The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Joseph Turkot

  At first, it appears like he isn’t even moving. It’s like he’s frozen in place. Russell slings the rifle around over his shoulder and raises it so that he has a clear shot. Don’t shoot, Ernest says quietly. Just having a look, Russell says. I study the old man and try to figure out why the hell they’re not shooting, but through the haze of the powder I can barely make anything out. And then I see the man’s arms. They’re up in the air, waving. No weapons. And combining with the wind is a human sound. Something like a cry. Russell hears what he’s calling first. He wants us to help him, he says. What? I ask. Russell tells me to be quiet and listen.

  We wait and a minute passes. The sound gets louder. The old man makes slow progress toward us. Russell studies him through the sniper scope. He’s waving, Russell tells us. Waving for us to come back. And now I can hear the cries too. Help me, don’t leave, please come back. His pleas rotate. And all of me wants to believe that it’s a horrible trick, and that this old man is evil, a face eater that wants to kill us, but the closer we let him get, the more I hear pain in his voice. I’m not going to waste ammo, Russell says, Snow will take care of it. And then, just like that, he slings the rifle back around onto his back, and stands up. He tells us we’re stiffening up and Voley is shaking. Nothing left to see, he says, Time to go.

  Are we going to leave him? I ask. And as the words roll out of my mouth I regret that I said them. They’re weakness, a sign to Russell of how far I’ve fallen. Russell tells me that the man is deformed. He must have been here longer than the others, because his face looks like it’s rotting off. From the radiation. He’s contaminated. There’s nothing we can do for him. I look at Ernest to see his expression, the man who waved a white flag at us on the ocean, drew us in and took us onto his ship. Helped us when we were weak. Saw that we weren’t the bad guys.

  Let’s get the blood flowing, is all he says to me when he notices my eyes are on him. He doesn’t say anything else. He lifts Voley and tucks him close again, rising with godly power against the weight of his pack. He coughs at full height, a deep horrible sounding cough, Russell’s cough in Wyoming. And then, as if the whole ordeal didn’t just happen, we turn again into the wind, and start walking.

  It takes fifteen minutes before the cries fade so low that I can’t hear them. Not once do I turn back to look. I don’t want to see him, don’t want to know if he’s watching us abandon him, the last living people he’ll ever see. I say a prayer to the snow that the foxes find him, and that they help him get back to the building before he’s gone too far out to turn around. And as that red bouncy image comes into my mind, I stop for a second. Russell looks back and watches me, wondering why I’ve stopped pushing. He waits, seeing if I’ll say something, but it’s just that I’ve given in. I have to look one last time. I turn my head and stare. I see the old man, but barely. And I could swear, with all the fog and the wind and the flying spray, that he’s stopped moving altogether. One way or the other, toward us or back to the Nuke building, he’s not walking anymore. Given up. I think about what he’s thinking, and what Clemmy thought. And then Russell tells me we’re making good progress, and that we can get to the water before it’s dark. Come on, he says. And then, with the sudden thought of water, and maybe warm rain again, my muscles grind once more into the soft white. My mind goes as blank as the mountains hiding behind the clouds, and before I turn all the way back to the wind, I notice one last thing: the tower, our guide, is barely visible at all now.

  Chapter 19

  We march and march, and as much progress as Russell thinks we’re making, the wind has started to fight us at every step, to slow us down, and to make the snow dance like I’ve never seen before. It swirls through the sky, mocking us, and then reforms into a line, like it’s aiming just for our faces in the end. My feet lift and go, and my muscles work, but I feel as if the movement is all relative now. That we’re moving just at the same time as everything else, so that we’re really just moving in place. And we’ll never reach the water.

  Ernest asks if Russell can take Voley for a bit. Russell says yes and we stop for a moment. I sit down to catch my breath and look at everything. At how different this path is from Clemmy’s. There are no steep rises and falls. Which must mean we haven’t gone off the line on the map. But when I turn on my butt to face the way we’ve come from, I no longer see the old man, and I don’t see the tower anymore either. Just the foggy base of the industrial building. And it feels like before long, if the weather doesn’t stop, we’ll be moving completely blind.

