February 19, 2011

In the few minutes before Barney Slezak recorded the gruesome YouTube video that would draw more than a million hits, winning him and his family an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to be on Jimmy Kimmel's show, he was thinking about how much he hated snow.

For starters, snow was blindingly white, which hurt his eyes, was hard to slog through when it piled up, which exhausted him, and was dangerously slippery when it froze, which meant he'd end up taking a hard fall.

For snow to even to exist, it had to be freezing outside, and the chill punctured his flabby flesh like skewers. His muscles shivered to generate heat, his pale skin puckered up to retain warmth, and his dick retreated so far into his shriveled ball sack that he might as well be a eunuch.

Not that he needed his manly equipment when there was snow around. Because when it was cold, his wife, Sophie, went to bed wearing granny pajamas as thick as a bathrobe, puffy slippers, and an Ebenezer Scrooge nightcap, a sight that didn't exactly inflame his libido. But if he used a lot of imagination, and did dare to touch her, she'd elbow him hard in the gut for rustling the sheets and breeching her cocoon of warmth.

Barney didn't understand why she had to wear all that stuff to stay warm anyway. She was fat enough to be hunted by the Japanese for her blubber. Then again, so was he. But that was completely different. He was a guy.

But as much as Barney hated the cold, here he was on that fateful Saturday, a hundred miles from home, sitting like a walrus beside his wife in the snow at Mammoth Peaks Resort, just because his five-year-old daughter, Kate, woke up that morning wanting to make a snowman.

Barney Slezak would do anything to make his daughter happy because she was simply the most beautiful, lovable, talented, and huggable girl ever born.

Every time Barney looked at her, it astonished him that something so perfect could have sprung from his rarely exercised loins, though he suspected his genes had some promise.

He'd risen from an inbred family of illiterate, toothless moonshiners to become senior die-cut sorter on the assembly line at Worldwide Patch, which didn't sound like an exceptional achievement, but to him it was the evolutionary equivalent of an amoeba miraculously birthing a four-legged, sentient creature capable of crawling out of the primordial slime.

If he could do that, and marry a woman with a high school equivalency certificate, there was no telling what potential for greatness Kate possessed.

She could dream big. Or at least he could on her behalf.

And because he knew everyone was as enamored of his daughter as he was, he filmed every little thing she did and posted the videos on the YouTube channel that he'd created in her honor (much to the carnal delight of one Clem D. Farlow of Owensboro, Kentucky, who had irritable bowel syndrome, a dog named Miley, and sixteen two-terabyte hard drives full of home videos of children that he'd ripped from the net, but that was another, and far more sordid, story).

So, naturally, Barney was recording the creation of Kate's snowman with the same solemnity and sense of historical purpose he would have used if he were capturing her presidential inauguration, or her acceptance of a Nobel Prize, or perhaps both.

The little girl in his view screen was pug-nosed and freckled, with round, rosy cheeks and big eyes that made it seem as if she regarded the world in constant, joyful wonder.

She was truly adorable now, but later in life, when her eyes were too big for her head, and she was living in Berlin with Gerda, an avant-garde lesbian poet fifteen years her senior, Kate would resemble E.T. with boobs and unshaved underarms.

But that was a long way off from this moment, as Kate happily dug up snow with her chubby, mitten-covered hands and slapped it against the base of her lopsided snowman, who gazed upon her efforts with delighted acorn eyes and a wide, twiggy smile.

Kate giggled with glee and eagerly dug up more snow, as if the more she added to him, the greater the chance he might come to life.

Kate was so intent on piling ice on her snowman, and Barney was so focused on her face, and his wife was so busy devouring a bag of 2nd Degree Burn Fiery Buffalo Doritos, that nobody noticed the hole the child was digging at her side.

Or what it was revealing.

Not until the stiff arm sprung up from the ice and the gnarled hand caught the furry hood of Kate's parka as she was leaning forward to pat more snow onto her snowman.

Not until Kate tumbled onto her back, looked up at the frozen claw suspended above her face, and let out a scream so deep, and so loud, that it made her nose bleed.

She scrambled away and, as she did, saw beneath her the wide-open, glassy eyes of the dead man staring up at her through the frost.

And then her scream morphed into a horrified wail that emanated from the depths of her soul and echoed off the mountain, making every creature who heard it instinctively tremble from the primal clarity of her terror.

She'd found Matthew Cahill.

On a chilly dawn less than two days before his death, Matthew Cahill chopped wood outside his cabin, which he'd built by hand with lumber that he'd cut at the sawmill where he worked.

He split the firewood with his grandfather's ax, working with a steady rhythm that somehow seemed in step with the cold breeze whistling through the tall, frosted pines and the beat of the water running over the rocks in the creek.

This was how Matt started every day, rain or shine, whether he needed firewood or not. He had enough wood to survive several winters, though this would be his last one here.

He did it partly for the exercise, to loosen up and get his blood pumping. But mostly he did to align himself, spiritually and emotionally, to the world around him, to renew his relationship to the most reliable, dependable, and enduring thing in his life.

Wood.

It was comfort, warmth, and shelter. It was the roof over his head, the heat in his stove, and the bed where he slept. It was how he earned his living.

Wood was history and heritage. He could see the past in the rings of every log he cut, in the scratches on a tabletop, in the sag of a bed frame, and in the fading planks of a home's siding. And he could feel it in the rough bark of the pines, in the smooth handle of his grandfather's ax, and in the memories emanating from the cabin walls like heat from an ember that never cooled.

And wood was pain, sorrow, and loss. It was the pine coffin that he'd made for his wife, Janey, who'd died a year ago in the bed they'd shared in the cabin that he'd built for her.

But each morning, with each swing of the ax and snap of split wood, his heartache ebbed and his reconnection to the life he was about to lose was strengthened.

Matt was shirtless this morning, a sheen of sweat on his muscled body despite the cold. He had a rugged physique and tanned skin that came from labor, not applied through hours spent in gyms and sunning on chaise lounges. His body was lived in, not worn like a stylish, tailored suit. It was real muscle, as Janey liked to say.

He stacked the wood in the storage shed, hung his ax and gloves on their pegs, and went back to the cabin, where he took a cold shower and dressed in his usual mud-caked work boots, faded jeans, and a heavy flannel shirt over a gray hoodie.

He made his bed, looked wistfully at Janey's photo on the nightstand, and remembered all the mornings that he'd awakened to her smile and her warmth before the cancer claimed her two days shy of her thirtieth birthday.

This, too, was part of his morning routine.

He had a quick breakfast of black coffee and buttermilk biscuits, got in his pickup truck, and headed down the hill towards Deerpark, a logging town built on the banks of the Chewelah River.

The truck bounced along the rutted old logging road, past a few scattered cabins and old farmhouses, before hitting the smattering of mobile homes that dotted the weedy fields at the bottom of the hill.

Matt was surprised to see his old buddy Andy Goodis leaning against Lissy Okrum's dented mailbox, smoking a cigarette and watching the road, obviously waiting for him to show up, though they hadn't made any plans.

Andy was brown haired and blue eyed, laid-back and loose limbed. He wore torn jeans, a faded denim work shirt over a white thermal T, a leather jacket, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. He looked like he was auditioning to be a model in a Levi's ad, something that might have been within the realm of possibility if not for his nose, which had been broken so many times that it looked like it had been molded out of Play-Doh by a very untalented child.

Matt pulled over in front of the mailbox and looked out the passenger window at Lissy, standing on the steps to her mobile home in her pink bathrobe and cradling a mug of coffee in her hands. Her patch of land was overgrown with weeds and she had a Buick up on blocks, where it had become a home to cats and other strays. Her bed was like that, too.

In high school, she'd been revered for her tit fucking. The boys lined up for the experience. Matt had been one of them. That was more than twenty years ago. Now Lissy was a cashier at the supermarket, and ever since Janey died, she smiled at Matt the same way she did that day in her father's shed when she removed her shirt.

Matt waved at her politely and she waved back. Andy flicked his cigarette in the mud and got into the truck.

"Thanks for the lift," Andy said. "My truck is down at the Longhorn."

"Ernie took your keys?" Matt asked as he got back on the road.

Andy nodded. “I was shit-faced drunk."

