Ellie sat in her car, watching the fat flakes come down to turn to slush upon her windows, and quietly stewed as she considered whether or not death was too good for her stupid, rotten, stubborn, willfully-oblivious, bloody little sister. She'd told her a dozen times already not to go off on harebrained schemes with men she had just met and "fallen madly in love with", only for the twelfth time for Mika to call her up in need of bailing out. Only this time she'd managed to end up without a ride in the ass end of nowhere because her latest 'boyfriend' had dumped her in what sounded suspiciously like a harebrained semi-illegal to outright illegal con falling apart, and now Ellie was stuck in the middle of a snow storm.
The only good thing was that Ellie had managed to extra a promise from Mika not to try to hitchhike, which meant that she was somewhere warm instead of potentially freezing to death on the road. Also, while she would have to be careful with her gas supply and battery levels, Ellie was pretty sure she could just wait this freak snow dump out. Worst case scenario she would wait for morning when the ploughs came through and could limp to the nearest gas station to wait however long it took for the roads further into the mountains to get cleared.
She was sitting and stewing over this when her review mirror flashed with light from the darkness. Twisting about in her seat, she saw the headlights of what had to be a tractor-trailer truck pulling into the rest area behind her. She just sort of sat and stared for a moment as the high beams turned off but the rest of the lights stayed on, vaguely illuminating the falling snow all around. After another few moments a figure emerged from the swirling darkness, walking towards Ellie's car.
Between the snow and the glare of the lights off the windows, Ellie only got a vague impression of the person on the other side of the window she only rolled down a crack. All she could tell was that they were large, male, and dressed in a lighter looking jacket and vest. Nervously she asked, "Can I help you?"
The man on the other side of the window said, "Well now, I was really rather seeing if I could come help you. It's snowing pretty hard out here and it looks like it might get a bit chilly out here, so I was wondering if I could be neighbourly and offer you a rest up in my cabin. Got plenty of heat and a cot, so it'll be a far sight better than freezing in your car here."
Ellie's hackles immediately went up at what could only be an invitation to rape and maybe some murder. Still, she forced a smile to her face and said, "Oh, thank you for the offer, but this old thing can get a bit finicky if it gets too cold, so I'm going to have to stay up all night babying it anyway or I might never get it to start in the morning."
The man seemed to consider this for a bit before he replied, "Well, I've got more than a little experience in engines and all that, so I'm sure I can get your baby purring again in the morning if it gets frozen up."
Now profusely sweating within her jacket despite the cold air leaking in from the crack in the window, Ellie just shook her head and said with as much forced politeness as possible, "No, really, that would be too much to ask of you, and the last time I let this beast get too cold a line burst. If that happens again I'd have to get a tow and go to the shop, and that's going to cost me time and money I really can't afford right now. So thank you for the kindly offer, but I'm just going to have to sit and suffer it out tonight."
The man loomed in close to the window, his eyes becoming visible through the crack opened up. Watery blue irises surrounded by faintly bloodshot whites and with flinty black centres stared in at Ellie for a long moment before they pulled away and the man said, "Well then, that's a pity there ma'am. You stay safe here tonight."
Then man then turned away and began to walk back towards his truck, but Ellie caught on the wind a mumbled, "…bitch." She wasn't entirely sure what he had started it off on, but it surely had to be a further denigration of her character or ancestry. If he said anything else it was lost to the night and Ellie rolling her window back up all the way.
Now thoroughly freaked out, Ellie immediately snatched up her phone and switched it out of airplane mode. While she had been saving power for emergencies, she figured this qualified as an emergency. Pulling up the map she had already downloaded, she tried to work out if it was worth risking pushing through to a town or another rest stop area. The roads had already been terrible when she had stopped, but she hadn't had some asshole trucker who she was certain was a threat to her safety sitting behind her earlier. The options weren't exactly great, but sitting around didn't seem like a great idea. The road ahead might be a twisting mountain road in the middle of a night snow storm, but at least if she died then it would be because she didn't sit around waiting to see if the person behind her was a serial killer or not.
