Read White Out: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller for Free Online

damn puppet movie that Paulie was so infatuated with.
    And when the electric returned, Christian would blast all four burners on the stovetop and get the stove’s temperature blasting up to five hundred degrees, both for warming a meal, even if they weren’t hungry for one, and to give them a place to sit, huddled around the stove, Paulie sitting comfortably on Christian’s lap. They would tell stories to each other, basking in the fleeting heat. Almost all of Paulie’s stories began and ended with a monster that was either very happy or not happy at all. They didn’t have the most intricate plots, but the boy worked at it.
    Christian’s stories always had the same formula: a little boy gets lost in some place scary, and then he meets something or somebody magical (a fairy, a troll, a unicorn, a wizard), and the boy eventually finds his way home to his Mommy and Daddy. Christian had a very explainable urge to leave the Mommy out of the story, to have the little boy return only to his father. It was petty, but he couldn’t help but feel that she had purposefully stranded herself with Tony, no matter what her real story was.
    Life was about as normal as it was going to be in their home, given the circumstances.
    Normal, e xcept for the layers of frost, building up on the walls like plaque. The house had descended into a deep freeze since the oil tank gave its last spurt, but the well-insulated house was retaining its inner warmth. In the last few hours, the icy death grip of the outdoors was reaching into the walls. The thermometer in the porch window was reading negative forty-five degrees.
    A thickening frost had developed on the downstairs bedroom's walls. That was where Paulie’s bedroom was, but they weren't using that room anymore. Instead, Paulie slept in Christian’s bed with him, conserving warmth beneath a bevy of blankets and afghans, so Christian had cordoned off Paulie’s room. They slept in the upstairs bedroom, in his and Annie's bed, where they had once conceived the child. Logic told Christian that heat rises, so the upstairs would be most ideal. That same rule didn't really apply when there was no heat to be found, but he figured it was as warm a bed as they were going to find.
    One thing he’d noticed, was that the basement wasn’t nearly as cold as the first floor. When he’d been retrieving canned goods earlier in the day, he was surprised by the relative warmth of the basement, being below ground level. In all likelihood, he’d move his mattress and all their blankets down to the basement if the temperature didn’t let up soon.
                  Christian rubbed his hands together, looking over a drawing that Paulie had finished off earlier in the day. It was a picture of their house, with crooked walls and an obtuse roof. Inside, he drew Christian and Paulie. They were both smiling, though it was hard to decipher with the childish interpretation. Underneath it, he wrote his name, but he gave it double A’s accidentally: PAAULIE.
    " My silly Picasso," he said to himself, weakly. His vision had been starry all morning, since their earlier meal (which he refused to call “breakfast”, for fear of ruining his favorite word forever). He was starting to ration their food supplies more carefully, being quite mindful of an uncertain future, so he'd held back on his own consumption for the kid's sake. No one could say how long it would be until the snow melted enough at least to let him get out of the house, even if it was to hunt down the neighbor's dog and kill it.
    The neighbor’s dog had become sort of an internal joke that he kept repeating to himself, but it seemed more and more plausible every time he thought it. The neighbor's dog was named Bucky, and he was one of many options. If the neighbors didn't chow down on Bucky first, of course. Sometimes, Christian would think about Bucky, picturing him running around the yard, fetching a bone. And in the next thought, he would