Stranded

by William Vitka

  More books in the Hroza Connection series by William Vitka:

  Book Two: Emergence

  Book Three: Live, From the End of the World

  Book Four: A Man and His Robot

  Book Five: The Blood God

  Releasing in July 2015

  Book Six: Kill Machine

  Releasing in August 2015

  STRANDED

  By William Vitka

  A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-484-4

  STRANDED

  The Hroza Connection Book 1

  © 2015 by William Vitka

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Sean Vitka

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  For the guys.

  For all the “dumb” Blue Collar workers who’re the only ones that can rebuild a 427 when it breaks down in a White Collar motherfucker’s car.

  Table Of Contents

  Part One: The Storm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: The Ship

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three: Plans

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Four: The Second Night

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part Five: The Hroza

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Part One: The Storm

  1.

  Never seems to work out the way we want it to.

  Specially not up a goddamn fuckin mountain. So where are we?

  Thinkin about base camp.

  Up a goddamn fuckin mountain.

  Base camp means warmth. Food. A bunk to crash in. A place to grab smokes. Booze. A spot to ogle porn and maybe take a dump in private.

  “Private” here’s nothing more than having walls around you.

  Loggers do shit in the woods.

  Porn. A smoke. A chance at a quiet shit. This is heaven for the men working the latest claim for Northern Light Logging. The company is known for saving costs by sending small crews to live at non-permanent sites for six months.

  Usually more’n six months, but who cares.

  Good pay. Crap conditions.

  The loggers are “simple” guys in White Collar-speak. They don’t give a damn about fashion. Or much else besides gettin the job done. Then going home. They wear heavy clothes and boots. They wear what’ll protect em from the elements.

  So “stupid” here’s about class. Way we look at each other.

  White Collar guy’ll call a “stupid” Blue Collar guy every time the shitter backs up or the car don’t work. Cuz, man, takes a “stupid” Blue Collar guy to fix anything.

  White Collar being so smart and all.

  Base camp—the guys, they call it “Sugar Tits”—is an oddity all its own. Only exists cuz the Feds opened up a big chunk of the wildlife preserve. Smack in the middle of nowhere. Northern Light Logging had to establish its own settlement, cut off from civilization.

  But fresh timber is fresh timber which is money and more money.

  The men survive in an environment where everything’s trying to kill em. Falling trees. The cold. The storms. The animals. Their own violent tempers. Their own fuckin tools.

  Saying goes like this: “You run in for the job, you run out for your life.”

  You’d never be able to talk about a chainsaw being out to get you without drawing some stares in polite society. But the men out here swear those churning teeth have a mind of their own.

  Wiseman, Alaska is the closest hint of civilization. There’s a smattering of homes. Two lodges for travelers. A general store. An airport.

  It’s also where Daniel “Doc” Thompson goes with his team of sled dogs to resupply.

  The crew doesn’t like Doc cuz he’s one of them—he ain’t. They like him cuz when he comes back to camp, he has the cure for what ails em.

  Known cures: Booze. Smokes. Porn.

  Sometimes, he patches the men up. He’s done enough work on the dogs to be a good hand with humans. He can suture wounds. Set broken bones. Stopgap measures till real medical help can be obtained.

  Then there’s the huskies.

  Man, the guys love playing with those dogs. Most of em, anyway. After a hard day’s work, titans of masculinity turn goofy when the canines’ fuzzy faces slobber their way around the camp. Reminds the men of something like home.

  Even when the huskies spend their nights howling from their pens. Even that sounds a bit like home. Like normalcy.

  Not that shit ever stays that way.

  2.

  “Thing I don’t understand,” Mags says from behind the counter of the Wiseman General, “is you boys buy so much—” She stops. Looks at the dirty magazines and videos among Daniel “Doc” Thompson’s purchase. “You boys buy so much smut.”

  Doc eyes her with a smirk. His brown, knit cap in his hands. His goggles propped up high on his forehead. His green keffiyah tucked under his jaw. “We don’t have a pretty lady like you up at camp.” He smirks again. Eyes blue. Hair a dirty blond. Without the heavy beard, he’d look thirty. With it, and the creases around his brow, he looks old enough to have some authority. He gestures at the stack of porn. “We just gotta make do. And you know there’s practically no Internet access at camp.” />
  Mags, near sixty, smiles back. She knows it’s a dumb game, but she enjoys it. Only fresh faces her outpost gets are from whatever Northern Light Logging manages to bring in. She’s aware that the men are here for a long haul.

