DRIPDRIPDRIPDRIPDRIP.
“Paulie. Paulie, can you hear me?” she asked, shaking her son. He was awake, but still pulling himself from the depths of sleep. They’d cuddled on the futon all through the night.
After he’d pushed his “family” out of the way, Edgar—or whatever the hell his name was—had secured boards over the basement door. His fury had overtaken every logical path, pounding the nails in, not even taking a moment to think it through; all the food and logs were in the basement. If he locked them down there, it wouldn’t be long until he was forced to return, cursing to himself as he pried the nails loose. The image almost made Annie laugh out loud.
Their captor didn’t seem very bright. Sick in the head, and monstrous, but a simple-minded dolt all the same.
“Mammah,” whispered Paulie, parting his sticky lips and looking up to her lethargically. He needed medical assistance and if he didn’t receive it soon, she wasn’t sure what long lasting effects it might have. Were there internal injuries to pair with his external ones? His left eye was still swollen and half shut, looking very much like Rocky Balboa at the end of the first movie. She wasn’t sure what Edgar had done to her son. She didn’t dare to speculate for the wrenching feeling it would give her on the inside. She’d been a terrible mother, allowing this to happen to her innocent little man.
“Hey, baby,” she said, trying to bite back the fright that she experienced when she looked at his broken face. The bastard would pay for what he did. Who in their right mind could harm a child like this? She’d been through worse with the men, if one was delusional enough to call them that, from The Purple Cat.
DRIPDRIPDRIPDRIPDRIP. DRIPDRIPDRIPDRIPDRIP.
Edgar was a bully, a psychopath, but he didn’t stand a chance against Annie. Not the New Annie. Not the woman who’d been ravaged, ripped, and stalked through the snow. This new woman wasn’t to be fucked with.
As Annie looked over at the door to the bulkhead, she suddenly recalled the previous spring, when the snow had also melted, albeit in smaller measures. Last winter was less than two feet of accumulated snow. This was closer to twenty feet in some areas, depending on the wind and drifts. But still, she almost had a chuckle as she pictured Christian, scrambling with buckets and a wet-dry vacuum, cussing beneath every strained breath. Every year he forgot to seal the bulkhead edging with foam insulator, and every year this happened. Poor Christian. He didn’t stand a chance as a homeowner. Annie had giggled at the sight of him, tossing old blankets in front of the door, thinking he could stop the water with a centimeter worth of fabric. It was sort of cute, in a way.
With this new storm (apocalypse, Annie, it’s the damn apocalypse, just say it and be done with it…stop pussy-footing), the bulkhead was surely covered with snow, but would it still be, with all of this rapid melting? She had to give it a try. Edgar wouldn’t have bothered sealing up the outside of the bulkhead, as he couldn’t have predicted this rapid flip-flop of temperatures.
“Wait here a second, baby,” she said to Paulie. He attempted a nod, but he was back asleep—more unconscious than asleep, really—in less than a few seconds.
She grabbed a miniature flashlight that Paulie kept under his pillow, muscling it out of his clutches. She wasn’t sure where he got it from, but Christian was always hiding survival tools around the place, always ready for just such situations. Christian had always been good like that, expecting the worst.
Annie approached the door that led to the bulkhead, turning the knob. As she pulled the door towards her, a wave of chilly water swept over her boots, splashing up against her ankles.
“Oh, my God,” she said, looking down at her boots and then staring at the cement steps for what felt like an hour, though it might have been a minute.
Clicking on the flashlight, she scanned the bulkhead’s steps.
And there he was.
She’d found her husband. His body was lightly jostling as water rushed over him.
Christian looked up at her, his face transfixed in a permanent look of shock. His body had stiffened so much that his arms and legs reminded her of The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, frozen in place, desperate for a can of oil to move freely once again. There was no oil that could bring him back though.
“Christian,” she said out loud, a rattle inside of her chest trying to escape, something just short of a scream. She couldn’t even manage a scream if she wanted to, though that was for the best. That would alert Paulie to what had happened, if the poor kid didn’t already know. Far worse than that, it would alert Edgar to what she had uncovered.
Get hopping, Annie. Step over your husband’s corpse so you can get that bulkhead door open. It’s still gonna be loaded down with some mighty heavy snow, and it’ll take everything you got, but it’s the only way you’re getting out of here. Try not to look at him. Try not to think about the times you fooled around on him.
It seemed like a cruel nightmare, something she could have never fathomed before this moment, but Annie reached down, biting back the bile that tried to eek its way up her esophagus. She grabbed him by the bloated, icy ankles, looking at his purple face, studying the nasty wound on his neck. Most of his head was detached, but not quite all of it. The son of a bitch had nearly decapitated his head, but had given up before completion. The sight made her go numb. She would never forget this image, no matter how long she lived.
You don’t get moving, then that won’t be very long.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to him, though she knew he couldn’t hear it. She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for—for his dying, for her not coming home when she should have, for being a cheater—but it felt good to say those words to him one last time. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, increasingly conscious of how pathetic she sounded now.
His head clunked against the cement steps and Annie could not recall a more hideous sound in her life.
Annie’s discovery explained the pungent, unnerving smell that she’d awoken to during the night. She cast it away, assuming it was rotting food, never imagining (stupid, stupid girl) that Edgar was lying about what happened to Christian. The look in Edgar’s lying eyes should have told the whole story, but she was a goddamned fool. Not to mention the fact that nothing could have pried her away from cuddling with her son throughout the night.
When she had Christian fully removed from the darkened bulkhead, exposed to the tiny bits of morning light that snuck in through the solitary window on the other side of the basement, he looked even worse than her first glimpse, through the stygian dark. Natural light always made things look worse.
He didn’t look like the man she had married. He looked like a deformed ghoul.
Annie grabbed a sheet from the closet. It was dripping wet because it had dropped off the shelf at some point, uselessly soaking up water that would not cease. It would still serve its purpose. She covered her husband’s body, whispering something that may or may not have been an insane person’s prayer, and wished with all her might that Paulie would not discover this terrible sight. It would ruin what remained of his life if he found his father’s body like this. Her boy would be screwed up for the rest of his life regardless of what happened (but wouldn’t all the world’s children be in the same boat, if any of them actually survived?). She wasn’t a fan of adding insult to injury.