Terror on the Ice

I awoke to the smell of burning flesh permeating through the small hut. How long have I been here? I could not even fathom a guess. The last thing I remember before I was hit with a giant white paw, tearing through my skin like it was removing the clear cellophane wrap off a package of chop meat, was my beautiful psychotic girlfriend, Emily. Well, she wasn’t always psychotic to this extent, but I guess starvation, the brutal cold and the will to survive, can drive anybody to madness. I don’t know if anyone in the domesticated world will ever hear this tale of mine, so right now it is only in my waking thoughts that I convey this story…God help me.

We left the coast of British Columbia around 6:a.m, in my estimation, about three days ago. I had always wanted to see the Northwest Passage as it had been like when such great explorers such as Franklin, Shackleton and countless others risked, and lost their lives in search of quicker shipping routes to Asia. With all this global warming nonsense being strewn about, the experts say within years this scenic maze of pressure ridges and pack ice, will disappear, giving way to a watery expanse fit for a multitude of cruise lines.

Emily and I managed to secure transportation albeit, from some very shady characters, but cheap nonetheless. It became even cheaper when another couple who were looking for the same adventure, begged to let them charter the flight along with us. In exchange they would pickup half of the overly expensive fuel cost that these two rogue pilots were charging us. So everyone was happy, the pilots got double the amount, Emily and I paid about a third of that, and our new companions Jack and Stephanie, looking like they just made a deal of a lifetime, got to come along.

We all had packs with us and were dressed very warmly, so the seating arrangements were very cramped to say the least. It was a small plane, twin engine I think, and my new friend ‘Jack’ wasn’t the most lean person I had ever met. He was about six-foot two, two-hundred and eighty pounds, bald, with a few patches of salt and pepper colored hair on each side of his head. He had little, beady, eyes that Emily would later tell me she wanted to “rip out of his bulbous fucking head.” Stephanie on the other hand, was quite attractive. She was a petite red head with sparkling green eyes and a body to kill for, from what I can tell through her thick layers of clothing. I could tell Emily wasn’t too thrilled with me as she caught me numerous times checking this young lady out. She had nothing to worry about, Emily was a goddess. She had shoulder length black hair that curled slightly at the ends, her blue eyes could only be compared to the enormous glaciers that formed from the frigid sea below us. Her porcelain-like skin, so white and unblemished, made her small lips look like she had just put on red lipstick, when in fact she never wore make-up at all.

We were about three hours into our excursion, when Jack asked the pilot how long it would be until we touched down.

“Big storm coming in, were gonna set her down right here for awhile.” He said with a smirk as he looked over to his buddy.

“I didn’t hear anything about a storm,” I said. “And how long do you plan to ‘setter’ down for?” I asked sarcastically.

“Well for us it’s gonna be about two minutes, for you, prolly a lot longer than that.” He said as he and his partner began to laugh uncontrollably.

“What’s the fucking joke?” Emily said as she started to squirm in her seat as the pilot began his descent.

“The ‘fucking joke’ is on you, you little bitch! You and your girlfriend over there, well your gonna be coming with me and Jake here. As for fat boy and your boyfriend, lets just say it’s a long walk back to civilization.” The pilot said as his pal Jake drew a gun.

We all sat back in our seats, trying to compute what was going on. I tried to reason with them but to no avail. The only explanation that made any sense to me, was that they just wanted to have some sick fun with our girls, kill them, and move on. Obviously they didn’t know what they were up against. I had my pack on my lap, and that pack contained a hunting knife. I motioned to Emily to keep talking to avert their attention from me. I dug deep inside until I felt the sheath, and drew the knife out slowly. With a quickness I never knew I had, I grabbed Jake’s hand with the gun in one hand, and with extreme force, burying the knife into the base of his skull with the other.

I started to twist the knife, scrambling his brains like a couple of soft eggs. Emily jumped over the pilot’s seat, grabbed him around the neck, and began to chew his ear clean off his head. He reached back with both of his hands and flipped her right over the front seat, her heavy hiking boots shattering the windshield. Snow, wind, ice, you name it was flying through the cabin of the small craft blinding us all. The plane was completely out of control, I could hardly hear the screams through the howling of the wind and the roar of the engines, but they were there.