"You'd have to be to land in Lissy's bed again."

"Lissy's not so bad. She still knows how to use those tits, even if she can sweep the floor with 'em now. She asked about you. Wanted to know how you were doing."

"What did you say?"

"I said she should go up and see you sometime in your monastery, that you're lonely up there."

"I'm not," Matt said.

"Of course you are. When was the last time you had a woman?"

"You know the answer to that question."

Andy shook his head. “No wonder you're chopping so much wood. Save a forest and jerk off instead."

Matt grinned despite himself. “You're an asshole."

"That's what you like about me," Andy said, grinning back at him. “I do all the things you don't have the balls to do. It's been that way since we were kids."

"I never wanted to steal Mr. Erdmann's Mustang and drive it through the front window of the Nussbaums' store."

"You wanted a Mustang, didn't you?"

"I was eleven," Matt said.

"But I got us the Mustang, didn't I?" Andy said. “I'm just saying that while other people dream, I make dreams happen."

They drove through the center of town in silence. Most of the storefronts on Main Street were empty, the businesses long since euthanized by Walmart and the big-box retailers along the highway.

Matt pulled into the Longhorn parking lot beside Andy's pickup. Ernie had left the keys for Andy on the front tire, as he always did. There was no danger of anyone stealing Andy's truck. It was old, dented, and rust eaten and would have been recognized as Andy's anywhere in Clarion County.

"Thanks for the lift," Andy said. “See you at work."

"Maybe I should stick around and make sure it starts up," Matt said. “You don't want to show up late again."

"Bye, Grandma," Andy said, turning his back on Matt and walking to the car.

"What if you need a jump start?"

"I'll call triple-fucking-A." Andy snatched the keys and unlocked his door.

"You don't belong to triple-fucking-A. I'm your triple-fucking-A."

Andy climbed into his truck and started the engine. Or at least he tried. It didn't catch.

He looked up sheepishly at Matt, who sighed, reached behind his seat, and pulled out his jumper cables. Rescuing Andy was just another part of his routine, one that Matt would have been shocked to learn would continue even after his own death.

February 20, 2011

The forest rangers dug Matt's frozen corpse from the ice, zipped it up in a body bag, and had it delivered to the Clarion County morgue cooler, where it was left to slowly defrost like a Butterball turkey the night before Thanksgiving.

Matt's body was stacked on a shelf above Aurelio Rojas, age twenty-seven, who'd had eight margaritas too many and whose head and torso were packaged separately as a result of his freeway collision with a big rig, whose unlucky driver was bagged one shelf below and who, at the moment Aurelio's Chevy Cobalt crossed the median and slammed into him, had been thinking erotic and anatomically impossible thoughts about his upcoming sexual encounter with Carla DuPont, who was waiting for him at the Motel 6 in Bigsby and who, when he didn't show up, assumed she'd been fucked and dumped for the umpteenth time and, facing her fourth abortion in ten years, slit her throat with a box cutter.

But Clarion County assistant coroner Lyle Whittaker knew nothing about Carla DuPont, or what other dominos of fate had been toppled by the three corpses on his Sunday morning to-do list of autopsies. To him, the corpses were just leftover tasks from the previous shift that he had to complete.

Being a coroner was just a job to him, not a calling, an ambition, or even a remote interest.

He'd been struggling through medical school when, one day in class, as he was about to cut into a cadaver, he had an epiphany.

It would be a hell of a lot easier working with dead people than trying to heal the living.

The idea became even more appealing after he watched a bunch of those CSI shows, which made the profession seem outrageously cool.

He could definitely see himself wearing Armani, driving a chrome-plated Hummer, and fucking a woman like Eva La Rue.

As it turned out, the profession was cool, but only in terms of the room temperature of his workplace.

He ended up wearing Kirkland, driving a used Camry, and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

But even so, he wasn't bitter or unhappy.

Far from it.

He had a secure job that paid decently, that kept him from being a disgrace to his family of doctors, that required no customer service skills, and that left him pretty much on his own to do as he pleased, which was spending hours playing World of Warcraft and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

And it looked like he'd be able to get back to Warcraft fairly quickly that Sunday morning. There were only three autopsies to do, and it wasn't like the cause of death in any of them was a great mystery. It was all by-the-numbers stuff.

Lyle decided to start with the simplest case, the guy who'd been buried in the December avalanche. He figured the body had probably defrosted enough to cut into by now.

The first thing Lyle noticed once he got Matthew Cahill's body on the table was that the corpse's skin didn't feel as cold or as rubbery as he expected, which meant something was wrong with the temperature-control mechanism in the cooler.

Not good.

The last thing Lyle wanted to walk into on his next shift was a cooler full of putrefying corpses. After he finished gutting Matthew Cahill, he'd alert maintenance to get the thermostat fixed right away.

Lyle took his scalpel and made a deep cut through the flesh at Matt's shoulder and was about to rip his way to the sternum and on down to the pelvis, so he could peel it all back, saw off the ribs, and remove the internal organs underneath.

He didn't get that far.

He'd barely moved his knife half an inch when he stopped what he was doing and stared in slack-jawed disbelief at what was underneath his blade.

Blood.

It seeped out of the wound like the juice from a ripe pomegranate.

Lyle watched in shock as the blood became a tiny rivulet, ran down the side of Matt's body, and dripped onto the steel table.

He stuck his gloved finger in the fluid and brought it up close to his eye just to be sure.

Yeah, it was blood.

But that was impossible.

The human body is mostly water. Within two hours under the ice it becomes a Popsicle with skin. On a molecular level, the crystallization shatters the cells, irreparably destroying organs and making resuscitation inconceivable.

The longest a person had ever survived being frozen was almost ninety minutes.

The longest any animal had been known to survive, in laboratory conditions, was three hours.

Matthew Cahill had been frozen for three months.

If the freezing didn't kill him, the oxygen deprivation alone would certainly have left him not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.

And yet…

He was bleeding.

And for that to happen, there had to be circulation, and for that to happen, there had to be a beating heart, and for that to happen, the central nervous system had to be firing neurons.

And for that to happen, there had to be life.

Lyle didn't have a stethoscope. There was no need for one in a morgue.

That left him only one immediate option for confirming what the blood was telling him, short of continuing his Y incision and cracking the body open to see what the hell was going on.

Swallowing hard, his hand shaking, he set the knife down on the instrument tray and leaned over the body, slowly and hesitantly placing his ear on Matthew Cahill's icy chest.

The skin was cold. But not deathly cold.

At first, all Lyle heard was his own blood pounding in his head. But then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

There it was.

Faint and muffled, but insistent…

It was like laying his head on a grave and hearing, through the six feet of dirt beneath him, someone pounding on the lid of their coffin.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

And as he heard it, he could see the blood continuing to seep from the wound that he'd cut in Matt's flesh.

There was no denying the evidence, as unbelievable as it was.

The dead man was alive.

Lyle ran to a phone and called 911.

November 18, 2010

The B. Barer and Sons Sawmill was built in the mid-1800s along a curve in the Chewelah River when the waterway was the best method for transporting logs from the northern forests to the mill and keeping them fresh until they could be cut.

Those forests had long since been stripped, graded, and reforested with tract homes, and the heavily polluted river was no longer used as a timber highway, but scores of logs were still stored in the man-made bay, less out of necessity than as a nostalgic nod to B. Barer and Sons' history.

So Matt figured that practice would end soon. Big changes were being made at the mill by the current generation of Barers in their effort to keep the business from collapsing, and nostalgia wasn't something they could afford anymore.

In desperation, the Barers had finally brought in an outside consultant, whose previous experience had been in the soft drink industry, to modernize their operations and find ways to save money. Roger Silbert was hated by the hard-core loggers, some of whom were fourth-generation workers in the yard, because he knew nothing about wood and had probably never held a saw in his life.

For decades, the mill ran on six circle rigs in four separate buildings. The logs were loaded on a sliding carriage and fed into a circular saw, where they were shaved and squared off into cants, which were turned after each cut by men with cant hooks, then re-fed down the line to the blade to be cut again and again, the lumber off-loaded and stacked with each pass.

It was a manpower-intensive operation that during peak periods required three eight-hour shifts and a hundred men throughout the plant to get the job done.