She was just coming to terms with the fact that even if the police were able to help her, she didn't have a signal on her phone anyway when her brain registered the fact that the lights behind her were getting bigger. With only a moment to look up and register what was happening, Ellie painfully flew about the interior of the car as the truck slammed into it, ramming forward and into the guard rail that separated the road from the valley beyond. After a terrifying few seconds where everything was shattering glass and mad angles her car seemed to stop moving, apparently getting hung up on the guard rail.
For a few fluttering heartbeats Ellie thought it was over, but then she heard the sound of the now far too close engine changing gears, followed shortly after by the twisted metal shriek of the two vehicles disengaging as the semi backed up. For just a moment Ellie considered if it might be over, before the irrational hope was buried by the only logical conclusion being that she had in fact encountered a serial killer and she needed to get out of her vehicle before he finished running her off the road.
While not being buckled up for the sake of comfort while sitting in park had led her to being thrown about the cabin of her vehicle, it now meant that she didn't have to struggle with whatever the crumpled mess around the buckle was. Instead she just had to take precious seconds to realize that the door wasn't going to open and she instead had to go out through the window, helpfully shattered by the ramming attack. The world was moving at treacle speed as Ellie flopped out of the window, onto the slush covered asphalt, adding further insult to the bruises and cuts she had already sustained.
The truck slamming into her car and sending it hurling over the guard rail and into the bleak oblivion of the snowy night affirmed to Ellie that she had made the right call. Then she heard the sound of the semi's door open and a sick chuckle. Looking back, she only saw a figure in the swirling dark, and then she decided to focus more on getting to her feet and running.
"You're a survivor, I'll give you that, but then so is every animal I hit that doesn't just die on impact," the man called out tauntingly as he approached and Ellie got to her feet and tried to get those feet to carry her away despite the pain and the slippery ground. The man continued, "Course, when you clip an animal, it's only proper to put the poor beast down. Can't let 'em suffer and all that."
Something ran cold in Ellie's chest and she froze in her tracks. Stomach flipping about and her heart simultaneously hammering away in her chest and trying to escape out her throat, she turned about and decided to face the figure in the darkness. The man was still advancing on her, but backlit by the diffuse glow of his truck's lights the glint of metal from a long, combat style knife was visible. The man just chuckled darkly again and said, "And now the limping deer gets frozen in the headlights. Good, you and all your savage friends and family need to die, but I can make this quick for you if you do this the easy way."
Ellie was trembling, and she couldn't get a good image of the man even as he was almost on top of her. He had just blended into an amalgam of every creep who had got too close in her space, every suspicious man who had ever got her guard up, every whispered nightmare of The Stranger society had told her to be wary of. Only he wasn't Strange, he was terrifyingly normal, a person who had held up a mask of politeness and an offer of aid despite the implicit expectation of sexual favour in return for aid, and responded to rejection with violence.
The hand without the knife moved out to grab Ellie, and in that moment her right hand snatched his wrist she began to turn and move forward, her left arm getting inside the arc of his knife wielding hand. Strength and size were on his side, so she needed to use her whole body for leverage, but she had actually trained for this. The fact that her attacker didn't know how to move with the attack also meant that pain had him contorting with her motion, giving her extra leverage.
The move was as simple as she could make it, but still overly complex such that they both ended up on the ground, which was the worst place for Ellie. Fortunately she had managed to send the knife out into the darkness and she wasn't under the man or in a tangle of her own limbs, so she was able to get up while he was still figuring out that he was on the ground. Her heavy winter shoe clad foot lashed out and struck something important feeling.
Ellie knew she was screaming. She knew the man was yelling. She couldn't hear anything though as her brain tried to figure out whether to run into the night or keep attacking, or what. Eventually she seized upon running towards the truck. While at first it was just that she was associated light with safety, she quickly figured that she could lock the cabin and possibly radio for help from this psycho. Unfortunately those few heartbeats to make up her mind were enough time for the man to recover, and despite a head start he was bigger and anger carried him along on long strides.
Instinct and long training with the very practical minded Minami-sensei meant that when the tackle came, Ellie was able to partially roll out of it, but now that surprise was no longer on her side the man's advantages were much more pronounced. A stream of profanities and mad snippets of the tortures he had in store poured forth from his lips and his fingers clawed at her clothing and limbs tried to envelop her. For her part Ellie used hands and elbows to target hands and face as she squirmed out of her coat, scrambling to find her feet amidst the snow.
