Ice Diaries

by Lexi Revellian

  “I don’t like Mike any more. He’s definitely off my protection list.”

  After he had gone I went to the window to watch him walk home. Morgan told me he’d be fine, Mike had no reason to waylay him, but I wanted to be sure. Greg’s figure gradually diminished till he disappeared and the faint golden light of a candle shone from his windows. Morgan said we should barricade the front door just in case, so we extricated a double bed from under my piles of stores and heaved it into the hallway, leaving the frame on end at an angle against the door. Would that be enough to stop a person intent on getting in? I was glad Morgan was there to protect me. Except it was Morgan Mike had the quarrel with …

  “We could add more furniture. I hardly ever use that door.”

  “We need to be able to get out that way if we have to. Two exits are better than one.”

  I still felt chilled to my core and bone weary, so got myself a glass of brandy. I needed it. I put my socks to warm on the stove top and flopped on the sofa, exhausted. My feet were marmoreally pale, and I began to rub them. Morgan joined me, heat radiating off him. He said, “Give me a foot,” and massaged it. The warmth of his hands brought an involuntary smile to my face. I was telling him about the party and had reached the rat incident when a thought occurred to me and I broke off.

  “I assume you got the spare part after all that?”

  “No. The box with the spares in wasn’t there. Either he’s hidden it somewhere else, or he had it with him tonight.”

  This was bad news. It meant Morgan had no alternative but to make a deal with Mike; and the longer this thing went on the more likely we all were to get involved. Greg and I had already. “D’you think you can trust Mike if he agrees?”

  He gave a short laugh. “No way. He’s lost too much face. He’ll want to get his own back.”

  That’s what I’d thought. My heart sank at the prospect of more conflict. “Mike said it was Eddie who knifed you.”

  “It wasn’t Eddie.”

  “Then why did you hit him? It seems a bit gratuitous.”

  “If I hadn’t it would have been three of them against me instead of two. I don’t count Mike.” He spoke as if it was a simple matter of arithmetic. “And I didn’t like what Mike did to you and Greg.”

  “Why didn’t you hit him, then?”

  “He wasn’t standing outside on his own. Eddie was.”

  I thought about this, unable to decide whether a savage premeditated attack on an unprepared man was justified in the circumstances, or reprehensible. We’d needed rescuing and Morgan had rescued us with efficiency, but smashing a person in the face and guts in a world without hospitals was a brutal thing to do. He might have ruptured his spleen and killed him. The fact that BJ was a nurse and presumably able to help Eddie had not, I felt sure, entered into Morgan’s calculations. David would never have behaved like that … uneasily, I recognized this was a situation he would not have been able to deal with. He’d have come to help and ended up outside instead of us – or as well as us, depending on Mike’s whim. I also had to admit, reluctantly, that some primitive part of me thought Morgan’s violent alpha male behaviour awesome. I changed tack.

  “What do you think Mike will do?”

  “Nothing tonight, most likely. He’ll think it over like he said. Nothing till he’s got the gold and the ACE. It’s after that he’ll try something. Other foot.”

  I swung my left foot up and put my hot sock and slipper back on my right, which felt more its old self. “Tell me what happened to Red.”

  “Why d’you want to know?”

  “Because I’m sick of everyone being mysterious about when Mike kicked you out. Mention the subject and everyone tells you contradictory stuff, or goes all vague and clams up. It’s like the Secret of Glamis Castle.”

  “None of us come out of it well, that’s why. Okay. I’ll tell you.” He let my foot go, went and got himself a bottle of beer, and sat down again. He took a drink and absently resumed massaging my foot one-handedly. “We were going through a small town when Red crashed his Yamaha, snagged it on part of a building sticking out of the snow and smashed into a wall. The sled was a write-off, but he was thrown clear, not a mark on him. That left us with seven sleds and eight people. Four of the sleds take two, but with two they go slower and use more fuel, and we were hauling supplies anyway. Mike told me to take Red behind me on my Polaris. Slowed me right down, it was a drag, we were way behind the others. I had a go at him for being careless. We had a row, yelling abuse at each other as we went along. At nightfall we stopped in a bell tower, the only building above snow for miles around. Cold, no proper windows.”

  He gazed at the flames in the stove’s little window without speaking for a bit, stroking my foot as if it was a cat, sending distracting tingles up my leg.

  “I should tell you Mike and I hadn’t been getting on too well. We’d disagreed over a few things. I’d always been closer to him than the rest, like his second in command, but after a while he cooled on me. I got the feeling he thought I was angling to take over, plus he didn’t like to see me talking to Serena. He got less friendly, started criticizing everything I did or said. To make this more noticeable, everything Red said was clever, a really good idea. I know this sounds dumb. It was. So that evening, we were all sitting round in the bell tower drinking to keep the cold out, talking about being one sled short, and Mike told Red he could fight me for my sled. The loser got left behind. We were in the middle of nowhere – anyone left there wouldn’t survive. I said no way. Did I say we’d had a lot to drink? The others were chanting, ‘Fight! Fight!’ Red was all for it. We’d fought back in FreeFight days, and were pretty evenly matched. He was dancing around, calling me chicken. I told him to fuck off. He hit me. I told him he was drunk, he should go to bed. He wouldn’t leave it. I couldn’t walk away, there was nowhere to go. I lost my temper. Mike got the fight he wanted. I’d got Red in a head lock on the floor. He had to tap out, I’d got him beat. Instead he pulled a knife and tried to stick it in my ribs. By chance I moved and spoiled his aim.”

