“Angie!” I shouted, breathing more heavily now. “There are a bunch of trees reaching into the ice in about fifty feet! Stay as close to the shore as you can and get yourself wrapped up in them! That’s where we’re going to get you out!”
I had no way of knowing whether she heard me or not. No way of knowing whether she’d be able to manage it. She had to be getting horribly beat up down there, bumping up against the ice and against the bottom of the river, at the mercy of the water. The only high point right now was that we were so close to the shore that even with the weight of the exoskeleton, she wouldn’t be out of our reach. Even if it took her to the bottom, she’d only be three feet down from the bottom of the ice.
Three feet. We’d be able to reach her.
As long as the current didn’t take her further out toward the center of the river. If she went out there…
No. I cut that thought off before it could fully form, absolutely unwilling to even consider it. It would never happen, and it wasn’t even worth thinking about. She was doing everything she needed to do to keep herself on the shore, and as long as she hit those trees up ahead, we’d be able to get her out of there.
It was the only option. The only option.
We reached the trees seconds later, and looking back up the river, I could see that Angie had given us about fifty feet of head start. She was currently clinging to some reeds in the riverbank, and I could see her body being tossed about by the current under the ice. I had no idea how she was managing to hang on—but I didn’t need to know. I just needed her to do it for a little while longer.
God, how long had she been under there now? I had no idea, and that was going to be the much bigger problem. If she ran out of air down there, it wasn’t going to matter how close we were to the shore.
I turned back to the trees and saw that Marlon already had the drill out. And he was pushing it much harder this time, the drill’s whine sounding out at a much higher key than it had when we’d measured the ice before.
“How fast can that thing get through the ice?” I asked.
“I’m pushing it as hard as it’ll go,” he answered quickly. “With luck, the increased pace will cause some additional cracks here. Make it easier to break through.”
Then, as if on cue, there was a loud cracking sound, and the drill shoved down several inches—and the ice around it cracked.
“Thank God,” Marlon murmured. “John, get over here and give me your weight.”
I darted over, thinking heavy thoughts, and paused at the edge of one of the cracks.
“Stomp on it, and be ready to jump back,” he said grimly.
I did just that, and with my second stomp the ice broke through, leaving a large hole. A hole big enough to grab Angie.
I turned and ran back up the river to where she was still hanging on, and got down on the ice, putting my face right next to hers. She looked terrified. And the crease in her brow told me that she knew she didn’t have much longer under there.
“Let go!” I shouted. “We have a hole in the ice about fifty feet down! Stay close to the shore!”
She gave me a single nod, then let go of whatever she’d been holding onto and started flying down the river again. Jumping to my feet, I raced after her, my hands already flexing with the need to reach through the ice and get her. I beat her to the hole, went skidding toward it on my knees, and plunged my hands down into the hole up to my shoulders, my hands hitting the ice-cold water and going almost immediately numb.
But I still felt her when she rammed against me, and with a superhuman effort, I forced my fingers to clamp around her clothing and pull upward. I felt her hands come around my hands, clinging on for dear life.
“I’ve got her!” I shouted. “Marlon, I’ve got her!”
His hands grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked, and a moment later, Angie was sliding up through the hole like an enormous trout. We all went flying backward and came to a stop on the shore, where I wrapped my arms around Angie and pulled her to me, caught between sobbing and laughing with the pure joy of having her with me again, her coughing in my ear telling me that she was indeed still alive.
It was either a lifetime or only thirty seconds later that Marlon’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me.
“John, we have to get her warm,” he said abruptly. “We have to get a fire going. Now.”
Right. A fire. I could feel Angie shaking in my arms, and realized now that she was soaking wet—and that the water was slowly seeping into my own clothing. And in this sort of environment, being wet was the absolute worst thing we could be.
I sat up, pulling her with me, and took a moment to look into her enormous eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She gave me a shuddering, shaking laugh. “Are you kidding? I’m the farthest thing from okay possible. But I’m alive. And I guess that’s a start.”
Right. Sense of humor, intact. And that was a start, for sure.
I climbed to my feet and then stooped over to lift her up in a cradle position, bringing her back to my chest and looking for Marlon. He was already up on the shore, in the lee of several trees, and had managed to get a decent amount of wood together. He pulled something out of his pack and quickly began sparking a fire, and by the time I hauled Angie up to him, he had it growing and crackling.
“Get her out of those wet clothes, and get some dry clothes and blankets, then get her by the fire,” he said. “I’m going to get started on some sort of shelter.”
He was right. I needed to get her out of her wet clothes, then insulate her from not only the cold air, but also set a blanket between her and the icy ground below, remembering the rule that “heat travels to cold.” Once she was in dry clothes that I’d gotten out of my own pack, I laid a blanket out on the snow as close to the fire as I thought would be safe to ensure she wasn’t heated too rapidly. I left Marlon to his own plans for shelter, knowing that he’d be fine without me, and set Angie down within two feet of the fire, then started to rub her briskly, beginning with her hands, cheeks, and arms. I needed to make sure that her circulation was intact. That would be the best possible way of warming her up, in the end. If her own internal heater was working, the heat would radiate outward, up to a point. It would help the fire do its job.