Matt had worked at the lumberyard since he was a teenager, and had done every job there was to do, before becoming a sawyer, the man running one of the circle rigs, an old Frick mill.

But for the last few days, he'd been running and testing a brand-new mill, a Wood-Mizer 3500, which Roger Silbert had urged the Barers to try out.

With the WM3500, the logs were loaded by a computerized, hydraulic system onto a stationary bed and were cut by a thin-kerf, laser-guided, vertical-blade band saw that passed over the cant on a gliding head.

Matt operated the system robotically from a chair at the head of the mill rig equipped with joysticks at the end of each armrest.

The log was turned hydraulically, and every piece of lumber that Matt cut from the cant was swept away by metal prongs behind the saw head as it slid back into starting position after each forward pass of the blade.

The freshly cut lumber was pushed down the line by a series of incline conveyors, roller decks, and pneumatic kickers and then off-loaded with hydraulic arms into neat stacks.

The WM3500 was a pleasure for Matt to operate. He was attuned to it in a way that he never was with the circle rig. It was all highly computerized, and yet cutting with it felt like an extension of himself and as natural as chopping wood each morning.

But he was ashamed of himself for liking it. He didn't have to be a professional hatchet man from Zippy Cola like Roger Silbert to recognize the savings that the WM3500 represented. The new system was more precise, yielding more lumber in less time. But it required half as many men to operate as the old circle rigs.

It was good news for the company and bad news for log hands and off bearers like Andy, who'd made their living with cant hooks and heavy lifting. It wasn't good for Deerpark, either.

Matt shut down the rig when he saw Rachel Owens come into the mill. She dressed like everyone else, in jeans and a flannel shirt, but she made it look stylish. She worked in the front office handling sales, but Matt knew she could do any job on the line as well as any of the men. Her father had been a logger.

Rachel approached his chair. “I was watching you cut. It looks like fun."

"Come on up and try it," he said.

"Only if I can sit on your lap."

He immediately blushed and looked around to see if anyone had heard her. She laughed at his embarrassment.

"Relax, Matt, nobody is paying any attention," she said. “Besides, it's not like there's a law against flirting."

But the truth was her remark was less flirtation than an honest expression of her desire.

They'd been seeing each other casually, going to movies and having dinner downriver in King City, for a few weeks now, but their romance hadn't advanced beyond some passionate kisses in the cab of his truck.

Something was holding him back and she knew exactly what it was-the simple gold wedding band that he still wore.

At first, the ring made him even sexier to Rachel. It demonstrated that he was a man of passion and deep emotion. But now she wanted to wrestle the ring off of his hand and throw it in the river.

The ring made Matt feel like he was cheating on his wife every time Rachel kissed him. He'd never said that to Rachel, of course, but it was obvious the way he tensed up whenever she touched him.

She thought it was time for him to get on with his life and, more urgently, get it on with her.

"What brings you down here?" he asked.

"You, of course. I'm looking forward to Saturday. Were you able to get us reservations at the lodge?"

He nodded. “It seems like everybody in Oregon had the same bright idea to go skiing this weekend, but I managed to get the last two rooms."

She'd call and cancel one of them as soon as she got back in the office. She had big plans for the weekend. “That's great. Deerpark is the last place we're going to want to be this weekend."

"Why is that?"

"Management is real impressed with the yields they're getting from this rig. They're going to retire the Fricks and order three more WM3500s."

"How many men are they going to let go?"

"Fifty, maybe more," she said. “It'll be in stages as the new rigs come in. But I'm sure your job is safe."

"I wasn't thinking about mine."

"Andy isn't your responsibility. He's barely even responsible for himself."

"That's why he needs me. When are they making the announcement?"

"Silbert is breaking the news to everybody today at lunch."

That gave Matt a whole hour to worry about how Andy would take it.

November 18, 2010

Roger Silbert gathered the employees in the yard, climbed up on the back of a flatbed truck, and addressed them with a bullhorn. He was thin, smelled of breath mints, and talked too fast. Today he wore a B. Barer and Sons cap to show that he was one of the guys despite his jacket, tie, and gold cufflinks.

There wasn't a man in the crowd who owned a pair of cufflinks or would buy a shirt that didn't have buttons that could do the job.

Matt stood beside Andy at the front of the crowd. Rachel stood on the periphery with the rest of the staffers from the front office building. The Barers were conspicuously absent, vacationing in Palm Springs for three weeks, as they did every winter.

Silbert began by reminding them of the bad economy, the sharp drop in new home construction nationwide, the influx of cheap lumber from other countries, and all the other ills that afflicted their industry, as if they didn't already know all about them, as if those worries weren't already keeping them up nights, or causing them to kick their dogs, or spend their weekends drunk, or put off going to their doctors for fear of what that hard bump under the skin, or that chronic pain, or that bleeding from the ass might turn out to be and what it might cost.

"We've had to take a hard look at how we do business and embrace new technologies that lower costs, conserve energy, produce greater yields, increase efficiency, and offer more operational flexibility," Silbert said.

Andy turned to Matt. “How many guys you got working on that new rig you've been playing with?"

Matt hesitated a second before answering. “Two."

"Shit," Andy said.

"So I'm pleased to announce that we'll be replacing our old, outdated equipment with the latest, cutting-edge equipment," Silbert said. “No pun intended."

He laughed, just to make sure everyone knew that his pun was intended and that he thought it was pretty witty. But half the men there had no idea what a pun was and no one was in the mood to laugh.

Andy spoke up. “When you say you're lowering costs, what you mean is that you're going to fire people."

"Unfortunately, there will be some reductions in our workforce," Silbert said. “But those who remain will have the security of working in a leaner, stronger, more efficient company that's better prepared to take on the challenges of the future."

"What you mean is that half of us, guys who have been here ten, twenty years, natural-born woodsmen, are going to be kicked onto the street to starve while you collect a bonus and move on to fire more hardworking men at another company in some other industry you don't know shit about."

"Let's not get overdramatic," Silbert said. “Nobody is going to starve. We'll be offering retraining programs, absolutely free, for all of our temporarily displaced workers."

"Training in what?" someone in the crowd called out.

"Word processing, website design, solar panel installation, computer repair," Silbert said, "and other exciting jobs in the new economy."

"I want to train for your job." Andy unbuckled his pants, let them drop, and then mooned Silbert. He bent over and peeked at Silbert from between his legs. “All I've got to do is figure out how to get my head up my ass and I'm qualified."

The crowd cheered and laughed. Silbert shook his head like a disapproving parent and lowered his bullhorn. There was nothing more to say and he knew it.

Matt smacked Andy's shoulder. “Pull up your pants. You're just making things worse."

"We're losing our jobs, Matt. Exactly how can things get any worse than that?"

"You might have kept yours before you did this."

"Yeah, right," Andy said, hiking up his pants.

Matt turned towards Silbert, who was walking back towards the main office building, and called out to him. “Are you going to fire Andy?"

Silbert stopped and faced Matt. “He's the first and only name on the list so far. He'll be out by the end of the day."

"If he goes," Matt said, "I go, too."

Andy looked at his friend in astonishment. A hush fell over the crowd.

"You're the best sawyer we've got," Silbert said. Then he moved a few steps closer to Matt and looked him in the eye. Matt could smell the wintergreen Life Savers on his breath. “But the beauty of the WM3500 is that now anybody can be the best sawyer we've got. Good luck to you both in your new endeavors."

Silbert turned his back on them and walked away. Matt looked past him to see Rachel, staring at him not with shock or anger, as he expected, but with disappointment.

"The fucking asshole," Andy muttered, snatching a long-handled cant hook from a nearby woodpile and advancing on Silbert from behind.

Matt rushed forward, tackling Andy just as he was raising the cant hook over his head. They hit the ground hard, rolling in the mud and sawdust, Matt wrestling the cant hook from Andy's hand.

Andy turned Matt on his back, straddled him, and raised his fist to deliver a hammer blow.

"Andy!" Matt called out.

His friend froze and blinked hard, like he was snapping out of a daydream. Andy looked at Matt, then in surprise at his own fist, poised to smash his friend's face in. He slowly lowered his arm and unclenched his fingers.

