by Nick Lake
“You OK?” she said.
“I think so.” He smiled. “Let’s do it again.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
They sat up, looking back at the mountain they had come down. There was no way the remaining men could follow, not without being seen. And they knew Emily had a rifle. Or at least, they thought she did. She had dropped it somehow, in the chaos of the slide. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
How many? she wondered. She wasn’t sure if the explosion had killed the one who had fallen. So at least two but possibly three. And they’d be coming, rifle or no rifle.
“Well, goddamn,” said Bob. He was lying flat on his back but then levered himself up. His gun-shot arm hung at his side. Blood staining his sleeve. They were going to have to do something about that.
“Can you walk?” said Emily. “We need to keep moving.” She was thinking of those men, clad in white, their eyes covered, ready to shoot. They’d be coming, and they’d be pissed.
“Sure,” said Bob. “But give me five minutes, OK, boss?”
She blinked. Nodded.
He took his cigarettes from his pocket, and his lighter. Emily shook her head at him. It was possible the men would see the flame, from up on the mountain. If they thought Emily and the others had been wiped out, if they’d seen the wing suddenly stop, and flip, then they may as well keep thinking that.
Bob sighed.
“I’m glad you have the lighter, though,” she said. “That was smart, to bring it.” She knew he’d just had it in his pocket, it had been there by default, but, well, it didn’t hurt to flatter people, especially ones you were stuck with in a survival situation.
He smiled very slightly.
Yep.
They sat there for a moment longer, looking up at the mountain in the pale sunlight. They could see the orangey red of the still-burning helicopter, its smoking ghost rising into the air.
“So, are you going to tell me who the hell those guys are?” asked Bob. “I mean, I’ve done some air defense work, contract stuff for the military bases up here. And these guys, whoever they are, they’re serious.”
“I guess you could call them the men in black,” Emily said.
“They were wearing white.”
She stood, and helped Aidan up. “Yeah, well,” she said. “It’s snowy.”
CHAPTER 9
THEY LEFT THE wing where it was. Emily wanted to keep moving. Needed to keep moving. So that Aidan would be safe.
“They’ll be coming,” she said. “The ones who are still alive. At least two of them. Maybe the other one too, the one who was knocked down by the explosion. I don’t know if he’s…dead or not.”
A pang as she said the word dead. Something like a stitch, but in her heart. She had shot deer before; rabbits. She had not wanted, ever, to shoot a person. Even her dad, macho man extraordinaire, wouldn’t talk about the people he’d killed in Iraq.
“Why?” said Bob. “What do they want?”
“Who,” said Emily.
“What?”
“Who—not what—is what they want. But I’ll explain later.”
“No,” he said. “You’ll explain now.” His eyes were hard, and he wasn’t smiling even a little bit.
Emily touched his hand; it was a manipulative move, a power move, the kind of thing call-me-Rachel, her cheerleading coach, would have done, but she didn’t have time to take it slow. “Listen,” she said. “I will tell you what’s going on. I mean, where am I going to go?” She gestured at the emptiness all around them. “But first I need to make sure you don’t die, and we need to put some distance between ourselves and those assault rifles while there’s still light.”
She looked down as she said it, and he followed her eyes and saw the blood on the snow, from his bullet wound.
He took a breath. He knew as well as she did that daytime was a fleeting thing up here. “OK.”
She made him sit on the rock they had crashed into, and looked at his upper arm. There were two distinct blossoms of blood on his sweater, front and back; the bullet had gone right through. That was good. She thought so anyway—she wasn’t exactly experienced with bullet wounds, not ones in people, but she figured there was less chance of infection with the bullet not still inside.
On the other hand, there was more chance for it to have hit stuff as it went through—but if it had nicked an artery, he’d already be dead, right?
She wished she had a knife—a knife was pretty much an essential for survival generally and would have been useful now in particular—but instead she tore off one of the sleeves from her long T-shirt, then put her sweater and jacket on again. She couldn’t really afford the loss of layering, the loss of warmth, but she couldn’t afford for Bob to bleed to death, either. She made him take off his sweater—she saw the tears standing in his eyes, magnifying them, when he eased it over the wound.
She bent down and scooped up some clean snow, pressed it into the wound as hard as she could. She figured it would clean the hole and slow blood flow at the same time. Then she wrapped her shirtsleeve around it as tightly as she could, tucking it under itself.
“Best I can do,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. The mountain was doing something to their speech. Grinding it down to essentials.
She looked across at Aidan, who was watching her intensely, and she took his hand. It was cold in hers—that was bad.
“Are you OK?” she said, looking down at him. He was as pale as the sliver of moon in the sky above them.
“I think so,” he said. “I have very little frame of reference.”
“That kid freaks me out,” said Bob.
Emily smiled weakly, leaned down, and kissed Aidan on the top of his head. “Yeah, me too,” she said.
“You’re going to give me the whole story, yeah?” said Bob.
