Fully Loaded Thrillers

At length, Jessica sits up, says, “I can’t sleep. I’m too thirsty, Ron. All that wine and walking around—I just got dehydrated.”

  “All right, you know that pot sitting out there in the fake campfire ring?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take it out onto the sidewalk and fill it with snow. You’ll have to pack it in really tight. I’ll see if I can fire up the camp stove.”

  -20-

  Before starting his practice thirteen years ago, Ron was an avid outdoorsman, spending countless weekends in the Cascades, even squeezing in a weekend a month outdoors during the slog of med school. As he kneels by the fire ring in the dark and fumbles with the camp stove, he realizes how much the gear has changed in over a decade, evidenced by the five minutes it costs him to unravel the mystery of attaching the red canister of white gas.

  As he screws it in, he hears Jessica climbing back through the storefront, pushing her way between clothing racks.

  “How’s it going?” she asks.

  He strikes the match, holds it to the burner.

  The stove flares up.

  As the fire burns down, quickly consuming the modicum of propane, he opens the gas, the lazy orange flame transformed into a low blue roar.

  “Put it right here.”

  She sets the pot down on the stove.

  “Why don’t you get three water bottles—I saw them by the daypacks—and fill them up. It’s gonna take a lot of melted snow to fill this pot.”

  While Jessica goes for more snow, Ron sits beside one of the mannequins, monitoring the stove, the heat cranked up to high, using a plastic spoon to stir the snow.

  It takes longer than he anticipates, but soon he has half a pot of slush, which he pulls off the heat and transfers into a water bottle that formerly belonged to the cute blond mannequin in the tight pink sports bra.

  He says, “Jess, what’s taking?”

  Another minute crawls by.

  He puts on his jacket and cold, wet shoes.

  Turning down the heat, he stands and walks toward the front of the store, past the cash register, into the storefront.

  Snow blows in through the shattered window.

  Ron steps down onto the sidewalk.

  “If you’re fucking around here, Jess, I will divorce you, ‘cause this isn’t even remotely…”

  No response but the quiet patter of snowflakes on his jacket.

  Ron glances down at the three water bottles lying in the snow, then the multiple sets of tracks leading up the sidewalk.

  Twenty feet ahead, darkness and snow obscure everything.

  His watch beeps midnight, and for a moment he feels sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but he shoves it back into that long-forgotten nook in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t needed since med school—those nights he woke in cold sweats in the dark, convinced he didn’t have the hardwiring to pass the boards.

  -21-

  In the cold, snowy silence, Ron walks up the sidewalk, his cheeks beginning to burn again, clutching in his right hand a wicked-looking ice ax with the price tag still dangling from the blade.

  He’s slept outdoors in the desert waste of Canyonlands National Park, in the immense sweep of Denali where it got so quiet those Alaskan autumn nights (after the mosquitoes finally shut up) that he imagined he could hear the stars humming like distant generators.

  The silence this winter solstice as he walks the empty streets of Lone Cone seems something else entirely—more a mask than an absence, and not a shred of peace contained within it.

  The tracks turn down 3rd Street, Ron’s legs aching as the snow melts and seeps through his khaki slacks. He wishes he’d thought to outfit himself in new, dry clothes from the hiking store, but it’s too late for that now.

  Around the back of a late Nineteenth-Century brick building, he turns into an alley, and after twenty feet, arrives at a pair of doors without handles—the termination of the four sets of tracks.

  He beats his fists against the doors, shouting, “Jessica! Can you hear me?”

  If she can, she makes no answer.

  Ron spins around, stares at a Dumpster capped with snow, at the power lines above his head, dipping with the weight of several fragile inches that have collected on the braided wire, hears a rusty door several blocks away swaying in the wind, hinges grinding.

  It occurs to him that he might be losing his mind, and he sits down against the building and buries his head between his knees and prays for the first time in many, many years.

