Snow Burn

by Joel Arnold

  But nobody knew where we were, so even if he called the police, what good would it do us?

  Quinn coughed once, then went back to snoring.

  What if we tied him up?

  The thought sent a wave of excitement through me.

  Of course! We could tie him up until morning, then ski out and notify the police. At least as long as the weather cooperated.

  Did Vince bring rope? I took a deep breath. As I crawled the short distance to his backpack, even the sound of my jeans sliding over the floor seemed unnaturally loud. I tried to hold my breath, but that only made it worse when I had to gulp in another deep breath. I pulled open the main compartment of Vince’s pack, the fabric scraping against the contents like a scream.

  The bottle of brandy rested on top. I pulled it out and set it aside. Sweat dripped off my nose. I gingerly moved aside clothing, chips and cans of soda, searching, each movement like a siren blaring across the small expanse. Hadn’t the brick-making containers been tied to Vince’s backpack? And the jug of water – I remembered it now, remembered thinking how heavy it must’ve been as we skied into the woods.

  A shadow loomed over me. I froze. I slowly looked up. It was Vince, thank God. He looked at me quizzically. I motioned him over.

  “Any luck?” I whispered.

  He shook his head. “What are you doing?”

  “Did you bring rope?” I asked.

  “Of course. Why?”

  He followed my eyes over to Quinn and nodded. “Oh,” he said, turning a shade brighter, embarrassed, I figured, that he hadn’t thought of such a simple solution first.

  I grabbed his arm tightly. “Find the rope,” I said. “I’ll look for the phone. We’ll do it when I get back.”

  I quietly slid on my coat, watching Quinn the entire time. Vince quickly found a length of rope, pulled it from the bottom of his backpack and placed it on top. Quinn continued to snore raggedly in front of the entrance.

  I held my breath and got down on all fours, my hands on one side of his body, my feet on the other. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell beneath me. I watched his face. His mouth hung open and a line of drool snaked out from the corners of his mouth. His eyes jerked back and forth beneath his eyelids.

  “Go,” Vince whispered.

  I lifted one leg over him and started to lift the other.

  That’s when his hand shot up and grabbed my ankle. I screamed.

  He shot up to a sitting position, twisting my leg. I fell across his lap. “What’re you doing?” he grunted.

  I scrambled to get up, but he wouldn’t release my ankle. The side of my face was pressed against the cold floor. “Let go!” I demanded, my heart attempting to dislodge my tonsils. “I’ve gotta pee.”

  His grip was hard. Painful. “Bull,” he sneered.

  “Let go!”

  “You’re trying to go back to town. Call the police. Aren’t you?” His grip tightened. Was he trying to twist my leg off?

  “You’re hurting me.” I tried to pull my leg away, but couldn’t.

  Vince loomed up, his shadow covering his half of the igloo. The fire shined brightly on his skin. “Let him go. You think I’d stay behind with you if he was going anywhere other than outside for a few minutes?”

  Vince seemed especially big in the igloo, like if he wanted to, his body could expand to fill up the entire space. Luckily he was my friend and not Quinn’s.

  Quinn loosened his grip. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he said.

  “Would you rather he pee in here?” Vince asked.

  Quinn let go of my ankle and pointed a blackened, frostbitten finger at Vince. “I’m getting tired of your bullshit.”

  I tried not to hyperventilate. “Can I go?” I asked.

  The two of them stared at each other, saying nothing with their mouths, but the words that shot back and forth between their eyes raised the hairs painfully on the back of my neck.

  Without taking his eyes off of Quinn, Vince mumbled out the side of his mouth, “Don’t get lost.”

  Chapter 26

  I left them like that, staring at each other in the cramped igloo. Funny how it wasn’t so long ago the place practically felt like a palace. But now, as I crawled through the narrow tunnel, the wind screaming in front of me, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Snow had already accumulated at the entrance, just in the short time Vince had been back. I knocked it out of the way with my gloved hands.