  It’s almost gone, I tell Russell as he walks behind me, lifting Voley into his arms. He ignores me and looks at Voley, like he’s trying to learn something about the dog. Part of me spikes with fear that he’s deciding whether or not Voley is worth the extra effort. I can’t convince myself that that’s not what he must be thinking, but I can’t bring myself to accuse him. He saved him, after all. Turned the boat around to save him and Dusty. But the thought persists and as Ernest begins to pull the boat between his loud coughs, I tell Russell I can handle Voley. It’s no problem for me, I tell him. And I know I really could do it for awhile. But Voley must weigh fifty pounds. Maybe more. But I know I could do it. For Voley I could. Russell tells me no, and his voice is so firm that I know he must not have been considering what I thought: there’s no way he’d abandon Voley. But the old man, he left him, I tell myself, trying to remain skeptical. It’s different, somehow. It has to be, I argue. You can’t save everyone. Only the ones you love. It repeats in my brain as we start moving again. Only the ones you love. Only the ones you love. It’s his bad luck we didn’t love him. And I realize that even though the weather is worsening, I am moving easier now. It’s like the boat is gliding all on its own, even though my fingers are barely touching it. I watch ahead at Ernest’s back and see why: He’s Poseidon again. And he’s not dying at all like I thought. He has the bullet in him and he’s sick, but the snow is no match for him. The wind isn’t either. And from how easy my steps are now, it starts to flood into my spirit—the feeling that we really will make it. Not just out of the snow, and back into the water, but back to the Resilience. I stop myself at the thought of the ship, and focus on my breathing. Each breath, not as cold as before. My body not fighting. Just warming itself from inside. And shut out the brutal hell that surrounds and beats us.

  We push and move and I forget everything else. But something starts to burn in my ribs. It’s hardly noticeable so I ignore it, but then it’s finally clear. It’s growing. Getting worse with each step. I want to ask for a break but I don’t. I don’t want to ask because I know Ernest is doing all the work. Are you okay? I ask him, hoping he might need one. Fine, he calls back. It takes another hour to finally do me in, but I can’t help it—my side feels like it’s ripping apart from the inside. So much pain I feel like I will pass out. I know it’s just a hole, nothing was hit by the bullet, and that it’s packed with gauze. That the pain is somehow all a head game. Something I have to outwit. But the meds must be wearing off, because the stitch spreads to the point where it’s covering my whole chest and I can’t breathe. I can’t move my feet. And I start to look around and take in the slopes that we’re on. I think we might be getting off the path, I say, half as an excuse and half because I think the dipping valley in front of us is a bad sign. My mind flashes back to the map, the sudden drops. The elevation changes all around us that we can’t see because behind us now, the tower is gone. All gone. And so is the industrial building. There’s just the same white behind us as in front. Russell looks back and sees this too, and seeing me wincing, he tells me that we can rest for five. I know five won’t be enough, but I don’t argue. But Russell seems to have needed it as much as me. Like the blizzard has destroyed him too. And Ernest finally comes around and he tips the boat so that it blocks the brunt of the wind. We sit and huddle together behind it, our mouths pooling fog together. Ernest rubs his fingers, straightening and unstraightening them, as if the iron grip he’s held for the last hour has locked hi
s bones in place. Finally they unstiffen and he takes off his gloves and starts to breathe into them, and then on his hands. Russell keeps Voley close to him, both of them half-sunk in the snow. Voley’s nose looks all dried out, and his face is mostly white with frost like Russell’s. His eyes are close and open repeatedly, like he’s on the verge of a deep sleep. And then Russell presents us with his idea: We could get the stove going under the boat, he says. And that’s when I know something’s wrong. It’s like he’s been hiding his own pain, maybe his leg, because he was the one who wanted to make it to the water in one day. To not spend extra time in the open. I remind him about this, and ask him, looking into his eyes because I can read him, What’s wrong? He tells me nothing is wrong, but that we might be going off the path. The valley is dropping, he says. And if we wait out the storm so we can see the tower again, we’ll have to get the stove going. If we push on through this, we won’t know where we’re going. Ernest looks at both of us, thinking it all through for himself, unable to decide. And then, finally, he says he has a better idea.