  -22-

  As he rounds the corner of Main and 3rd, searching for something with which to break through the front of that brick building his wife has disappeared inside, light just ahead stops him in his tracks.

  He feels certain it wasn’t there before, this soft glow of firelight flooding through windows onto the snow, and at least fifty pairs of skis leaning against the front of the building.

  Ron jogs over, glancing up at “Randolph Opera House” painted in ornate red lettering that arches over the entrance, and the marquee above it which displays: “Dec. 22 - Midvinterblot.”

  Through the windows that frame the doors, he glimpses an empty lobby illumined by candelabras.

  The doors are unlocked, and he steps inside onto red carpeting darkened by the soles of wet shoes, sees a vacant concessions booth, coat closet, walls covered in framed posters advertising stage productions, autographed photos of musicians of modest fame who’ve played this opera house over the years.

  He proceeds through the lobby into a darker corridor lined with closed doors that access the theatre, hurries through an archway on the right, and quietly ascends two flights of squeaky steps.

  -23-

  The balcony is sparsely peopled.

  He slides into a chair in the front row, peers down through the railing, the opera house lit by three hundred points of candlelight, the lower level packed with what Ron estimates to be the entire population of Lone Cone, everyone extravagantly, ridiculously costumed as if they’ve come to a carnival or a masque—headdresses of immense proportion, the details lost in the lowlight, only profiles visible, and the room redolent of whiskey and beer and the earthy malt of marijuana smoke that seems to hover in the aisles below like mist in a hollow.

  The stage is the spectacle, forested in real, potted fir trees, with a painted backdrop of the mountains enclosing Lone Cone in every season, all surrounding the strangest object in the theatre—a life-size golden bear which appears to have been forged of solid bronze.

  It stands on its hind legs in a metal recess at center stage, and a line of people shuffle past, contributing pieces of firewood to the pit before returning to their seats.

  This goes on for some time, while on stage left, a trio of men on guitar, fiddle, and mandolin enliven the theatre with bluegrass.

  When everyone has taken their seats and the musicians abandoned their instruments, a tall man rises from the audience and takes the stage. Clutching a long candle and costumed like a Spanish conquistador, even though his silver helmet conspires to mask his identity, Ron pegs him for the sheriff who threw him out of the Lone Cone Inn several hours ago.

  The conquistador raises his arms and shouts, “Come forth!”

  At stage right, the red curtains rustle, then part, and two figures emerge dressed all in white, even their hoods, each holding an arm of Jessica Stahl, and at the sight of her, the crowd roars, Ron feeling a ripple of nausea until he notices his wife smiling, thinking, Has this all been some devious game?

  They escort Jessica around to the back of the golden bear, step down into the pit, and one of them lifts a hatch in the back of the beast, while the other whispers something in her ear. She nods, accepting a clear mask attached to some kind of tank.

  Jessica holds the mask to her mouth for a moment, then stumbles back, the crowd cheering, and she waves to the audience and blows kisses, the applause and whistles getting louder, long-stemmed roses spitting forth from the front rows onto the stage.

  Jessica clim
bs into the golden bear, and the men in white close the hatch and return the way they came, vanishing through curtains off the stage.

  The sheriff-conquistador raises his arms again.

  The audience hushes.

  He turns and approaches the golden bear, ducks down into the recess.

  After a moment, he climbs back onto the stage and strides across to the left side, where he grabs a thick rope and pulls.

  A trapdoor in the ceiling swings open, snowflakes drifting down onto the golden bear.

  “Lights!”

  A collective exhalation sweeps through the theatre, candles extinguished, the room pitch black.

  Ron leans forward, squinting to raise some detail in the dark. A moment ago, he felt a passing twinge of relief, thinking there was some reason or logic behind this bizarre, awful night, but that is falling out of orbit now.

  The room becomes silent, no sound but the occasional whisper flickering down below.

  At first he mistakes them for lightning bugs—motes of ascending light down where the stage should be, but the snap of boiling sap and the sudden odor of woodsmoke corrects the error.

