The Blast

Supernatural Stories | Jun 15, 2013 | 8 min read
12 Votes, average: 4 out of 5
I told my nephew that several years ago, I earned my living as a cleaner in a German grocer's gigantic distribution warehouse. I dare not say which grocer, for to do so would surely imperil my life. Implications by one such as I matter little in the high and aerie places where princely powers dwell; yet even so, to use a name would be deemed an offense and may have the effect, perhaps, of calling forth.

Effectiveness of engineering function is a sure German trait and Germans are better yet known for their efficiency. This statement is common knowledge to all ethnic groups that are familiar with them and most of all resides within the mind and heart of the German man. I know for this blood courses, with others, in my veins. This penchant for efficiency however, makes a remote and somewhat isolated corner of aforementioned warehouse seem all the more singularly strange, for there can be no earthly reason why it is so damnably cold there.

Everyone avoided the "Blast" with a sense of primordial dread. It was basically a very large flash-freezer used for storing many pallets of frozen foods, juices, and desserts, including numerous varieties of ice creams. The cold there sank to the bone and well-paid (and equipped) selectors with special freezer suits including full face masks and hand/feet warming inserts even despised that part of their job and would ride through only briefly to stop and grab what they needed. Often they would hastily load the items and hurry out, restacking them once they were well into the regular freezer area which was just below 0°Fahrenheit. No one ever stopped to hold a conversation in that place. I heard from two different selectors that they had heard the Blast was 40 degrees below zero, but they believed it was even colder, as did I. I'm not sure if anyone really knew the temperature. What made it worse was a stirring of the air as the overhead ductwork pumped the hibernal ammonia-cooled atmosphere into the abominable room.
Cleaners, like myself, rushed through that place with a large push broom or briskly drove their machine, stopping only to grab and gather entangling plastics or pallets, often having to make several passes intermittently over time and throughout the day to avoid staying any duration.

On a hardly noticeable incline from there was the freezer proper; it was five times larger and filled with an unimaginable quantity of all things frozen. Outside the freezer were a wrapping machine and an unloading dock where trucks backed up to unload or receive cargoes of palleted frozen foods. Driving down the wide corridor from here one passes the areas where thousands upon thousands of cartons of eggs are brought in and out, inside large metal rolling crates on a daily basis. There on the right, through those automatic doors, is the meat locker. It's just below freezing (around 28-30F). Here is the second wrapping machine on this cold side. Then comes the cooler, also on the right behind automatic doors, where all the sandwich meats and cheeses, yogurts, and unfrozen juices are kept. On down this way we pass the produce room with vast quantities of fruits and vegetables and lastly the banana room that also contains potatoes, onions, and tomatoes. This entire lengthy ride was past and through another massive loading dock, primarily on our left. This great expanse terminates in a thick plastic curtain and beyond is the warm side, known as the "dry side"; and It is three times as large as back here.

My favorite supervisor at this place was a gentle but firm man named Raoul. He often laughed and smiled and gave praise where he could and coaxed, cajoled, and encouraged where else he could not. He endeavoured to motivate and get the best work from his subordinates, and unlike most supervisors, was in amongst the tasks and probably the hardiest, swiftest worker of us all. Raoul was not of German descent, nor of any white race nor black, but rather up from an almost forgotten region of Mexico; from an all but vanished race of people there. His peers horizontally and vertically along the chain of command openly admired his abilities as an overseer, but I believe they secretly begrudged the fact that he was ranked among their equals, far and above the general lot befallen any other Latin-American worker in the place.
I alone knew why he had innately succeeded to a higher status and had potential to climb much higher; and I alone knew how he was instinctively a great and revered commander over his fragmented allotment of working men. I kept this secret knowledge to myself for, though uplifting in its revelation, the disclosure could only bring danger to my friend. I had seen his athletic and muscular figure before. Aye, his face was identical in every nuanced detail to the all the timeless statues and ancient depictions of the Toltec warrior/shaman/king Topiltzin, granted by his people the high title of Quetzalcoatl. If proud to look upon in aspect, Raoul was humble and courteous in approach and demeanour. If he realized his own reincarnation, his beautiful charm belied no haughty narcissism and endeared him to nearly everyone.

