After the last rays of light vanish from across the diffused sky, and after consuming every morsel of Jordy Merlot in a matter of minutes, the wendigo continues northeast, making the long trek toward Kansas. They keep at an unrelenting pace moving at supernatural speeds. The wolf pack stops only once to devour a family stranded along the highway with a busted radiator hose.
The woman’s loud shrill voice comes from the above drainage ditch they are running along. Immediately scaling the ditch to the flat of the highway, the wendigo settle just below the ridge, watching the intense argument unfold between a husband and his wife. Crouching against the dirt incline, they presume to stalk their unsuspecting prey and wait for Cold Bill’s command to leap into action, although Bill seems captivated by the intensity of the familiar scenario and restrains his counterpart.
Furious with accusation, the wife is out of control and fuming, continuously charging forward, slapping at her husband’s chest for failing to take the car in for inspection before dragging his family out into the cold of an empty highway on their way to Colorado for a skiing trip. Her constant overbearing protest reminds Bill of similar arguments that had occurred between him and his father. The husband, who appears less than a man, recoils before his wife’s mindless battering and cringes against the station wagon. The teenage boy, whose always-angry eyes seem both detrimental and detached, stretches out across the backseat of the station wagon while his iPod spills an emo-bitter ballad into his ears.
I’m hungry. Let’s be quick here, Adlemeyer conveys his thoughts to Cold Bill, yet Cold Bill is unable to respond as he continues to watch the wife berating and physically abusing her husband.
Yeah… I’m tired of this bitch. I want to eat her, so she will shut up. Blaster tilts his head to Adlemeyer and then to Cold Bill. Quit stalling and attack.
Shut it and wait, Nuke warns them both and then turns to Cold Bill. They are right, brother. We should be quick and keep moving. The Rockies are still ahead of us.
Fuck the Rockies. I’m hungry now! Blaster growls scaling further up the side of the drainage ditch. Perhaps if the couple were not so involved in themselves, they might have seen Blaster leering over them, perching himself next to the highway in plain sight.
Blaster, Nuke calls to his brother.
Who cares? It’s not as if they could do anything about it anyways. I’m hungry. I want man flesh. Blaster disregards Nuke and releases his tongue.
You would think you might have learned something by now, but you are still the shit bird you always were brother. Adlemeyer scoffs creeping up behind Blaster.
Do something, Nuke snaps, intending to draw Cold Bill away from his thoughts and to the escalating situation. Still, Bill seems entirely mesmerized by the argument he can only attest to his own quarrels with his dad. He feels himself stirring as he watches the argument unfold although it is not enough to free him from his current prison; Cold Bill remains in control.
The beast is now fully aware of the situation that arouses Bill. If allowed to persist, it could quite possibly mean Bill’s escape and its own imprisonment. Without a second thought, Cold Bill pounces up from the roadside ditch leveling the screeching woman driving her backward against the asphalt.
Torn tissue and a split skull, needless amounts of blood spill on to the cold highway. The force of the impact detaches the woman’s face from her skull, which gruesomely reminds Bill of an oversized Halloween mask, as sagging folds of her forehead partially cover her lifeless eyes and her mouth gapes at her throat.
It’s about fucking time. Blaster rears back and leaps across the highway, landing next to Bill. Adlemeyer and Nuke quickly follow.
wait! Cold Bill viciously strikes Blaster across the face quickly, sending the wendigo skirting away from further assaults. you will wait!
Fuck that! Blaster growls and takes one threatening step forward. Cold Bill turns his malignant gaze upon his disobedient brother and snarls, releasing his tongue.
i’m hungry! Blaster brutally protests.
You will eat last, Cold Bill warns him and then sinks his teeth into the dead woman’s neck.
Completely horrified by the sudden assault on his wife, the husband has made an about face and now runs down the center of the highway’s two lanes. Whether he had clearly forgotten about his son in the back of the station wagon or the wendigo’s nightmarish presence had instantly drove the man to insanity and he fled out of sheer terror, Cold Bill only hears his panting words as the man opened into full desperate strides and never once looks back. “OH GOD, OH GOD! JESUS, HAVE MERCY! JESUS, HAVE MERCY!”