  Out of the darkness surfaces a single image—the golden bear—though it’s no longer golden but the deeper reddish hue of molten bronze, and as the flames underneath it intensify, the bear glows brighter and brighter.

  Ron says, “Oh, Christ.”

  The bear bellows, a high-pitched, Jessica-sounding roar, her voice channeled through a complex of tubes that curl to the right of the bear’s glowing head like a brass tumor, and words mix in with the screams, but the tubes and the pain slur them into nonsense, the bronze clanging now like a huge cymbal as Jessica desperately beats against it from inside, her juices dripping through holes in the bear’s haunches, sizzling on the stage.

  Someone in the crowd shouts, “Another year of plenty!”

  “No avalanches!”

  “No cancer!”

  “More tourists!”

  And they are clapping now, down below, the applause building, stoned and drunken toasts being proffered from every corner of the theatre, fighting to be heard amid the tortured commotion emanating from the stage, the golden bear smoking as snowflakes fall through the ceiling onto the brilliant bronze, instantly vaporizing.

  Somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman weeps, and a man whispers, “Shut the fuck up!”

  Ron jumps out of his seat and stumbles back down the stairwell, spewing vomit on the walls, reemerging into the dark corridor, racing toward the nearest door, throwing it open to wafts of woodsmoke and a sweeter-smelling incense that he knows is his wife, roasting inside the golden bear.

  He starts into the theatre into an awful, disengaged clarity rooted in shock—people turning away from the horror onstage to see this uncostumed tourist with vomit down his jacket, barging in like he’s come to fuck up a wedding.

  The screaming of the bear has become harsher, the voice inside blown out, winding down, and Ron sees those white-masked executioners break through the curtains on stage right and rush down the steps into the outer aisle.

  Something inside him screams Run.

  -24-

  Ron crashes into the doors of the Randolph Opera House and bursts out of the theatre, back down the sidewalk, kicking up clouds of snow as he runs toward the north end of town.

  After three blocks, he glances over his shoulder at the hordes of people spilling out of the theatre, a handful stepping into skis, flashlight beams arcing toward him.

  He turns left onto 7th and runs so hard he can’t think about anything but the incomprehensible pressure in his lungs, sprinting past a chocolate shop, a closed hostel, the street taking a steep pitch as it descends toward a spread of ground so level, it can only be a frozen pond.

  Behind him comes a whoosh—a shirtless twentysomething, her long blond hair flowing in her wake and dressed like some Viking goddess right down to the horned helmet, gliding toward him on a pair of skis, accelerating as the street steepens, five seconds away at most.

  Ron digs his heels into the snow and slides to a stop and turns, the skier racing toward him, inside of ten feet.

  He swings, the serrated blade punching through the side of her neck, Ron temporarily blinded by warm mist from the severed artery, the ice ax all the way through. He tries to grip the rubber-coated handle to rip it out, but the blood has made it slippery and the Viking Goddess slides away from him, still skiing down the street, her hands trying to extract the blade.

  Ron wipes the blood out of his eyes, and fifty yards up the street, sees a herd of people make a wide, sliding turn around the corner of Main and 7th, a crowd of thirty or forty tearing down the street after him, screaming, shouting, yeehawing, laughing like a throng of revelers cut loose from the world below.

  He runs down to the skier who has fallen over in the snow, sticks his foot against her head for leverage, and jerks the ice ax out of her throat.

  Then running again, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, veering into the yard of a private residence, a dog accosting him through a bay window, thinking if he doesn’t find some way to escape his tracks he doesn’t have the faintest hope.

  Up ahead, more shapes materialize out of the dark, a dozen perhaps, and smaller, their voices high-pitched—a band of children tramping toward him through the snow.

  Ron looks back, can’t see the pursuing crowd through the blizzard, but he can hear them calling out to him.