  It was worse outside. I would never find that phone. It was lost until the spring thaw, many cold, cold months away. I wanted to curl up in the entrance. It seemed to be the only safe place in the entire world at the moment. If only it had a fifty-inch flat screen plasma TV with stereo surround sound…

  A dull ache spread through my ankle. My heart raced. What if Quinn hadn’t let go? What if he’d given it a sharp twist and snapped it like a twig?

  What if he’d grabbed my neck instead?

  And what if I did fall asleep here? Right here in the entrance of this humble abode? Would I wake up? Ever?

  Maybe my body would be found at the same time as the cell phone, my corpse freshly thawed as the first plants of spring struggled to sprout from the cool earth.

  No. I couldn’t stay here. I had to go out. I had to at least try to find that phone. Maybe I wouldn’t find it. And if I did, it probably wouldn’t work. But at the moment, it seemed to be the only option I had.

  I slowly crawled out.

  The wind hit my face like a dozen whips. I’d forgotten to pull my ski mask down over my face, so I did it now. The wind still reached its icy tentacles through the eye and nose holes. I stayed on my hands and knees and kept my face down as I searched the deepening snow. Twice my hands knocked into something hard, but both times it was only the protruding roots of a tree. No phone. Where was it? It couldn’t be far away.

  And the wind – it would not let up. It stung. It screamed. It made the snow dance dizzyingly in front of my eyes. How could it not drive a person crazy?

  I wondered briefly what the temperature was. I should’ve taken the small thermometer Vince kept on his jacket zipper. But again, it was the wind chill that was the most dangerous. The wind chill made a thermometer useless. Even if the thermometer read a balmy twenty degrees above zero, if the wind was strong enough, your skin, your lungs, your entire body could be tricked into thinking it was twenty degrees below zero and decide to shut down and turn into one giant Popsicle. But what could I do?

  I made two circles around the igloo. The first time around, I kept the side of my body up against the igloo wall, digging my hands in a path around its base, feeling for the phone. The snow was loose and light, like sawdust, and was easy to run my hands through, but the wind kept pummeling it, making it jump up into my eyes. After the first go-round, I paused at the entrance. Could I make it around again? I tried to listen for any noise inside the shelter, but the sound of the blizzard drowned out everything else. I wondered if I’d be able to hear myself scream, but I didn’t want to waste any extra energy trying.

  Okay. Let’s circle this thing again, I thought, blinking away another fresh barrage of snow from my eyes. This time I made a wider circle. I let myself veer about three feet, four feet from the igloo walls, but not far enough away so that I couldn’t see it.

  I dug. I pushed aside snow. I felt with my hands, my knees, my boots. A phone can’t just disappear, can it? Sure it was small, but geez…

  Maybe the wind blew it away, I thought, only half-kidding.

  I searched. Grew cold. Colder. I forced myself to search some more. Nothing, zip, nada.

  I sucked in a breath through the fabric of my ski mask and forced myself to stand.

  My bladder cried out.

  Damn it! Not now. Not out here. Maybe I should just go back inside and do it. Find an empty Coke can and do my business in there.

  Vince would laugh his ass off.

  But then it might reek – make the entire igloo smell like urine. It was bad enough in there witho
ut that. Better just buck up and find a tree to lean against, I thought. And I better do it now, because the way my bladder throbbed, I knew it meant business.

  I peered through the swirling snow. Funny how a simple snow flake was so fragile and innocent, but when you had millions of them blowing around your head, it was enough to drive a person insane. I reached blindly for the nearest tree, and leaned my forehead against it. Luckily, the tree blocked the main thrust of the wind. I took my gloves off and slid my bare hands beneath my ski mask to warm against my cheeks. Then I unzipped my pants and did my business against the tree. The steam it created was quickly swept away by the wind. When I was finished, I had to struggle with the zipper to get it back into place.

