by Mark Kelly
“What?”
Simmons rolled his eyes and told her about Petit Henri’s weather prediction.
“Do you believe him?”
“I’m not sure what to believe anymore.”
35
A close call
The snow started to fall in a thick blanket an hour after she left the base. Feeling happier than she had in months, Saanvi looked up into the sky and opened her mouth. As the giant snowflakes tumbled and twirled around her, she playfully dodged her head from side to side, trying to catch the flakes on her tongue, where they quickly dissolved, leaving nothing behind but the faint taste of water. Soon bored with the game, she turned to Alisha.
“How much longer?”
“I told you already it’s a two-hour walk,” Alisha answered in a strained voice.
Saanvi wondered if Alisha was still annoyed at her for being late. She was going to ask, but decided to stick to something safer.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“What’s pretty?”
“The snow.”
“It’s a pain and I hope it stops soon,” Alisha replied sullenly. “It’s making it difficult to walk. I don’t know what I was thinking letting Daphne carry all the supplies back to the cabin by herself.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want to go to town and help her?”
“No, that would be stupid,” Alisha snapped. “We’re half-way to the cabin now.”
Saanvi slowed her step and fell back at the sharpness in Alisha’s tone. She closed her mouth and stared down at the ground as the happiness she had felt only moments earlier disappeared like the snowflakes on her tongue. It’s my fault, she thought. I shouldn’t have been so pushy. Alisha didn’t want to take me today and I forced her to.
They trudged in silence through the ever-deepening snow. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only ten minutes, Saanvi heard an engine and looked up to see a pair of headlights in the distance.
“Who do you think it is?”
Alisha stopped in place. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the blowing snow and stared down the road as the lights grew nearer. “It looks like a big truck. It must be soldiers from the base.”
Saanvi’s heart pounded. She wasn’t going back to the base to be locked up again. She searched for a place to hide amongst the snow-covered rocks and pine trees in the forest alongside the road.
“What should we do?” she asked in a panic. “Should we run?”
Alisha spun around and looked in the direction they had come from. There was nothing behind them but two pairs of footprints trailing off into the freshly fallen snow.
“We can’t run. If we do, they’ll follow us.”
“Maybe they won’t.”
Alisha grabbed Saanvi’s arm. “Yes, they will. You don’t know what it’s like out here. The soldiers stop everyone on the road, and they’ll know we’re trying to hide if they see footprints that disappear into the forest all of a sudden. All we can do is keep walking. Don’t say anything. They’ll recognize your voice since you’re probably the only person for a hundred miles with an English accent. If they catch you with me, we’ll both be in serious trouble. I’ll do the talking, okay?”
Saanvi nodded.
“Do you have a scarf?” Alisha asked as the lights grew brighter and the engine louder.
“Yes, in my pack.”
“Quick, get it out and put it on. Pull it up over your face like you would if you were trying to block the snow. Hurry!”
Saanvi dropped her pack on the ground and opened it. She stuck her hand inside, fumbling for the scarf she had taken before leaving the house. She found it and quickly wrapped it around her face as the vehicle, a five-ton army truck, slowed, then came to a stop. She and Alisha looked up at the truck’s cab as the soldier sitting in the passenger seat rolled down the window and peered at them.
“Fuck of a day to be out for a walk, isn’t it?”
Saanvi’s throat tightened with fear. It was Sergeant Dines.
“Where are you two going?” Dines asked, her eyes lingering on Saanvi as she studied them.
“Home,” Alisha said, pointing in the direction they’d been walking. “We were in town getting supplies.”
The expression on Dines’s face quickly turned to suspicion. “Home? There’s fuck-all in that direction, nothing but empty highway between here and Deep River. You telling me you’re going to walk all that way in a snowstorm?”
“N-No, of course not,” Alisha stammered, then she lied. “We live a couple miles down the road on the left in the house next to the abandoned gas station.”