“When we stop to camp,” said Emily. “Let’s get as far as we can from the plane first.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” said Bob. “Remember, I’m the one with the lighter.” There was heat in his voice, as if smoke might come out with his words. His eyes were round stones, unyielding.
Emily looked at Aidan. He shrugged.
“Yeah,” she said. “I remember.” She turned, trying to orient herself. Her head was still spinning from the crash, but she could see the track they’d scoured in the snowy slope. As their pursuers would too. “Northwest is that way, right?” She pointed.
“Right,” said Bob.
“So let’s go.”
CHAPTER 10
THEY SET OFF through the trees. Movement would keep Aidan from getting too cold. They were lucky in one thing: he was still wearing his puffy coat, the one she’d bought for him at Mackay’s general store, but she worried it wasn’t enough.
The snow was deep, powdery—hard to walk through, her weight pressing down into it. Aidan was walking more easily: he was lighter.
“Where are we going?” her little brother asked.
“Where we were always going,” she said. “The antennas.”
“Walking?”
“We don’t have much choice,” she said.
A pause as they picked their way through roots and snow.
Aidan put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out a plush toy monkey. He held it close.
“That’s why you went back to the plane?” she said.
He glanced at her—a quick glance, which ran off her and down, like water. “Yeah. I wanted Goober. I found him under our seats.”
“Seriously?” she said.
“Oh, come on,” interrupted Bob. “Don’t be hard on the kid. He wanted his toy.”
A complicated expression passed over Aidan’s face. Emily felt the earthquake friction of different layers of reality rubbing together.
“He could have been killed,” she s
aid eventually.
“He’s just a kid.”
Emily didn’t say anything, but she gave Aidan’s hand a squeeze, just one, hard. He was quiet after that.
So: Aidan had his monkey. Which she had also bought for him at the general store, because without her he would have had no clothing and no toys. They had a lighter. Boots—and she was glad she’d had the presence of mind to dress them both in good, sturdy ones. She was acutely conscious of everything they did not have, however. They did not have:
Water.
Food.
Clothing, beyond what they were wearing. It was a good thing she’d had her jacket on when the helicopter arrived.
Rope.
A knife.
The rifle, even.
But she did have herself, her own experience. All those trips with her mom and dad. God, she’d hated them at the time. Living the dream. That was what they called it. Being in the outdoors. Good for the soul. As if suffering, as if being cold and sore and covered in blisters and bug bites was going to make you a better person. She would have been happy becoming a better person by staying in her contemporary dance class in the city and not moving to a place where people thought jumping up and down to rock covers in the Crescent Moon bar was dancing.
Still, it was all there, or some of it, anyway, what had been drummed into her about survival. Shelter, fire, water, food. None of which, at this point, she had.
But she had:
Aidan.
And she had:
Her own will, and her own will was a knife; it had cut her away from the isolated town that was her new and only world, had made this different reality. She would kill the world with her bare hands, if the world came for Aidan, with the strength of her will, which was a knife. She would cut the world into a million pieces.
She squeezed his hand again, this time without realizing.
He squeezed back.
“I love you,” she said.
“I know,” he said matter-of-factly.
She laughed. “Jerk,” she said.
He frowned at her, and she marveled at the things he still didn’t understand.
Then she heard a rustle from the undergrowth over to their left, and held up a hand to stop the others.
An impression of brown fur, and she breathed out, relaxed—it wasn’t the men with the guns. But then the fur advanced, grew, and was a bear.
She froze, all the breath out of her lungs, the warmth of it fading as it mingled with the Alaskan air.
CHAPTER 11
THEY COMMUNICATED WITH their hands and heads. Emily pointed to the bear and then made a shushing, calming gesture, palms down. Like: keep very still. It hadn’t seen them yet. The trees loomed over them, casting long thin shadows on the snow.
Bob nodded, with more than an inflection of: Yes, of course, what am I, an idiot?
The bear was not long awake, this early in spring, Emily thought. Big and brown. Hungry. It could tear off a limb from a person like a person would tear off a chicken wing.
She pulled Aidan down toward the ground, toward the snow, and Bob crouched too. Emily pressed a finger to her lips, as if they needed telling. Bob, anyway. You didn’t go disturbing bears so soon after hibernation.
Her own breathing roared in her ears. The bear was maybe fifty yards away, head low.
They crouched, Emily holding Aidan’s hand tight in hers. She licked a finger and held it up. The wind was blowing from the bear toward them: that was good.
And the bear kept its head low, snuffling along through the undergrowth. She remembered something from a trip with her parents: in the spring, bears mostly foraged for berries and roots, instead of hunting.
Mostly.
She began to relax a little, though there was an ache deep in her thighs from crouching, and she couldn’t sit—the snow would get on her clothes, and her dad always said, “You get wet, you die.”
It felt like forever, but might have been twenty minutes, when the bear, at last, lumbered heavily away from them and into the forest. They straightened a little, to ease their joints. Bob and Emily did anyway. Aidan was quite small.