“Everyone get down!” I yelled as I prepared for impact. Jack and Stephanie who were sitting behind us, were now in one seat. Stephanie hugging Jack around his neck while straddling him, her eyes clenched shut. Emily was crunched under the control panel where she ended up after the pilot flipped her. The pilot, was clutching his severed ear screaming in pain, while I sat with my head between my legs behind a lifeless scumbag who’s brain matter was now running down the back of his seat.

It seemed like an eternity for the plane to finally hit the surface, surprisingly, it felt just like a regular landing as we treaded over the sea, occasionally becoming airborne again, reminding me of skipping stones across a lake as a child. The craft eventually found a surface of hard, choppy pack ice. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster, only there was no safety bar holding us in. I kept waiting for some kind of impact, and I couldn’t even brace myself as the top half of my body was shifting side to side. Suddenly it happened. As I would later discover, the plane went between two forty-foot high pressure ridges, ripping the wings of the plane to shreds. The impact was so great, Stephanie never had a shot of survival. I watched as she flew from the back seat, knocking the front seat completely down and crushing the pilot. I heard every vertebrae in his back snap like twigs in quick, uniformed, succession. Stephanie’s head was severed from her body in one swift motion, as the rest of her body flew out the window and disappeared into nothingness. Her head landed on the floor next to Emily. Her eyes still open, looking straight at me like a stuffed deer head on a wall.

When the craft finally came to a halt, I immediately went to check on Emily. She was half-covered in snow, and other than a few abrasions and aches, she was fine. Jack was screaming in pain, his shin bone was jutting out through his clothing. Muscle tissue, flesh and blood oozing over the edges like ice cream melting over the sides of a cone. He noticed Stephanie’s eyes and hair peaking out through the snow toward the front of the cabin, and before I could stop him, he lunged in pain and started to dig around her. It hadn’t occurred to me that he never saw what happened to her. He kept on digging until he hit nothing but red snow. He grabbed her face and pulled her head to him, falling backward and holding it to his chest like a mother holding her newborn child…crying.

Emily and I pulled Jake and Troy’s bodies from the wreckage, well that’s what the tag on his shirt said his name was anyway. He must have been some half-assed mechanic who somehow got his hands on a client’s plane, and decided to make some money for himself and his buddy. Take the plane for a spin, kill us, dump us off in no-mans land, bring the plane back, just another day at the office. The perfect crime.

We started to drag them as far away from us as possible when we heard this thunderous sound, it was the ice shifting below us. It was like an earthquake. I made my way over to Emily and held onto her tight, when it suddenly went quite.

“What the hell was that?” she said, looking around in all directions.

“I think were on an ice floe and its about to separate again, I think we should get back to the wreckage.” I said as I helped her up and began to run toward the plane.

We had just made it back when we heard another crash, this time we had to hold are ears because the sound was so loud. Sure enough, the ice separated and our two dead abductors started floating away. If it weren’t those men, it would have been a fitting funeral for any man. Kind of like a Viking funeral, sending the body off on a vessel, setting it afire as it makes its way to eternity. In this case, nature sent them off on a cold chunk of ice heading straight to hell. Oh the irony of it all.

Jack wasn’t doing so well. After we convinced him to let Stephanie go, we patched him up as best we could and let him rest while Emily and I tried to cover the holes in the plane. It would be dark in a few hours and the temperatures would drop to below freezing. We did have some matches, but that wasn’t the problem, we had nothing to burn, that was the problem. Other than our packs, we had a tarp that we found in the plane but we had to cut that up and use it to cover us from the elements.

“Why didn’t we strip those bastards,” I mumbled to myself as I started cutting the packs up into square swatches.

We managed to get a fire started outside the plane. We didn’t know how long we could keep it burning since the wind started picking up and snow began to fall. We left Jack inside and tried to keep him as comfortable as possible. Meanwhile, Emily and I started discussing our next move out by the fire.

“I’m so cold Mike, what happens when we have nothing left to burn? And what about food?! We brought nothing but crackers and we keep feeding that lazy invalid in there!” she yelled as she pointed inside.

Her actions took me totally by surprise. I mean I’ve witnessed first hand very disturbing behavior from her in the past, but this was a maimed man who was lying in pain with a bone sticking out of his leg and who just hours before, was holding his dead girlfriend’s severed head in his arms. I thought just maybe, she would have a little compassion.

