, close your eyes, and step out into that wall of speeding cars.

Could you take that step knowing full well that you might end up in the grill of some speeding commuter with a big fancy truck? How about being mashed under the tires of a semi-trailer, with twenty thousand pounds of speeding weight mashing you into a pulp?

Sounds like hell, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

Well, you should have thought of that before you made her break my heart. Fourteen years together, and my heart broke like a hot glass filled with ice. I cupped the pieces in my hands and they bled and bled. Now stop talking about her or I’ll make you wear a blindfold.

There’s no sense crying about it, my friend. There is absolutely nothing you can do now. Those ropes on your hands and feet aren’t going to let you escape, and this shiny nickel plated handgun is going to make sure you don’t try anything stupid. Because if you are thinking of being a hero, I’m going to put a bullet in your head right here by the side of the road.

Then I’m going to go to your house and shoot your wife and children, before putting the gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger.

Maybe I
am
crazy. Maybe I’ve just had enough of this place to keep me full for a good long while. Maybe she was the only thing in the whole world that mattered to me, and you took that away when I found you two in bed together.

It’s just about time for you to start your journey. The ropes on your feet are so tight, aren’t they? You’ll have to hop, just like the little frog.

You never know. You could make it across all those lanes of traffic safely. Do that, well, and I might just let you walk away.

Why not? You’ll be free to get back to your little frog-hole in the swamp. Sounds fair to me. Are you feeling brave?

Good.

It’s almost time to go.

And don’t ask about her again.

Let’s just say that this time I won’t be getting a high score.

White Out

KJ Moore

Frosted white beneath a stream of salty smoke, the two men watched each other as one chewed a leather apron. The oils that seeped out were thin and bare.

Close to the fire that popped and spat hot blubber, Don hugged the long leaning knife he’d found to his chest and held the apron to his cracked lips with the heels of his hands. Curled and blistered, his hands were yellow and throbbing.

“They won’t come,” Graeme said, touching his right hand to the pool of lukewarm water about his feet. He hissed as he tried to nurse life back into his shiny fingers. “They’ll go for each other first.  Then a bear’ll probably get them.”

Don watched the fire as he chewed. Both sleds had been lost. The first dog team had been dragged through a crack in the ice by the sled laden with medical supplies. The others had barked hoarse warnings when the men tried to whip them back into line to free the remaining sled. They then dug in the ice for the drowning team. But it was no use; the ice froze around the second sled leaving it and the remaining dogs half submerged.

Stirring at the memory of their stiff distrust and mournful howls, Don nudged the alight rags gathered from across the whaling sheds with the tip of the knife.

Graeme fidgeted loudly, coughing. “Can’t believe you just left them.”

Around the apron, Don grunted back in wet sounds.“Just have to go push on without them.” The remaining distance to Aleknagic was a long and likely fatal walk. The thought of staggering across miles of white wilderness made them both shift on the rotted floor.

A long silence of deliberation as Graeme worked his thick tongue about the tight words. “You would say that: Push on.  Push on when we should’ve been stopping to eat, and push on when we should’ve been checking the ice.  God damn, Don, it was a soft winter.”

He jerked his head, the deep lines about his eyes shifting together. “Storm should have toughened it out more. And no good getting there if we can’t get there in time.”

The heaviness of the air felt like night, though the light reflecting off the snow outside was still sharp and clear. Thick time passed. Don watched as Graeme slept and woke to stir the fire back to life, then swirled his hands through the water. Graeme noted the stare. “How long’s it been now?”

Don swallowed in long convulsions, thinking. “Three, maybe four days.”

There was a mouthless low groan and Graeme pressed his elbows into his stomach, sitting back down. He breathed through his teeth. “Oh, God.”  

They had been expected tomorrow in Aleknagik, three days away, and the window to treat with the post-exposure prophylaxis was gone. Once the first symptoms appeared, ten days after being bitten by the rabid dogs, there was no hope. It had taken four days from after those bites for the dogs to turn paralytic in their hind legs. They suffocated hours later, and then rabies had been suspected.  With the storm grounding the few Alaskan planes available, the infected people at the head of Wood River had had to rely on drugs being brought in by sleds. The drugs were now beneath the ice and there was no chance of more getting out in time.  

