by Mike Mullin
“If Jeff there tries it with that dagger, well, he’s no artiste. He’ll just plunge his blade into each socket. He’ll probably hit the prefrontal cortex and cause permanent brain damage. He might chip the supraorbital foramen and maybe the zygomatic bone. The wounds will be nasty—a mix of exploded eye, bone, brain, and blood. She’ll die. Slowly. Most likely of infection.
“Blinding is not part of the revenge you’ve earned. The Law of Steel takes the hands of thieves, not their eyes. But I’ve earned a little fun, don’t you think? No one here would begrudge me that. After all, some of them want your head.” The crowd hollered and whooped its agreement.
“I’m going to cut your arms free now. Tell me, what are you going to do? Are we going to have some fun with your woman?”
“Nothing,” I said through gritted teeth. “I won’t do anything.”
“A pity,” Red said lightly from behind me. “But at least we understand each other.” His knife whispered at my back, and the ropes binding my arms fell away. He hadn’t even nicked me.
“Kneel and bare one arm. Place it on the chopping block. Your choice which one.”
I slowly sank to my knees in front of the log. Its surface was black and scarred. It had been used for this purpose before. I stripped off both gloves and forced my sleeves up to my elbows. I held up my hands, staring at them in horror. They had a slight blue tinge from the cold. I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, trying to decide which hand to sacrifice.
“No hurry,” Red said. “We’re happy to wait. We’ll just amuse ourselves with your woman’s lovely brown eyes in the meantime.”
Without even thinking about it, I put both arms on the chopping block. Somewhere deep within me a terrified voice wailed no, no, no—a man with one hand is a cripple, a man with none, in this postvolcano world, is dead. My head floated—I was afraid I would pass out, but my voice was still strong and clear. “The thefts were my idea. Take both my hands. I’ll pay your knife’s price for both of us.” Red tsked. “That’s not how the Law of Steel works. Choose an arm. Now.”
My fingers curled around the edge of the chopping block. The bark was rough and ridged.
“Jeff,” Red said casually, “cut out her left—”
“No!” I yelled. I pulled my right arm off the block. The gladius flashed in a huge arc, and I watched in horror as Red severed my left hand just above the wrist.
Chapter 37
At first there was hardly any pain at all. My left hand and wrist lay on the snow before me, limp without the connection to my brain. Its fingers were already turning blue-gray. It was impossible to believe, impossible to take in. I still felt like I had both hands, like I could command both fists to clench, both thumbs to grip, both sets of fingers to caress. Blood seeped from the hand, staining the snow. Blood spurted from the end of my arm, keeping time with my heart.
Red seized my arm roughly, dragging me over to the fire. I was too dazed to resist. He plunged my stump into the pot of boiling tar. Then there was pain, indescribable in its intensity. The urine I had been holding released in a flood, and I passed out.
Darla’s scream woke me. Red laid her down in the snow beside me. The stump where her right hand had been was covered in black, lumpy tar. Consciousness fled again.
I was cold, terribly cold. Snow bit into my chest, arms, and legs; a bitter wind lashed my back. I was naked, face down in the snow. One of Red’s soldiers was hurrying away from me, carrying my boots and a bundle of damp rags that used to be my clothing. Darla was naked too, and unconscious again.
Red had retreated back to the circle of onlookers. “Let’s show ’em off in style!” he roared.
The crowd roared back. It didn’t sound like a collection of humans; it sounded like one gargantuan animal proclaiming its terror and rage to the black heavens. A snowball skimmed the ground near me. Another hit Darla’s face so hard it rocked her head sideways, splattering ice into her mouth and nose. She screamed and then started coughing.
I tried to go to her, to push myself upright, but in my rush I had forgotten about my missing hand. I planted the stump in the snow. The pain was so intense, black dots danced before my eyes. I collapsed. A ball of ice slashed across my back, and I felt a warm trickle welling in its path.