It was the end of my shift. I had finished my duties and desired to say goodbye to my comrade before departing for the day. Not normally seeking him out, he was usually somewhere working along the route toward the front exit. Not today. The last I had seen Raoul was about an hour previous and he was walking hurriedly away from a high-level corporate supervisor of Scandinavian, probably Norwegian, descent. I didn't trust the man. He presented a friendly facade and often smiled, with icy precision, while seeking flaws and weaknesses in his subordinates. He knew the power of his position and habitually exploited others with unnecessary tasks and subtle tricks that went all but undetected. My companion had stridden away with a troubled and angry look that I feared might belie an emotion that would lead to misjudgment.
I rode to the break room but no one remained. Nearly everyone had gone home. I had searched the whole dry side of the titanic warehouse, resigning that he had left for the day without passing me, when suddenly I was struck with a most shiveringly horrible knowledge.
Whipping my machine so tightly that it rode on two wheels for a moment, I spun it around, racing against time already lost, and launched through the heavy curtain that splits the building between the warm and cold sides. I passed the banana room, the produce room, the wrapping machines; the cooler, the meat locker, around and gently sloping down into the freezer; then down, down unending, unutterably descending into the hoar-frosted heart of the blasted Blast!
There he lay… Raoul, in a crushing trap beneath two toppled pallets of frozen ice cream tubs, his gallant face now frozen in a horrible agony of struggle and panic. In vain I tried desperately to free him, knowing it was already too late. I tugged, tore, ripped, and flung cases of cartons everywhere, attempting to get to my friend, now turning blue; so glaciated and rigid under all these heavy worthless things. The plastic straps and wrappings that held the vast amounts conspired against me to snag and grab like fettering tentacles but the horrid cold robbed all things of elasticity and they broke away at my blind berserking frenzy to reach him. Stinging tears filled my eyes, burning and clumping as they froze in my lashes. My fiery rage and desperation had kept my temperature up and the chill at bay but my fingers and toes and face were beginning to lose sensation. I was as poorly clothed for this as my fallen hero without coat or head covering and could feel the skin of my cheeks stiffening as the heat wafted from my body, like smoke off a smouldering fire.
The numbness was so deadening here; it seemed impossibly colder than usual and I slowed to prevent exhaustion. Looking upward, I believe from lack of hope, I gasped a prayer to the Sky Father of the old Nordic lands (whom much of my people had worshipped in the ancient times) and simultaeneously a ray of sunlight pierced a tiny aperture I'm sure noone knew existed. The bright beam held strangely eddying waves and particles; and I must have imagined the slender forms of fierce female warriors soaring up and down within it. The streaming ray lighted on Raoul's face, about his blank eyes…

And then… I saw the hole in the corner where the walls meet together at the floor!! It was never there before, I KNOW, but nonetheless it was now, and deep and black and opening wider. You can say shock and hallucination, but I could feel and see what little heat was left about me swirling off in steaming vapours and pulled down into that yawning abyss. And something else was there as well, something that shifted and shambled, lurching upward from the darkly frozen stygian depth. I shivered with freezing fear of it and what it was I can not, dar'st not say.
At last, I believed I had enough weight off Raoul to claim his body and, in a panic, grasped his bare hand with mine and tugged; and at once, with a crystalline snapping noise, (like when ice takes a branch from a tree… I still hear it when I sit up stark awake in my bed in the night) his entire hand broke away at the wrist and clung to mine as you might only half believe.
I have no memory of my flight but apparently with what adrenaline and strength remained to me and my benumbed body, I flew that terrible frozen nether region on mercurial wings. They have mailed my last paycheck and my relatives have retrieved the motorcar that I abandoned because I left on foot crossing wood and stream alike in mindless leaps and bounds… and never returned.
I doubt there was ever an investigation into the death of my noble friend; that beautiful young man whom, I have much faith, was the Toltec demi-god hisself. It is my belief that his body was never recovered but rather taken by the something else into that dark hole that led beneath the blast down to the world beneath the worlds.

"Surely that tale isn't true Uncle Xavier," spoke my twelve year old nephew Riley.
"You do look like you're crying now, but surely that is just another story you came up with to give me chills and stir my imagination, right?"
"Hmm? Just another story? Of course Lad." I hastily crumpled and tossed the paper in my hand toward the trash can and missed. It really wasn't trash at all, and I had meant to miss the can, to better draw his gaze from following mine, which had drifted unconsciously to a pickling jar on the shelf behind his chair…
Which evermore contains the right hand of Quetzalcoatl.

Hel was a Goddess scorned ‘tis told;
Revenge is sweet and best served cold;
And Odin's favoured childe She kept
Though all the World, save Loki, wept.
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