She had just almost managed to get back to her feet when the slush churned up by their fight picked a side and had her foot slide out from beneath her as she was pushing off. She very much almost recovered from her forward dive, but the snow kept betraying her footing and she ended up launched into a long slide along the road. She had been heading for the truck, but the tackle had diverted her slightly, so that her slide went forward of the truck, away from the door that represented safety.
Despair and desperation gave way to confusion and panic when the slide ahead of the truck then carried her past the ruins of the guard rail and off the road. The initial drop wasn't that big, but then Ellie was separated from the light as her world became a tumbling mass of cold earth, wet snow, and whipping tree branches that came at her without warning as she tumbled and bounced in muffled blackness.
There was a sudden stop, and then the blackness became absolute.
At some point Ellie realized that there was sensation in the darkness. She wasn't sure if she felt first or smelled first, but even though she couldn't truly determine up or down, she knew that she was touching something like cool rock, while she smelled something that was familiar but hard to describe. The closest description stale milk upon linens and the faintest waft of tobacco, but even that failed to capture the full description of it. The scent was unpleasant and yet familiar and oddly comforting, and it disturbed her slightly that she could not place it even as she felt her stomach flip over.
Despite the scents being more immediately obvious, Ellie couldn't orient herself by smell, so her attention soon drifted to touch. She could feel something at her back, but there was neither a sense of up or down nor a sense of buoyancy that she could give direction to. It was more of a dreamlike knowledge that there was something solid behind her, combined with that dream sense that she could simply will herself to change position, along with a deep seated and primal fear of losing contact with the solid. More than that, while she knew that her back was touching the solid, she had no real sense of her own body, exploratory touches coming more from a disembodied feeling of self than actual limbs.
Ellie drifted along the stony surface, ghostly touches and will moving her through the blackness. Time had no meaning, and the dreaming texture of it all almost lulled her into an even deeper sleep, but somewhere along the way she found something. Touch without fingers found a sharp edge in the naturally featureless stone surface… or rather, with more exploration it was more of a relatively sharp edge. The depth was barely there; only perceptible by the fact that everything else was so indistinct that even the slightest scratch stood out to Ellie's wanderings. In fact, that was what it felt most like: like a desperate scratch by human nails upon rough stone.
Further exploration revealed that the scratch formed a sort of 'F' shape, and that further around it there were other scratches. Those were all sorts of different things, symbols carved in stone with hard to discern shapes. Some felt more familiar or more distinct, and Ellie found her imagination wandering in response. A mind or minds had made these, and she struggled to find the meaning behind them, visualizations of objects and actions rising alongside the sounds of speech. Thoughts of elder civilizations that carved their stories into the stones of their temples and tombs flickered through her mind, and in the dreaming dark they may have even taken on a reality of their own as ghostly aurora.
Gods and heroes played out their stories, painted upon the void by a mind desperate for context, and in that hallucinatory stage Ellie suddenly had a sort of illumination and orientation. Her mental motion altered her orientation to not just the carved symbols and the associations they conjured up, but also to the smells of this place. Certain movements took her to places where the unpleasantly nostalgic scent became stronger, while other movements seemed to dampen out all smells at all, something that unnerved her and drove her back into milk and linen and tobacco.
It was the tobacco that gave a further clue. Whispers of sound and more complex symbols seemed associated with a stronger scent of tobacco, alongside something else. It took a moment to place it, but it was the smell of metal and blood. A sort of firework went off in Ellie's brain as that triggered a long chain of associations, the symbols and visions transforming into the atomic structure of oct-1-en-3-one, the actual chemical that caused that odor. The vision of the organic compound was so clear, the quantum mechanical nature of the electron cloud interactions between the nuclei obvious in ways that the mathematics and computer models could not capture. Idle thoughts ripped apart the molecule into constituent atoms, forming them into simpler compounds and bouncing various forms of radiation off them. Electrons spun away, breaking or forcing the formation of new bonds that wiggled and danced, shining out with infrared and radio waves.
The joy of exploration like this reminded her of her thesis work, and that made the smell of blood and tobacco even stronger, and the phantom sounds took on a rhythm. Was it a drumbeat? A heartbeat? The clash of steel on steel? All three at once and none of the above?