  “That was the cut on your side?”

  “Yes. I got mad, which was stupid. You shouldn’t get angry when you’re fighting. I broke his arm, deliberately. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Silence while I compared his version with Mike’s. Eddie had looked as if that story was untrue, the way he’d gone red and hadn’t met anyone’s eyes. I believed Morgan. And I didn’t like it. The more I found out about Mike, the worse he seemed, and everyone else except Greg thought he was a nice guy. They’d been eating out of his hand at Nina’s, all of them. Eventually I said, “Then what?”

  “Mike kicked me out, like I told you. I don’t know what happened to Red. He wasn’t any use with a broken arm. My guess is they left him behind, with no transport, in the middle of nowhere. Mike’s a cold-blooded bastard.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. Morgan might sneer at our little group, but it was a hell of a lot nicer than the one he’d been part of. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which we would leave an injured man to die alone. I wondered whether he’d told me everything.

  “Why didn’t Mike like you talking to Serena? Was there anything between you?”

  “Not really. She hadn’t been with us that long.”

  “I thought you’d all set out together a year ago?”

  “Six of us did. Mike and five fighters who worked for him. But he had eight sleds, space for two more. He thinks people are disposable; he ditches them when he doesn’t need them any more, or falls out with them. Serena’s the third girlfriend he’s had this year. He dumped each one when he met her replacement. That’s why Serena does what she’s told. She doesn’t want to be left behind with some random group of people existing at subsistence level like you lot. If Mike had been able to get his hands on guns Eddie wouldn’t be with him, he’s too thick to be a good fighter, he’s only fit to be a bouncer. Mike wasted a lot of our time trying to find guns. We dug down to two police stations
, but the cops must have taken them when public order started to break down. That’s what you’d do with civilization collapsing round you like a house of cards. I told him at the first one that’s what had happened, it wasn’t worth trying another, and I was right.”

  The thought of Mike with a gun was chilling. I hoped he didn’t come across any in London. Morgan was still talking.

  “Then there’s BJ; he’s an upgrade on Ben, the paramedic we had before. We left him in Birmingham, and as soon as Mike comes across a doctor BJ’ll be toast. Mike’s terrified of catching some bug or getting hurt, a real wuss.”

  Morgan hadn’t answered my question about him and Serena, so I went back to it. “What does ‘not really’ anything between you mean?”

  Morgan smiled at me under his lashes. “I always knew you cared, Tori.”

  He lifted my foot and kissed my toes. I snatched my foot back and put on my sock. It had been thawed for a while but I’d been focused on what he was saying … plus who doesn’t like having her foot rubbed?

  “Serena was the only woman around, so you kind of noticed her. If we were alone she used to stand a bit too close to me – I don’t flatter myself, I’m sure she did it to everyone. She knew the effect she was having all right, but she’d act shocked if you tried to take it further. It was partly to up her value in Mike’s eyes, having all of the guys wanting to shag her, but I don’t know how loyal she’d be to him if he wasn’t top dog.”

  Serena had fancied him, she’d told me so. In vino veritas. Interesting he hadn’t noticed. But she’d have been too scared of Mike to do anything about it. “You tried to take it further?”

  “I’m only human.”

  I let that go. “Why was Serena the only woman? Travelling from place to place, you must have come across lots of groups of people like us.”

  “Yeah, there were women. Never had time to get to know them. Some of them saw us as their ticket out, but Mike didn’t want passengers. He said they’d slow us down and use up supplies. He was the only one allowed to bring a woman along.”

  I sipped my brandy and considered all this. Morgan might not have told me everything, but what he had said I believed, and it seemed to me the situation was rife with hazardous possibilities.

  “So to sum up: Mike is a psycho in a world without law, where might is right, and he has three cage fighters on his side. You tried it on with his girlfriend, and stole his gold and his best sled. Then you broke Eddie’s nose. He is now living a two minute walk away from this flat. You are not possessed of superpowers. You have no way as yet of getting away from Mike,” and here I fixed him with a stern eye, “and even if you did, you would not go leaving Mike dissatisfied in case he makes all of us who do not have sleds so we can escape from him stand outside till we have no noses or toes or fingers any more. Because that would be a mean and shitty thing to do, even worse than what happened to poor Red, and it would prey on your mind and stop you sleeping.”

  I took a breath; I hadn’t finished, but before I could continue, he interrupted me.

  “I’ll be able to get away from here tomorrow, as soon as Mike hands over the sled. He’ll do that because else he won’t get his gold. When I said I couldn’t trust him, I meant he’d want to get back at me. No reason for him to pick on your lot. Come with me.”

  He said this in such a throwaway manner I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Come with you?”

  “Out of here. On the back of my sled. Go south. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes, but …” I prevaricated. “I thought you didn’t like carrying people on the back of your snowmobile?”