“Listen, first of all you need to come down, we have to make one of two choices. Wait here for help or…

“Wait here for help! Nobody knows were out here Mike, what do you think somebody out walking their dog is just gonna happen upon us?

“Let me finish Em!” I said raising my voice louder then I ever had with her. “Or, I can head north. Maybe I will run in to an Inuit village, there are people that still live out there Em, like nothing has ever changed for a couple of hundred years. It’s our best chance and maybe, if I’m lucky, a plane will spot me.

“What are you saying? You want me to stay here with Jack? Wait here to die Mike?” she said as she cupped her face with her hands and started to sob.

“You need to be here Em, if a plane does pass overhead there is no way he’s coming out to wave his hands and try to get their attention. This way we have two ways to possibly get out of this mess.

She reluctantly agreed and we went back inside. There was no sense explaining are plans to Jack, he fell in and out of consciousness and apparently was in shock. He kept mumbling something about heaven and hell, shaking and sweating profusely. I still had my pack which contained my knife, some crackers, a book of matches and half a canteen of water. I would have to make shelter out of ice and snow. I actually learned how to do this from watching survival documentaries. With any luck, I would only have to build one of these, if I was out here for more then a day with no food or water in the freezing cold, the next one would surely be my tomb.

I told Emily I loved her, and if I didn’t find anyone by morning I would head back.

“Just try and stay warm, conserve your energy, and don’t go wandering outside the plane. This ice can crack again at anytime, and the safest place to be is inside, understand?” She nodded her head without speaking. She had a very distant look on her face, like she had a plan. For some reason, if I was to return, I had a strange feeling I wasn’t going to be seeing Emily anymore…not the Emily I knew anyway.

I must have walked five miles, the weather so far was cooperating but daylight was no longer on my side. The only signs of life I encountered were a couple of gulls and a polar bear that I wisely avoided. I decided to start making my ice fort, I knew by the time I was finished, it would be at least another three hours and the temperature would soon drop to below freezing. Hopefully Emily was having better luck back at the plane. I was very worried about her, and at the same time I was concerned for Jack. She didn’t have the slightest bit of compassion for this guy. Sure, he was virtually a complete stranger, but to react like that when we had only been stranded a couple of hours, was baffling to me.

I knew she would be okay until I returned. She was out of the elements, so frostbite wasn’t a concern. She had matches and those swatches of pack I had cut earlier, to start a fire and stay warm. She had some water, and if she ran out, she could always melt some snow to drink. “What would she boil it in?” I asked aloud. ‘She would get creative,’ I imagined. I remember her saying she was very concerned about food. I told her the crackers should suffice until I got back and if worse came to worst, we would have to hunt or fish.

“But what if you don’t come back?” I remember her saying as she turned and looked at Jack, literally dying right in front of us, “what then?”

‘Was she capable of doing the unthinkable?’ I wondered. What if I didn’t come back? Was she even willing to wait? I had to get back as soon as possible, but that would have to wait until morning. Jack meant absolutely nothing to me, but he deserved a fighting chance. That’s one thing, at least, Emily always insisted on. But now circumstances were far different, and extremely dire.

I woke at dawn and started digging myself out of the ice shelter. The snow fell over night, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. My fingers and toes were quite numb, but as long as I was moving, they eventually would thaw out and the pain would subside. I walked about four miles, when I saw what I thought was smoke in the distance. As I drew closer there was no denying it, it was clearly smoke billowing above in the vicinity of where the wreckage had been. ‘Emily must have seen or heard a plane,’ I thought, and she was burning anything she could get her hands on to make a signal for them.

I got to within a hundred yards when I saw Emily, going in and out of the plane. I also smelled what I thought was burning meat coming from the fire. She was clearly cooking something in what looked like a pink, oval, bowl of some kind. Emily had made a make- shift stove, presumably using the rods from the tarp we had found yesterday. I looked in the bowl to see what she managed to cook up. It was a dark, thick liquid that kind of reminded of lentil soup broth. I pulled out my knife and started mixing it around, a thick, gelatin-like substance stuck to my knife like barnacles to a ship. As I kept mixing trying to figure out what this concoction was, I took my knife and started poking around in the bottom, I felt it pierce something soft, I pulled it out and waited for this gray substance to drip off of it so I could try and determine what it was. It didn’t take long.