All at once a sense of gravity, temperature, and embodiment returned, and Ellie was in a cold freefall, bile rising in her gorge. In the darkness all around her images continued to flicker, well-known faces she had yet to meet merging with strangers she had seen her whole life. Eyes stared at her, judging her, but the judgements were all different. Some were kind and encouraging, their judgements of worth, while others were more negative.
The judgement of watery blue eyes, faintly bloodshot with flinty pupils, made Ellie scream in a combination of rage and fear. She reached out to shove or claw them away, and they evaporated away, leaving a single golden eye staring back at her. The eye crinkled in a manner suggesting a smile – a mixture of cruelty and pride – and then Ellie's scream turned into one of agony as everything faded back to black, only a sense of gravity and the beating of drums remaining.
Eventually the drums faded to a rhythmic beeping, and Ellie's eyes flickered open to discover that she was lying in a hospital bed, propped up in a sort of half sitting position with numerous tubes and wires all connected to her. The beeping was clearly a heartrate monitor, and while Ellie felt incredibly weak she also didn't find it too terribly difficult to reach out and find some sort of call button. Pressing it caused a light to begin obnoxiously flashing, so she had obviously pressed more of an alarm than a 'more blankets please' button. The nurse racing into her room confirmed that, although from the shocked look on the woman's face Ellie supposed that even a standard request would have elicited a shocked reaction.
What followed was a barrage of gobsmacked doctors and nurses who came to check in on her. The overall story was rather fuzzy, but she gathered that she had been found by some ice fishermen who had decided not to give her up for dead, and while her official core temperature had been 18 °C by the time medics had been able to take it, everyone was pretty sure that she had set a record for lowest core temperature without dying. The fact that Ellie had recovered so quickly and with so minimal damage was even more shocking, and the doctors wanted to run all sorts of tests on her.
The 'minimal' part was what Ellie was examining when the officers came in. No one was quite sure what had happened, but a prominent scar on her neck and the fact that one side of her face had been badly frost-burned to the point of the loss of hair and destruction of an eye suggested that she had been submerged in water while suspended by her neck, water continuing to flow around her without freezing over or blocking airways. The doctors were still trying to figure out if they should remove the dead eye or not, so the blackened and lidless orb was still there, beneath an eyepatch and other dressings.
Some part of Ellie relished the shock of the men with badges when the nurse escorted them in to see her, although she couldn't place why exactly. Whatever the cause, she quickly set aside the mirror she had been using for inspection and reset her eyepatch.
"Good morning Miss Hunter, this is Sergeant Davidson and Constable Lee, here to talk to you about the things you told us," the duty nurse explained. The two men were both fairly standard 'cops' – bigger than average, more muscular, but also somewhat bland and nondescript otherwise – with the sergeant having grey in his hair while the constable looked significantly younger.
"Hello officers," Ellie replied, the strange jolt of satisfaction curdling away to generalized unease. She supposed she was just still getting used to the changes to her face.
"Hello Miss Hunter, we've heard that you've got quite the story and we would like to officially get it from you now that the doctors have cleared you for visitors," Sergeant Davidson said, pulling out a notebook while Constable Lee set out an audio recorder and got out his own notepad.
"I have? I figured that family would have come first…" Ellie muttered.
Thankfully the duty nurse piped up at that moment and said, "You didn't have any ID on you when you came in, so we had to wait for you to wake up. We have contacted your family, but the police arrived first. Sounds like your mother has further to go."
"Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense," Ellie noted, before she shook her head to focus and said to the officers, "Right then, so…"
She then went through her story for perhaps the third time since waking up, this time in perhaps the greatest detail yet, up to the point where she fell off the edge of the road and into the valley below. Everything after that was some sort of hallucinatory nonsense or her waking up in the hospital. While Lee seemed ready to interrupt a few times, Davidson repeatedly waved him off and gestured for Ellie to keep going until the end.
Once her story wrapped up, Davidson flipped back through his notebook a bit before he said, "Right then, I've got a few questions for you here. You said that you were going to fetch your sister, Mikaela Hunter, but you didn't exactly explain from where."