Bill readily refrains from joining Nuke and Adlemeyer dismembering the wife in the drainage ditch. Instead, he turns his hateful gaze upon the fleeing man and leaps into the air, digging his clawed feet into the husband’s shoulders, driving him into the pavement. After taking another short leap off the demolished man, Bill whirls about to face his prey.
Broken nose, busted teeth, and a mouth full of blood, the confused husband crawls forward, mumbling, “Oh god. Jesus, please have mercy, have mercy.”
They always beg for mercy, and it always falls upon deaf ears. Exposing his neck, shoving the head down flush with the shoulders, Cold Bill sinks his teeth into the carotid artery; warm blood erupts like molten lava into his mouth. He slakes back a mouthful and tosses the ragdoll-like corpse in the ditch. He then signals to Blaster who paces back and forth in excruciating pain, smelling the spilled blood and salty human meat. Blaster acknowledges Cold Bill’s pity and rushes headlong into the ditch; his ghastly presence replaced by the equally ghastly emanations of ripping flesh and crunching of bones.
Hearing a faint music that only the heightened senses of a wendigo could detect, Cold Bill turns a curious eye toward the station wagon; the foulest of human gore drips from his rapacious jaws. He shakes his head from side to side, allowing a large remainder of the man’s neck meat to find its way down his bulging throat and then creeps toward the vehicle.
Circling the baby blue station wagon with wood paneling, the wendigo’s tongue slithers all along the imitation wood finish searching for the source of the music. He then places his bony hands over the driver’s door handle—click. Sliding silently into the front seat that stretches across the width of the boat-like vehicle, Cold Bill cocks his head to the backseat; his tongue lashes outward, mingling with the enticing scent of youth and innocence. The boy barely has time to register the overwhelming stench of immense decay when Bill leaps over the seat and down upon the teenager. A sudden sharp scream echoes across the flat frozen plains—the station wagon rocks back and forth, and a spray of blood spatters the windows. A moment later, the vehicle settles, and with each crunch of the wendigo’s deep bites, the station wagon’s undercarriage gives off a creak or groan.
Cold Bill had made a short work on the vacationers. The wendigo leave little evidence of the family of three stranded along the cold highway broken down due to a faulty radiator hose. The scarceness left behind would never explain what happened to the family.
* * *
By nightfall of Monday, the wendigo crossed the pine forests and mountain valleys of Utah to begin traversing the snow-capped Rocky Mountains of Colorado’s Continental Divide. The high altitude and freezing temperatures are a comfort, and the often-steep snowy cliffs and dangerous terrain do little to humble the wolf pack’s efforts. Moving down U.S. Highway 160 to Wolf Creek Pass, the wendigo keep steady pace across Colorado until they are just south of Rio Grande National Forest. As the night quickly wanes and heavy palettes of snow turn to light drifts and then again, into the golden brown colors of an ensuing fall season, they find themselves on the outskirts of Pueblo moving along Highway 50 into La Junta. The sun begins to break as the wendigo cross the Colorado state border headed for Garden City, Kansas, just northwest of Dodge City.
Transfixed on the sign rapidly approaching (white with green borders and with a caption that reads: “Welcome to Kansas, the Sunflower State”), rage overcomes Bill, and again, he struggles to rise from the prison where Cold Bill has placed him. Since Utah, Bill silently and persistently brooded over what he would do when he made it to this point. He had been saving his strength, and with the sudden realization of home setting in, he now knew he had a difficult choice ahead of him—a choice that involved stopping in Derrylin for the night and then moving eastward into Missouri or abandoning his brothers while desperately trying to lure them away from Derrylin and Abigail. That was only if he could subdue his beast.
Bill knew his brothers would not stop at nothing to devour all that he cherished. Filled with the understanding that Abigail and his parents were now in the gravest danger, Bill begins his ascent to the surface. His supernatural strides come to an abrupt halt; he is entirely too quick to abandon his position on point allowing his brothers to blur past him. He appears to be confused, keeping his head low to the ground as his internal struggle against Cold Bill ensues.