  The company wants to keep em logging in those hills for six months. A lifetime, in a way. But NLL hit the sweet spot with the Feds. Bid at just the right mark. Cheap. Promises to re-seed the trees. Be environmentally conscious. Which means NLL gets first dibs. And as much lumber as their crew can carry out during the work period.

  Mags says, “Don’t you lay your charms on me, kid. You ain’t gettin no discount just cuz you’re cute.”

  Doc shrugs. “Thought I’d give it a try. But if you had some spare kibble, my dogs would lick your face extra hard.” Again, the smile. The bright blue eyes. Tufts of dirty blond hair falling across his forehead.

  Mags exhales through her nose. “Coupla forty-pound bags near the back room. Was gonna toss em since nobody’s buying. About two weeks expired now, but help yourself if your dogs can lift em.”

  “Hell, Mags. You know if you boil that shit in a stew, it’ll do the dogs fine. I’ll toss in some animal bones and eggs to make it thick. Expired kibble ain’t dangerous. Just tastes like crap.”

  “Dan, all kibble tastes like crap.”

  “Fair point.”

  * * *

  Doc walks out to the dogs. Eight pairs of eyes and eight muzzles turn to him. He’s their pack leader. His voice is law.

  He slams down the extra eighty pounds the animals’ll have to carry. Walks up the line. Checks their harnesses and paws. Pats em and pets em all with equal love. Their lips curl. They bare their teeth. But he knows they ain’t snarling. They’re smiling.

  Duster, Angel, Rocket, Pharaoh, Dean, Button, and Winston.

  Happy, healthy huskies.

  Doc plays no favorites, even though he has one. A dog named Rubin at the lead. Rubin’s a big, tough motherfucker. One Doc raised from mewling, teat-sucking pup to hardened sled machine.

  The dogs are Doc’s life.

  It’s a symbiotic relationship. They keep each other alive.

  The men at the camp, well...Doc could live without the men at the camp. They’re pleasant enough, but that don’t make em all friends.

  Doc slings his Henry H010 .45-70 lever action rifle over his back. His Colt M1911, .45 ACP, sits on his hip—bears and wolves are real threats up here.

  He grabs the reins. Whistles. “Let’s go, kids.”

  They shoot off toward Sugar Tits.

  The snow-laden run is deep and wet. Divots in the path could flip the sled and leave him injured. Battered. Helpless.

  Doc’s thought about this.

  It’s why he trained the dogs to halt when he shouts: “Fuck.”

  That’s usually first outta his mouth when something goes wrong.

  * * *

  The wind slaps Doc’s face. Frozen particles in the air feel like needles punching into exposed skin.

  The dog team pants and pulls. Their tongues bounce between their canine jaws.

  Doc knows the sun exists somewhere behind the wall of white above. But damned if he can figure out where it might be right now.

  He’s made this run from Wiseman to Sugar Tits plenty of times over the last three months. Ain’t difficult. Sorta nice. Gets him away from the oil and smoke and grime of the camp.

  His huskies ain’t built for racing. They’re built for hauling. And he prefers to keep em at a medium pace. The last thing he or the camp needs is to become a mutt clinic. Though in a way, it already is. The mutts just happen to be human.

  Today, though, he pushes the huskies. Hard.

  Another couple hours, he’ll be there. Cheered for bringing porn.

  3.

  Sam Ackerman slaps the side of a big Sitka spruce. “Hell, kid. I’d be up here doin this even if my cunt ex-wife hadn’t taken half my shit then fucked off to Florida with that limp-dick boyfrienda hers.”

  The greenhorn, Alan Fiske, nods like he gets it. But he doesn’t.

  Fiske was in the process of becoming a helicopter pilot in the Army before he was drummed out. Now he’s here. Not that he’ll ever tell the other men why.

  Ackerman hefts his massive Stihl MS 880 chainsaw. He smiles. It’s a beast with a 121.6 cc engine. A tree-murdering machine with a five foot blade. He loves it. Cares for it like a girlfriend. It’s the tool that puts money in his bank account. Which in turns keeps the alcohol flowing and keeps the tits bouncing at the strip clubs.

  If logging and the chainsaw are his paramours, booze is his mistress.

  He’s a big man. Bit over six feet. Shaved head. Packing a gut that proves his relationship to the sauce. Rest of him is muscle from the work.

  Ackerman revs the badass saw.

  Fiske’s eyes go wide. “When do I get one of those?”

  “Maybe when you put in as many years as me. For now—” Ackerman nods to the trees he’s cut down. “Get your skinny ass in gear and hook em up to the skyline cable so the yarder can pull em up the mountain. Move it, princess.”