Darla was crawling toward me, wobbly as a threelegged stool. I cradled my left arm against my chest, moaning with the pain of it. I staggered over to Darla as icy missiles rained around us. We clung to each other with our good arms and started shambling toward the open gate— the only break in the vicious circle of people around us. The volume of their roar swelled, and they rushed closer.
A chunk of ice hit my nose. Blood dripped from my nostrils, streaming across my lips, filling my mouth with the taste of old copper pennies. We ran.
The crowd surged, following us out the gates, pelting us with snow and ice. Their roar had died down, and now we could hear individual epithets, “Thief!” “Warren scum!” and worse. I kept my good arm around Darla’s back, my hand under her shoulder, trying to hold her up. She was doing the same for me. My stump was tucked close to my chest, where the snowballs pelting my back couldn’t reach it. We ran awkwardly, with our heads down.
Even our most enthusiastic pursuers dropped off after about a mile. My feet, which had burned like I was running across the blue flame of a gigantic gas burner, were numb now. Darla trembled under my arm—we were both shivering uncontrollably.
Bikezilla.
We had to make it to Bikezilla. Our go-bags were strapped to the load bed. They each contained a knife, food, a fire-starting kit and, most importantly, extra clothing. It was only another mile to the place we had hidden Bikezilla. We could make it. We would make it.
By the time we got to the right spot, we were both shivering so badly we could barely walk, let alone run. We had dragged Bikezilla across the snow berm near the ruins of a bank. I wasn’t sure how we were going to get Bikezilla back onto the road one-handed. It had been tough enough even when we were whole and clothed.
Just climbing the embankment naked, shivering, and one-handed proved to be nearly impossible. I slipped twice, once falling into Darla and knocking us both back down to the road. When I finally did reach the summit of the berm, I got the third worst surprise of the day: Bikezilla was gone.
Chapter 38
I whimpered and sagged to my knees, utterly defeated. Red must have used the day we had been held captive to follow our tracks and find Bikezilla. He had chopped off our hands, dipped the stumps in tar, and created a show of “law” for his people, but his ultimate intent was for us to die. It looked like he might get his wish. Darla topped the berm behind me. Her hand and feet were a sickly shade of blue-gray. She didn’t react much to the hole in the snow where Bikezilla had been, only nodded as if she had been expecting it. She hooked her hand under my shoulder and hauled me upright.
“F-f-farmhouse. On t-t-twenty,” she said.
I remembered it. “How f-f-far?”
“T-t-two, three miles.”
I nodded and sat down, sliding down the berm on my butt. When I looked back up the berm, I noticed that I had left pinkish streaks of blood in the snow. I tried to stand, but I was shaking so hard, it took three tries just to get up. By that time, Darla was down. Her teeth clacked like an old typewriter. I helped her to her feet, and we wrapped our arms around each other for warmth and support.
We had taken fewer than ten steps before we fell. I threw my arm out to catch myself—it’s almost impossible not to, even if your arm ends in a fresh stump—and screamed with pain so fierce that I nearly passed out. Darla had done the same thing. We lay in the road, shaking spastically like fish drowning in air.
I forced myself to my feet and helped Darla up. We took a few more steps and fell again.
We had fallen four or five times before I got to where I could keep my injured arm tucked in and allow my shoulder to absorb the force of the falls. After nine or ten falls, I looked back. We had come less than four hundred feet. The dark shell
of the bank was still clearly visible despite the waning light. There was no way we were going to travel three miles before dark. I wasn’t sure I could walk another three miles at all. After dark the farmhouse would be invisible from the road. We could pass it and keep walking, oblivious, until our bodies gave out and only our ghosts could continue stalking the icy roads, searching for shelter in a barren world.
I turned Darla around and pointed at the bank with my stump. She nodded wearily, and we started retracing our steps.
Crossing the snow berm again to get to the bank was the worst part. I crawled up three-legged but still slipped backward over and over. I gritted my teeth against the pain, paying for every foot of height I gained with bloody knees and a bloody palm.