By now other loggers had gathered around them. They pulled Andy off of Matt, who raised his hand up to his friend for a lift to show there were no hard feelings.

But Andy just backed away until he was swallowed up in the crowd and disappeared from Matt's sight.

Another logger took Matt's hand and helped him up. Matt thanked him, slapped the dirt off his clothes, and went to clean out his locker.

Twenty minutes later, Matt and Rachel sat across from each other in a booth at the Denny's on the edge of town. They each had a cup of lousy coffee in front of them and picked at a piece of banana cream pie that looked incredible but tasted synthetic.

"How could you not have known that Andy was guilty?" she asked.

"Maybe I want to see the best in people."

"Or you're blind, at least when it comes to him. What's he got on you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did he take a bullet for you? Give you his kidney? Or does he have pictures of you doing something terrible, like molesting little boys? Whatever it is, it must be huge."

"It's loyalty," Matt said.

"That's it?"

"It's huge to me. He's my oldest friend. I'll always have his back. That's all there is to it."

"But he's an asshole," she said.

"Not to me."

" Especially to you. How come everyone else can see it and you can't?"

Matt set down his fork. “You want to know what I see when I look at Andy?"

She nodded.

"Terror," he said.

It began with a sore back.

At first, Janey thought she'd twisted something the wrong way as she was lifting a box of school supplies out of the pickup truck. Matt was always telling her to lift with her knees, not her lower back, and she always ignored him.

But the ache wouldn't go away. After a week or two of ice packs, massages, and enough Advil to eat away half her stomach lining, she gave in and saw the doctor, something she absolutely hated to do. She saw it as a sign of weakness, a failure of character, and an avoidable expense. But it was the only way, short of hitting up one of her drug-dealing high school students, to get her hands on some Vicodin.

She went in for her aching back, but all the doctor wanted to talk about was some freckle he saw right above her hip. Janey found it incredibly irritating, especially when he refused to give her a prescription for painkillers until she went across the hall to see a dermatologist, an old coot with hair coming out of his ears who insisted on cutting the freckle out with what felt like a razor-edged melon baller.

But he stitched her up, gave her the Vicodin, and sent her back home.

Two days later, she got The Call. The little freckle was malignant.

It turned out that the freckle was a tiny speck of an unusually aggressive, particularly corrosive strain of skin cancer that had metastasized, wrapped itself around her lower spine, and then went straight up to her brain, where it was spreading like an oil slick.

Within just a few weeks, she was in the hospital and grim-faced doctors were telling Matt it was time to talk with Janey about her "end of life" wishes.

She had no wishes for death. All of her wishes were about life, and the future she and Matt were supposed to have together.

But now her future was measured in the steady drip of fluids into her IV, which was pumping her full of drugs that dulled her pain but fogged her thinking.

She'd long since lost the will to eat and was being nourished by a feeding tube. She pissed through a catheter and crapped into a bedpan, unable to make it to the restroom any longer.

Janey mostly slept. When she was awake, she was rarely lucid, more often dazed, incoherent, irrational, and irritable. Only occasionally would the real Janey emerge and offer him a tender smile and a look of sadness, and then she'd disappear into herself again.

Matt spent his days sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, soothing her as best he could.

There was a couch in the room that folded out into a hide-a-bed, but he'd usually fall asleep in his chair, still holding his wife's hand.

As he had now.

It was the coldness that woke him up. It was like he was holding on to an icicle.

He jerked awake to find a doctor he'd never seen before standing on the other side of her bed, looking down at Janey, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with her labored, rasping breathing.

The doctor had a jaunty demeanor, as if he was waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to finish their rhyme before breaking into song. He was wearing a round reflector band on his head, and an outrageously large stethoscope dangled from his neck.

"Why is she so cold?" Matt asked him.

"Perhaps because she's dead." The doctor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and then held a selection of lollipops out to Matt like a sugary bouquet. “Want a lollipop?"

"She can't be dead," Matt said, glancing at the EKG, the little light bouncing across the screen. “Her heart is still beating."

"Really?" the doctor put on his stethoscope and touched the diaphragm to her chest. “We can't have that."

The instant the stethoscope touched her flesh, the skin turned black, curling back and exposing her muscle and sinew, which rapidly rotted away, revealing her sternum and internal organs, which were riddled with yellow pus.

"No!" Matt screamed, lunging for the doctor, but it was too late. The rot was spreading up to her lovely face, devouring it, revealing her skull, eroding the bone itself, and exposing her brain, where maggots feasted on the gelatinous lobes as one writhing, squirming, squiggly mass that spewed out of her cranial cavity and over her entire body.

Matt looked up in horror at the doctor, who unwrapped a lollipop and began sucking on it in an outrageously lewd and suggestive way.

That's when Matt noticed the doctor's orange hair, the round, red ball on the tip of his nose, and the smile painted around his lips.

He wasn't a doctor at all. He was a clown.

The clown took the sucker out of his mouth. “We are going to have so much fun together, Matt."

And that's when Matt woke up, disoriented and afraid, his heart pounding.

It took him a few long seconds to realize that he'd had a nightmare, and that he was in his cabin and not the hospital, and that Janey was long dead.

So the worst part of the nightmare was true.

He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was 4:11 a.m., several hours until dawn. But he knew there was no way he could get back to sleep now. So he got up, put on his clothes, and went out into the frigid darkness to chop wood.

Perhaps if Matt hadn't been in such a hurry to get out of the room, and if it wasn't so dark, he might have noticed the lollipop wrapper on the floor…

…and the maggots squirming beneath his bed.

November 19, 2010

The original lodge at Mammoth Peaks was essentially a massive log cabin with several stone chimneys. It was the only authentic building in the resort. The stores, restaurants, and condos mimicked the look of the lodge, with facades of fake stone and artificially weathered timber that might not have seemed so artificial if the real thing wasn't right next door.

Matt and Rachel were staying in the lodge, surrounded by the natural, rustic warmth of that aged timber, in a room with a huge fireplace and a bed made of carved wood that was eerily similar to the one in Matt's cabin.

Rachel didn't know that, since she'd never been in Matt's bedroom, and thought his discomfort was the lingering result of the embarrassing "mix-up" in their reservations that meant they now had to share a room.

"I am so sorry about this," Matt said. “I really did reserve two rooms."

"You don't have to keep apologizing," she said. “I honestly don't mind."

Especially since she'd dishonestly canceled the reservation herself and was relieved when the desk clerk told them the hotel was entirely booked up.

"You can take the bed," Matt said. “I'll be fine on the couch."

She stepped close to him and draped her arms around his neck. “I want to sleep with you."

Rachel could feel him stiffen up, but not in the way she would have liked. His shoulders got tight and he pulled ever so slightly away from her. She responded by pressing herself against him and giving him a deep, tender kiss.

She could feel him relax, and his hands found the small of her back. He didn't move away.

"I don't know if I am ready for this," he said.

Rachel never knew a man who wasn't ready for sex, and yet here he was, going so achingly, frustratingly slow. In a way, it was sexy, like the longest foreplay ever. But she was ready for it to end.

"All I'm asking is for you to hold me close, to let me fall asleep in your arms, and to let me wake up beside you in the morning," she said. “Does that really sound so awful?"

"No, it doesn't." He kissed her softly. “It sounds very nice."

Rachel resisted the temptation to suggest that they take a little nap right now, which was smart, since it wasn't even eleven a.m. yet.

She smiled and broke away from him.

"Let's hit the slopes," she said.

February 20, 2011

If a skier manages not to be smashed against a tree, or carried over a cliff, or crushed by the weight of the snow and debris, he can survive an avalanche.

For about twenty minutes.

After that, most survivors of the initial impact and burial will die of asphyxiation.

A few lucky ones might find a pocket of air and hold on as their body temperature plummets and blood is diverted from their extremities to their vital organs.

The cruel truth, though, is that even if they manage to be rescued alive, they are still very likely to die, except in the cushy comfort of a hospital bed, a catheter and an IV shoved into them, instead of in an icy grave.

The key to surviving an avalanche is to be rescued within that first, critical half hour.

Matthew Cahill was under the ice for three months.