  Downed trees are money. Money waiting to be transported to the mills. More they move, more cash they get. Wasting time is forbidden here. Unless, maybe, it’s a smoke break. Most of the men just smoke on the line.

  The kid knows this. He jogs from log to log setting chokers.

  A choker setter is the lowest position in the field.

  And in logging, like every business, shit rolls downhill.

  * * *

  Michael Gordineer sits in the cab of the yarder—a machine that looks like a metal telephone pole attached to a tractor with tank treads that keeps logs moving up—and thinks: I don’t really give a shit about any of this.

  He scratches a week’s worth of dark brown beard.

  He’s a worker but not a worker long enough to have a gut made outta alcohol like Ackerman. Just a thirty-something with delusions, thinking he could do better, but can’t.

  He looks up at the skyline wire. The carriage rolls along it, towing logs.

  He sees the carriage as a mechanical slug. Thinks: If the line snapped, or if one of the winches broke, that goddamn thing would go shooting down the mountain. Must weigh better’n two thousand pounds. It would crush everything in its way. People. Trees. I’m still not sure I’d give a shit. I wanna go home. I wanna get laid.

  He ain’t a veteran. He ain’t a greenhorn. But he also ain’t sure what to do with himself. He thinks about his girlfriend in Anchorage. Jennifer. He wishes he was there. Why’d he sign on for this fuckin job?

  His mind barks back at him: For the money, idiot.

  He mutters, “Yeah. There’s that.”

  He lights a cigarette and keeps moving logs.

  At least he’s in the cab of the yarder. Bit warmer in here. Not stuck out with the cold like Ackerman and the new kid. Fiske. Or the site manager, Tom Swift. Buncha white guys up a mountain chopping trees for months.

  Gordineer thinks: Are there any black loggers?

  Nah. The fuck would a black dude want freezing his ass off on a mountain in Alaska? Those guys don’t like the cold. Closest we got is David Kong. The cook. He’s...Korean? Chinese? One of those people with slanted eyes. Does that make me racist? Born in America anyway so fuck if it matters...

  A hard rapping on the side of the yarder cab snaps Gordineer out of it.

  Tom Swift flaps his hands. “Dumbass, move the logs. We don’t get the trees on the semi for the driver, they’re gonna rot. You jerkin off in there or what?”

  4.

  David Kong leans over a giant pot of stew. He stirs the concoction of beef and carrots and peas and potatoes and fat. A cigarette dangles between his lips. He entertains the idea that he could be a great novelist. That he could turn this frozen nightmare into a Jack London-style tome of men conquering the elements.

  Or something.

  There’s no way he’s gonna write any of that Tinker Bell twinkly vampire bullshit.

  A half-inch lo
ng chunk of ash falls into the stew.

  Kong furrows his brow. Leans back. Exhales through his nose.

  He chucks more salt into the mix and buries the floating ash under some meat.

  Nobody’ll taste it. They never do.

  He checks his pack of Camel Blue cigs and notices he’s running low.

  * * *

  Doc brings the dogs to a halt just outside Sugar Tits’ main building. He shakes the snow and ice from his beard.

  The camp looks like military barracks. Bare-bones. But the structures are solid. Able to withstand the monstrous weather.

  The main building warms them and feeds them and entertains them and lets them take a dump in relative privacy. The garage towers over all. It’s the resting place of the yarder, their two trucks and Dogtown, the kennel. The bunk building grants them protected slumber—though Doc tends to sleep on a cot near his huskies.

  The daily process goes something like this:

  Wake at the bunks. Dress.

  Stumble into the main building.

  Eat. Smoke. Knock back a drink if needed. Use the shitter as necessary.

  Head toward the garage.

  Avoid Doc if he’s been drinking. Don’t try to wake him or the dogs. Instead, sneak to one of the vehicles. Start the engine. Leave.

  Or.

  Start the engine and rev it like a mad bastard to see how quick Doc gets up and launches into a tirade about how certain mothers are whores and certain fathers died in various stages of mental decay.

  They don’t fuck with Doc like he’s a kid.

  They fuck with Doc like it’s a science experiment.

  Rinse. Repeat.

  For months.

  Doc lifts sacks of supplies off the dogsled. He bangs on the big door to the main building. Rings the buzzer to announce his arrival. He carries more bags and boxes of food. Porn. Cigarettes. Booze. He waits for a minute to catch his breath. He pounds on the door again. Shouts. “Kong, get your ass out here and help. Or I am not giving you another carton of Camels.”

  That gets the cook’s attention. Kong runs outside. He slips his arms through the sleeves of his parka. Grabs a big, heavy bundle and rushes it inside. Cuz, man, he really needs to stock up on stogies.