We found a hollow in a corner of the bank protected from the wind. The snow was shallow there. I dug downward. We needed a fire, something to help us survive the night. All I found were shards of glass from the bank’s windows and a few chunks of burnt lumber.
Darla was digging a hole in the side of the snowdrift at the edge of this sheltered spot. I picked up a large piece of glass and tried to carve a charred stick of wood with it, holding the wood between my numb feet. I had a vague idea that I could make a fire bow. Instead I cut my only hand.
Darla had almost disappeared inside the snowdrift. I grabbed a brick and started beating it against the wall. There were no sparks, no matter how hard I knocked the bricks together. Still, I kept trying until Darla laid a shaking hand on my shoulder and motioned for me to follow.
We crawled into the tiny space she had excavated inside the snowdrift. She kicked at the ceiling of the tunnel until it collapsed behind us, sealing us in. Our body heat warmed the small space, but not enough. We needed clothing—some kind of insulation from the frozen ground beneath us. My shivering eased, and I felt a wonderful warmth spreading through my body. That made me feel worse, though. When you get so cold that you feel warm, it’s a sign that your body is preparing to shut down. I knew—I’d been this far gone into hypothermia once before. I held Darla tightly, squeezing our bodies together, trying to conserve heat.
“We’re going to die here, right?” I said.
“Probably,” Darla sighed.
My mind wandered through a long silence. In the darkness and false warmth of Darla’s embrace, I imagined we were drifting through a surreal landscape of blue fields and emerald sky.
Darla’s soft voice called me back. “You . . . you think there’s anything after this?”
“I don’t know.” I’d been devout once, attending Sunday school and services, well, religiously. But that had ended about the time I turned twelve. Now I wasn’t sure. “If there is an omnipotent God, he’s an asshole for allowing all this to happen.”
“I hope there is something after this,” Darla said. “Mom was sure of it. She had unshakeable faith—even the eruption didn’t change her belief. . . . I’d like to see her again.”
“You think you can get married in heaven? Or purgatory, or whatever?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I wanted us to . . . I’d been, I thought that little jewelry store in downtown Stockton might have—”
“That’s why you wanted to go downtown—you must have asked me four times.”
“Twice. I wanted a ring. To propose the right way, you know.”
Darla kissed me. I was so cold that I couldn’t even feel it. Sad—that I couldn’t appreciate our last kiss. “When you were passed out back there in Stockton and I had to put my hand on the block, I had this strange daydream—just a flash, a single image. We were standing in front of a huge crowd, in a wedding dress and tux—”
“You’d look great in a tux,” I said.
“Shut up. Let me finish,” Darla said. “We were holding hands, your right and my left, in front of all those people, and I wanted that picture to be true. So I put my right arm on the block.”
“I wondered why. That’s a pretty stupid reason to give up your good hand.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re supposed to be more practical than I am.” “Yeah.”
“I wish I’d gone ahead and proposed, ring or no ring. I’d have liked to see that picture you daydreamed. I’d have liked being your husband.”
“Look, Alex,” Darla’s voice had shifted, low and fierce now instead of wistful, “there are people who get married but live separate lives, people who marry and divorce before they’ve been together even as long as we have. They say marriage is a sacrament, that it’s a legal contract, but here’s what I think it is—a commitment. And by that standard, we’re already married, more married than most of the people who have the license. I’ve watched
Alyssa, I know she still lusts after you, and she’s far sexier than I’ll ever be—”
“No, she’s not.”
“Oh, bullshit. I’ve seen your tongue hanging out when she sashays past. Max worships the snow she walks on.” “It’s hard not to look,” I conceded.
“That’s not the point. Even when you thought I might be dead, you kept faith with me. And sometimes I catch you looking at me, and even though you look nothing like him, you remind me of how Dad used to look at Mom.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I’m not sure what I ever did to be worthy of it—” “You—”
“Never mind. You said God’s an asshole, but did you ever stop to think, if not for the volcano, we’d never have met?” “And we wouldn’t be dying in a snowdrift.”
“It was worth it, Alex.” I felt her teardrop land on my nose. “It was worth it.”