Ellie bit her lower lip a bit before she said, "Our grandmother lives out in the interior, and Mika had gone out to visit her but her ride back fell through. I didn't want her hitchhiking back, so I told her to stay put and I would go get her."
Davidson hummed thoughtfully for a moment before he asked, "You've been… evasive about exactly where your grandmother lives. Would you care to be a bit more explicit?"
Ellie's chewing of her lower lip became more pronounced and after some further hesitation, both officers looking concerned and suspicious, Ellie finally admitted, "She lives on a reservation…"
A wall seemed to come down over Davidson's face, and he asked, "You're native?"
"First Nations," Lee quietly corrected, eliciting a barely perceptible eye roll from his senior.
Feeling like she was in freefall, Ellie said, "I'm not Status, mom definitely isn't, and I'm not 100% on whether my dad was. Grandma is, but I don't think she was when he was born so I don't really know." Her stomach flipped over as she admitted all that. She knew that there wasn't really anything to be ashamed of, but she had long ago learned that there was plenty to be scared of, and that life was easier if people thought she was Italian or Greek.
"I see…" Davidson noted, and then he began to probe Ellie about the location she had been when she was attacked. In the back and forth Ellie quickly became confused by the questions, since it sounded like they hadn't even found her car yet. They kept going back over events, doubting events and timelines and preying upon Ellie's growing confusion and distress.
Eventually the duty nurse decided that enough was enough and told the officers, "Okay, that's the initial statement, enough for you to do your jobs while she recovers."
That left Ellie alone in her bed, alone with her thoughts, and suddenly she could see in her mind's eye what was about to happen. The police would roll up and down the highway a few times, but if they hadn't found her car yet then it wasn't all that obvious where it was, probably concealed by trees and buried in snow. There was a lot of confusion about the timeline, but it had been days already, days for other vehicles to run over evidence and the snow on the road to be stirred up. It could take until spring or even summer before they might find her car, and her attacker had never been in there anyway. At best what evidence they had would go into a box somewhere, at worst Officer Davidson had sounded suspicious of Ellie's entire story.
When the duty nurse came back, Ellie asked numbly, "Has there been any contact with my mother?"
"We gave her another call, but we just got her voicemail this time," the nurse replied, and Ellie frowned again. The nurse added on, "You woke up rather fast for what happened, so she's probably still on the road."
"She's only like… four, five hours away," Ellie replied.
"Actually, the way she put it when we first contacted her about you being recovered, she was 'closer to Alaska'," the nurse replied.
Suddenly every muscle in her body went tense, the heartrate monitor blipping out for a second before it began to go wild with her panic and excitement. The nurse looked at her vitals questioningly, and Ellie said, "I need to talk to my grandmother right now."
After a bit of back and forth the nurse finally agreed to let Ellie make the call, deciding that it would be better for her health not to let her sit and wait. Bringing a phone over to the bed, Ellie frantically punched in a number she had known for much of her life. Every ring had her heart racing, and every silence between was an eternal void. Finally though the sound of the other end connecting came through, and Ellie heard the badly transmitted voice of her paternal grandmother on the other end.
"'Ello? Who's this then?" Granny Vicky asked.
"Grandma! It's me, Ellie!" Ellie almost explosively shouted out.
There was silence for a moment before her grandmother said, "You're alive then girlie."
The tone sent shivers down her spine, and Ellie asked in a dead monotone, "Granny…"
"Mika got tired of waiting for you. She… she walked out onto the road after the storm cleared, and ain't no one seen her since. Your mama's been frantically looking for the both of you since…" Granny Vicky explained, Ellie's heart breaking with every syllable. Her tone was so dead, so resigned, so used to having to just keep going when someone you knew walked away from home and you never heard from them again.
"Mika…" Ellie breathed out in anguish, the very worst case scenario that she had been out on the road to prevent having happened anyway. Best case scenario Mika had got in with another bad crowd and was currently strung out somewhere and would come calling for help in a few days. Worst case scenario… the cops would take a few notes, poke around for a bit, and declare that she probably just didn't want to contact her family, all while her body rotted away in the wilderness.
The phone dropped from fingers more numb than when she had been frozen, and then Ellie just started to cry.