  I don’t want to spend any more time in this than we have to, he says. We can’t see the tower, I tell him. The tower doesn’t matter now, Ernest says. It will look the same no matter where we are. Because there’s no mountains to see. Everything else is gone. Even if the storm cleared up enough, we’d need the mountains to clear up too for a point of reference. And that’s not going to happen, he says.

  Russell looks around at everything again, the bare white blank. He draws a deep, slow breath in. You’re right, he says, but he doesn’t add anything else. It’s like he doesn’t have a solution one way or the other. If we wait, Ernest says, we’re stuck here overnight. If we do that, we won’t have enough fuel on the water to reach the ship. Either way, if we waste time out here, we freeze to death. Alright, we keep going then, Russell agrees. I don’t say a word. I know Ernest is right, but I don’t think my body will cooperate.

  Ernest gives me ten minutes instead of five, but when we start moving again I still can’t go two steps without the shooting pain. Russell stops us and digs into his bag for more medicine. I take some of it and then Ernest asks me if I can walk at all. Without helping with the boat, he adds. And I know that it won’t be easier because he’s the one who’s been doing all of the work. I tell him I’ll try.

  We start again but only get another fifteen steps before I give up. I sink into the white quicksand. Each nerve of my side and my arm is on fire, like something inside is dying. But then, after I’m still for a moment, the pain fades away. Like the struggle of battling the snow—using my muscles—is setting everything on fire, but when I stop, I’m fine. I tell this to them both because I fear they might think I’m lying, giving up, even though my body has refused to go on. And then, very casually, Ernest tells me to get in. What? I say. In the boat, come on. No more time to wait for you. We’re freezing.

  And he says it with a bit of anger, as if he won’t have an argument about it. That he’s going to pull me now, and that’s that. I start to protest, and say that we should wait, but then, before I even finish my own sentence, I start to climb in. I can’t fight him. And all at once, we’re moving again, and I’m not moving at all.

  I watch the snow come in, flying over Ernest’s neck and shoulders. The slope rises then falls around us. It must be an hour that passes but we’re moving at half the pace. He’s slowing down because of me. But something is happening behind us too. It’s Russell. Each time I look back, his usual five feet distance grows by another five. He’s falling behind. At first he and Voley are in clear sight, but when I look again, they’re almost at the point where the fog starts to cover them up. To blend them into the white. And as much as I’m afraid that Ernest will pull us off an icy cliff in our snow blindness, and his fatigue, I’m also afraid that we’ll lose Russell and Voley to the endless white. That I’ll look back and they’ll be gone. Unable to catch up anymore. I tell Ernest we have to wait for them, and without argument he agrees. It’s like he hadn’t even noticed, like he was so zoned into his march that he was oblivious. I sit quietly, listening to Ernest’s soft panting, and waiting to hear Russell’s. When he reaches us, his face is all white, concealed by the frost, and so is most of Voley’s body. Together they have started to become one thing, and I realize that I must look like a snow monster too. Ernest’s face is clear, but it’s beat red, somehow warm enough to prevent the frost from staying. Like his exertion is warding off the frostbite that I’m feeling in my own hands and feet. When I try to get up and talk to Russell, my legs lock in place. I can’t move. I work myself free after a minute and collapse out of the boat right into the snow. Let me hold him, I tell Russell as I stand up. No, he says. Get back in the boat. I argue: Let me hold him. Russell stops paying attention to me and starts to walk past us, like he doesn’t want a break at all. And then, right after he passes Ernest, and Ernest rises to start hauling the boat again, Russell collapses. He and Voley fall forward into the snow, their faces and bodies burying all the way so that all I can see is Russell’s back. And then, somehow, with a squeal, Voley wiggles out from under Russell and lies still at his side.

  Russell! I scream, and try to get to him, but my side lights up with fire, like the hour’s rest hasn’t done anything to help. I push through it by sheer adrenaline but before I can lift him out of the snow he turns himself over. He looks up at the sky and spits out a fountain of white. Then, he apologizes. Like he’s sincerely sorry that he fell down. That his body gave out on him. And before he gets through with his apology, he drives his fists down into the ground and starts to hoist himself up. Come on, he says, like nothing’s happened. He reaches underneath Voley, who can’t move from his new position in the snow, and tries to lift him up, but he can’t. Stop, I tell him. You going to do it? he says to me. And I say yes but I know I can’t either. I try to walk to Voley and lift him up myself, but Russell pushes me away, telling me to get in the boat. The lightning runs up my side again, and then I freeze with hope as Russell manages to raise Voley up into the air. Everything looks good again, and Ernest nods, saying we must be getting close. More than halfway, he tells us.