Dines scowled. “I didn’t think any one lived there. It’s a real shit-hole, looks deserted.”
“That’s why we picked it. There’s just the two of us. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. You’re a woman. You know what it’s like out here, right?”
Dines frowned.
Despite their situation, Saanvi couldn’t help but think that Dines probably didn’t know at all what it was like. Next to Lucia, Sergeant Dines was the most fearless person she had ever met.
“Come on, Dines,” a chorus of voices yelled from the back of the truck. “We’re freezing our nuts off back here. Quit the chit-chat and get a move on.”
As the soldiers in the back continued to yell, Dines turned and pounded her fist on the metal wall that separated the truck’s cab from the cargo area. “Shut up, or I’ll make you all walk back to the base. I’m busy interrogating a couple of refugees.”
Refugees? She thinks we’re refugees. Saanvi sighed with relief.
“We aren’t refugees,” Alisha said to Saanvi’s dismay. “I told you already that we live up the road.”
Dines turned back and glared at them. “I’ll decide what you are or aren’t. What’s in the pack?”
“Food and some other stuff.”
“Open it up and let me see.”
Alisha lowered her right shoulder and slipped off her small day-pack. “Not yours, the other one,” Dines said, pointing at Saanvi’s backpack, which was still on the ground by her feet with its flap open and its drawstrings dangling down the side. “Take the items out one-by-one and show them to me.”
When Alisha bent over and reached for the pack, Saanvi felt her stomach knot so tight she could barely breathe. The top of her pack was stuffed with clothing, but the bottom contained a stash of military food rations she’d taken from the base. If Sergeant Dines saw the rations, she’d know where they came from, and they’d be in huge trouble.
Stirred into frantic action by the panic flooding through her, Saanvi did the only thing she could think of. She pushed Alisha away, yanked the pack off the ground, and spoke in what she hoped was a disguised voice.
“Don touch…s’mine.”
Alisha stopped and looked at Saanvi in astonishment.
“She retarded or something?” Dines asked.
Retarded? Saanvi cringed inside. That wasn’t even remotely close to what she intended. She hugged the pack tight against her chest and said, “Dis is mine. Don touch.”
“Uh…sure, whatever,” Dines replied. She stared at Saanvi as if she were contagious, then leaned out the window and spoke to Alisha. “Is that your daughter?”
“My sister,” Alisha answered, catching on that Saanvi was up to something.
Dines nodded sympathetically. “I had a friend whose brother was retarded too. Down’s syndrome or some shit like that. Nicest fucking kid you’d ever meet, but looked and talked a little bit funny.” Dines scratched her head. “I think he was missing a chromosome.”
“Jesus Christ, Dines,” the soldier next to her muttered. “People with Down’s syndrome aren’t missing a chromosome. They have an extra one.”
Dines turned in her seat towards him. “What do you know about it? You an expert?”
“Everyone knows. It’s common knowledge.”
“How about you? Did you know that?” Dines said, turning back to look at Alisha.
Alisha blinked and then nodded.
“Well, I guess that makes the two of you geniuses.” Dines reached over her shoulder and pounded on the cab’s metal wall. “Hey, assholes, do people with Down’s syndrome have an extra chromosome, or are they missing one?”
Saanvi heard the men in back whispering to each other. “Extra one,” they answered in a single voice, and then erupted in laughter.
“You’re a bunch of dickheads,” Dines shouted back at them. “You overheard us, didn’t you?”
“C’mon, Dines,” one of the men in the back pleaded, “Don’t be such a pain in the butt. Can we please go back to the base? We really are freezing back here.”
The stubborn look on Dines’s face wavered as a gust of wind blew snow into the truck’s cab. She glanced down at Saanvi and Alisha with what passed for pity on her grumpy face. “It’s your lucky day. Pack your shit up and get out of here.”
Saanvi reached down and quickly fastened the straps on her pack before Sergeant Dines could change her mind.
