Whiteout Marionette

Locked out of his rig in a blizzard, a trucker realizes the phantom child he stopped for wasn't lost—it was waiting.

"Just make it to Thunder Bay, Ben. Come on."

The words were a puff of steam in the warm cab, gone before they even registered. My voice sounded thin against the howl of the wind outside. It was a physical thing, the wind. A bully, shouldering my rig, trying to push eighteen tons of steel and freight into the ditch.

The wipers fought a battle they were born to lose, slapping back and forth in a frantic, hypnotic rhythm. Slap-smear. Slap-smear. For a second, a patch of windshield would clear, showing me a wall of white. Then it would be gone, buried again. The highway markers, the tall ones they put out here for this exact reason, were just ghosts. Faint orange flickers swallowed by the storm the moment they appeared. I was driving on memory. On faith.

Then I saw it.

A flicker of movement on the shoulder. Something dark against the impossible white. I blinked, chalking it up to road hypnosis, the same way you see phantom deer on a long haul through the night. Just your eyes playing tricks. But my foot eased off the accelerator anyway.

The something was still there. Not a deer. Too small. Too still.

It was a kid.

A fucking kid. Standing on the shoulder of the Trans-Canada in the middle of a whiteout, a hundred klicks from anything you could call a town. Wearing a dark coat, no hat. Small.

"No," I said it out loud this time. "No way." My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Every instinct, every story swapped over burnt coffee at a truck stop screamed at me. *You don't stop. You never stop.* You call it in. You radio dispatch and let the people with the flashing lights handle it. You keep your wheels turning.

But the shape didn't move. It just stood there, a tiny, solid thing in a world that had dissolved into chaos. What if their car went into the ditch? What if they were the only one who got out? My mind churned through the possibilities, each one worse than the last. A little body found in the spring thaw. A news report with a grainy school picture.

God damn it.

I geared down, the engine groaning in protest. The air brakes hissed, a long, mournful sigh that was immediately ripped away by the wind. The rig slid a little, a gentle, terrifying drift to the right before the tires bit and held. I pulled onto the shoulder, maybe fifty feet past the figure. My headlights bored two perfect, useless cones into the swirling snow. I left the engine running. Of course I left the engine running. You’d have to be an idiot to kill the engine out here. The heat, the radio, the lights—that was life.

Flipping on the hazards, I grabbed my heavy jacket but not my gloves. A mistake. My phone was on the passenger seat, screen glowing. I’d grab it when I got the kid settled. The priorities felt clear in my head. Get the kid. Get warm. Get moving.

The jump from the cab to the ground was a shock. The wind hit me like a physical blow, stealing my breath and driving ice crystals into my cheeks. It was colder than I thought. Colder than hell. The noise was immense, a deafening roar that made the warm, rumbling cab feel like a distant memory.

"Hey!" I shouted, turning. My voice was a joke. The storm swallowed it whole. "Kid!"

I squinted back toward where I'd seen the figure. Nothing. Just the uniform chaos of the blizzard, the snow blowing horizontally across the dead pavement.

My heart sank. Did they get spooked? Run into the trees? There weren't even any trees out here, just scrub and rock buried under four feet of snow. I took a few steps, my boots crunching, the wind trying to tear the jacket from my back.

"Hello?" I yelled again, cupping my hands around my mouth. Nothing. Not a track. Not a sign.

This is stupid. A trick of the light. A snow-caked signpost I’d mistaken for a person. I was tired, my eyes were shot. I felt a surge of frustrated anger, at the storm, at my own bleeding heart. Wasting time. Burning fuel.

I turned back to my truck, a hulking, beautiful beast breathing warmth and light into the storm. My lifeline. I reached for the handle, my cold fingers fumbling for the familiar metal.

*CLUNK.*

The sound was so clean, so final. It cut right through the howl of the wind. The sound of a door lock engaging.

I stared at the handle for a second before my brain caught up. Then I pulled. Nothing. The door was solid, immovable. I pulled again, harder, yanking on it with a sudden, sharp spike of fear. It didn't budge.

Locked. It had locked.

"No. No, no, no." I pressed my face against the freezing glass. The cab was right there. An inch away. The green glow of the dashboard. The steady rumble of the diesel engine. My phone, a bright rectangle on the passenger seat. My goddamn gloves on the dash. My whole world, warm and safe, sealed away from me.

I pounded on the window with my fist. The cold glass stung my knuckles. "Hey!" I screamed, a useless, pathetic sound. There was no one to hear me. The passenger side. Of course. I stumbled around the front of the rig, the wind battering me, pushing me off balance. The headlights blinded me for a second, two white suns in the blizzard. I shielded my eyes and felt my way along the grille, the metal so cold it felt like it was burning my skin. I grabbed the passenger handle. Pulled.

Locked.

Panic began to unspool in my gut, cold and sharp. This wasn't happening. It was a freak thing. The wind must have slammed it just right, the mechanism must have caught. That had to be it. I looked around frantically. A rock. I needed a rock. Something to break the glass. But the ground was gone, hidden under a thick, uniform blanket of white. There was nothing. Just snow and steel and my own rising terror.

And that's when I saw it again.

The figure. The child.

It was standing in front of the truck, right in the center of the headlight beams. A perfect, dark silhouette against the storm. It hadn't run off. It had just… moved. It was absolutely still, its form indistinct, just a small, person-shaped void.

I froze, my hand still on the passenger door handle. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The wind howled and the snow swirled around the small, dark shape, but it remained untouched, unmoving. My chattering teeth were the only sound I could make.

Slowly, so slowly, the figure raised an arm. A small hand, thin and pale, reached out and pressed flat against the center of my windshield. It wasn't a violent gesture. It was delicate. A simple touch.

The engine sputtered.

I heard it over the wind. A cough. A hiccup in the steady, powerful rhythm I knew better than my own heartbeat. The green glow of the dash lights flickered once.

The engine sputtered again, a wet, choking sound.

The figure didn't move. Its hand remained pressed to the glass.

Then, with a final, dying groan, the engine quit. The headlights blinked out. The world plunged into an absolute, suffocating darkness. The roar of the engine was gone, leaving only the high, thin scream of the wind. The heat was gone. The light was gone. The life was gone.

Silence fell like a hammer. A profound, terrifying silence that the storm couldn't fill. My truck was just a cold block of dead metal now. A tomb.

I backed away from it, stumbling backward into a snowdrift. My breath came in ragged, white plumes. My eyes, adjusting to the gloom, could just make out the massive shape of the rig, a mountain of black against the grey-white of the storm. The figure in front of it was gone.

I felt a presence. A stillness to my right. I turned my head, slowly, every muscle screaming in protest.

It was there. Standing beside me on the shoulder of the highway, no more than three feet away. I could see it more clearly now. A child, yes, but the face was a pale, smooth oval with no features. Just an impression. It wore a thin, dark coat, unsuitable for this weather, for any weather. It wasn't shivering.

It wasn't looking at me, but I felt its attention like a weight on my soul. I tried to speak, to scream, to do anything, but my throat was frozen shut. The cold wasn't just in the air anymore. It was inside me, a deep, invasive chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Its small hand touched my arm, and the cold wasn't on my skin, it was in my blood.