Freeze

2

Warren hadn’t wanted Bub to come with him. Not because he didn’t enjoy the Lab’s company but because Bub had started to limp. It hadn’t been much of a thing at first, just a hop in his step—Warren had blamed it on a thorn or a muscle sprain—but over the last few weeks, the hop had become much more noticeable, almost a lurch. Warren knew he should have brought the dog to the vet days ago, but he’d kept telling himself it was nothing, just sore muscles, that Bub would be fine. And then the snow had come and…well, he’d had other things to worry about.

So Warren had tried tricking him into staying inside—the cold couldn’t be good for him, would only zap what strength he had left and put more strain on his leg—but Bub was having none of it. Warren situated the dog bed by the fireplace and put a fresh blanket inside; Bub circled it once, obligingly, but then limped to the kitchen door, tail wagging. Warren found an old rawhide in the treat basket in the pantry and placed it on the living room floor; Bub sniffed the treat, licked it, and then turned away, pointing his nose at the kitchen door and the back door beyond, still wagging his tail.

“You sure?” Warren had asked. “You don’t want to stay inside by the nice, warm fire?”

Bub barked and grinned, as if to say, nice try, old man.

Except, of the two of them, Warren wasn’t exactly the old man anymore, not once you’d done the old dog-years-to-human conversion.

“Oh, just let him go,” Tess had said from the kitchen. “He might not have many more chances to play in the snow.”

Warren hissed. “Hush your mouth. He can hear you.”

In the kitchen, Tess had laughed.

If Bub did hear—of course he did; he wasn’t deaf—he didn’t seem to care. He’d kept right on wagging that old butt fan of his and grinning his furry, lopsided grin.

“Fine,” Warren had said. “You wanna go for a walk?”

And, of course, Bub did.

Now, here they were, gathering wood in the shed, Bub sitting on the dirty concrete floor in the corner beside an old, discarded wood stove—his tail clearing a spot in the dust behind him—panting and watching Warren dig through the logs as if it was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen in his life. Warren worked his way to the far end of the woodpile, looking for perfectly seasoned wood, logs that would burn through the night without sputtering and dying on him.

He lifted the tarp at the end of the stack and pushed a few of the topmost logs out of the way.

Outside, gusting wind blew against the shed. The wall creaked in one spot, then in another, as if the wind was testing it, looking for a way in. Warren ignored the sounds and moved aside another pile of wood.

“Here we go.” He turned to Bub. “Can you say ‘mother lode’?”

Bub cocked his head and woofed.

Warren smiled. “Exactly.”

He took an armful of quartered logs from the pile and loaded them onto the old sled. Whether the sled had been his or his brother’s once upon a time, he could no longer remember. Either way, it had seen its fair share of winters and had been through more than a few hillside crashes. One of the runners had a warp to it that made the sled wobble even on the smoothest of snow, the old planks were cracked and bowed, and the paint had worn away so completely it no longer looked as if it had ever been painted at all.

Warren bent over to pick up a chunk of wood that had bounced over the edge of the sled and then returned to the woodpile for another load. Outside, the snow seemed to have picked up considerably. Warren heard it rattling against the shed, felt the freezing air seeping in through the thin walls. Despite the thermal undies, the snowsuit, and the heavy-duty coat, he shivered.

Most of the wood in the shed would have been fine for a normal fire—one of those hour-long blazes you sat in front of with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine—but now that he, Tess, and Bub were relying on the wood to keep them from freezing to death, Warren wanted to be more selective. He rolled a few too-green logs from the stack and found another bunch of winners. He’d curled the first few pieces up in his arm and was turning back to the sled when he heard the screaming.

He dropped the wood, barely missing his toes (his boots were good enough but probably wouldn’t have done much to spare his little piggies from a falling hunk of heavy wood). Bub had gotten to his feet in record time, bad leg or no. The dog looked from the shed’s door to Warren and then back to the door. He whined. Warren heard it even over the sound of the buffeting wind.

Bub took a step toward the door, looked back at Warren, whined again. Louder this time.

Come on. Let’s go. Come on. Go, go.

Warren did. He hurried to the door and jerked it inward. Cold air and gusts of snow blew across them. Bub didn’t slow down, rushed across the threshold and into the snow, and Warren followed. The wind hit him in the face, blew sleet up his nose and into his mouth. As he shuffled through the snow, he pulled up his scarf.

The screaming had stopped. Not died down but stopped completely, which scared Warren even more than the shrieking had. He ducked his head and tried to hurry across the yard.