How could I ever forget Stephanie’s sparkling green eyes, even though the last time I saw them, they were staring at me from a lifeless skull, now… from the end of my hunting knife. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the gelatin-like substance, was actually Stephanie’s brains. In fact, the bowl she used to cook the eyes, ears, nose and lips, was Stephanie’s skull. She removed the hair, scooped and cleaned out the neck, turned it upside down so the top of her head was facing down and stuck the rods through the eye sockets to hold it in place. A witch couldn’t have made a sicker brew for her cauldron.

Jack’s scream turned my attention back to the plane. I went inside and instantly started to get sick to my stomach, I have seen some disturbing things in my life, but this was beyond anything I have ever done or witnessed. Emily had taken her knife and sliced Jack open from throat to belly. She was pulling his insides out like a kid pulling out the tissue paper from a box to get to his birthday present. Blood was everywhere. She chewed on his intestines like she was pulling on a piece of salt water taffy at the beach. Jack was still alive and was trying to pull his intestines back toward himself. It looked like a sick game of tug-of-war. Finally, having enough of struggling with him, she reached into his chest and ripped out his heart, ending his suffering.

“Emily! Stop it!” I shouted, wiping the remainder of bile from my lips. She turned her head and just stared at me, tilting her head to one side like she was trying to figure out who I was. She held the knife to her lips and started lapping it up like a dog with her tongue, she was to far gone. I pulled my knife out and backed myself out of the plane, never taking my eyes off of her. I turned to run, but my feet got caught up on Emily’s macabre pot of stew, sending me to the ground. I flipped quickly to my back, holding my knife with both hands outstretched as Emily came charging toward me. She dove through the air with the grace of an Olympic swimmer, only to be intercepted by a giant polar bear.

I don’t know where the bear came from, nor did I care, I had the feeling even if Emily had landed on my knife, she wouldn’t have felt it. I was clearly watching a woman who lost all sense of reason, even as the bear had his snout buried in her chest, she was hacking away with her blade laughing at the challenge. Although Emily surely would have killed me if that white beast hadn’t come along, I just couldn’t let her get devoured while I sat and watched. We had been through to much together after all. We had started killing together a few weeks after we had met, two kindred spirits with two bizarre things in common, the thrill of the chase and the exhilarating triumph of the kill.

Sure, Jack and Stephanie were going to die anyway, we discussed that much on the plane, but this wasn’t the way it was suppose to go down. Emily and I traveled extensively, and every where we went we made it a point to lure a couple away with friendly intentions only to lead them to an untimely and gruesome death. I guess this is the way it was supposed to end for us, I mean who would’ve thought we would get abducted by two novice thrill killers, survive a plan crash that kills one of our potential victims and maims another, only to be stranded and watch my girlfriend carry out her deepest and darkest fantasy on a man that had no chance in hell to escape. That wasn’t Emily’s way. She always liked the challenge, the begging and pleading, giving false hope when there was none at all.

Maybe it was this place, the cold, barren Arctic that can drive any man or woman mad. Emily was psychotic as it was, so am I for that matter, but I guess she couldn’t see a way out and wanted to go out at the top of her game. I suppose she would have made me her last victim if not for my concern for a man I planned on killing just a day earlier. At the very least I found something out about myself during this ordeal, I had compassion for someone but for all the wrong reasons. It was a start anyway.

That polar bear was having none of my interference. I think I sunk my knife twice, into the back of his head, before he swatted me away with relative ease. Like I said, that was the last thing I remembered before I woke up to the smell of burning flesh. An odor I can quickly recognize now. I was surrounded by two adult and one Inuit child, who was trying to get me to eat strips of hot polar bear meat. I guess there was a village nearby, just in the opposite direction, a fifty-fifty shot, luck just wasn’t on my side. How different things could have been. I would eventually recover from my wounds and make my home in the arctic among the people who saved my life. I learned to hunt and fish and speak the language of the Inuit, mastering it to my surprise, in a very short time. It came in useful when I would sit about the fire in the cold arctic night listening to stories from the elders.

My favorite one is about the wild woman who escaped the clutches of a polar bear, after saving me from a certain death and never to be seen again. I was already a part of arctic lore which I found amusing. Many a day, one of our people would go hunt seal and never return, of course this was usually blamed on falling through the ice or polar bears, but I knew better. I wonder if Emily will ever call on me to continue what we loved to do best, hunt and kill, and I surmise, I probably would. So much for compassion.