Then, after another ten minutes or so, they began to slowly move in the direction they’d been heading: northwest. Emily glanced at the sky worriedly. The sun was very low now. It would be dark soon, and the temperature would drop below zero.
They descended through a valley, over a brow, and then into another, smaller, valley. Bob was walking slowly, she noticed. Limping, and inhaling sharply when his unsteady footing in the snow caused him to twist his shoulder and arm.
They walked.
And they walked.
What must have been an hour passed. It was freezing, and Aidan was shivering—she could see him trembling. They needed to stop soon, to shelter.
There was a lake far below, on the other side of an outcrop of rock. The low sun gleamed on it—it was still iced over in the middle, tinged blue, but the outer parts were reflecting light in the shifting way that suggested water. Ringed with a stony beach, it looked like, then a layer of pine, a belt of what might be cottonwood, thickets of cranberry bushes, probably, though it was the wrong season for the berries…and rock, and grass, up to where they stood.
Twin lakes, actually, Emily realized: one higher, feeding the other via a small river that this far off registered as white, from the spray.
And at the upper lake, a cabin. A low structure, wooden, one story. No smoke coming from it, so unoccupied, it seemed. A hunter’s cabin, maybe. About a few miles away. A few clicks, her dad would have called it.
“Cabin?” said Emily to Bob.
“Yeah, I see it.”
Too far away, though. Too far to reach before nightfall. Night was something that really did fall, this far north. Something dangerous. Like a guillotine.
“Can’t reach it before dark,” she said.
“Nope.”
Emily scanned the small valley, noticed the shadow of the cliff to their left. It was sheer, the rock, and trees grew close to it, aspens and cedars.
“There,” she said. “We’ll make a lean-to shelter against the cliff.”
“Oh,” said Bob. “You know how to do that too, do you?” His voice caught on a snag of pain somewhere inside him, softened his sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said neutrally.
She led the way downhill and to the left. Southwest, she could see, from the setting sun. Off-track, for where she and Aidan were going, but they had to stay alive before they could think about their final destination.
She found low-hanging branches, thick with needles, which she was able to twist until they snapped away from their trunks. She made Bob sit against the rock of the cliff, Aidan too, while she did it—gathering as many thick branches as she could. There was no point in Bob bleeding out, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let Aidan freeze to death.
She was sweating, soaking her clothes with it, and she knew she’d pay for that when the sweat froze, but she was grateful—in the moment—for the warmth. Anyway, if you didn’t get shelter, you might as well butcher your own carcass and give it to the nearest vulture.
She paused to take off her jacket, made Aidan put it on over his own. He tried to refuse, but she could see the skin going pale, almost blue, on his face. She hugged him, until his shivering stopped, then carried on working. She didn’t like the color of his skin.
She leaned the branches against the cliff wall, longest first, and then made a sort of weave across that. She left an opening in the middle, a very basic chimney, for smoke. No point insulating your shelter and then dying in your sleep of smoke inhalation.
An image: their first camping trip after moving to Alaska. Her dad had made a shelter just like this. Her parents’ joy at this vast open landscape, at being finally in the wilderness for good; her fury at being trapped, confi
ned, in so much huge emptiness. And yet, it had all gone in, somehow, the stuff she had learned, and it was keeping her alive now.
Still, if her family had never moved here, she would never have needed to know, to be kept alive.
But she wouldn’t have Aidan, either.
Her mind went in circles like that: a fish in a bowl.
Meanwhile, she needed to build the fire.
At least Bob had the lighter, so they could cheat there. But the ground, she thought, the ground was a killer. Too cold—it would leach the life right out of you. She couldn’t do much, but she forced herself to go out again into the trees, breath ghosting in front of her, arms aching, and gather more branches, soft ones dense with needles, which she laid on the ground, to form a kind of mat to sleep on.
Then: More wood, this time dead branches, no leaves, the drier the better. She got some, and then she got more, and then she got more. They didn’t want to run out in the night. It was spring, but the temperature would easily fall to twenty below when it was full black. In the sky, the moon floated above the treetops, ribboned by thin mist: it was like something done with Day-Glo paint, then smudged with a finger.
She dragged the wood back and stacked it at one end of the shelter, then went back a final time, looking for leaves and moss, anything to use as tinder. She formed it into a pile in the middle of the lean-to. “Come in,” she said, to Bob and Aidan.
Aidan scooted in, and she made room for him, then held out her hand to Bob, who had entered the shelter from the other side.
“You’re going to light a fire?” said Bob. He looked up the mountainside in the general direction of the crashed plane. “With those men out there?”
“They might see it and find us and shoot us,” she said. “But if we don’t have a fire, we will die.”
“I vote for not dying, personally,” said Aidan.
Bob snorted, almost involuntarily. He inclined his head slightly.
“Lighter,” Emily said to Bob, still holding out her hand.
He hesitated. She could see the thoughts behind his eyes. It was his only leverage, after all.