“How’s the leg?” I asked as I worked.
“Completely numb,” she said through blue lips. “It doesn’t hurt, though. And that’s a relief.”
“Good. I was afraid that contraption was going to drag you down.”
“I was, too. Why do you think I worked so hard to stay so close to the shore? At least there, ‘down’ was only a couple of feet.”
I paused then and leaned in to kiss her cold lips, my own lips turned up into the start of a smile. Then I rested my forehead to hers and stared into her sparkling, very alive eyes.
“I love you,” I said. “I don’t know what I would have done if we didn’t get you out of that ice.”
She put her ice-cold hand up to my face. “But you did,” she returned. “And that makes you my personal hero. Now help Marlon with that fire. I’ve never needed it worse than I do right now.”
Half an hour later, we were sitting in a structure I never would have dreamt possible. When I’d found Marlon, he’d been in a pine tree, using his saw to cut branches off it and throwing them to the ground.
“Take them back to the fire!” he shouted down from the tree.
I didn’t argue. I picked up as many as I could carry and toted them quickly back to the fire, then returned for another round of branches. Five trips later, Marlon was down from the tree and helping me, and once we’d moved all the trees to our impromptu campsite, he started showing me what he wanted me to do with them. We buried the stoutest part of each branch in the snow, leaving the fronds sticking up into the sky, and built a rough circle around Angie and the fire, then ducked through the branches ourselves and sat down with her.
It wasn’t perfect. It certainly wasn’t airtight. But it
was shelter from the wind for both Angie and the fire—which was now roaring. It wouldn’t do for the night. But for now, it was enough.
I moved as close to the fire as I dared, mindful of the fact that I also had wet clothes that needed changing, and started rubbing at Angie again. The color was starting to come back into her skin, but I could see that she was still shaking, and I was starting to get very worried.
Our list of options was getting shorter with every minute we spent out here. A glance at my watch told me that it was past midday already. Before long we would have to start worrying about losing the sun entirely.
If the cold and damp hadn’t killed her, the dark almost certainly would.
I looked up and saw the same thoughts flying across Marlon’s face, and a shift of my gaze showed me that Angie was thinking the exact same thing. We all knew that we couldn’t stay here.
I just didn’t know what else we were going to do.
“Well one of us might as well say it,” Angie finally said. “We can’t stay here. Can’t stay out in the snow and weather now that I’m so close to hypothermia. We have to move.”
She’d barely finished speaking when a howl tore through the air around us, and we all froze. Seconds later, another answered it. And then another.
“Wolves,” I whispered. God, could it get any worse?
“And they’re close,” Marlon answered, his voice just as quiet.
Shit. Wolves. The only thing that would work against them—
“Oh God, the guns,” Angie murmured, her mind moving along the same lines as mine.
I looked up and met her eyes, and I knew mine were dark with the realization that she was right. Our best hope at fending off these wolves was guns. And ours had been strapped to her pack, where we thought they’d be safe.
Which meant they were now at the bottom of the river.
22
We sat completely still, the fire flickering over our features, and listened for the wolves to call out to each other again. When they did, I cringed. I wasn’t an outdoorsman. I’d started hunting only when Angie began to teach me what it was all about. I’d never been one to really, truly enjoy time in nature—with all the dangers. All the things that could go wrong out here. So it wasn’t like I’d heard wolves howling in real life before.
But my instincts knew exactly what it was. And my body knew to be terrified.
Chills ran across my skin, leading to an outright shiver—which was echoed by the woman sitting next to me.
“At least ten of them, maybe more,” she whispered. “And they’re on the move. They’re on the hunt.”
“Are they coming after us?” I asked, trying to figure out how that would even happen. Did wolves usually hunt humans? Didn’t they generally try to stay away from…you know, things that might shoot them? And why would they be after us? We weren’t wounded. Much. We certainly weren’t bleeding all over the ground.
“Probably not,” Marlon said. “They’re probably after smaller game. Rabbits. Maybe a deer or two. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be dangerous to us if they find us. Wolves might be where dogs started—”
“But that doesn’t make them tame,” Angie finished for him. “And it also doesn’t make them something you want to run into when you’re alone in a forest. Wounded. And cold.” Her eyes went to mine, and then to Marlon’s. “We can’t stay here. Those howls are getting closer, and that means they’re heading our way, whether it’s on purpose or not. They’ll move a lot quicker than we can, so we can’t wait to run once we see them.”
“Especially with you already wounded,” I injected into the conversation. I, too, turned my eyes to Marlon, knowing that he had the experience we needed right now. “We need to get Angie to a hospital, sooner rather than later. We need to get her inside, where she can get some real shelter from the cold. We definitely need to get her out of the air before night falls. And now we’ve got wolves on our tails. What are our options?”