I held her tightly. It got harder and harder to talk as we froze slowly to the ground, merging with it. Finally we drifted off, arms wrapped around each other, entering the longest night as one.
Chapter 39
I woke in excruciating pain. My skin was on fire with a heat that tingled and surged and spiked, as if thousands of sharp needles were being poked into me one after the other. I’d gone to Hell, and the welcoming committee was a thousand berserk acupuncturists.
I tried to open my eyes. A flickering, reddish light blinded me. Maybe I really was in Hell. My head was foggy; I couldn’t focus. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but that resulted in pain so intense drowned out the needles in my body. I lay still for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts, to understand what was happening. The front side of my body was uncomfortably hot, almost burning. There was something rough against my skin. And someone was pressed against my back. Not Darla—but I couldn’t have said how I could tell.
Darla. I forced my eyes back open, heedless of the glare, propped myself up on a wobbly arm, and looked around.
We were still in the corner of the ruined bank. A large fire blazed, shielded from the wind and Stockton by the bank’s brick walls. Darla was nearby, facing the fire on her side like I was. A woman was pressed up against my back, another pressed against Darla’s back. A thin man with a face as hard and sharp as a hatchet—maybe in his early forties—fed the fire while a seven- or eight-year-old girl dug in the snow and ash, finding charred scraps of lumber and passing them to the man. The little girl was wrapped up tight, in an oversized pink coat with a fur-trimmed hood. Only her cherubic red cheeks and face were visible.
“Shh,” the woman behind me said. “Lay back down. You need to warm up, sleep, and heal.”
“Darla,” my voice sounded more like a frog croaking than human speech.
“She’s okay. Let her sleep. You’re safe. If we’d wanted to harm you, all we had to do was nothing.”
That made sense. I lowered myself back down, noticing for the first time that both the woman and I were wrapped in several blankets. I put my head on her arm and slept.
I woke to the woman shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, wake up,” she whispered. “We got to move on before daybreak. If we could find you, Red’s men could too.”
The mention of Red snapped me to full awareness. Darla was standing nearby, the firelight playing in red shadows across her
skin. She was struggling to step into a pair of long johns one-handed. The woman—girl, I saw now—who had slept against her was trying to help.
I stood, shivering in the frozen air. To shiver was joyous—it meant my body had warmed up to the point where it knew the difference between hot and cold. My remaining fingers throbbed, my toes felt like someone was actively sawing at them with a knife, and the scrapes on my back hurt, but otherwise I seemed okay.
The woman dug a pair of long johns out of a pack next to her and held them open for me to step into. It suddenly occurred to me to be embarrassed—here I was letting my freak flag fly practically in her face. I hurried to put on the long johns, although my one-handed efforts were agonizingly slow.
They had two full sets of clothing, including winter coats, gloves, scarves, hats—even boots. Everything was too big for me and Darla, but we made do, rolling up cuffs and pants legs, wearing three pairs of socks, and stuffing a fourth pair into the toes of the oversized boots. Whenever I shoved my stump into a piece of clothing, just the cloth running over it was agonizing. It wasn’t bleeding, though—the tar had frozen to a hard lump that sealed the end of my arm effectively. I let the shirts and coats
hang long over the stump.
“Who are you?” I asked as the woman helped me dress. “Why are you doing this? Not that I’m not grateful.”
“We’ve got to hurry,” the man said. “We need to be miles away before daybreak.”
“I’m Alex,” I said, holding my hand out to him.
He shook it quickly. “Hurry!”
I tried to hurry, but I was clumsy, unsure of my new center of gravity, and suffering the aftereffects of nearly freezing to death.
“I’m Isaac, but most folks call me Zik,” he said. “My wife, Mary” The woman helping me dress nodded. “And our girls, Charlotte and Bronwyn.”
“Just Wyn,” the youngest girl said. She was dumping armloads of snow on the fire. As soon as we were dressed and the fire was out, we left. Each of the four of them had a pack. I offered to carry one, but Zik refused.