  Twenty feet ahead, on the shore of that frozen pond, his eyes lock on the remnants of a recent battle—saplings thrust into the snow supporting handmade flags (Stars and Stripes vs. the Jolly Roger) and opposing snow forts, their features smoothed and hidden by the storm.

  -25-

  Ron crawls through a snow trench, his hands aching in the cold, somehow manages to still himself as a collection of footsteps approach.

  “I’m cold.”

  “Shut up, pussy, if we find him, you know how sweet Christmas will—”

  “I’m not a pussy.”

  “Okay, twat. Wait, look.”

  “That’s just the others.”

  An adult male voice shouts, “Hey, who’s there?”

  “Just us!”

  “Us who?”

  “Chris, Neil, Matt, Jacob—”

  “What are you kids doing?”

  “Helping.”

  “No, you’re fucking up the tracks. Shit.”

  “What’s wrong, Dave?”

  More footsteps arrive.

  Ron crawls a little further through the trench, his hair, eyelashes, eyebrows snow-matted, too scared to even register the cold.

  The trench leads into a small cave constructed of cantilevered bricks of packed snow, the voices muffled now.

  Ron rises up shivering onto his knees. There had been a lookout window, but it’s buried in new snow. He reaches forward, pokes his finger through the soft powder, which all falls in at once.

  He ducks down, the voices audible again.

  “…little organization would go a long fucking way.”

  “Hey, watch the language around the kids, bro.”

  “You understand what’ll happen if—”

  A woman breaks in, “You’re not thinking, Dave.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s his primary objective right now?”

  “I don’t know…getting out of town?”

  “How? In this storm? With his car toasted? No, he needs to get out of this miserable weather or he’ll freeze to death.”

  The voices begin to fade, Ron lifting up, peering through the window, watching the crowd move by, down toward the frozen pond.

  Light passes through the window, and he prostrates himself on the floor of the snow cave, listening for some indication he’s been seen.

  After a while the voices have vanished completely, and he looks out the window again, the crowd nothing but distant, restless lightbeams, barely visible in the storm.

  -26-

  Ron mas
sages his bare, blistered feet to get the blood circulating, colder than he’s ever been in his life, though he doesn’t think he’s freezing to death. This little snow fort is actually warm.

  He wonders how long he’s been inside—thirty minutes, forty-five tops—and he’s spent most of it trying to convince himself this can’t possibly be happening. He’s had “horror dreams” before—car accidents, the death of friends and family, being chased by a murderous street gang through a parking garage, life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—but he always wakes up and the fear always leaves.

  Even as he sits there, rubbing his cold, wet feet, he has a rock-solid premonition that in mere moments he will wake in that hotel in downtown Flagstaff he and Jessica checked into a little over twenty-four hours ago. It was their first night on the road, and they dined at a gem of a pizza joint near the university, went straight to the hotel, made love, and crashed, tired and giddy with the thrill of finally being on vacation, next stop Colorado.

  He tells himself, and he believes, that he still sleeps in that hotel room. He’s really tossing in bed as he hides in this snow cave, Jessica probably kicking him under the covers, swearing at him in that sexy, sleepy voice of hers to quit moving or take his restless ass over to the sleeper sofa.

  -27-

  Ron inhales the scent of hotel linens and forced air from an unfamiliar central heating system, the covers soft between his legs.

  He throws an arm across the mattress, feels the figure of his wife asleep beside him, her naked back rising and falling against his hand.

  Later, they sit at breakfast, cream-cheesing bagels.

  The light that blazes into the room washes out everything on the periphery and even the rogue strands of Jessica’s hair glow like incandescent silk.

  “I had the worst dream last night,” Ron says.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He thinks for a moment, says, “I forgot.”

  “Chilly in here.” As Jessica rubs her arms, Ron notices her breath clouding. He’s grown cold as well. He reaches down to lift his bagel, and it looks like a bagel, the circumference lightly browned, the lox spread warming on the surface, but when he touches it, it crumbles in his fingers like snow, freezing to the touch.