The facts of the case were unbelievable, so Dr. Jack Travis, the trauma specialist on call in the emergency room, chose to ignore them and deal instead with what he saw in front of him: a patient suffering from extreme hypothermia, typical of someone buried under the snow for an hour instead of months.

In all likelihood, Matt was headed right back to the morgue.

Hypothermia was a condition that Travis, having worked in the ski resort community for a decade, had plenty of experience dealing with.

Matt's body temperature on arrival was sixty-nine degrees. Travis covered him with heating blankets and put him on an epinephrine drip to elevate his blood pressure.

The patient was totally unresponsive to stimuli and his pupils didn't react to light, which indicated to Travis that Matt had suffered anoxic encephalopathy-severe and irreversible brain damage.

Travis ordered a complete metabolic panel, chest X-rays, and an MRI to see just how grim things were. But when the results came back, the doctor was stunned by what he saw.

The blood oxygen and muscle enzyme counts were normal.

The lungs were clear.

And the brain scan showed no swelling at all.

It was as if Matthew Cahill wasn't hypothermic at all, just deeply asleep.

But with the nerve response, pupil dilation, and core body temperature of a corpse.

And he was rapidly defrosting.

There really was nothing Travis could do except wonder how it was possible and wait to see what happened next.

So that's exactly what he did.

He pulled a stool up beside Matt's bed and waited, along with the leaders of nearly every department in the hospital except pediatrics and oncology.

But even those two department heads found excuses to be in the ER, having heard the news, which was already beginning to spread far beyond Mammoth Peaks.

In fact, a stooped-backed fisherman floating down the Yangtze River in a flat-bottomed wooden sampan was using his iPhone to catch up on the hash-marked tweets about "the frozen man" at the exact moment that Matthew Cahill startled everyone in the ER by taking a sharp breath and opening his eyes.

Travis bolted up and leaned over Matt, looking into the man's questioning eyes.

"You're alive," Travis said.

It was supposed to be a reassuring statement, but to Matthew Cahill, it sounded more like a question, one that he was expected to answer.

Matt was fortunate that he was taken to a university hospital, not so much for their medical expertise and wide resources, but for their selfishness and greed.

The university was known in the scientific community for offering lucrative salaries to researchers in return for retaining the patents on anything that anybody created or discovered, accidentally or intentionally, while on their payroll.

The university was also known among pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, equipment manufacturers, and third world dictatorships as a shameless whore that would sell those patents to whoever offered the best prices, the biggest endowments, the most endowed escorts, the highest bribes, and the most decadent perks.

So it was in the university's financial interest, over the three short days that followed Matt's admittance to the ER, to downplay reports of his miraculous rebirth and to keep him, and whatever lucrative secrets his body might hold, all to themselves.

The hospital's public affairs director did an excellent job deflecting press inquiries by not exactly denying the facts, but by pointing out how ridiculous and unbelievable they were, implying that it was all either an elaborate hoax or a big mistake.

The university was helped in their efforts by Matt's refusal to grant any interviews, take any calls, see any visitors, or allow any information about his condition to be shared with the media.

But most of all, the university benefitted from the media's short attention span, their insatiable hunger for news, and the timely discovery of video of a teenage Disney starlet enthusiastically engaged in a naked three-way with a couple of shockingly tumescent Nick at Nite boy toys.

Life after death couldn't compete with celebrity jailbait sex, so Matthew Cahill was forgotten even faster than he'd been discovered.

But not by the doctors or the scientific community.

They all wanted to take a sample of something, anything, from Matthew Cahill.

Unfortunately for them, they would have to make do with what they got from him in the first few hours after his arrival in the hospital. Because after that, as he rapidly regained his strength and became fully aware of his situation, he refused to allow any further blood tests, or X-rays, or CT scans, and rejected virtually all medical treatment beyond IV fluids the first day or so, and stitches to the cut the coroner made.

Dr. Travis and all the other doctors on the team, now numbering well over a dozen, strenuously objected to Matt's decision, warning him of all sorts of dire outcomes. But having survived the most dire of all outcomes, Matt was not swayed.

So on the morning of the fourth day, the doctors went off to conspire with hospital administrators and left him alone in his room to ponder his strange fate.

The last thing he remembered was looking over his shoulder and seeing that wave of snow closing in on him. And then he woke up in the ER.

He didn't much care how, or why, he'd managed to survive. He certainly didn't consider it a miracle. If anything, it was a cruel joke that his demise was quick, painless, and revocable, while his wife's demise was comparatively slow, unbearably agonizing, and utterly final.

Where was her reprieve?

Why was he spared the suffering and finality of death when she was not?

He would gladly have traded his survival for hers, only nobody had offered him that opportunity.

But Matt was a practical man, not one for pondering the philosophical meaning of things. He took events as they came.

And the fact was, he was glad to be alive, to feel the warmth of the sun and the light breeze coming through the open window.

He didn't care how it had happened.

He simply accepted that it had.

And all he wanted to do now was get on with life as if his death had never happened.

And to see Rachel again. He found himself longing to be in her arms, to feel her warmth, to hold her close as he fell asleep.

As he thought about that, and how comforting and safe it would feel, he drifted into a light sleep, waking up again moments later when he sensed someone else in the room.

It was another doctor, standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his chart.

"I thought I told you that I'm done," Matt said. “You can take that chart with you when you go."

The doctor looked up, and Matt saw that he wasn't Travis or any of the others on the team.

But Matt knew him.

Even without the old-style reflector on his head and the enormous stethoscope around his neck. It was in the mischief in his eyes and the jauntiness of his pose.

It was Janey's doctor.

From hell.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" The doctor grinned, toying with his stethoscope. “Should I listen for a heartbeat?"

Matt remembered the horrible things that had happened when the doctor listened to Janey's heart.

But that was a nightmare.

Which meant…

"You're not real," Matt said.

"What about all the rest?" The doctor said. “This hospital room, the sunlight through the window, or you in that bed?"

There was something unnaturally still about the air. The window was open, but the drapes weren't fluttering in the breeze. Matt could see flecks of dust floating in place in the streams of sunlight.

"All of that will be out there when I open my eyes," Matt said. “But you won't be. You're nothing but a cartoon character in my nightmare."

"Has it occurred to you that perhaps it's the other way around?"

"That doesn't make any sense."

"And what happened to you does? C'mon, Matt. You were consumed by an avalanche, swept off a cliff, and buried in snow for three months. But here you are, alive and well, not a scratch on you. We both know that's impossible. So what does that tell you?"

The doctor from hell had a point, one that made more sense than everything else that had happened to Matt over the last three days. Matt was nothing if not pragmatic.

"I'm dead," Matt said.

"Don't look so sad," the doctor said. “Death has its advantages. For one thing, there's no need for pricey medical insurance."

"What are you talking about?" Matt said. “I don't give a shit about insurance."

"You may not, but we do." It was a woman's voice, and it came from the foot of the bed.

Matt turned to her. She was a young, short-haired woman with glasses, wearing a crisp white blouse and a tight skirt and holding a file folder to her bosom.

"We are not in the business of giving away medical care, Mr. Cahill. That wouldn't be much of a business, would it? You left your job at B. Barer and Sons the day before your accident and, as of that moment, lost your company medical coverage. You are uninsured. That means you are financially responsible for all the costs that you have incurred since being-how should I put this?-disinterred. The cost is well into six figures."

"Who are you?" Matt asked.

"I told you when I came in. Janet Dorcott, senior vice president of hospital administration. This inability to focus is yet another reason why you should heed your doctor's sound advice and remain here until we know the true nature of your medical condition."

"I'm dead," Matt said.

"You would be if not for the heroic efforts of our physicians and the resources of this hospital. But as I said, that all comes with a price."

"Now this really is a nightmare." Matt turned to the doctor, but he was gone. In fact, so was the strange stillness. The drapes were fluttering in the light breeze again.

That led him to conclude that the conversation with the doctor wasn't real. But that this conversation with Dorcott was actually happening.

Which meant he'd been having a waking nightmare.

That simple realization was scarier to Matt than anything the freakish doctor or this irritating woman had said.

And she was still talking.

"However, with a little cooperation from you, we are willing to waive a substantial portion of the costs of your past and continued care. All we ask is that you stay here for a few more days and that you agree to ongoing, and exclusive, participation in some simple, and perhaps minimally invasive, testing to maintain your good health and to ascertain what happened to you."

