Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN being yanked from sleep by an unknown intruder in the middle of the night was being forced outside during heavy snowfall to figure out a motherfucking generator, Johnny thought.
The whole night felt like Mazelle Washington’s curse on him, just when he’d started to embrace ownership of her lodge.
(You think you’re gonna wish me dead and then fuck in my bed, you puny little rat bastard?)
As he climbed down the back steps, frost pelting his face, Johnny wanted to scream his frustration into the snow-shitting sky.
But Tasha and the girls were calm, the only blessing tonight, so he would have to keep his howls bottled in his head.
His heartbeat had barely slowed since he heard the first crash in the kitchen, waking him from a dream he suspected was about the room where he’d been sleeping.
He might have dreamed he was in the sickbed, where he had last seen Mazelle.
Johnny was carrying the single gas can he had from the garage and a heavy-duty flashlight that illuminated the backyard like a lighthouse, its beam piercing through the snowfall to the sagging cabin twenty yards from the back porch.
The rifle was slung across his shoulder, a precaution.
He scanned the trees and piles of snow, fooled by the motion of snowfall at first. Satisfied, he turned to the large tarp between the kitchen and dining room windows.
The tarp was beneath an awning, so it was only half-covered with snow.
He unveiled a five-thousand-watt black generator, as good as new.
Hollman had convinced him to make the investment during his refurbishing project (sure—what was an extra grand two years ago?), but Johnny had never learned how to use it.
YouTube was his go-to for research, but with no signal he would have to rely on common sense.
The Briggs & Stratton generator looked like a car engine, but it stood tall on wheels like a barbecue grill—and he wasn’t a master of either.
The one-gallon gas can he’d brought felt puny when he assessed the size of the generator’s obvious gas tank on top.
Please don’t let this thing be empty, he thought.
The only thing he remembered Hollman telling him was that a generator this size might burn up a gallon of gas an hour, depending on how much power they used.
In retrospect, even bringing three gallons might not have lasted them the night running the heat.
His flashlight was almost too bright for him to make out the position of the fuel gauge on the tank, but he was relieved to see that it was almost halfway full.
How long was that? How many gallons did this tank hold?
Maybe the manual was in a drawer somewhere in the lodge—knowing Hollman, he had organized the manuals for potential renters—but it didn’t matter now, since Johnny only had one more gallon to add to the tank. It would have to do.
The cold had numbed Johnny’s ears as soon as he stepped outside, but now his earlobes burned.
This weather reminded him of why he’d never wanted to live in the Midwest after one year of college in Iowa, when his ears, nose, and toes were quick to burn if the temperature dipped below thirty degrees.
He guessed it was closer to twenty-five degrees on the mountain now, and if he didn’t get the generator on, his family would spend an uncomfortable night huddled by a fireplace.
They might need to do that anyway. Johnny had hated that feeling in the hallway, helpless to protect his children because they were so far from him.
And his worry that he might get startled and shoot one of them, like Tasha warned him.
He never wanted that feeling again, so he would convince them to stay in one room, generator or no generator.
Something had been in the house, and it might come back.
Johnny’s heart quickened when he thought about the large shadow sliding across the kitchen floor, but he forced himself to focus on the generator.
He remembered from an old chemistry lesson that gasoline didn’t freeze unless the cold was extreme, so he uncapped the fuel tank and poured in what was left of the supply he had bought in McCloud.
He had wanted to give Imani an earful when he realized she’d left most of the gas behind, but it had been his responsibility, or Tasha’s, to check after her. That felt like a worry from a year ago.
While Johnny poured gas from his can into the tank, which was challenging without a nozzle he’d forgotten to bring with him, a crack sounded from one of the treetops over the cabins, startling Johnny so much that he spilled a precious stream.
He was lucky he didn’t drop the can. Snow sprayed from above as a limb fell…
unless it was an animal jumping from a tree.
He swung his flashlight toward the sound, trying to confirm that a branch had fallen.
Nothing was moving, and plenty of fallen branches lay near those cabins.