  I yanked my gloves back on and turned back to the igloo. Again, it had disappeared behind the wall of swirling snow. I took a few steps forward, my hands held out in front of me, and soon saw the shelter walls glowing slightly from the small fire within.

  I trudged toward the entrance, fell to my elbows and knees and pulled myself inside.

  When I got back into the warmth of the igloo, Quinn sat up, his back against the inside wall. He glowered at me. In his hand was the bottle of brandy. I looked up and saw Vince on the other side. Something was wrong.

  “Where’ve you been?” Quinn asked.

  “Outside, taking a – ” My voice caught in my throat.

  Vince lay on his side, his hands and ankles bound with rope. A piece of cloth was stuffed in his mouth, secured with a shoelace pulled tightly around his head.

  I felt dizzy. My tongue felt like a piece of thick, dry sponge. Thoughts flew through my head so fast that I couldn’t grab onto any one of them. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be here.

  Anyplace but here.

  Vince looked up at me, his eyes wide open and full of fright.

  Chapter 27

  I could barely squeeze any words out of my throat. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I didn’t like the way things were going,” Quinn said. “What were you doing out there?”

  “Taking a piss,” I said, unable to stop shivering.

  “You were out there too long just to be urinating.” He pronounced it you-ra-nating.

  I looked at Vince again. He watched Quinn, his eyes blinking rapidly.

  “Take the gag out of his mouth, at least,” I said. “So he can breathe.”

  “He can breathe fine.”

  “He saved your life,” I said.

  Quinn shrugged. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes no longer darted about like a nervous birds’. Instead, a frightening calm had settled over him.

  “How can you do this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t have much choice, did I?” Quinn said. “Son of a bitch had the rope out. He was going to tie me up.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He squinted at me. “I bet you knew about it, too. I figured I better take some action.”

  I swallowed.

  Quinn tilted back the brandy and took a long sip. A splatter of blood coated the outside of the bottle. My stomach dropped. I looked at Vince again, and noticed blood dripping from his hair. I crawled over to him and wiped a swath of bloody hair from his forehead.

  “He’s okay,” Quinn said. “Just hit him hard enough to throw him off a bit.”

  “We weren’t going to hurt you,” I said.

  “An animal backed into a corner has no choice,” Quinn said.

  “Just leave, okay? We won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

  “Promises aren’t worth the spit they’re uttered with. Besides – ” He nodded at the hole in the roof. “You know what it’s like out there.”

  He stared at me for a long while with his calm, calm eyes and took one last swallow of brandy, finishing the bottle.

  I slowly took off my jacket. I used my shirtsleeve to wipe the blood away that had collected on Vince’s forehead and dripped slowly down his cheeks. He watched me for a moment as I did so. It was hard to look at him like that. This was my fault, wasn’t it? The rope had been my idea. How did it backfire so quickly? So easily?

  Damn it!

  If I hadn’t heard Quinn moaning in the first place, if I hadn’t insisted we go see what it was, we never would’ve found him. He would’ve frozen to death, and Vince and I would be sitting up playing cards, none the wiser.

  And to think only hours ago, I’d been worried about my dad calling.

  Chapter 28

  For the sake of argument, let’s say the man whose life you’ve saved turns out to be a dangerous escaped convict. He’s tied up your best friend – the one who always knows what to do, but he can’t do anything now, can’t say anything because there’s a goddamn piece of cloth shoved into his mouth.

  For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re scared shitless and it feels like you’re in a bad dream, only you know it’s not a dream at all, but a nightmare come to life, and you start to wonder if this might be your last night on earth.

  What do you do?

  Mr. Sweeney? Vince? What do I do?

  Anyone? What do I do?

  What what what…

  Okay, stop. Think.

  What could I do? What should I do?

  The short answer was simple. Move. I had to move. I felt that if I sat there any longer, I’d go crazy.

  Blood continued to trickle from Vince’s forehead. I grabbed the backpack and turned it upside down, spilling its contents.

