Smirking at the sight of the thing, she asked, “Where the hell did you get a pair of skis?”
“Eddie from accounting. He keeps them in his office, tucked in the corner. I think he does cross country skiing during lunch or something. I’ve never seen him actually do it, so maybe he only intends to. Lucky for us, right?”
Speaking of lunch, thought Annie. Her stomach grumbled at her. If her stomach had lips, it would have been pouting since Saturday. They wholly raided the vending machine during the first week, and then they started scrambling through people’s desks, pulling out anything edible. Most people kept at least a candy bar in their work areas. Winnie had an entire case of peanut-butter filled pretzels in her office. She reluctantly shared them with Annie and Tony, but they ran out the day before. The bizarre thought that Winnie had given up on life because she ran out of snacks suddenly torqued inside of Annie. She wasn’t sure if she was about to laugh or cry.
Tony kept talking, as if he couldn’t keep a lid on his mouth. This whole experience was actually thrilling to him. Annie was starting to wonder if he was worrying about his wife and children at all. In fact, she couldn’t recall him making a single cell phone call home. He said, “I watched this thing on Siberian fur traders a couple months ago. Do you know they live out in the woods, in fifty below weather for about four months straight? They trek through the woods in snow as deep as their waistline. Skis help to distribute the weight for anything that hasn’t been packed down by something like a snowmobile. If we get on my raft here, it’ll distribute the weight enough to keep us on the surface. We’ll sink if we stay still, but I don’t plan on stopping for anything at all.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a Siberian fur trapper,” observed Annie. It was true; she was the furthest thing from tough, and she loathed the bitter cold. She often regretted choosing to live in New England because of that. But there wasn’t really a choice in the matter at this point. Her livelihood was on the line.
“We’ll be fine. The first stretch I’ve got planned for us is only a couple of miles. If we can make it to The Purple Cat without incident, then we’ll be all good. They’ll have all kinds of supplies there and a big old fireplace. We can wait it out through the rest of this storm.”
The Purple Cat was an atrocious idea, especially for the sake of her teetering marriage, and it wasn’t the first time Tony had surfaced it. She pictured that roaring hearth in the bar, with Tony spreading out a thick blanket, raiding the wine cellar. It was not something that Annie wanted even to think about. The bastard was always on the hunt, only thinking with his engorged phallus.
She didn’t want to go to The Purple Cat, not to rest or get warm or to raid their food supplies, although a warm meal might calm her nerves. Annie just wanted to be home, with her baby boy, warm and cuddling him close to her. The idea of hanging around an abandoned restaurant didn’t settle right with her, especially assuming other people hadn’t gotten the same simple idea, that being, “go where the food is.” Tony wasn’t the only one to think that way. A typical restaurant had enough food to feed an army. It was quite possible that they would encounter an actual army.
That aside, she couldn’t help but air her skepticism about the mode of transportation. “Are we going to test this thing out first? What if it doesn’t work?” She asked, squirming for a way to get out of leaving behind a relatively safe environment. In reality, she was terrified of what was left of the world, of what lurked beyond the iced over windows. Her eyes couldn’t bear to look at the ice-laden mess that her planet had become since last she was outdoors.
An air of confidence overtook Tony’s facial features, almost to the threshold of cockiness. It reminded her of her father for a moment, and the comparison nearly made her squirm. “I guarantee this will work. It warmed up a bit this morning, not enough to melt it, but enough to harden the surface just a tad,” Tony said. “That might be our saving grace. If we’re going to leave, it should be today.” He tapped his hand on his jury-rigged snow sled. “It’s sort of like a pontoon boat. You’ll sit in the carriage like a pretty princess (Annie resisted the urge to make a gagging noise), and I’ll stand on the back, right behind you, and shove us around with the ski poles. I’ll be right behind you.”
Putting my crotch in your face. He hadn’t said those words, but Annie imagined the tableau: the heroic stagecoach driver with the gargantuan bulge in his knickers, pushing the pair through treacherous, ungodly conditions, saving her life and brain-washing her with his proud codpiece staring her in the eye the whole damn way. She promised herself only to look ahead of them, to keep her eyes on the road. That is, if she decided to go with him at all.
“I don’t see it happening. How are we better off than Winnie was when she went traipsing out into hell?”
“Because you’ve got Tony on your side.” Annie loathed when people referred to themselves in the third person. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. And hell, if the sled thing doesn’t work, I’ll put you up on my shoulders and march you all the way to The Purple Cat. And I’ll even cook you a nice dinner when we get there. I make a kick-ass chicken parmesan. Or eggplant parmesan, if they have any eggplant on hand.”
There it was again. He did not intend to bring her home. Of course he didn’t. That was where he would lose her forever, once she was near Christian’s sphere of influence again, trying to make everything better the way Christian always did. If this was indeed the end of the world (as many of the pundits were preaching before the cable lines went out), then this was Tony’s last opportunity to secure Annie as his end-of-the-world plaything. Annie wished that she was just being paranoid, like a petite teenage girl walking alone in an unlit parking lot, but she knew that there was something seedy about Tony’s intentions. There always had been; it was all spoken through his sharking eyes, caressing every inch of her body whenever he felt the urge, standing over the top of her cubicle (look how tall I am!), smiling and asking her how her weekend was (I went bungee jumping!), slurping on a cup of cold coffee out of his kitschy “Hang In There” mug (I can slurp on your desperate little kitty, too!).
Tony cleared his throat, seemingly frazzled by her silence. Something inside of her loved to watch him squirm a bit, to make him suffer for his unwelcome approaches. “Listen to me, Annie.” Yes, she thought as she raised her eyebrows, she was listening. “I’m one hundred percent confident of this. I’ve skied in much worse conditions than this. I got stuck in a blizzard on Sugarloaf one year. I almost died out there, but I kept my head on straight.” His face contorted, as if he was trying to convince himself that it was all true.
Of course, it was a blatant lie, and wasn’t he always one hundred percent confident in their dealings? Annie could recall dozens of occasions where he’d profess a similar cocksure declaration, where he convinced the higher-ups to pursue something fruitless and wasteful. He had an audience with some of the key players in the business, and they trusted him in all the wrong ways. He pissed away several major accounts by his boldly naïve initiatives, and he paid no repercussions for his botching measures. Men rarely paid for mistakes in the business world, or so Annie had noticed pretty early on, whereas, women would be thrown under the bus for even minor transgressions.
The overhead lights flickered on and off. The electricity was still hanging on, but just by a thread. It would give out any day now. When the electric went, they were better off hitting the road. Annie realized that and stared down at the cart. Her options were slowly evaporating.