Looking around, Bill familiarizes himself with the flat plains of his home state. Although he can no longer visually imbibe the golden fields or farmland beauty, his tongue mingles with the bustling winds and the smell of harvest corn, wheat, and sunflowers. Forever yearning for absolution, Bill lets out a sad moan. Cold Bill and him stand motionless, perched on hind legs, propped up like a curious prairie dog, although monstrous and undead. Inquisitively, Bill tilts his head from side to side as his tongue relentlessly whips about, tasting and smelling every familiar scent. No closer to home, the memorable aromas only serve to confuse Bill, drawing him into a web of long deposed emotions that he knew he could no longer justify rationally. Yet he craved them to no end.
Don’t stop. Nuke continues forward, sprinting farther ahead of Bill. We need shelter as the day approaches. Patience—we’ll head back after sunset.
Bill says nothing, and Cold Bill is helpless to act. Already, the pack is nearly a mile ahead of them.
Don’t be foolish, Nuke warns Bill. There is no time keep moving.
However, the longer Bill placates his beast with those enticing earthly aromas, the further his mind’s eye unwittingly expands outward, until Bill can no longer hear his brother in thought, and he soars above in the sky traveling over the flat lands and fields of Kansas in a fantastic dreamscape. After all, Bill is a wendigo, and wendigo are undead spirits capable of many terrifyingly wondrous feats.
Thousands of memories flood Bill’s mind tearfully awakening him to his past. Faster and faster, he soars over the trees, the ponds, and the cut fields of corn and wheat and harvested yellow and black sunflowers oblivious of any specific destination, guided solely by his stirring memories of Derrylin. When the thought of home thoroughly overwhelms Bill, the sky expels him, and he spirals downward in eloquent descent. Through sheer willpower, Bill rips through the fetid veil of his undead counterpart to find himself standing in front of the familiar styling of his parent’s classical mansion on the northern edge of Derrylin. Emotional distraught, he buries Cold Bill.
Much to Bill’s surprise, he clairvoyantly projected himself well over a hundred miles in a matter of seconds. Awestruck—palpating utter bliss, his malefic expression remains unchanged. He turns his attention to the voices of the two men talking behind him.
Immediately, Bill recognizes the one dressed in an Armani camel hair blazer and white twill dress shirt. Roland Spencer gloats conspicuously behind a humid October perspiration, standing in the threshold of the main entryway, vigorously signing off on documents. Roland oversees the removal of his parents’ exquisite furnishings hauled from the mansion and placed into a mover’s truck. Bill is confused and unable to understand why Roland would have movers empty his parents’ house. More so, Bill is beginning to feel that something devious is afoot.
Moving with uncanny speed, with the utmost desperation, he quickly surveys all of the mansion’s twelve rooms, discovering that all twelve rooms were empty. There is no sign of his parents. He quickly returns to Roland’s side hovering over him like the vast shadow of death coming to collect on a soul. Bill listens closely as the two men talk. He silently promises Roland that there will be dire consequences if he is to unearth any trickery.
“I appreciate your boys working through the night, Milton. Really, I do. It’s imperative that we get everything itemized for the estate sale.” Roland then looks down at his Rolex Milgauss wristwatch, unaware of the unseen wendigo listening in. “It looks like it’s a little past six thirty. I’ll just finish signing off the rest of these documents, and that should wrap things up. Sound ’bout right to you?”
“That sounds ’bout right, Mr. Spencer.” Milton Barlow pushes up the bill of his work cap and uses a white handkerchief pulled from the back pocket of his faded jeans to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I still need to pack up the workshop. That is… if you do not mind us sticking around for a few extra hours. To be quite honest Mr. Spencer, I could really use the overtime, and my eldest, Scotty, is saving for that car you know.”
“Hmm… tick tock, tick tock.” Roland taps his index finger to the face of his watch, giving Milton a somber expression of displeasure. “Time is money, Milton, time is money.”
“I know, Mr. Spencer, but I think we can have it wrapped up in a few hours.”