“I hope you’ve got food stockpiled,” Dines said to Alisha. “Everyone’s being called back to base. This storm is going to be bad…real bad.”
Alisha’s eyebrows pinched together with concern. “We’re good for a couple of days, maybe three. That should be plenty, don’t you think?”
“Just a couple of days? Shit, you’ll need food for longer than that.” Dines leaned forward and reached for something down on the floorboards by her feet. “Here,” she said, dropping two ration packs out the window. “It isn’t much, but it’s better than a kick in the ass.”
Alisha watched the ration packs fall into the snow by her feet. She bent over and picked them up. “Thank you. I’m sure we’ll be all right, but this is really nice of you.”
“Sure, whatever,” Dines said with an embarrassed shrug. “Just be careful. I’m not kidding. We’re in for rough weather.”
Saanvi could tell from the look on Alisha’s face that Dines’s warning had spooked her. And that in turn, spooked Saanvi. She wondered if she had made the right decision leaving the base. It wasn’t too late. All she had to do was pull down the scarf wrapped around her face and Sergeant Dines would take her home.
“Ready to roll, Sarge?”
Dines gave Alisha and Saanvi a quick wave and then nodded to the driver. He shifted the transmission into first gear and the truck jerked forward.
As the vehicle drove away, Saanvi felt a surge of courage. I’m not going back, she thought, forcing herself to stay brave. She raised her hand up into the air and waved goodbye to the soldiers as the truck passed and its taillights disappeared into the swirling snow.
“Do you think we should be worried about the storm?” she asked Alisha.
“We’ll be okay…I think,” Alisha replied, “but Daphne has two packs to carry and that soldier is right—it’s getting bad out here.”
“Do you want to go back and help her?” Saanvi asked, tensing as she remembered how Alisha had responded the last time she asked that question.
“No, we should keep going. Daphne’s tough and pig-headed, but she’s not stupid. She’ll find a place to stay in town until the storm blows over. Did you remember to bring food with you?”
Saanvi grinned from cheek to cheek. “I have rations I stole from the base,” she said beaming broadly as she opened her backpack to show Alisha. “That’s why I disguised my voice and grabbed the pack before you could open it. If Sergeant Dines had seen the rations, we would have been in big trouble.”
Alisha smiled weakly. “That was good thinking. To be honest, I wasn’t sure at first what the heck you were doing, and that conversation with the soldier was weird. Thanks for bringing the food. We’ll need it.”
Relieved to have finally done something right, Saanvi smiled back.
“Let’s get going. It’s getting worse,” Alisha said as a tremendous gust of wind whipped up the snow, pelting them with ice crystals. Saanvi raised her scarf until only her eyes were uncovered. She reached for her pack, but Alisha grabbed it first. “I’m bigger and stronger than you,” she said, throwing it over her free shoulder. “We’ll take turns, okay?”
Without waiting for a reply, Alisha hunched over with the pack on her back and started down the road. Saanvi took one last look in the direction the soldiers had gone and followed after her.
It took them two hours to reach the abandoned gas station. A few miles past it, they left the main highway and turned down an unused logging trail. Alisha held her hand up and motioned at Saanvi to stop. “We’re almost there,” she said, gasping from exertion. “Let’s rest for a minute.”
Grateful for the opportunity to catch her breath, Saanvi hunched over and placed her hands over her face to protect herself from the blowing snow. When she lifted her head a moment later, Alisha was still bent over.
“I’ll take the backpack now,” Saanvi shouted over the noise of the wind.
Alisha looked up. “Are you sure?”
Even though she was exhausted, Saanvi nodded. It was her pack, and now it was her turn to carry it. She glanced around, trying to get her bearings. They were deep in the forest, at least a mile or two off the main road and in the blizzard everything looked the same.
“How do you know where we are?”
“From the trail markers,” Alisha shouted, pointing to something off to her left. “If you follow them, they’ll lead you right to the cabin.”