Don continued to grind leather between his molars, saliva welling about his lips. “Don’t talk to me about God.”

Slipping the apron from his lap, Graeme sat back against the wall and watched the black smoke peel through the gap in the roof.  “We should go back.  Maybe something—”

“Something nothing,” Don barked around the hide in his mouth. He levered his body up with the wall then paced Graeme in a jerking arc. “There’s nothing there, just the dogs and a hole.”

“We can’t just sit here.” 

They both knew it but didn’t know what more to say, so they didn’t say anything.

Silence pressed. “How’s your hand?”

Don raised his curled right hand, overlooking the frostbite as Graeme was. Four puncture wounds slid into tears, dark purple and hard at the edges. “Alright. Won’t matter much if this keeps up, but it’s healing fine. Ain’t the first time I been bit.”

The wind pressed about the shed again, holding them inside.

Graeme finally asked the lingering question. “How do you think it happened?”

Don looked about to sit down but seemed stuck on his feet and swayed, clutching the knife like a new baby and tonguing a piece of leather. “Think the dogs ran off a wolf or a fox with it.  Chewed it up a bit, probably, then bit on the handlers when they went wild.”

Graeme shook his head. The ice coating on his hood scratched his face. “Should have just killed them when they first got wild. Can’t do nothing with a dog that won’t get beat into line.  They should’ve shot ‘em or beaten their heads in if they didn’t want to waste the bullets. Then them handlers wouldn’t have got bit and wouldn’t be dead in a week.”

A week was optimistic and Don smiled at the naivety. He     sat down. “If they’d killed the dogs then they wouldn’t have gone dead in the back legs and frothed, and no one would’ve known different. Got to treat a person before they start getting sick, and couldn’t have guessed they’d get sick if the dogs had died before they themselves got sick.”

They let the wind speak for a while, feeling their eyes crust and freeze close and their hands burn with cold. Don quit the leather and scooped handfuls of snow, offering it out to the smoke until it turned soft and then drunk the grey slush as if each swallow was the first.  

Graeme’s gut hurt more than his hands. “We can’t stay here. They got no reason to look for us here.”

“They won’t look for us.” Don scratched as his beard, slick with salty water.

“We should go back to the sled. Dogs might have settled enough to work ‘em now, and some of the crates might have floated up.  If we’re lucky.”

“Ain’t nothing there to find. We stay here and we got fire, so we let our hands get better off then we go and find someone who might be looking in a few days. Too far to Aleknagik like this.”

“We ain’t got nothing here,” Graeme croaked through his teeth, running his boot along the rotted floor. All the sheds were rotting on the inside from the summer whaling seasons, but because of the cold they didn’t smell. “We can’t keep going without food.  Leather ain’t gonna help us much longer.”

“There’s food plenty if we looked.”

Graeme started to stood up. “We looked all around here, Don, and there’s nothing. Even the hooks and winches been picked clean by the birds. We gotta go. Dogs might have died now and we can bring one back and cook it, then go on to Aleknagik when we got some strength to do it.”

“No way the dogs’ll be dead yet,” Don said to his wet palms, greasy water running out from the sides of his mouth where he couldn’t swallow fast enough. “They’ll last longer than us. It’s only been a day or two.”

Graeme shook his head and the wind moaned, finally empty of falling snow. He started for the thick door. “I’m going back.  You coming?”

Don looked up and down the height of him, settling on the blistered fingers held like overgrown claws. With the knife between his elbow and chest, he took a last handful of slush into his mouth and got to his feet. “Think we could kill a dog if it came to it?”

***

Out of the shed and over the inlet of the sea ice, they walked through the snow that had frozen stippled with salt. It clutched their boots for half a mile and then turned clean and powdered for the rest of the walk.  

Graeme followed Don, pausing when the older man stooped for handfuls of snow, thirst outweighing the pain in his hands.  “How long can we go without food?”