She flashed a smile so forced, so synthetic, that for a moment he wondered if he was dreaming again, or if she might be some kind of android.

Her smile couldn't hide what her offer really meant.

Imprisonment. They'd never let him out, at least not until they understood how he survived death and they could replicate it in a blue pill or an expensive procedure that they could profit from.

He was feeling fine and didn't much care how it was possible.

What Matt needed now was to get back to his life, to center himself.

He needed to chop some wood.

"I'm leaving," he said. “Right now."

Matt threw off his sheets, yanked the IV out of his arm, and stood up.

Dorcott looked at the blood trickling down his arm like it was gold.

Who knew what secrets, what pharmaceutical breakthroughs, were dripping uselessly to the floor?

It reminded her of what her preacher said to the boys he caught whacking off, about the unforgiveable sin of wasted seed.

If God wasn't happy about that, imagine how pissed off he was about this.

Almost as enraged as the regents, not to mention the hospital accounting department, would be with her if she let Matt leave.

The fact was, Matt hadn't signed a single piece of paper since he was admitted.

The university had no claim on him, no clear title to his blood and tissue or to the billions of dollars that could be derived from them.

Then again, if he walked out without paying his bills, and a few years down the road they made discoveries based on what little of his bodily fluids they had, maybe they could argue that what they were doing was simply recouping their debt, plus interest.

Or maybe not.

Janet thought about tearing her shirt open, screaming rape, and calling security. The idea kind of excited her, but she let it go.

"You can't just walk out of here," she said. “You have a moral, ethical, and legal obligation to pay us."

Matt looked at the blood seeping out of his arm and found it as reassuring as the coroner had found it shocking.

Dead men don't bleed.

"Send me the bill," he said and walked past her to the door, his naked ass peeking out of the opening in the back of his gown.

As soon as Matt left the room, Janet Dorcott did three things. She called the lab to collect the drops of blood on the floor, she called Dr. Travis to fill out a commitment order, and she called security, telling them to stop Matthew Cahill from leaving.

Matt took the stairs down to the lobby. When he emerged, he was stunned to see Rachel sitting on a couch, which she'd turned into her own little encampment. There were blankets, pillows, and fast-food containers everywhere. She'd obviously been waiting there for days.

He smiled at her. “Could I get a ride?"

It took her a moment to realize that yes, it really was Matthew Cahill standing in front of her with his butt hanging out.

She leapt from the couch and ran into his arms, nearly tackling him.

They embraced, and then she stepped back to look at him again, as if to confirm she wasn't seeing things.

"It really is you," she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “When they said on the news that you were alive, I didn't believe it."

"I still don't," he said and gestured to the couch. “Were you living here?"

"I came here as soon as I heard. I tried to see you, to call you, but they wouldn't let me. So I planted myself here. There was no way I was going to leave here without you."

He looked over her shoulder and saw two beefy security guards marching their way.

Rachel followed his gaze, then moved away from Matt as the men approached.

"You're going back to your room," one of the guards said to him.

"You can't hold me here," Matt said. “I'm not a prisoner."

"Yes, we can. Your doctor has determined that you are delusional and a threat to yourself and others," the guard said. “He's having you committed to the university mental hospital."

After his waking nightmare, Matt couldn't argue with the doctor's diagnosis, but he doubted that the commitment was for his own good as much as the university's. They would do everything they could to keep him as a scientific asset to poke, prod, and maybe even dissect.

Matt balled his hands into fists. He didn't know if he could take them both, but he was certainly capable of messing them up bad, despite having been dead for a few months. He felt as strong and as capable as he had the day he died.

And that knowledge made him smile.

He wanted to fight.

Bring it on, assholes.

The guards could see the change in his expression and realized that Matt might actually be crazy.

Scary crazy.

But before the guards could make a move, or Matt could throw his first punch, Rachel stepped between them and sprayed the guards with Mace.

The guards squealed and staggered back, rubbing their eyes. As they did, she kneed one, and then the other, hard in the groin, doubling them over in agony.

"Fuck you," she said to them, then turned to Matt. “Let's go home."

Afterwards, as they lay entwined in the sheets, Rachel rested her head on Matt's chest and listened to the miraculous, comforting sound of his heartbeat as he stroked her hair.

"There were a hundred forest rangers and skiers out on the slopes after the avalanche, probing the ice with poles, looking for you," she said, knowing that she was already breaking the implied promise that she'd made to him in the car at Costco. “We couldn't find you. I didn't want to leave, even after it was clear you couldn't possibly have survived. After a few days, the forest rangers gave up, closed off the area, and said we'd just have to wait until spring, and the snowmelt, to recover your body."

"Here I am," he said.

Yes, he was. She lifted her head off his chest and rolled onto her side, so she could look at him while she spoke, to remind herself that it was true.

"I was blamed by a lot of people for what happened to you, for skiing on a dangerously steep, backcountry run and for not carrying avalanche transceivers. But their blame didn't compare to how much I blamed myself."

"Forget about it. None of that matters now," he said. “I'm alive and I don't blame you for a thing."

She kissed him and looked into his eyes. “There was a memorial service for you. It was beautiful. I cried all the way through it. So did a lot of people. They are going to want to see you again."

"I know," he said, already dreading those awkward reunions, and all the inevitable questions, but knowing that he'd have to get them out of the way soon if he wanted to go back to his life the way it was. “But one on one, as they come along. I don't want to make a big thing out of it."

"It is a big thing, whether you want to acknowledge it or not," she said. “You came back from the dead. Don't you feel any different now?"

"Of course," he said, giving one of her nipples a pinch. “Don't you?"

"What I mean is, what does it feel like to be resurrected?"

He didn't have any memory of dying. One moment, he saw the mountain of snow bearing down on him and the next he was looking into Dr. Travis' stunned face. He had no idea what it actually felt like to die and be reborn.

But then he realized that wasn't entirely true.

"I know what it feels like," he said, "but not because I was buried in an avalanche."

She sat up and looked at him. “I don't understand."

"I've been dead ever since Janey died. Today, with you, is the first time I've really felt alive since that moment." He slipped the wedding ring off of his finger and set it on the nightstand. “You brought me back, Rachel. Nothing else did."

Rachel kissed him and suddenly wanted to do everything they'd just done all over again.

"That's very nice, but you didn't answer my question." She reached between his legs and was surprised, and pleased, to discover that he was already hard, but no more surprised, and pleased, than he was to reach for her and discover that she was already wet. “How does it feel?"

"It feels like-" He searched for the right word, but then she climbed on top of him, took him deep inside of her, and began to slowly grind against him, making it difficult for him to concentrate.

So he didn't. He let go. He let the right word find itself.

"It feels like love," he said.

"I may never let you leave this bed," she said.

"I may never want to," he said.

Matt spent the next week at Rachel's house, sanding and restaining her cabinets, replacing the dry-rotted wood around her windows, and repairing her fence while she was at work at the sawmill.

He found that working with the wood, which Rachel brought home from the mill, centered him and eased him back into the flow of day-to-day life again.

The fantastic sex, home-cooked meals, and loving, tender company of a good woman didn't hurt, either.

Maybe it was because of all those things, the comfort and the security, that he didn't have any more waking nightmares or delusions.

He also hadn't bumped into Andy again.

The truth was, Matt was thankful that his oldest friend hadn't showed up. He was afraid of what he might see.

What the hell was that on his face?

What did it mean?

But Matt wasn't in hiding. He and Rachel went out for dinner a few times and went shopping in town. So he'd already run into people he knew and even more he didn't know.

He didn't see any more putrid sores or any imaginary doctors from hell.

But did hear again and again about how unbelievable and impossible and miraculous his return was.

Those encounters made him uncomfortable and, as glad as he was to see his friends and as appreciative as he was of their happiness for him, he was also eager to get away from them.

He didn't like the attention. He wanted to go back to being just another face in the crowd.

His intention was to move in with Rachel and make a living as an independent carpenter. But he was quickly coming to the conclusion that the only way he'd be able to have a normal, anonymous life again was if they moved somewhere else, where nobody knew him.

