Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse

by Connor, T. W.

  He blew out a breath, but was already moving toward the bank when he answered. “Honestly, John, I don’t think we have much of a choice. Let’s get Angie over here and get the hell around that bend ahead of us before Randall and his men show up. We’re going to be more exposed on the river than we were in the trees, and if we can put a bend or two between us and them it’ll make me feel a whole lot better.”

  20

  It took us about ten minutes to get Angie situated the way we wanted her to be. We decided on our way back over the ice that we weren’t going to let her try to walk herself. Not yet—and maybe not at all. The sled made things chancier, with its weight, but the way she’d have to walk with the exoskeleton could be even more dangerous.

  I was seriously questioning our decision to bring it at this point, with how heavy it had been, but I was also counseling myself to be patient. We didn’t know yet if we’d need it. And if we did, we would kick ourselves if we’d left it behind.

  “She’ll stomp,” Marlon told me bluntly. When I looked at him with surprise, he shook his head. “It’s not her fault. Nothing to do with her natural carriage, and everything to do with the fact that the leg’s mechanics are going to be messed up. That thing has her leg in a vice, more or less, and it’s going to make it incredibly difficult for her to do anything more than swing the leg outward in a half-circle to make it move forward. If we’re going out on thin ice, the last thing we need is for her to be walking in a way that makes her even heavier.”

  We’d arrived back at Angie’s litter by the time he finished the statement, which meant she got to hear the end of it, and I could already see her nodding.

  “He’s right. I’ve tried moving my leg with this thing on and there’s nothing natural about it. I don’t know about stomping, but it’s not going to be a smooth gait, and I don’t want to cause any trouble. But maybe if I lay on my stomach, I can help to push with my hands.”

  I shook my head at that. “Once we’re on the ice, pulling you is going to be easy as pie,” I told her. “We’re going to have more trouble getting a grip on the ice ourselves than we are pulling you. In fact—”

  “Only if we have to,” Marlon broke in, correctly reading my mind and putting the idea on a list that we might use later. “If we have to move somewhere very quickly, we’ll consider all of us getting into the sled. But I don’t want to do that unless it’s an absolute necessity. It’ll concentrate all of our weight into one place, and every engineering class I’ve ever taken says that doing that is a very, very dangerous idea.”

  “Agreed. But if we have to move quickly, it’s the first thing we’ll consider,” I confirmed. “In the meantime, Angie stays in the sled, and I say we pull her together.” I gave her a quick grin. “You’ll have two carriage horses rather than one at a time.”

  Marlon gave me an answering grin and a nod, and with that we were each taking a side of the sled and scooting it over the mud and debris at the side of the river and to the banks, where the ice met that mud. There, we both paused, without having discussed it.

  “We sure about this?” I asked.

  “Sure about what?” There was a tinge of concern in Angie’s voice.

  Marlon met my gaze and a hundred and one thoughts flowed between us as if our minds were actually wirelessly connected. This was the best way we had of getting back to Ellis Woods quickly. It was the best way we had of covering our tracks and making it harder for Randall and his crew to find us—or effectively follow us. If we were incredibly lucky, taking the river would give us both of those outcomes at the same time.

  If we were incredibly lucky.

  If we were unlucky, it would be exactly the opposite. We were asking the ice to take more weight than we were sure it could hold, and we’d be pounding on it ourselves as we moved forward. We were also concentrating a whole lot of weight in one place—on one sled.

  Even more concerning was the idea that if the ice broke under the sled, it was Angie who’d be going into the water. Angie with her leg not only broken, but also weighted down with metal and leather. She’d go into the water with a handicap that might actually kill her.

  Was it worth the risk? Were we willing to gamble her life at least, and all our lives, potentially, on the too-thin ice, just to get away more quickly?

  “We stay as close to shore as possible, where the ice is thickest,” Marlon finally said. “We step as lightly as we can but go as quickly as we can. And the moment we see a likely spot, we get up off the ice and away from danger.” He looked down at the sled, then, and added one more thing. “And Angie doesn’t get to keep the additional pack. I’m sorry, John, but you’re going to have to actually wear it.”

  It was an absolutely minimal price to pay. I reached down, scooped it up, and slid it onto my back.

  “You ready?” I asked Angie. “You’re going to be our eyes and ears out there. If you hear or feel or see anything that looks even remotely like the ice giving in, you shout before you even blink, you got me?”

  “I got you,” she said solemnly. “Now let’s go. This decision isn’t going to get any easier with us standing around talking about it, and we’ve got a madman on our tail. If this river gives us the best chance of getting away from him, let’s do it.”

  Her words gave me all the motivation I needed. I ducked down, grabbed one of the ropes, and wrapped it around my waist, then waited for Marlon to do the same. Once he had, we stepped gingerly out onto the ice together and started pulling.