But hurrying wasn’t easy. Even in the low spots, the shallow valleys between the drifts, there were at least sixteen inches of snow on the ground. Warren’s boots weren’t snowshoes—they weren’t even really winter boots, just old leather things that got wet and dyed his socks brown when he wore them out in bad weather—and although the snow was pretty dense, it wasn’t even close to packed enough for him to walk on top. He had to trudge through instead, like trying to walk through water.

And, on top of that, walking toward the house meant walking into the wind and snow, which had been picking up all day but seemed to have gotten especially bad just during the few minutes they’d spent in the shed. Hard bits of icy snow peppered his face if he looked up and to a lesser extent even when he kept his eyes pointed straight down at his unseasonable footwear.

Despite his limp, Bub was having more luck. He weighed less, of course, and sank only partway into the snow, and he didn’t have all the layers of extra clothing restricting his movements. He hurried on ahead and stopped a couple of times when Warren lagged too far behind. During each of those delays, he stared toward the house, toward his mistress, and whined. The wind brought the sound back to Warren, almost seemed to amplify it. Once, Bub snarled in a way that gave Warren the chills. Chills on top of chills. Swirls of snow billowed around the Lab, not obscuring him (they weren’t that close to a whiteout…not yet anyway), but giving his already pale yellow coat a smokey, ghostly look.

When they were close enough he thought he’d be able to make himself heard over the wind, Warren yelled for his wife.

No answer.

He pulled down his scarf and tried again: “Tess!”

Another cloud of snow blew against his face, into his mouth, and nearly choked him. Tess still didn’t respond.

Bub barked and limped on. Warren followed him to the back door.

He almost didn’t see the broken window at first, might not have seen it at all if the curtains hadn’t billowed and caught his attention.

He didn’t know what the broken window meant (if it meant anything at all) and didn’t care. All that mattered was getting to his wife. Finding out what in the world had made her scream like that. Making sure she was okay.

Bub leapt over the single step leading to the back stoop. Under the snow, you could hardly tell the step was there—in fact, the whole stoop had just about disappeared under the drift that had formed against the house. Warren kicked around under the snow until he found the riser, then followed his dog up to the door and jerked it open.

Bub nosed his way inside as soon as the opening was wide enough, barking, scurrying. Warren watched him slip on the linoleum. Then the dog was around a corner and gone.

Again, Warren followed.

Snow fell from his boots, and he slipped twice as he hurried down the narrow back hallway.

He found Tess on the kitchen floor, her face a bloody mess. For a second, Warren was sure she was dead, that she’d fallen into the window and slit her jugular and bled to death right there, alone. His heart pounded; a sob rose halfway up his throat and stopped there, choking him. But then she moved, looked up at him with bloody, teary eyes, and said his name.

Bub had already gotten to her. He licked her hands and face and neck. Warren moved to pull him away, but Tess wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck and pulled him against her.

“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” She said it several more times, maybe trying to convince herself as much as Bub and Warren.

Warren stood there for a second, stunned and confused, before dropping to his knees beside her and lifting her chin to get a better look at her face. His heart had slowed somewhat, but he still couldn’t seem to breathe. He didn’t think he’d ever had to work this hard to get his body to do the things it was supposed to do on its own.

He unwound his scarf and dropped it to the floor between them. “What happened?” He tried to ask it as calmly as possible but wasn’t quite able to keep the hitch out of his voice.

Dozens of cuts lined her face. Beads of blood seeped from the wounds and ran down her cheeks and neck. One long cut arced from her forehead back to her ear. It was bleeding worse than any of the others but not exactly gushing. She’d grabbed a dishtowel from somewhere and must have been using it to wipe herself up. The towel was covered with red splotches. Broken glass littered the floor behind her and the counter around the sink.

“I…” She shook her head, and fresh blood welled in her wounds.

“I don’t know. I mean, the window broke, but…” She shook her head again, more softly this time. “You tracked snow into the house.”

He looked back at the mess of tracks he and Bub had left on the floor and then returned his focus to his wife.

“It’s okay,” Warren said. “I think it’s going to be okay. Most of these cuts don’t look bad—or not too bad. I’ll warm up the truck. We’ll get you to the hospital.”

“Just to be safe?”