He was planning on talking about it with Rachel when she got home from work at the sawmill. But before he could get around to it, she practically tackled him to the floor and fucked him with such animal ferocity that he thought she might morph into a werewolf when she came.

The enthusiastically carnal encounter left them both ravenous, so she insisted that they go out for something to eat. Considering how nice she'd been to screw him nearly senseless the second she walked through the door, and considering the sacrifice he was about to ask of her, he told her they could eat anyplace she wanted.

He was hoping for the Charles, the hotel restaurant with the best steaks in town, or maybe La Reve, the French restaurant on the river.

She picked Happy Burger.

A regional fast-food franchise just outside of town, off of Highway 99.

He was disappointed, but if that was what she craved, he was happy to oblige.

Besides, it was her money that they were spending. He was penniless. He'd willed Andy what little he had in his bank account, and his buddy had already drunk his way through it.

Happy Burger had been around since the 1950s and was one of the chief employers of teenagers and high school dropouts in Deerpark.

All the workers wore uniforms made up of white pants, patriotically red-white-and-blue-striped shirts, and caps that looked like smiling hamburgers on a plate.

The employees were required, at all times and under all circumstances, to have smiles on their faces as big and happy as the one on the Happy Burger on their heads.

That was one reason why teens who worked at Happy Burger never got laid. The other was that they were usually as greasy as the fries they served.

But the place made fantastic burgers, thick and juicy, with a big slab of melted American cheese on top.

Matt and Rachel could smell the burgers grilling from half a block away, even with the car windows rolled up. By the time they parked and walked in, their stomachs were growling so loudly that they sounded like slavering wolves.

A blond-haired teenage girl with breasts as perky and happy as her smile was waiting to take their order at the register. Her name tag read "Bubbles." Her given name was actually Lorinda Dudikoff, but when she was a toddler, she used to delight in farting in the bathtub, a pastime that both she and her parents found utterly hilarious. The Dudikoffs had more footage of those fart bubbles, and from more angles, than James Cameron had of the sinking of the Titanic. They started calling their daughter Bubbles from that moment on, and it stuck.

The truth was, she still liked to fart in the bathtub.

And to masturbate while she did it.

And to have her boyfriend watch.

And to have him masturbate, too.

But you'd never know any of that looking at her and are probably sorry that you know it now.

"Good evening," Bubbles said. “Welcome to Happy Burger. What can I get for you?"

"A big, fat, double hamburger. Greasy fries. And an extra-large chocolate shake," Rachel said, then turned to Matt, who was still scrutinizing the menu, even though he'd known it by heart since he was a child. “Have the same thing."

"That meal will kill you," he said.

"But you know you want it," she said. “Go ahead, Matt-live a little."

"Fine, make it a double," Matt said as his attention was drawn to the man standing behind Bubbles, stuffing burgers into to-go containers. The man's back was to them, but Matt recognized him. “Andy?"

His friend turned around.

Andy had the face of a decomposing corpse, yellowed teeth and bulging, bloodshot eyeballs poking through a rotting mass of dripping, maggot-infested flesh topped with a Happy Burger hat.

The smell of decay was overwhelming. It reminded Matt of the carcasses the neighborhood dog would leave under his house when he was growing up. But this wretched odor was worse than any stench that had ever seeped up from the floorboards.

"Don't be sad, don't be blue, Happy Burger has treats for you!" Andy sang, the incessant beeping of the French fryer alarm as his musical backdrop.

Matt grabbed Rachel by the arm and took a big step back from the counter.

Andy cocked his head quizzically. “What's wrong? Haven't you ever seen a captain of industry before?"

Matt couldn't take his eyes off of Andy's rotting face. He knew it wasn't real, that it was just a delusion, but it was so vivid, so horrifying.

But if you don't want to be institutionalized for the rest of your second life, you'll pretend it's not there.

So Matt forced a smile that would have made Happy Burger proud and stepped back up to the counter.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he said. “Your new look just takes some getting used to-that's all."

But does it have to smell so bad, too?

"It was either take the job or starve to death," Andy said. “You've been dead. Did I make the right choice?"

Fat horseflies buzzed around Andy's face, laying more of their eggs in the putrid, bubbling flesh that dripped off of his exposed skull.

Andy's neck was swollen taut, and Matt could see things squirming under the skin, waiting to break through.

Time seemed to slow down, and the beeping of the French fryer got louder and harsher, making it difficult for Matt to think.

Matt glanced at Bubbles, standing there with that dumb smile on her angelic face. If she saw the horror, she wasn't showing it.

And neither was Rachel.

She wasn't repulsed at all. If anything, she seemed absolutely delighted by what she saw.

It wasn't real.

He had to keep telling himself that, even as he breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench and fought to avert his gaze from Andy's melting face.

"This is only temporary," Matt said. “You won't be here long."

"Sure-today, employee of the week," Andy said. “Tomorrow, chairman of the board."

A kid, his face covered with acne, came out from the back of the kitchen, his big Happy Burger smile showing off the shiny braces on his teeth. His name was Chip, short for Chipper, because of his upbeat and positive attitude. He was born to be a Happy Burger manager, and eventually its CFO, and he knew it. This job was just a stepping-stone. One day there would be a plaque outside this restaurant in his honor.

That was true, there would be, but not for the reasons he thought.

"Hey, Andy, the French fries are ready," Chip said. “Can't you hear the alarm?"

"In a minute, kid," Andy said. “I'm talking to a couple of my friends."

"The fries have already been in the oil ten seconds too long."

Andy whirled around and looked at the kid. The rapid motion splattered bits of Andy's face on Chip's shirt. Matt fought the urge to gag.

"I'll be two more seconds," Andy said and then looked back at his two friends.

Matt could see a little tear opening up in Andy's swollen neck, a maggot working its way out.

"It's okay, Andy, we were just leaving," Matt said, trying not to look as one maggot, and then another, crawled out of Andy's throat, which was opening like a zipper.

"No, it isn't okay," Andy said. “You came to eat. You're going to eat. On me."

Andy crammed hamburgers, fries, apple turnovers, anything within his reach, into a couple of Happy Burger bags.

"We are losing the golden brown texture," Chip whined, tapping his foot in frustration.

"Back off-you're pissing off our customers." Andy glowered at Chip and then handed the bags to Matt.

That's when Andy's throat burst open, maggots spilling out everywhere, down his shirt and onto the stainless steel counter.

"Come back and visit us soon," Andy said, his larynx exposed, clotted with yellowed pus and globs of blood.

Matt muttered his thanks and hurried out the door, barely making it into the parking lot before he started vomiting.

Andy watched as Rachel's car sped past the restaurant and back towards town.

"If we lose those fries, Goodis, it's going on your permanent record," Chip said.

Andy adjusted his Happy Burger cap, tugged on his Happy Burger shirt, and turned to Chip.

"Well, if it's that important to you, Chip, don't you think you should handle this crisis personally?"

Chip straightened up and lifted his chin with pride. “I'm management. You're food preparation."

Andy smiled at Bubbles, the perky cashier, and imagined for a moment how her big Happy Burger smile would look around his big happy cock.

Chip stabbed Andy with his finger, breaking his reverie. “I'm talking to you, Goodis."

Andy whirled around, grabbed Chip by the back of the head, and led him over to the French fryer.

"Don't be shy, Chip, take charge." He held Chip's head over the vat of boiling oil.

"How do the fries look?"

Chip squealed, the hot oil spraying in his face. “They're fine! They're fine!"

Andy looked over his shoulder at Bubbles, who was staring at him in horror.

He smiled at her. “Where's your smile?"

And then he shoved Chip's face into the fryer and watched her scream.

Andy got hard in an instant.

Her scream was infectious.

Within seconds, everyone but Andy was screaming. Bubbles. The customers. The kitchen crew.

And Andy just stood there, pup tent in his pants, Chip flailing under his grasp.

"How are we doing on that golden brown texture, Chip?" Andy lifted Chip's face out of the fryer for a moment and examined it.

But Chip had no face, just a sizzling, oozing slab of deep-fried skull meat with French fries stuck in it.

"They look done to me," Andy said.

A stocky Mexican employee at the burger grill had enough, grabbed a knife, and charged him.