Saanvi squinted into the blowing snow. She saw a grocery bag nailed or tied to the trunk of a small tree at the bottom of a rocky ridge. She watched a vicious gust of wind tear off a chunk of flimsy weatherworn plastic.
“Let’s go,” Alisha said, “It’s only another twenty or thirty minutes.”
It was closer to an hour.
“There it is!” Alisha shouted as they emerged from the forest into a small meadow.
Saanvi’s heart sank when she saw the cabin. It looked like something plucked out of the 1800s. The tiny dwelling would have easily fit in the small backyard behind her parent’s house in London. Its walls were made of roughly hewn logs that had faded from a hundred years of exposure to the elements. On either side of the plywood door, there were two tiny glass windows, one of them half-covered by a piece of wood.
“Let’s get inside and warm up,” Alisha said.
Disillusioned, Saanvi trudged after her. When they entered the cabin, she almost cried. The inside of the dark single-room building was even worse than the outside. The dirt-floor was covered by cardboard boxes that had been cut and flattened out. Two mattresses lay side-by-side on the hardened earth next to a rickety kitchen table. In the furthest-most corner, snow had blown in through a crack in the wall and was piled in a small drift next to an ancient cast iron wood stove.
Stunned, she stood in the doorway as tears welled up in her eyes. She knew there were lots of people in the world who lived in horrible conditions, but none of the places that she had ever lived in had been this bad—not since the pandemic started, not in her entire life.
Alisha nudged her out of the way and shut the cabin door. Then she twisted a piece of wire through a set of eye-hooks to keep the door closed against the blowing wind.
“It’s not much, but it’s home,” she said with far more pride than the dismal shack deserved. She pointed to a plastic storage tub sitting beneath a window. “Why don’t you unpack and put your stuff in there while I start a fire.”
“I’ll do it later,” Saanvi replied, not intending to do it at all. First thing in the morning she was going back to the base.
36
I’m so cold
It wasn’t the feeble light trickling through the window that woke her, nor the anticipation of going home, but rather the cold; a deep and deadening cold that seeped into the core of her body, chilling her to the bone and making it nearly impossible to sleep. Saanvi shivered inside her sleeping bag and curled up into a ball as she tried unsuccessfully to warm herself.
A while later, she heard paper being crinkled a
nd rolled over to see Alisha crouched by the ancient wood stove. She watched Alisha crumple a piece of newspaper into a ball and toss it onto the glowing embers where it burst into flames.
“I’m so cold,” Saanvi groaned. “What time is it?”
“About seven a.m.” Alisha answered, puffs of steam in the air when she spoke
Saanvi groaned again. It was too early to be awake and too late to go back to sleep. “How come you’re up so early?”
“I’m restarting the stove. Once I get it going, it will warm up in here. Are you hungry?”
“A little,” Saanvi replied. In fact, she was starving. Her last meal at the base was dinner the day before yesterday, and when they arrived at the cabin last night, they were both too tired to worry about food.
“I’m hungry too. I’ll melt snow to make water so we can eat and wash up.”
Melt snow?
Saanvi was gobsmacked. It sounded so primitive. “Don’t you have water in the cabin?”
As she spoke, she realized how dumb she sounded. How could there be water in the cabin; it didn’t even have a floor, or real beds, or any of the things she had in her house at the base.
Alisha gave her a cross look. “There’s no water because after hiking through a snowstorm for five hours to bring you here, I didn’t feel like walking to the stream to fill up the water jug.”
Shivering in the cold air, Saanvi sat up in her sleeping bag and apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just thinking it must be a hassle having to cart water from the stream to the cabin every day. At our old farmhouse, we had a well with a pump.”
“Good for you, but we’re not at your old house,” Alisha said, poking at the embers in the stove. She tossed another piece of wood on the fire, slammed the stove’s cast iron door shut, and stood. “Here, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
No, I won’t, Saanvi thought, I’m going home and the sooner the better. But she still hadn’t told Alisha and now didn’t seem like a good time.
