Early Thaw Page 2

  “Yeah, Leslie,” she said, wiping chocolate from the corner of her mouth. “I’ve seen a few “mumblers,” too.

  “They’re everywhere,” conceded Leslie, suddenly looking sadder than she thought possible for someone wearing a cartoon tie.

  She didn’t want sad. Spent several days there already. “Well, south and west aren’t happening— West Thumb is one big bloody meat pie. So, what, we’re going to Cody?

  “Oh, no way. There’s no way we’d make it to Cody. That road’s bad enough under normal conditions.”

  Val squirmed a little in her polyester throne as, suddenly, the backseat Costco started to make sense. They were in a car, though—they were moving. This was progress, right? He couldn’t be thinking about…

  She tried to sheathe the razors in her voice. “So, um, where are you driving, then?”

  “A trailhead,” he said, grinning like he’d just found candy in his pocket. “About ten miles from here. Leads to Thorofare creek. There’s a cabin there— saw it on a backcountry hike I took a few years ago. It stays warm. The hot springs generate electricity and keep it warm.”

  “So, what, you’re gonna hang out for a week or something? Wait till this all boils over?” Val started fidgeting with the window switch in anticipation of the answer she didn’t want to hear.

  Leslie, aglow with comic-book masculinity, was oblivious to her anxiety. “I’m going to stay there as long as I need to. If it’s weeks, great. My guess is more like months.”

  He was making complete sense, of course, and it infuriated her. “You can’t seriously be planning that,” she screeched. “People die out there from falling into water, for Christ sakes! There’s bears, moose, bison—lots of stuff that wants to kill you or fuck you up. It’s like a little Australia!”

  “I’ve been driving around for almost two straight days,” he answered, his eyes still locked on the pavement, “and things have only gotten worse.” He seemed suddenly, strangely, resolute. “Every time I get to a campground or touristy spot, I see hundreds of those things. Almost didn’t make it back from Old Faithful, the crashes were so bad. You’ve seen the roads. You’ve seen the bodies everywhere. What other options are there?”

  She was rabid in her panic. “We get out! See who’s still kicking around out there! You’ve got a working car…granted, it’s a piece of total shit, but it’s big enough to at least push stuff out of our way! Let’s leave and get some help!”

  Leslie clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Think about it: if this stuff’s happening in Yellowstone National Park, it’s happening everywhere. And the more people there are in an area, the more…ex-people there’ll be. Here, we have a chance.”

  “’We’?” repeated Val, her rage bubbling over. “There is no ‘we,’ Leslie, unless you’re talking about you and Garfield there. If you’re gonna Thoreau it up, that’s fine, but I’m getting the fuck out of this park.”

  Val’s words—screamed, more than spoken—hung in the air for a few silent seconds. As they passed a cheery yellow VW bug with its front end smashed into a tree, she did her very best to ignore the shadows thrashing around inside.

  “Well, you’re welcome to the car,” said Leslie, sighing. “Like I said, I won’t be needing it. But you might want to memorize where the trailhead parking lot is, in case ‘getting the f out,’ as you put it, isn’t as easy as you thought. I’m guessing you’ll have to turn around pretty quick.”

  “Thank you, Leslie, for your expert analysis. Jesus, do you even know how insane your plan sounds? And no offense, but you don’t exactly look like the backpacking type. You look like the type backpacking types have to save.”

  Feeling a sudden, desperate need to establish her credibility, she added, “I know—I work for the Parks Service.” She neglected to mention the length of her employment.

  Both were quiet for a long time, their eyes fixed on unfolding tableau of mayhem ahead. Leslie finally broke the silence.

  “Hey, what’s your name?”

  She growled her answer. “Valerie.”

  “Valerie. Can I call you Val?”

  She stared at him, stared right into his eyes with a livid intensity she’d previously reserved for drunken douchebags at trivia night and one particularly dickish boyfriend. His head swiveled from the road to her face, smiling obliviously and waiting for her answer. Like a dumb goddamn puppy.

  Silent, she looked back at the road.

  ***

  Val sloshed the corn onto two plates, covering sophomoric drawings of Old Faithful’s plume in lumpy yellow mush; after months staring at it in the pantry, they were finally getting around to eating the stuff. Leslie’d be coming back in a half hour or so, and it’d still be pretty warm. Good enough, anyway.

  On the countertop, the walkie-talkie was buzzing quietly where she’d tossed it. She couldn’t make anything out, but the constant flicker of lights on the display indicated he was rambling about something. She used to listen halfheartedly as he shared his mind-blowing communiqués from the field—“light snowfall from the southwest last night” or “bird chirping somewhere in the area”—but nowadays she just let him play soldier and turned the volume down. Today, her tolerance wasn’t even substantial enough to get past some bullshit about “ambient temperature.” Like he knew what the fuck that was. Not that she even needed to listen: with every mumbler pop frozen firmly to the ground, the only thing he had to worry about was the Park’s insane topography…and he’d pretty much learned that lesson already. Besides, she figured any real emergency would be indicated by more than five minutes of mic silence.

