Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

When it swung fully open, I saw something else hanging from a meat hook, pink and streaked with frozen, red-black rivulets: half of a human ribcage.
    I let out a short, involuntary yelp.

Chapter 36
    “Hey, who’s there?” a voice yelled from the direction of the fire.
    I stepped inside the abattoir to hide. Bits and pieces of people hung everywhere. The stomach-turning stink of blood that I’d barely noticed as the door opened now overpowered me. I turned my face toward the wall, trying to hide from the room’s gruesome contents.
    “Guuuys. It ain’t funny punking Brick again.”
    His voice had a weird singsong quality—like what I imagined a preschooler might sound like with the vocal chords of a grown man. I slid the glove off my right hand, drew the pistol from my belt, and tried to thumb off the safety. My hands were shaking and slick with sweat. My thumb kept missing the safety, sliding just over the top of it.
    “I ain’t going to jump and scream like last time, so you can come on out now.” The voice sounded closer.
    I tucked the pistol under my arm, pulled off my other glove, and used my left hand to snick off the safety.
    “I know you’re in there,” the voice was very close now. “You think Brick’s a dump truck, but I’m not that dumb. That ratchet didn’t fall out on its own.”
    I held my breath. The guy stepped through the doorway. Half of him was in shadow, the other half lit by firelight. He looked like something an amateur sculptor had attempted to chisel out of an enormous block of granite before giving up the job as hopeless. Then an equally inept painter had come along and covered the sculptor’s work with crude blue tattoos of Woody Woodpecker. He turned away from me, checking behind the door.
    I took one step toward him and jammed my pistol against the back of his head. “Down! On the floor! Now!” I used the most commanding tone of voice I could manage while whispering.
    “Oh-uh?” He sounded like a mooing cow.
    “Down!” I repeated.
    He turned toward me slowly. I pressed the pistol harder against his head, but he kept turning, so that by the time he could look at me, my pistol was against his right temple rather than the back of his head. “Who are you?”
    “Nobody! Now get down, or I’ll shoot you.”
    “Oh. You’re a bad guy.”
    I had to stifle a panicky laugh. I was holding a gun on a cannibal named Brick, standing in a room full of frozen human flesh, and I was the bad guy? “On. The. Floor.”
    “You won’t shoot me.”
    “I will.”
    “You won’t.”
    “What? Do you want me to shoot you?” It was like arguing with a two-year-old.
    “No. But if you shoot, my brothers will hear it.”
    The apartment building was about one hundred yards off. A pistol shot might not wake them. But if they had posted guards . . .
    Brick started turning again, slowly reaching for the gun in my right hand. I quickly sidestepped to stay behind him and snapped a front kick toward him.
    My kick connected perfectly, catching him right between his legs. The hours of farm work, pedaling Bikezilla, and skiing had paid off—my kick was so powerful it lifted him onto his toes. Then he crumpled, collapsing and clutching his crotch.
    When he could breathe again, he moaned, a sound that started as a low, monotonic “Oooh” and grew into a high-pitched screetch: “Eeee!” I quickly shrugged out of my pack and grabbed the first thing that came to hand from the top—a dirty T-shirt. I tied the T-shirt around Brick’s head, forcing it between his teeth to muffle him. Then I cut a hank of rope from my coil and used it to tie his hands behind his back. He didn’t resist at all—just rocked back and forth on his knees, moaning through the gag.
    “Get up,” I said.
    “Uh-uh,” he moaned, shaking his head.
    I moved around to his front and cocked my leg behind me. Which was sort of silly—no martial artist would telegraph their moves like that—but I figured it might scare him. “If you don’t get up, I’m going to kick you again.”
    He moaned and struggled to his feet.
    I retrieved my gloves, safetied the pistol, and put my pack back on. “Come on,” I said. I led him out of the meat locker into the main part of the shed and shut the door behind us, sliding the broken ratchet back into place. Closing the door on that grisly morgue brought a sigh of relief to my lips. I hoped I’d never have to open it again.
    Threatening him with further violations to his family