  We worked hard to get to the bend in the river as quickly as possible, Marlon and I digging the toes of our boots into the ice, leaning forward against the ropes, and charging forward like bulls. Behind me, I could hear the sled gliding along, and I’d been right about what I told Angie earlier: At several points, I actually thought the sled was going to pass us. It was moving a lot faster than we were, particularly now that we’d moved the second pack from the sled to my back, and we had absolutely no trouble making quick time. The only drawback was the debris on the ice, courtesy of being so close to the banks. We hit tree branches, leaves, and even mud as we slid and skated forward—but that was a small price to pay for the thicker ice right here.

  It also, I had realized, gave us a quicker escape route if we needed it. If Randall and his boys suddenly appeared behind us—with their guns—we’d need to get up into the woods as quickly as possible, and being so close to the shore meant we’d be able to do that a lot faster. Sure, it might have just been a coincidence. A lucky side effect of sticking close to the shore, where the ice was thicker.

  But I’d been around Marlon for long enough now that I was betting it was a whole lot more than that. That man had a mind like a steel trap and seemed to be able to see every possible eventuality in a situation within moments of looking at it. He might have known that being close to the shore made for safer ice, but I was willing to bet that “quicker escape route” had also been high up on the list of things that helped him make the decision.

  The man must have been an absolute marvel in the field, whether he was with the military or the intelligence community. Working with someone that capable and even-tempered would have been a dream come true. A lot of people in Afghanistan had liked working with me, for those very reasons, but Marlon’s capabilities put my own to shame.

  We were lucky to have found him. To have been found by him. We were lucky to have him on our side.

  When we hit the start of the curve in the river, Marlon held up his hand and I slowed.

  “We need to go slower around the curve, or we’ll end up sending Angie and the sled further out toward the center of the river, just with her momentum,” he said quietly.

  I nodded and matched my pacing to his. We were barely creeping now, and the skin on the back of my neck was absolutely crawling with the feeling that someone was behind us, watching. Normally I would have paid attention to that instinct and whirled around, my handgun up and at the ready. But that wasn’t my job right now.

  “Angie, you got
eyes on everything behind us?” I called over my shoulder.

  She was our eyes and ears right now. It was our job to provide the manpower. Hers to provide the lookout.

  I heard her shifting in the sled, and then heard a grunt of pain that must have meant she’d pushed her leg too far. Then: “Nothing, there’s no one back there—and if there is, they’re hiding so well that even I can’t see them.”

  Another pause, and I assumed she was narrowing her eyes the way she did when she really wanted to focus on something, and checking both sides of the river for signs of inadvertent movement or brightly colored clothing. The sort of clothing people normally wore when they were hunting, to alert other hunters to their presence.

  Yes, it would have been stupid and pointless for Randall or anyone else to wear that sort of clothing out here, where there were so few other hunters. And it would have been absolute lunacy for him to wear it when he was hunting us and needed to be as subtle as humanly possible. But the man was also certifiably insane.

  I didn’t think it was a big jump to think that he was in fact wearing reflective, bright orange hunting gear. And if he was, it was going to make him a whole lot easier to spot.

  “Nothing,” she finally said, her voice registering both surprise and relief. “If they’re out there, they haven’t made it to the river yet.”

  “Hopefully they don’t,” I replied. “Hopefully they think we’ve gone an entirely different way. Maybe they’ll find our camping spot in the cave, and it’ll set them on the wrong path.”

  “One can only hope,” Marlon answered, and something in his voice made me turn toward him, my own eyes narrowed.

  “You’re expecting it to,” I guessed.

  I saw the corner of his mouth jerk up in what would have become a smile under less intense circumstances.

  “‘Expecting’ is a rather strong term,” he said. “But I have to admit that the idea had occurred to me. That cave was in the exactly wrong direction if we were planning on coming to the river. And there are towns in that direction as well. Maybe he’ll think we’re trying to put him off our track by heading for a town other than the one where he knows you live. With luck, that little field trip will send them on a wild goose chase. With even more luck, they won’t realize it was a wild goose chase until we’re well within the town limits of Ellis Woods.”

  I snorted in appreciation. Like I’d said, the man was a master planner. Always at least three steps ahead.

  We were moving too slowly for my liking, but our progress was still a lot faster than it would have been up on the snow, and within five minutes, we were around the sharp bend in the river, and we gave ourselves a moment to stop and rest. Marlon and I bent over, huffing, and Angie looked backward and to the sides of us, using the binoculars I’d packed in her backpack on that morning that seemed like it had been a different lifetime, when we first left our home to go hunting.

  “Nothing,” she finally said, dropping the binoculars against her chest. “I don’t see anything that looks like it might be humans. No movement, no flash of clothing. The complete lack of movement in a forest this populated with animals would normally make me suspicious. It’s not like animals to just up and disappear unless there’s something dangerous in the area. But then I remembered that we’re out here, doing what has to look like something entirely crazy to the animal population. I guess that’s a good enough reason for them to have skedaddled from the area.”

  “Not to mention the fact that there’s no running water here,” Marlon added. “They’re not here for water, and there’s plenty of grass under snow in less-crowded parts of the forest. I don’t expect we’d see much wildlife in this area, regardless.”

  “Good point,” she muttered.

  “How much further do you suppose it is?” I asked Marlon, bringing the meeting back to order. Randall and his men might not be after us yet—and if Marlon was right, they might be headed in the opposite direction—but I still wasn’t going to feel relaxed until we had Ellis Woods firmly in our sights.