I’d been trying to come up with the list since we put up the branches and started the fire. And I was running desperately short of ideas. I was hoping he had another brilliant toy hidden up his sleeve.
“We use the river,” Angie said, her shaking now starting to show up in her voice. “We’ve talked about it before, and we were doing it before. We just have to go back to it.”
I turned on her, my refusal already on my lips. “Use the river, are you kidding? Yeah, we were using it before, and you fell into it! Remember, that dunk you took? The fact that we had to save you from drowning?”
She put a hand up. “I remember. And I appreciate it. But it’s our only option, John. We have to get out of here, and we have to do it quickly. We don’t have time to walk through the woods—and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to do it with wolves out. We have to find something quicker. Something that will get us out of here in a hurry.”
I stared at her, wanting to call her crazy… But knowing that she might also be on to something. And then Marlon agreed with her.
“She’s right, John,” he said slowly. Then, his voice rose a little bit. “We have to get her to a hospital. I agree with you there. We definitely can’t stand to spend another night out here—and there are a number of reasons for that, starting with this little miss suffering from hypothermia. And ending with the fact that we’re almost out of food. We have to get to town. The sooner the better. And the wolves…”
“Just confirm the fact,” I said. “I get it. So the river, then. But you’re both failing to see one important piece. If we don’t have time to walk through the forest, how does walking down the river fix that? We’re still walking. And, I’ll remind you, in a much more open, easy-to-find-and-shoot situation.”
Angie turned and met my eyes, and I tried to look past the shaking as I read her expression. She was cold, yes, and I could still see tinges of blue around the edges of her face that made me very, very worried about how much damage she might have sustained. Even if we got her to a hospital, would they be able to treat her? Or was she going to lose pieces of herself to frostbite?
I cursed myself once again for having allowed her to talk me into this trip at all. If I’d just said no. If I’d just told her to wait until the weather was more stable. Maybe I would have been able to save her from all of this.
Or maybe she would have come without me. And been attacked by that bear by herself.
At least this way I was here to take care of her. To sell my soul, if need be, to get her home safely. So I asked again.
“So what do we do? How does the river get us home faster? What am I missing?”
“The sleds,” Angie said simply.
I stared at her, trying to read between the lines. Trying to understand what the hell she was talking about.
“The sleds?” I finally asked stupidly.
Marlon gave me a tired—but somewhat hopeful—grin. “The sleds,” he confirmed.
Then the wolves started howling again, and they were a whole lot closer than they had been. We threw snow on the fire, ignoring the fact that Angie still needed it so badly, and shot out of our little snuggery. Our destination: the river.
We were evidently going back to the sleds. For reasons I still didn’t truly understand.
Once we found the sleds again—about two hundred feet back up the river—we came to a stop, all three of us shuddering in the bitter cold. A glance up told me that the sun had indeed reached its zenith and was starting to slide toward the horizon. We were running out of time. And the air temperature around us was dropping quickly, spurring us on.
I very carefully didn’t think about how Angie was feeling right then. We were moving as quickly as we could. Doing everything we could. It would just have to be enough.
Marlon was already stacking the sleds one on top of the other again, the way they’d been when Angie was riding in them. He put the cracked and damaged one on the bottom and the newer one on the top, then threw everything but one quilt to the side.
“They’re all
too soaked to be any good to us now,” he muttered. “But we’ll need the one. For protection.”
“Protection against what?” I asked, still not catching on.
Marlon looked up at me. “Protection from the wind,” he answered quickly.
I just stared at him. Either he and Angie had suddenly started speaking a different language or I definitely had frostbite of the brain. Because none of this was making sense.
A small hand on my arm made me turn to my wife.
“John, we have to get to town in a hurry. And we know we can’t outrun those wolves. Not in the forest, not on the river. But this river is a pathway, don’t you see? It’s a straight shot to town, an easy route. We’ll use the sleds as our vehicle. With all three of us in them, and the river’s slant…”
“Oh my God, you two are crazy,” I said, but I was already turning toward the river, wondering what she meant by the slant. Then I saw it. She was right; the river had started to run downhill here. It was slight, but once you were looking for it you could definitely see the angle.
The river was one big ice chute. And my wife and our new friend were talking about using it as a slide.
“What about the fact that Angie just almost drowned?” I asked, now only half angry. Because their answer was starting to make sense to me. I just wanted to make sure it was at least mostly safe.
“I’ve thought about that, and I think I know the reason it happened right then,” Marlon answered. “We should never have stopped. As long as we were moving, our weight was distributed across the ice. Once we stopped, though, we were in one place for too long. Our warmth might have melted the ice where we were, or perhaps it was just our weight resting on one place for too long. Maybe it was just pure bad luck that we stopped in a place where the ice was already weak. But if we’re moving, it has less chance of happening. Especially if we’re moving quickly.”
I stared at him. Moving quickly. Getting to town quickly. Getting Angie to a doctor. Getting away from the wolves. Getting out of this God-forsaken forest.
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 15
