"Help! Anyone!"
Lank cried out again for what felt like the millionth time, his throat raw.
He didn’t even know if his words were penetrating the confines of his current prison. It was worse than any prison Lank had ever spent any time in. He'd trade the prefabricated faded green plastic of the Porta John he was trapped inside of for the cold, hard steel and concrete of a cell any day of the week. That woman had stabbed him in his injured foot. He hoped to return the favor someday, or worse.
Damn Winslow was a foot from that stupid door, and he didn’t come and get me out.
Winslow tore off after the woman when he saw her slip in the side, and then there was Grizz. He barely made it off the porch. He wasn't sure if Grizz could see him in the Porta John, but he could feel his eyes through the cracks. He saw the disgust on his face. He knew he'd have to pay a price, and right now he couldn’t imagine a worse one. After Winslow took off after the girl, the shooting started, and then the fire.
Lank had worked himself up onto the crapper’s plastic seat and was in the process of getting his wrist restraints under his ankle when the cafeteria exploded. The force had knocked over the Porta John. It wobbled back and then fell to its side. Must've caught an edge because it flipped onto the door side, sealing it to the ice.
The concussive force of the exploding cafeteria had enough energy to slide the Porta John nearly thirty feet from where it had originally been located. Todd Lankowski was now lying face down on the door of the Porta John covered in urine and fecal matter donated by members of The Way.
Lank learned a valuable lesson that day. There isn’t any amount of blue sanitizing liquid capable of masking the vile funk after being bathed in months' worth of human waste. Lank had given up any hope that anyone was coming to get him, and he was damn sure not going to die inside an outhouse on top of a burning glacier.
Lank began slamming upwards against the back end of the Porta John, using the force of his legs to try to crack the seams. He tried not to think about the filth he was pressing himself into as he bashed himself wildly around the inside until he felt a crack. After a brief but arduous struggle, Lank wormed himself through the plastic, bursting out like a Jack-in-the-Box.
He looked back to where the outhouse had been and the firelight of the still-burning cafeteria. A trail of blue and other horrible things marked its path to the final resting position where Lank now stood. He wanted to strip naked and clean himself from head to toe and burn his clothes in the cafeteria fire. He welcomed the wind because it worked to carry away some of the stink he'd collected.
The blue liquid coating his clothes had begun to freeze over. He started making his way toward the cabin for a change of clothes and to see if anyone else was alive. He looked back at the Porta John that had almost become his coffin. Grizz appeared on the other side of the porch, near where he and Winslow had parked their ATVs. He did not look pleased to see Lank.
"You good-for-nothing dipshit. I can’t count on you for anything."
"I wasn't high, honest. It was that freaking MacIntosh and that crazy bitch. She caught me off guard. Look in my eyes, man."
Grizz did. He penetrated the depths of Lankowski's soul. "If I didn't know you and you weren’t covered in shit and piss, I would take you by your neck and break it right here and leave you to die."
Grizz was bleeding from two gunshot wounds that Lank could see, one in the upper right shoulder and the second on the outside meat of his bicep on that same arm.
"You've been shot? Is it bad?"
Grizz took one step back and balled a fist. "Touch me with those shit-covered hands and it's the last thing you touch."
"Let me prove myself to you. I knew when we got up yesterday morning that it was gonna be my day, my day to prove that I was ready to follow, to be a true member of The Way, and to earn my Mark. Look, I screwed up. Let me make it right."
"None of them are leaving this mountain. Not today, not ever. You want to make things right with me? Let’s start by finding them and making good on my promise." Grizz walked towards his ATV. "And I don’t care if you have to ride around this mountain buck naked, you’re not wearing those clothes anywhere near me. Hell, they'll be able to smell you six miles away."
Lank hobbled off to get a change of clothes from the bag he kept in one of the bunk rooms. He turned around and gave a big middle finger to the Porta John. His eyes followed the bloody trail that marked every time his right foot struck the icy ground. He thought about the man who'd shot him and the woman who'd stabbed him, and Lank planned on returning the favor tenfold.
He continued on the trail down to the cabin, and a few minutes later he was in dry clothes that no longer carried the horror of what he'd experienced.
"I heard them ride off.” Lank said. “They had to have headed for the trails."
"They're gonna find a surprise when they get there. Sunrise is a couple hours away, and I don't want any one of them to ever see the light of it."
They started their ATVs and disappeared into the blizzard in the direction of the trails.