  And I wasn’t going to be completely happy until I had four walls around me again. Walls that would slow down bullets. And a door that would keep people like Randall out.

  “About five miles or so, I’d say,” he guessed. “Far enough that it’s going to take us awhile to get there, and it’s not going to be an easy trip. Close enough that it’s doable. Might even be doable today, if we can stay on the river for long enough. And if we don’t bother stopping for too long come lunch.”

  “Damn lunch,” I ground out. “I say we work right through lunchtime. I want to get my wife home, to her daughter, and to medical help. I can eat tomorrow.”

  Marlon let out a bark of laughter at that, and I could see him nodding from my peripheral vision. “On that, my friend, we’re agreed. If we get too hungry and feel like we can’t keep going, we’ll stop. Until then, we will be the work horses your wife needs.”

  He reached into his pack, shuffled around, and then pulled several packages from one of the pockets. He tossed one to me and one over his shoulder to Angie, keeping the third for himself. When I looked down, I saw that they were granola bars. The kind my mom had given me when I was a kid.

  The corners of my mouth ticked up slightly at the thought, then I began tearing into the wrapper, already able to taste the combination of peanut butter and chocolate with oats.

  “I’ve never found anything to be quite so satisfying as a granola bar when you’re out in the wild,” Marlon said, his voice holding something that sounded like slight embarrassment. “I’ve loved them since I was a kid.”

  “Me, too,” I answered.

  I was just biting into my granola bar when the ice under my feet let out a terrifically loud breaking sound and started to crack.

  21

  “John!” Angie shouted, her voice filled with the same terror that was flowing quickly through my veins.

  But it was already too late. By the time I’d sent the necessary commands to my limbs and whirled toward her, the cracks under our feet were already snaking along the ice, growing larger and larger as they went. And they were heading right for the sled.

  “Oh God, the sled!” Marlon shouted, springing toward Angie just as the ice started to give way under his feet.

  I sprang forward at the exact same moment, though I could already see that we were going to be on thin ice—no pun intended—as far as timing went. The ice was cracking around the sled already, particularly in front where Angie’s pack was sitting, and I could see her jerking with the sled as the ice started to give way underneath her. I sprinted for her, one part of my brain screaming at me to get there as quickly as possible while the other part screamed—almost as loudly—that adding my weight to the ice was going to make the cracking even worse.

  I didn’t listen to that second voice, and if Marlon had heard a voice like that in his own head, he wasn’t listening to it, either. We raced forward, my mental dialog throwing curse after curse at me for having left the ropes so long between us and Angie, and for a moment, I thought we were going to make it. We were running faster than the cracks were progressing, and the thunderous sound that had accompanied them had fallen off now. Perhaps, I thought, it had ended. Perhaps it had just been some sort of small crackle, and we were going to get through it okay.

  But I was still a solid five feet from her when the ice under the front of the sled gave way completely, sending the nose of the vehicle tipping right through the ice sheet and into the rushing water underneath it. I had time to register that Angie’s pack had been swept away and was now bumping along underneath our feet, and a split second more to look up and see Angie’s eyes on me, wide and full of the knowledge of what was about to happen, and then she was gone, sliding under the ice and right into the churning, freezing cold water underneath us.

  I had a snapshot of her going in, one of those cold, dead moments when the world around you stops and you see one thing with ice-cold clarity, like that’s the only thing in the entire wo
rld that matters. And in this case, it was. My Angie, my wife, was trapped in the water under our feet—trapped under the ice—without air or any way to get it. I saw her almost at my feet, her face turned up to the ice, her eyes wide and terrified and her mouth stretched into an O of shock and absolute horror.

  Then I started moving. We had to get her out from under that ice, and we had to do it immediately. She was going to run out of air within a minute or so—and that was only if she’d managed to take a breath before she went under—and I didn’t know if her body would even last that long in the freezing temperatures under the ice. Even worse, she was wearing what amounted to a metal cast on her leg. She’d be lucky if she stayed up against the ice for long. That thing was going to drag her right to the bottom.

  Fifteen seconds had me at the sled, and I yanked it out of the hole in the ice and slid it quickly toward the shore. We might need it later—especially if we got her out. Then I was on the shore and absolutely sprinting for a point I’d already marked about two hundred feet in front of us, Marlon on my heels. We needed to get ahead of Angie and get to a spot where we could prepare an exit route for her.

  I had no idea if she could hear me, but I shouted at her anyhow.

  “Angie, hold on! We’re going to get you out of there! If you see anything down there to grab onto to slow your progress, do it!” Then, to Marlon: “You still got that drill on you?”

  “You bet I do,” he answered, his voice as cold as the air around us. “Give me thirty seconds of head start and I’ll break into the ice ahead of her.”

  “That spot up ahead where the trees reach down into the river,” I said, my voice just as cold, my eyes on Angie, who was indeed trying to hang herself up on the shore. “It’s a place she can actually hold on for a moment. That’s our target.”

  “Right,” he answered firmly.