Did bears climb trees? His mind felt blocked until he knocked loose a memory, as if his inner thirteen-year-old whispered an obvious school lesson in his ear: Bears hibernate. It was December.
Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t a bear. Childhood fantasies aside, was a mountain lion stalking him? Or something worse?
“Fuck… fuck… fuck…” Johnny whispered.
He screwed the generator’s fuel cap back on with shaking fingers, his back muscles tight as he braced for something to lunge at him from behind.
He quavered with joy when he spotted a bright red on switch, but nothing happened when he flipped it.
No rumble. No shaking. He switched it off and on two more times, finally leaving it off.
He would be out here for a while. Tasha had offered to help if he needed her, but he didn’t want her out in this cold. Especially with whatever is here with me.
“Fuck… fuck.” Johnny turned to surveil the yard with the light, lingering on shadows, looking for signs of tracks. Distantly, to the left, the fence to the ski trail glimmered.
He shifted his shoulder to swing his rifle under his elbow, steadying the stock with his free hand, sliding his finger across the trigger. He noticed the weight of the box of ammo he’d slipped into his jacket pocket before he went outside—just in case.
Once Johnny stationed the flashlight on top of the generator, he had just enough of a halo to see the generator’s tangle of mechanisms while he kept the wider beam trained on the trees.
He had to do this. He had to warm up the house.
He pictured Money laughing his ass off at him, which gave him enough nerve to look away from the trees and scan the generator in glances.
Engine. Carburetor—he’d better hope it wasn’t that.
An alternator, maybe. And a screen that could be clogged.
Each snaking tube and grille discouraged him.
The more lost he felt, the more he was convinced he was being watched from the woods near the cabins.
Pure instinct made Johnny caress the fuel line, not sure what he was looking for, and his hand caught on a moth-shaped plastic knob, also bright red.
He had to grab the flashlight to see what was nestled in shadow: another on/off switch, this time for the fuel line itself.
It was off! Johnny quickly turned the knob to the on position.
His eyes still trained on the trees, he slid his hand back to the power switch. Please let this work, please let this work. Johnny was praying, or as close as he came to prayer, biting his bottom lip in his fervor.
Before he could flip the switch on, a branch above the cabins swayed, rocking under the weight of something heavy. Johnny shot his beam toward the sound in time to see the thick branch shrug off a curtain of snow. Was something sliding down the trunk?
Something heavy hit the ground with a thunk.
The snow where it landed moved, carried by whatever had buried itself underneath.
A straight line of displaced snow emerged, five feet long.
Then stopped. Johnny held his breath. His eyes were wide-open so long that he blinked away falling snow across both contact lenses he had accidentally fallen asleep in.
In that instant of blurriness, he heard wet, scraping movement under the snow again, and another line had appeared after he blinked, at a forty-five-degree angle to the first. When the buried thing moved again, shifting angles but still advancing, Johnny’s knees jolted with a surge of adrenaline that still couldn’t stir his paralytic legs to move.
Something was moving toward him under the snow.
And it was big. And it was fast, like slashes from a sword, its path denting the frost one way and then the next as it snaked closer.
Johnny remembered his rifle, snapping its long barrel toward the movement, always too late as it scooted this way and that.
More snow clogged his contact lenses as he heard the advance quicken, sloughing off snow closer to him, and he was sure the hidden beast was upon him.
Johnny let out a strangled yell he believed would be his last.
The odd motion skirted him and rounded the corner of the lodge, toward the ski trail.
Gone.
Tears tried to distract Imani from her task, but she fought to keep her focus as she squatted next to the living room fireplace and flicked her flint to try to light her delicate nest of kindling beneath the tower of logs.
She had practiced using a firestarter a million times in their backyard at home.
Sparks danced from her flint strikes, but instantly died.
Not even a wisp of smoke yet. You can do this.
You can do this. What were the chances that the power would go out and they would need the extra gas she had left behind?
Imani’s worst-case scenario had come true.