Don squinted at the watery sun.  “Couple more days, maybe.”

They kept walking, the snow rustling so that either of them could pretend they were alone. “When that plane went down a few years back, think the survivors went six days before they started starving to death,” Graeme said.  

It had been the last time a plane tried to fly out here through a snow storm. “Guy I know found two of ‘em,” Don said, stopping to take more snow into his mouth. “Froze to death with full bellies.”

“Hope the dogs are dead.”

Time passed and snow fell, filling the footprints leading back to the whaling sheds to shallow indents. The wind carried past them and dogs started to bark up ahead. More time passed and they could see the dark shapes howling and jerking at their lines as they approached.

Graeme stopped walking and looked at his hands, breathing the other man’s name like a prayer.

Don kept walking and stopped when he was just out of reach of the dogs. They watched him with bright eyes and hot mouths. The lead dog was rent into bloody portions, and Penine was bowed over something slick, rasping at the lump with his tongue whilst watching the returned man. Chest tight, Don could feel the pit of his stomach throbbing.

He looked across the animals to the sled trapped by one sunken end in the fissure in the ice. Past it the ice was cloudy, still freshly frozen and still weak. Like before, Don couldn’t see the other sled or the crates that had been lashed onto it. There was a shape in the snow, though, and he moved towards it.

Graeme was trapped half out of the ice, arms stretched out and raw fingers grasping. There were sharp pits in his waxy face, red flecks from where birds had tested his stiff flesh. Don looked back to the wandering line of his lone footprints, holding the leaning knife harder to his chest. His gut churned, caved inwards. Graeme was in the ice—went down with the sled.

The pit of his stomach throbbed anew, twitching his body and shaking his head. He clumsily eased to his knees, shifting the leaning knife to bring the blade to the heels of his ruined hands.  Eyes wide and away from Graeme’s face, he chipped at the coat on one of the reaching arms.  By the time he’d gotten through the fabric the dogs had fallen silent and watchful, noses twitching when the smell of blood reached them.

Cleaving away thin slices, Don stacked the meat in untidy piles between taking mouthfuls of snow.  The short hairs of the arms were stark against the pale hide, and he sheared against their grain to take long, stiff planes of meat. When it was too much agony to keep using the knife, Don bent to take one of the scraps into his wet mouth and bunched the rest against his chest. Ignoring the dogs, he followed his tracks back towards the whaling sheds and the waiting fire.  

To his right there were mountains of broken ice, and to his left the curve of the Earth against the milky blue sky. Graeme matched his steps on his left side, and he hunched his body over the flayed strips.

Graeme didn’t try to take it. “They’ll be dying by now,” he said, watching Don eat the freckled skin that had covered the bicep of his right arm. “Window for the vaccine’s gone.”

Don’s face twisted and he coughed, choked on the stiff meat with slow heaves. It cleared after his knees sank into the snow, and he dipped his face to chew up the powder. Graeme remained standing, and the man in the snow watched his frosted boots with a curled lip.

“I ain’t gonna take any,” Graeme said, scuffing his toes in the snow. “I think someone’s coming.”

“No one’s coming,” Don said, dropping the meat strips to pick through them with the side of his better hand.  

Graeme crouched, reaching but stopping short of touching. His eyes were framed with thick white crystals. “It’s alright, you know.”

Don grunted, but it wasn’t unkind. Saliva rolled at the seam of his mouth. 

The barking grew loud enough to be a curiosity, and he looked up to see Graeme staring back towards the sheds. Unseen, he found the biggest slice of meat from the lot and took the edge into his mouth, tonguing the slick underside as he watched.

The closing dog sled bore one man wearing a Caribou coat with tight Aleknagik stitching. Graeme vanished. Don sat up at the voice that came up coarse from the man’s gut. Between his stomach and the humming in his ears, he didn’t understand what came after the cautious pause.

Mouth full and overflowing with saliva, Don couldn’t speak and breathed through his nose. He watched the man’s eyes travel to his hands and at the sharp exhale, he looked too. The half-eaten strip had the seam and crease of an elbow at one end, and a shrunken mole in the middle.