He kissed her bleeding forehead. Her skin was freezing. “That’s right. But first, let’s go in and sit by the fire, warm you up. I’ll find some tweezers and pull whatever shards I can. No sense taking a long, bumpy drive with your face still full of glass.” Again, he thought he managed to sound much calmer than he felt. They’d both had their fair share of accidents, and he guessed they were lucky this had been the worst of them, but it was impossible to look at Tess’s bleeding face and think anything about the situation was lucky.

“Do you think we can?” She squeezed the rag with her bloodstained fingers. She looked down and wiped absently at the back of her hand.

“Sure,” he said, trying not to look at the blood, afraid he might break down. “The bigger chunks anyway. I—”

“No, I mean get to town? Do you think the truck will make it?”

Cold wind and swirls of snow blew in through the broken window. Warren looked at her for a second, watched the blood welling in her wounds, saw the dazed look in her eyes. “Definitely.”

In truth, he wasn’t sure at all. The truck had good snow tires on it, and it was a reliable vehicle, but there was a lot of snow out there. They’d have to make it down their mile-long private drive before they hit the nearest mountain road, and even if that road had been plowed (which it almost certainly hadn’t), it would still be all kinds of slick and nasty.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes were clearing. “I’m okay. It’s not worth risking our lives.” She tried to get up, slipped, and fell back onto her butt.

Warren steadied her. “Easy. Let me help you up.”

She wrapped her arm around his neck, and he pulled her to her feet.

“It’s riskier if we don’t go,” he said.

She gave him her infamous don’t-be-stupid look. “It’s not that bad. Seriously.”

“No offense, hon, but you’re not exactly a doctor. You could have glass in your eye and go blind. Or you might have swallowed some. You could be bleeding internally right now and not even know it.”

“I thought you said it didn’t look bad.”

He led her toward the living room, Bub right behind them.

“Yeah, I did. And it doesn’t. But what do I know? I’m not a doctor either.”

Warren ignored the sofa and the recliner, which were on the side of the room farthest from the fireplace and looked dark, cold, uninviting. They’d moved two armchairs next to the hearth on the first night of the power outage, and that was where he led Tess. She dropped into the nearest chair and leaned her head against the tall backrest.

The fire hadn’t died down completely, but the single remaining log was half gone and wouldn’t last much longer. Warren took two logs from the pile in the corner of the room, the pile he’d gone out to replenish, and placed them in the fireplace. It took them a moment to catch, but when they did, fresh waves of heat came rolling out.

Bub moved beside the chair and looked up at Tess. When he whined, she patted his head and scratched him under his chin.

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “Why don’t you lay down on your doggy bed.”

He didn’t. Instead, he sat down and rested his face on the arm of her chair.

She smiled and told him he was a good boy.

Warren took a deep breath, and his body eventually calmed down. He used the poker to scoot the two new logs closer together until the flames had risen and the fire was roaring. In all his winter garb, he was getting hot. He pulled off some of the layers but then remembered he’d be going back out again soon enough. He turned away from the fire instead to go looking for some tweezers and antiseptic.

“Hey,” Tess said.

He stopped and turned around.

“I need to tell you something.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Before the glass broke, I thought I saw something. Something…” She looked down and scratched Bub’s head again.

Warren waited.

“Something like a hand,” she finally said, speaking the words so quickly they were practically one, somethinglikeahand.

“A hand?”

She nodded.

“Like a human hand?”

Now she looked up at him. “I don’t know. The glass was frosty. It was just a shape. But it hit the window twice, and…and it looked like a hand.”

Warren ran his fingers across his mouth. “I was just out there, and I didn’t see anything. Definitely not a person.”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

He sat down in the other chair. “You might be a little stressed out right now, maybe even in shock, but I don’t think you’re crazy. If you say you saw something, I believe you did.”

She chewed at her lower lip.

“I doubt it was a person,” he said. “It was probably just a bird or a clump of snow blown out of a tree, but when I go out to start the truck, I’ll look for prints. Okay?”

She nodded and grinned.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just, if this was a movie, you wouldn’t have believed me. You’d think I was out of my mind until some psycho broke in in the middle of the night and raped us both to death.”

The fire crackled, and Warren let out a short huff of a laugh.

“First of all,” he said, “what kind of porno snuff films have you been watching?”

She gave him a ha-ha-very-funny half grin.

“And second, this isn’t a movie. If it was, I’d look like Robert Redford.”

Tess smiled, reached over and grasped his hand. “Redford’s got nothing on you.”

“That’s just the trauma talking.”

She patted his hand. “Probably.”

He shook his head, got out of the chair, and went looking for some medical supplies.