You can do this. You ruin everything, dumbass. You better fucking do this.
While Dad was outside trying to figure out the generator, Mom and Sharise huddled beside her at the fireplace.
The central heat had been off for only a few minutes, but the heat was evaporating like an illusion.
The only light in the living room was from their phone flashlights, which made the unfamiliar space and its old-fashioned furniture look like a museum of relics.
“God, Imani, it would be faster for me to go upstairs and grab my lighter,” Sharise said.
“We’re staying together,” Mom said.
“I’ve got this,” Imani said.
“Why do you keep a lighter?” Mom’s voice was casual, but the question wasn’t. Imani was so startled on Sharise’s behalf that she hesitated before her next strike. More sparks were stillborn.
“There has to be a lighter in the kitchen, right?” Sharise said, trying to recover.
“I asked you a question, Sharise: Why do you have a lighter?” If Mom searched through her sister’s backpack and found her Altoids tin that was not full of mints, Sharise would get grounded for a year. Or longer.
“We were going camping?” Sharise said, like it was obvious. “So I brought a lighter.”
“A ski lodge is ‘camping’?” Mom said, still pressing. Maybe Mom and Dad weren’t as clueless as Sharise thought they were. She’d been smoking weed with her friends for at least two or three months, by the smell of her clothes after school.
“No Wi-Fi or cell phones?” Sharise said. “And now no electricity? Yes—camping. Ask her why she brought all that survival stuff in her bag. She could have just brought a lighter too.”
Sharise, as usual, tried to get out of trouble by shifting blame.
Imani felt so annoyed that she struck the flint extra hard, and a giant spark flew to the straw in her kindling pile, glowing orange.
But small. So, so small. Please, please, please please.
A wisp of smoke like a strand of cotton rose from the ember.
The orange glow spread to the next twig, the smoke thickening.
Gently, Imani blew as if she were whispering.
“You’ll blow it out,” Sharise said.
“I know what I’m doing,” Imani said.
She bent over to blow again. A baby flame sprang from the ember, born hungry.
When Imani blew again to nurture it, the smoke grew to a cloud big enough for Tasha and Sharise to see.
They both cheered while Imani fanned the flames until they were tasting the thicker logs.
She wanted to be sure the fire would survive before she stopped nursing it.
“Great job, baby!” Mom said, and pulled Imani close to kiss her temple.
“You actually did it,” Sharise said. “Let me shut up, I guess.”
“Yes,” Imani said, giving Sharise a long look. Then, more softly: “You’d better.”
When the lights had gone out, everyone forgot about the big confession Sharise was about to make, and Imani was itching to warn her sister not to say anything about the deer’s head or she would spill every secret she could think of—real or fake.
She privately raised a finger to her lips: Shhhhh.
Sharise pursed her lips, defiant. But she nodded her agreement just out of Mom’s sight.
“There’s nothing to be worried about, Imani,” Mom said, trying to comfort her for the wrong reasons. “Even if your dad can’t get the generator going—”
A rumbling sound came from outside, and the kitchen lights came back on, with cool light sharpening their faces. Mom turned on a table lamp shaped like drooping rose petals, and with homier light it was just a living room again.
Everything looked normal except for the pile of blankets and pillows Dad had said they should bring while he was in the garage, in case it took him a while.
Dad knew how to change tires and put on snow chains, but he wasn’t exactly a handyman, so when he said he didn’t know what kind of shape the generator was in (or, probably, how to turn it on), they had prepared for a long, cold night.
But he’d gotten the generator going in less than ten minutes!
Imani heard the door from the garage open (with that freezer full of meat) and close hard, more like slamming. Dad locked the door fast.
“Good job, hon!” Mom called out.
Imani expected her father to be smiling when he joined them in the living room, but when he pulled off his jacket’s hood to show his face, he looked weary and shaken, as if he’d been outside for hours. Dad didn’t notice the fire or look anywhere except at Sharise.
Dad went straight to Sharise and leaned over her. “Tell me what you saw outside.”