White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Read Free Page B

struggle, she felt much better, from frozen toe to frozen eyes.
    Night night, piggy. Night night.
    Her grandfather still smelled like crushed mint leaves when he gave her the warmest hug she'd felt in a long time.
     
    *   *  *
     
     
    "Daddah?" Paulie asked, looking up at his father with glassy eyes, looking like he might burst into tears at any moment. "When’s Mama coming home?" he asked.
    Christian forced a smile. "Mommy will be home soon, I promise. She's still stuck at work."
    Still stuck at work. Now isn't that amusing, thought Christian. The word “convenient” also drifted through his thoughts, but he tamped it down, wishing he could crush that nasty word into a fine powder and flush it down the toilet.
    She stayed late on the night that the storm started , claiming car problems. By midnight, she declared herself trapped until the morning came. By the next afternoon, the tone in her voice had shifted, and Christian could detect it immediately. A worm had turned inside of her, and it had nothing to do with the weather.
    And on the second day, it got worse, and on the third, even worse still. Inch by inch, her excuse s piled up like crystal snowflakes, burying the woman he once loved. He could picture her, nuzzling with Tony in the mailroom, or sitting on the Big Boss Man's desk, hand delivering each other naughty memos.
    It was all in Christian's head, of course. She wouldn't dare do that to their family, no matter how much they bickered about how they defined their family now. She wouldn't ever harm her son, even if harming her husband came very easily to her when the opportunity arose. They'd “stay together for the kids,” no matter what happened between them. It was an unspoken mandate, something that could not be broken, not even by Tony, with his smooth jaw and six-figure salary.
    The heating vents ticked their warming sound, something Christian had grown incredibly attuned to since the storm began . That tick-tick-tick continued to keep Paulie and him alive for one more day. There was two more weeks’ worth of oil by Christian’s estimate, judging by the position of the little red indicator on the tank. They'd just received a delivery of heating fuel right before the storm. The oil was delivered on Annie's day off from work, when she'd taken Paulie to his yearly checkup. They usually topped off the tank, so it was actually a bit odd that there wasn’t more in the tank. They weren’t penny-pinching these days, so it never hurt to have a full tank of heating oil.
    " Daddah, I's cold," said Paulie, rubbing his tiny hands together.
    For a four year old , he was a tough cookie. This was the first time the kid had complained about the plummeting temperatures. The typically curious boy couldn't see out any of the windows, blocked by piles of compacted white, and he hadn't seen his mother in several weeks... but he just kept on keeping on, tough as nails. Christian remembered a flashback from his childhood, of being denied an icy pop by the ice cream truck man, because he'd been short a nickel. He could remember, in his vivid mind’s eye, rolling around on the sidewalk, thumping his fist against the cement, begging for the icy pop, as the tinkling bells of the truck drifted deep into his neighborhood.
    Paulie was cut from a n altogether different cloth. If anybody could survive the storm of the century, it was he. “We'll warm up and bundle together in a little bit, right after lunch. I've got some nice black beans for you.”
    His son made a face, expressing his concern with eating black beans for the tenth lunch in a row, but it was the only staple that they had an overabundance of. Still, Paulie didn't complain. He wanted to, but he understood the shit show that his father was dealing with. Paulie was perceptive, and that instinct would serve him well in adulthood.
    Christian promised himself that the first thing he'd do when the snow let up , was to buy Paulie a Happy Meal. And they'd probably never