  Neither of them had really mastered the art of ice fishing yet, so today they’d have to rip through more of the trout jerky she’d made months before. It wasn’t good. But November was the last time they saw open, fishable water, and they’d decided to hook as many of the little bastards as they could, in preparation for a winter they’d assumed would be harsh.

  Sashaying sardonically over to the far counter, she opened the metal bear box where they stored the dried fish. Her nose had never really healed right, but as the top swung open on its hinge, she said a little prayer of thanks for the deviated septum and accompanying impaired sense of smell. She plucked out four little fillets and relatched the box.

  ***

  She’d roared out of the lot, dumping gas into the Caprice’s oversized engine. Anxious and eager, she half-believed the faster she went, the less accurate Leslie’s prediction would be.

  She felt slightly guilty leaving him at the trailhead like that—it was probably the last time anyone would see him alive. Stooping from the weight of his immense pack, he looked like an anemic Atlas. He was calm, though—almost happy to get started—so the sight of him in the rearview mirror was faintly unnerving.

  For one, he was definitely better prepared. Ripped jeans and a long-sleeve weren’t doing much to keep her warm at night; even now, the late afternoon air was starting to stipple her forearms with goosebumps. If she had to sleep in it, maybe she could keep the car warmer than the visitor center storage closet had been.

  She rolled up the window. The resulting smell of dirt and days-old sweat reminded her that personal hygiene had taken a backseat to not getting her ass bitten off—hafta find a shower soon, she thought, and checked the damage in the rearview, as she’d done thousands of times.

  This time, though, she was met with the existential shock of not entirely knowing the person staring back. The girl she saw there looked too callow to be real. Bleach-blonde hair. Beryl eyes. Freckles just starting to fade with the summer sun. She even had charcoal trails of eyeliner on her cheeks. Little girls nomming on their moms, and she was still wearing makeup? It didn’t make sense.

  Speed did seem to make sense, though, so she pointed her toes and took the 45 mph road at something around 60. Frost heaves and potholes weren’t much of a hindrance for the car’s capable suspension—POS though it was, she had to give it that. In fact, after the first four miles of relatively open road, she actually started feeling good. What if this stuff was only going down in Yellowstone? What if the fine folks of Cody were busy buying cheap shit at Wal-Mart, gorging themselves at the Pizza Hut buffet—totally oblivious to the crazy her world had become?

  At Sylvan Lake, though, she started counting the cars. Bellies bared, upside down in ditches; crumpled—almost poured—around trees. Bits of glass adorning the blacktop in cheap jewelry. Smoke, fire, and melted shapes she didn’t want to think about.

  Blood, too. There was lots of blood.

  She gulped air. Some part of her brain recognized the danger of hightailing it past an ever-increasing number of accidents, but she inured herself to the tightening in her gut and pushed the pedal harder. The Caprice rolled over fenders, torn rubber, and unidentifiable, crunchy bits of cars.

  To distract herself, she began adding up the hours since the first… first mumbler, as Leslie would say. Devin had come back to the visitors’ center at, what, four o’clock? He was laughing about how the crazy old Chinese guy at Prismatic had to be restrained and carted off by his family. That was three days before. So…74 hours?

  Jesus, she thought, how long will it take for someone to do something?

  Above cliffs and trees, the unbroken emptiness of the sky answered her. Kid-picture blue; the brightness almost hurt her eyes. Already, it was starting to get seriously cold— around 40 degrees at night— and this was a winter sky. No clouds, nothing between you and empty space. Glaring sun tilted just a few too many degrees away from the world to make you feel warm: brightness without heat. Light that left you feeling cheated.

  As she neared the pass, her abs bucked involuntarily inside her belly. Leslie had guessed right: the way was blocked. Bad. On the right, a Ford hatchback teetered on the warped guardrail
, its front half suspended over 300 feet of air. An RV, its windswept decals and Got Fish? stickers laughably surreal in the context of the carnage around it, had crashed into the rock face on the opposite side. Daylight peeked out between the two vehicles, but not enough for Val to maneuver in.

  She fishtailed to a violent stop. A frustrated college-girl groan gurgled in her throat, as if this latest problem were on par with bad hair or back-to-back midterms. She realized how out of place the sound was now.

  Time to make a choice. In another month—shit, maybe another week—she wouldn’t even make it this far; this road would be impassible from snow. And who knew how many more accidents might happen before then? There had to be a couple more assholes like her trying to get out of the park…

  Like her dad told her when she was learning to drive: “You make a move and you go.”

  It took her just a few seconds to devise a plan. Reversing a quarter mile down the road, she lined the Caprice up with the tail end of the hatchback and dropped the car into gear. Then she floored it.

  The car roared on a mainline of gasoline. Trees and mountains slid past as the odometer’s needle tickled 55. Remembering all the UM stories about drunk drivers surviving accidents unscathed, she willed her muscles to go limp in preparation for the crash. She had to make sure only to clip the rear passenger side of the Ford: the wrong angle would make her a permanent installation.