  Quinn tensed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I glared at him. “I’m looking for something to bandage his head with.” Where was my mom and dad’s first aid kit when I needed it?

  Quinn’s eyes bore into me. “Don’t try anything funny.”

  “There’s nothing funny about any of this,” I said. My voice sounded unreal when I talked. It sounded distant. Shaky. Frightened.

  I found a white t-shirt – it would make a decent bandage, but I kept looking through the contents in case there was anything else that might come in handy. A pocketknife or something. But there was nothing. I turned to Vince and wiped more blood off his forehead with the shirt.

  I’d never seen anyone so helpless. Anger washed over me. I wanted to jump across the room and bash Quinn’s head in. But if I tried that, he’d overtake me, too. Vince was a lot stronger than I was, so if Quinn had subdued Vince, what could he do to me?

  Vince looked at me a moment more, as if trying to communicate with his eyes, then turned his attention back to Quinn.

  I wrapped the t-shirt around his head, covering his injury. It wasn’t bleeding badly, but a discolored knot started forming where the bottle had connected.

  Think.

  But it was so hard to think. So hard to think beyond my best friend lying there like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat. So hard to think beyond the fact that an escaped convict sat within arms’ reach of me, and that he was desperate and calm and had tattoos on his chest that throbbed with hate. But hey – at least my mind was off the deadly blizzard raging outside the igloo…

  I turned to Quinn. The campfire glowed between us. Although the brandy was gone, its lingering smell made my nose itch and my eyes water. “What are you planning to do?” I asked quietly.

  Quinn sighed. “Here’s my problem,” he said. “I’m trying to avoid the law. You two are the law’s link to me. So – ” He cleared his throat. “There-in lies the problem.”

  “We won’t tell anyone,” I tried again, knowing it was pointless.

  “People say anything when they’re desperate.”

  “We saved your life,” I reminded him. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

  The coals cast light and shadow on Quinn’s face, coloring it like a jack-o-lantern. He held the empty bottle up and studied it against the fire. Then he set it aside.

  “Does it count for something?” he asked, rubbing his chin. “Do you think I’m enjoying this? Do you think I like having to kill someone so that I can go free?”

  Kill
someone? I swallowed. Kill someone?

  “If you kill us, won’t that make it worse?” My voice cracked. “If you kill us, that will be one more piece of trail for the police to follow. One more reason for them to catch you. But if you just let us go…”

  “Yeah, right. You’ll just pretend this never happened, like it was some bad dream?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Quinn coughed into his hand, then spit into the fire. “It never works that way.”

  For a moment, it seemed all the air in the igloo had been sucked out of the ventilation hole.

  I’d never felt so cold and hot all at once. I wondered briefly if my life would flash before my eyes. Would I see a light at the end of the tunnel? Would I end up at a bus stop where my dead relatives waited to greet me?

  Stop it, I told myself.

  Think.

  Chapter 29

  As far as I saw it, I only had a few options.

  One – I could panic. Completely freak out. That seemed the easiest. I was definitely on the verge. But what good would that do?

  Two – I could remain passive. Compliant. Just wait the night out. Hopefully this guy would leave in the morning, letting us go.

  But come on – was I really that naive? Should I risk leaving the outcome in this guy’s hands? He was desperate. Like he said – an animal backed up against a wall.

  Both of those options were worthless.

  But there was a third option. The hardest option. And that was to:

  Stay calm. Stay focused. Stay vigilant and perceptive for a possible solution to rear its head.

  Then I thought, Why the hell couldn’t I be the one tied up?

  Vince would know what to do. If anyone could stay calm and focused, if anyone could find a solution, it was Vince. I was the couch potato, damn it! I was used to just lying around! Why couldn’t Vince be the hero again? He was good at it!

  My mind started slipping toward Option One. Panic mode. Complete freak out time. Hop from one foot to the other and throw poop at the icy walls.