  Ernest turns without even ordering me back into the boat, but before I can go twenty steps I’m fighting again so that I don’t fall down. And I stop and tell him I need to get back in. And then, like Russell, I’m the one apologizing. Ernest doesn’t pay attention to me and just waits, then starts on again. He plows through the powder, and against us the wind turns, so that it’s not hitting directly at our faces. I feel like we’re moving faster now. I lay my head down and watch the fast strands of white and gray above us, and then close my eyes when they can’t take the ice anymore. When I sit up, I realize I fell into a daydream. I can’t tell if it lasted ten or twenty or two minutes. I look behind to check on Russell and Voley. All I see is white.

  Ernest! I shout. They’re gone! Right away Ernest releases the boat and tells me to wait here. He runs back. It’s only a minute before I hear him calling out something. And then, from the white, he reappears alone. Russell is nowhere to be seen, nor is Voley. Where are they? I ask. Get out, he says. I climb out of the boat. Wait here, he tells me. And this time, he turns the boat around and carries it with him, in the opposite direction. After endless minutes pass by I shout once and then again with no reply, and start to move and fight my body to follow after him. I finally see him reemerge from the emptiness. He’s hauling the boat. When he’s at my side, I see inside. It’s Russell and Voley.

  Russell’s wide awake. His eyes are going. He looks at me, sadness hollowing them out. It’s my leg, I’m sorry, he says. And I know that all he wants to do in the world is come through for me, like he always has, but that he can’t. His body won’t let him, just like mine won’t let me. And the only thing in the world that stands between our deaths, and the final end of our trip from Philadelphia, and the old and long hope, the dream of everything, is the coughing man beside us. And he coughs loud and clear and then gets to work, as if this is
all business as usual.

  Get in, Ernest tells me. Like he can pull all three of us. No, I say. You can’t. You can’t pull us all. He just stares at me, as if he’s seriously considering it. And he looks all around, like he’s taking one last survey of the weather. Divining whether or not it really will clear up any time soon. If we can risk staying overnight in the blizzard, get the stove going, waste the fuel and hope for better luck tomorrow. But something comes into his face, like he’s remembering something. I think it must be when he forgot to keep the stove going, and we almost froze to death. And I think that maybe he doesn’t trust himself staying overnight again in this hell. You get in, or you walk. If you walk, you’ll die, he says. He tells it very plainly and calmly, trying not to upset me, but to let me know he’s decided. The weather won’t break. We can’t lose any time on the wasteland. And our only choice is to go on. I have no option. I climb in the boat.

  “Are you sure?” I ask him as I fall in on top of Russell. I look as long as I can into Ernest’s eyes. I can’t believe who he is. Or where he came from. I think I must be still in my dream, and that thought hangs in my head until he finally nods his head. Not a single word. Just a red-cheeked smile, white teeth, and a nod yes. If old Jack taught me anything, he says, it’s this. This is it. Now lie down.

  And then his smile is gone. An eternity in it, and sucked away in an instant by the fresh wind. I climb around inside, on top of Russell and beside Voley, and together we share our warmth. The warm crawls over me quickly, their body heat sharing with mine. And by degrees, I notice that we’re moving again. At first, I try to stay awake. To help. I tell Ernest I’ll keep an eye out for the steep drops. The cliffs that I saw on the map. So that I can warn him if we’re going over. If we’re slipping. So we don’t fall to our deaths. But raising my head becomes harder and harder, and Voley licks my coat, and then climbs his way up close enough to kiss my face. And he yawns and closes his eyes, like all this around us is just something you can shut out. Leave. And he’s reminding me how. I can’t help but follow him. And I close my eyes and enter sleep again. But this time, there are no dreams. Nothing, just like the miles of white Ernest leads us through, alone, the last moving form.