  Hours later, when she was pretending to sleep, what happened then would play across her eyelids a few hundred times. In the hatchback, just three feet from where she’d aimed the car, something was moving. A face. In the second or two before impact, a tiny face floated up into the rear window from under a pile of clothes. It was a woman, and she was crying. Crying, but definitely not mumbling.

  Val neglected to apply the brake.

  A jolt, the noise of metal ripping, and the Ford spun on its undercarriage and slid from the guardrail, tumbling into nothingness. Val didn’t have much time to reflect on her first murder, though; the Caprice promptly slammed into a pickup thirty feet beyond, providing her with a close-up view of GM steering-wheel design.

  All was quiet and motionless for a few seconds, the car’s thin idle threatening to die as she slowly came to. Something high up in her nose had snapped, and warmth was dribbling from both nostrils. No biggie—she’d had bloody noses before. Pain, lots of pain in her forehead and neck, but all the major pieces still seemed to work. She raised her throbbing head, took a deep breath, and surveyed the newest predicament.

  She was covered in her own blood: not a ton, but enough to make her gag a little. The windshield was bowed and stippled with tiny checkerboards and spiderwebs, but it hadn’t been smashed out of its frame. Up front, the car had its own Old Faithful now— a plume of steam that shot from under the crumpled hood. But what the hell was making that n…

  Oh god.

  Why didn’t she think? The vehicles had been part of a de facto corral—one that she’d just burst through. Suddenly, she understood why the accidents had happened in the first place, what the drivers had been trying to avoid.

  Ten…fifteen people shambling toward her. Except these weren’t people anymore. A skinny hiker lady dragging her foot behind a broken ankle joint. A 50-something cougar with denim jacket and Paula sequined whimsically across her Stetson. A tiny boy wearing Spider-Man pajamas, blood coagulated in shiny wads around his mouth—probably a former resident of the RV. All had chunks—pounds— of skin and muscle missing. All were very interested in Val.

  They piled on the car, scraping the metal with fingernails and bony nubs. Gobs of saliva trailed from their teeth as they gnashed at her from the other side of the window. There was no formal pattern of attack; they clawed each other to get closer to her, their fingers gouging soft tissue and ripping rotted flesh.

  No time for plans. She threw the shifter into R and mashed the pedal. For a few long seconds, nothing happened as the Caprice came to terms with its new, broken self. Then something clanged, and the V8 barked back to life. The car barreled backward toward the hole Val had punched, tossing mumblers like celebratory confetti. Escape.

  Almost.

  The Caprice’s rear end caught the RV’s bumper and skidded in a perfect crescent toward the guardrail. Val felt the front tire give as the car slumped and slammed into solid metal; her nosebleed splattered the far window as she whipped toward that door. The engine made a funny knocking/revving noise and died. Val was now firmly installed as the gate of Dead Folks’ Corral—a condition she, remembering Ms. Hatchback, resolved to end quickly.

  Sliding across the front seat, she pulled the passenger handle and threw her weight against the door. It didn’t move. She reached around the headrest to try the rear handle, hammering a fist against the cheap plastic upholstery. Nada. Both doors were as good as welded in place: the first crash had crimped them shut.

  The mumblers were back on the car before she could think. Their aimless slaps echoed inside like a preschool drum lesson. One particularly gruesome fucker—an overweight trucker type whose right arm and shoulder had been completely devoured—discovered the weakened windshield and began pounding it with his good hand. Flakes of glass rained down on Val; each strike brought the windshield closer to collapse.

  She twisted the latch on the glove compartment and nearly tore the door off. Her hand dug for something with weight or sharpness, something that could be weaponized. Nothing. She thought momentarily of kicking out the passenger window, then remembered a body she’d seen the first day. Half-eaten, slumped over a window frame. She figured a stray piece of glass to the lungs might cut her escape short, too.

  Not that it mattered. One final thump from the mumbler and most of the windshield fell upon her, leaving a row of jagged glass teeth along the frame. Onesie didn’t care—he shredded his good arm reaching for her, but the windshield was now just shield, and it did a pretty good job. Val squirmed beneath the laminated glass, maneuvering her upper body away from the fetid pile of pus, beard, and flannel crawling onto the hood. It wasn’t until she reached for the open frame, though, that she noticed her friend had managed to pull himself off the ground.

  Oh, you fat, disgusting bastard.

  He fell upon her with nearly all his weight, his body slipping against the glass in a blood-greased scramble to reach her. Pinned beneath, she kicked against the seat, curled the passenger side of the windshield up and out. Broken glass tore her body in hundreds of tiny places, but she knew she had just a few seconds to get something done—Onesie was scraping the splintered windshield with his teeth, mincing his nose and lips in the process. Folding the sheet of glass back towards the mumbler, she pushed down hard against him, dragging her legs out from under his immense stomach. Then, crouching in the she small space she created, she planted a foot on his face and launched herself from the car—clearing Paula’s lacquered claws by inches.