Roland lets out a long depleted sigh. He places both hands firmly on his hips, sizing up the situation. “I have to be at the courthouse for a meeting with Judge Cole this morning. I suppose…” Roland says this with a pause and a second long sigh. “You and your boy can take inventory of the workshop… but I want those itemized papers this morning.” He then quickly adds, “I don’t want any monkey business either. Not like the last time with the Gordon estate. I’ve already taken a mental snapshot of the workshop, and I’ll know if any goes missing.”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t even think of it. There will be no monkey business—no, sir. No monkey business at all.”
Roland looks off to one side. He does not trust Milton Barlow one bit, especially not after a complete set of antique silverware and an air compressor just up and vanished from the Gordon home after Emerald Gordon passed away in his sleep. With his attention on more pressing issues, Roland realizes he has little control over the situation. He turns to Milton, his eyes still shifting with reluctance.
“You got two hours and not a minute more. This mess has already taken too much of my time.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Spencer.” Milton removes his hat nervously, holding it down in front of him. He rolls it up like a newspaper and shakes his head, understanding perfectly clear—two hours and not a minute more. Milton then adds, “Mr. Spencer… about the workshop?”
“What is it now?” Roland sighs again; he is growing impatient with each passing second.
“Well, isn’t that where Ms. Alley May Crabtree found Ted… I mean, she found him dead right there on the workshop floor?”
“It’s true, why?”
“Oh… oh nothing, Mr. Spencer. It’s just sort of creepy, that’s all.”
“Well, you need not concern yourself, Milton. Just get things packed up and get me that itemized sheet by eight forty-five.” Roland looks at his watch—6:37 a.m. “Not a minute more.”
If Roland and that buffoon Milton were suggesting what Bill thought they were suggesting, then Bill knew his father was dead. That unchanging expression, that of corruption and absolute evil, and that spark of hatred cast through yellow pinpoint eyes do little to mask Bill’s sudden pain. At first, his emotions converge calmly due to shock. Then all at once, they explode outward in uncontainable psychic chaos, crashing violently against the rotten walls of his decomposing brain. He lunges at Roland; his bony talons rip through the man shredding the very fabric of his existence. Yet Roland’s apparition flees, dissipating in a burst of wispy smoke—a taunting exasperation dancing upward like intertwining ethereal tendrils racing toward the breaking dawn. Bill is enraged. He wants Roland Spencer dead. He wants answers and pursues.
Fleeing from the unwanted scene, Bill chases Roland’s ghostly smoke across the vast illuminating sky. Although torrent, again, Bill’s mind expands outward as he searches for imprints his dad may have left behind. He needed the truth about what happened and why Roland was now in control of his parent’s estate and not his mother. Within moments, Bill finds himself in a field of freshly cut greenery and gray cold markers that lurch upward from the ground, keeping the dead buried under them, marking them for eternity. Hovering over one such gravestone, Bill stares into words etched in black marble:
Theodore William Colden
Beloved Husband and Father
June 6, 1948-September 16, 2010
Bill lowers his eyes, studying the dim glow of the wilted flowers placed at the foot of his father’s headstone. A pitiful groan escapes him as he realizes that his dad had passed away while he was in Kuwait. He immediately feels sick with shame for leaving his mother and father. Despite the differences that he and his dad shared, Bill loved his father. Never more did he wish to turn back the hands of time and desperately fly back to the day of their argument. Those days seemed trite compared to how things have escalated. He should have accepted his father’s proposition to him to take over as Derrylin’s CFO after his retirement. If given the chance, Bill would happily tell his dad yes. Yet such things are no longer possible.
Bill was swept away in anger and grief; a sudden wind carries his thin gray form from the cemetery as if he was nothing and weighed nothing. Only the concerned memory of his mother allows Bill to escape this wind. Furiously, he moves through the streets of Derrylin, racing against traffic retracing his mother’s imprints to discover her fate.
Where is she? Roland had better not put her in a retirement home. Was it too much for her to bear losing both Dad and me? Worse, is Mom in the hospital hurt, or… is she dead?
Bill needs those answers if he were to make his decision—stay with his brothers or continue alone until he could find a way to end his curse. Eventually, his thoughts pull him into the lowest level of the Derrylin Regional Hospital. He speeds through corridors down two flights of stairs until Bill comes to an abrupt halt where on one side of a single white door, he can feel the faint presence of his mother.