Andy shoved Chip at the Mexican, who inadvertently skewered Chip on his outstretched knife and watched in horror as blood splurted all over his arm.

"Oops," Andy said.

Bubbles turned to flee, but Andy stuck out his leg and tripped her, sending her face-first to the floor. When she started to rise, he picked up the cash register and dropped it on her head.

The remaining two employees in the kitchen came at him now, so Andy reached under the counter for the Happy Burger Happy Shotgun and happily blasted one guy onto the burger grill and the other into the milk-shake machine, releasing a spray of chocolate.

That left only the Mexican still standing, holding the bloody knife in his hand and blubbering like a baby over Chip, who convulsed at his feet in a puddle of blood, fries, and vegetable oil.

It was damn irritating.

So Andy swung the shotgun at the Mexican's head like a bat at a pinata and felt the satisfying smack of contact. The Mexican dropped, banged his head on the edge of the fryer, and crumpled on top of Chip.

There was a moment of stillness as Andy stood there, the shotgun in one hand, his hard-on in the other, listening to the sound of the sizzling grill, the fry alarm, the splurt of the milk-shake machine, and the whimpering of the dozen customers who were hiding under their tables.

It was such a beautiful noise.

Andy smiled to himself, gave his hard-on a friendly tug, then reached under the counter for the box of shells and strolled out the door, singing the Happy Burger song.

"Don't be sad, don't be blue, Happy Burger has treats for you!"

Two police officers standing in the street stopped traffic a block away from Happy Burger and directed drivers to turn around. But even from that distance, Matt saw enough to know that something very bad had happened.

A chopper circled over Happy Burger and bathed the scores of police cars, paramedic units, and ambulances out front in its harsh spotlight. Officers were spread out on foot, moving cautiously up and down the street, their guns out, searching for someone.

Matt knew in his gut who it was.

As Rachel started to turn the car around, Matt told her to slow down and lowered his window to talk to the officer, a potbellied man in his fifties.

"I have a friend working at Happy Burger," Matt said. “Can you tell me what happened?"

"There was a shooting," the officer said. “The assailant is at large."

"Was anyone hurt?"

"I really can't say any more than that. This block is restricted," the officer said.

"You'll have to move on."

They drove back to Rachel's house in silence. She parked the car in the driveway and turned to Matt.

"You think it was Andy, don't you?"

"I know it was," he said. “I saw his face."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Never mind." He held his hand out to her. “I need your car keys. I have to find him."

"Leave it to the police. Please."

"They'll kill him."

"Maybe he needs killing," Rachel said.

But she gave him the keys.

He walked her to the door, gave her a kiss, and then went around to the backyard to pick up his grandfather's ax.

Matt sat on the hood of a cop car, watching all the activity while he waited to be allowed to go home. Entire families and kids on bicycles crowded around the sawmill fence, watching and waiting for something to happen. Scores of police officers scurried around, scribbling in their notepads and generally looking dazed and confused. The Sheriff's Department helicopter circled overhead, aiming its spotlight here and there, for no apparent reason. Crime scene investigators crawled all over Andy's car, taking pictures and scraping things into baggies, though Matt didn't see the point of any of it.

Andy had massacred six people and now he was dead.

Matt had killed him.

Case closed.

What more did they need to know?

Matt, on the other hand, had all kinds of questions, none of which could be answered by a geek in a forensics lab.

Andy was going bad days before the massacre, and only Matt could see it (although, to be fair, people had been telling him for years that Andy was an asshole).

How was it possible?

Then again, how was anything in Matt's life possible since the avalanche?

A few yards away, Roger Silbert sat in the back of an open ambulance, his head bandaged and a blanket around his waist to hide his soiled pants, giving a statement to a uniformed officer.

"What can I say? Andy Goodis was a deranged, disgruntled employee. He was also a drunk. I'd been warning people about him since I got this job, but nobody would listen. This is the tragic result."

Matt became aware of someone approaching him. He turned to look and was surprised to see Rachel coming his way.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"The police ran the plates on my car, wanted to know if it had been stolen," she said. "I told them my husband had it and I demanded to see him. Hope you don't mind the lie about us, but it was the only way they'd let me in to see you."

"It's okay," he said. "I'm glad you're here."

She stood in front of the cop car and gave him a hug. "Are you all right?"

Matt shook his head. "Something is wrong, Rachel. I can feel it. Even worse, I saw Andy become evil."

He'd also smelled it, but he didn't want to mention that.

"Of course you did," she said. "We all did. You just didn't want to see it."

"There's a lot I didn't want to see. But I can't pretend anymore. Something happened to me. And nothing is the same."

"Not all of it is bad," she said.

"There's a reason I'm not dead."

"And she's standing right in front of you," she said. "At least, that's what you told me."

"I'm afraid there's more to it. I think it has something to do with Andy, and the way I saw him rot. And I'm afraid that somehow, I'm the reason it happened."

As if on cue, the coroners emerged from the sawmill, wheeling Andy out in a body bag on a gurney.

Matt looked past her and she followed his gaze.

The coroners pushed the gurney up to the van body and were about to slide it inside when they stopped in midmotion.

And so did everybody else.

Matt looked at Rachel and saw her standing stock-still, her head turned, looking at the gurney without blinking, without breathing.

"Rachel?" He waved his hand in front of her face. "Can you hear me?"

But there was no reaction. She was a statue. Everything was still. Everything was silent. It was as if time had simply…

Stopped.

Even the helicopter was suspended in the air, its blades no longer moving.

Impossible.

But there was a lot of that going around lately.

Even the air itself seemed to solidify.

Matt tried to slide off the hood of the car, but it was like trying to swim through Jell-O.

He caught some motion out of the corner of his eye.

Someone else was moving.

Matt turned and saw a uniformed police officer strolling jauntily towards him across the yard, spinning his nightstick like a bandleader's baton and whistling the Happy Burger song.

It was him.

The doctor from hell.

Only he wasn't a doctor now.

"I can't tell you how entertaining this has been," the cop said with a wicked smile, flashing those oh-so-sharp incisors. "I have learned so much."

"Who are you?" Matt asked. "What are you?"

The cop strolled over to the paramedic unit and regarded Silbert and the officer with amusement.

"You already know me, Matthew. Everybody does, if only a little bit. But you and me, we're going to have a very special relationship. Let me introduce myself. My friends call me Mr. Dark."

He reached out and touched the festering sore on Silbert's cheek. The sore erupted, spraying yellow puss all over his face, rotting away the skin.

It was like watching time-lapse photography of a decomposing corpse. Within seconds, the flesh was gone, dripping off his bloody skull in thick globs, leaving only his bulging eyes and perfect teeth.

Silbert reached out to the officer in front of him, the one frozen in midnotation, and snatched the gun from his holster.

In that instant, time started again, the suspended sound returning with a deafening roar, followed by the blast as Silbert shot the officer point-blank in the stomach.

Silbert grinned and turned towards Rachel.

Matt launched himself off the car and into Rachel, tackling her to the ground as Silbert opened fire, the bullets shattering the windshield.

As Matt and Rachel hit the ground, a dozen officers drew their weapons and fired, bombarding Silbert with a hail of bullets.

Silbert jerked into a grotesque dance of death, like a puppet yanked by every string at once, before collapsing, thoroughly perforated, into the back of the ambulance.

Matt rose up on his knees and hurriedly, but intently, checked out Rachel, looking for any signs of blood. "Were you hit? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she said. "What happened?"

But he didn't answer. Now that he knew that she wasn't hurt, his priorities abruptly shifted to something more urgent than her questions.

He had to find Mr. Dark.

He had to stop him.

Matt got to his feet and saw pure chaos, police officers and paramedics and coroners running around everywhere in a mad panic. He pushed through the throng, looking for the man responsible for the mayhem, for the death.

He couldn't see him.

But he could hear him.

Mr. Dark's maniacal laughter rode over the cacophony of panicked cries and frantic shouting like a musical loop on a merry-go-round.

"Why am I alive?" Matt yelled.

Mr. Dark's singsong reply came from somewhere nearby and yet far away.

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

Matt continued to push through the crowd until he reached the fence, but Mr. Dark was nowhere to be seen.

But he was out there.

Matt had no doubt about that.

He could hear the laughter.