  “Depends who it is. I liked you holding out on Mike for me, and I liked that you told me you wouldn’t have kept it up much longer. You’re not a fool, Tori, and you’re honest. And not bad-looking either.” He scrutinized my face. “You scrub up well.”

  I paused. “Would there be a … sexual element to this arrangement?”

  “A sexual element?” He laughed. “Yes. I can definitely promise you sex would be involved. But I think you might like that too.”

  He reached out and put an arm round me, and my skin tingled and my stomach fluttered at his touch. I didn’t resist when he pulled me to him and his lips nuzzled my neck, nor when his mouth met mine in a lingering kiss. I shut my eyes. His muscles felt hard as he held me to him. His face tasted of salt and he smelled good – sweaty, but good. His fingers found the zip tag on my top under my sweater and I pulled away.

  “I’ll think about it.” My voice sounded husky, my heart was pounding. After a year of drought, my body was waking up and flowering like a desert after rain. David came into my mind, as insubstantial as a ghost, as far away as a friend from childhood.

  Morgan murmured, “D’you have to start thinking about it right now? Can it wait?”

  “No. That wouldn’t help me think.” I got up and moved away.

  Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian

  CHAPTER 15

  Dig two graves

  I fell asleep ten seconds after my head hit the pillow. It had been a long day. In the small hours I woke to the sound of the wind howling round the building, and snow spattering intermittently on the windows. I’ve never got used to how black the nights are now. For most of my life, the streetlights’ orange glare meant it was never completely dark; awake at night, I could see well enough to go to the bathroom without turning on a light. These days, unless a full moon shines, the blackness is absolute.

  I lay rigid, eyes open seeing nothing, heart beating fast, listening for sounds of people creeping about and trying to force an entry, hating being a sitting target. Imagining how much safer I’d feel if Morgan was lying beside me, I was tempted to light a candle and go and fetch him. He wouldn’t mind being woken; I was certain he’d make the move with enthusiasm, and then proceed to take my mind off my fears. That idea, and the memory of kissing him, made my heart beat in a much more agreeable way … But I hadn’t decided whether to travel south on his sled, and didn’t want to sleep with him then say goodbye, leaving me an emotional mess, yearning for him as well as David. And after all, he was only a few metres away over on the sofa if anyone did break in. He hardly stirred, either lacking imagination or confident in his theory that nothing would happen yet.

  His proposition ran through my mind. It would be a gigantic leap into the unknown; not just because I didn’t know Morgan well, but because no one knew what was happening where the ice stopped, or where that was – the Mediterranean, North Africa? It could be full of warring factions mowing each other down with machine guns. But at least it wouldn’t be under twenty metres of snow … I tried to imagine what it would be like to travel south on the back of his snowmobile, camping in abandoned buildings on the way. The journey would be dangerous – we might die slowly of cold or hunger if anything went wrong, if the snowmobile broke down, for instance, or we ran out of supplies. How was he planning to cross the Channel? Would it be frozen over, or would we need a boat? I realized I no longer believed David might come to find me. I had to accept he was dead, and leave him out of my plans. I had a cautious faith in Morgan; it seemed to me, little as I knew him, that beneath a guarded, sometimes churlish exterior he had a basic decency one could rely on. And God knows I found him attractive.

  I got up early and made breakfast, yawning. Morgan joined me. He didn’t say anything about the night before. I brooded about how ineffectual I’d been in my brief struggle with Mike and Big Mac; how I’d hated being held, unable to move let alone get away. Realistically, I’d never defeat a cage fighter, but I hadn’t even left a mark on either of them. We sat side by side, spooning porridge silently until I said,

  “Can you teach me some self-defence moves?”

  He gave me a sidelong look and smiled. “After breakfast.”

  We did a warm-up session first which left me sweaty and panting and wondering if I’d have the energy to learn to fight. Morgan was cool and breathing normally.

  “I’m not as fit as I thought I was.”<
br />
  “You’re using different muscles, that’s all. You’ll get used to it. Okay. Surprise, speed and ruthlessness. Remember when you’re up against someone who’s bigger and heavier than you your main weapon is surprise, and you can only surprise him once. So make the most of it. You need to hit him as fast and hard as you can in a vulnerable area, and don’t worry about hurting him badly – that’s the idea. You want to disable him. Never pull your punches, try to hit right through him. Commit to the move. I’m teaching you to fight dirty, and the only rule is to win.”

  Morgan stood facing me. Snow whirled past the windows.

  “Let’s do some basic moves in slow motion. I go to grab you.” His right hand came towards my left arm. “You raise your left to knock my hand out of the way, and chop the side of your right hand against the side of my neck, carry through, bend your arm and hit me in the face with your elbow coming back.”

  He made me practise until he was satisfied, then moved on what to do if someone grabbed my hand – you twist out of it and get them in a wrist lock – and also showed me how to avoid being grabbed in the first place.

  “You’re doing well. Intelligence gives you an edge in MMA. A journalist once said it’s like chess for the abnormally tough. Oh, there’s one low trick you can try if a cage fighter’s got you in a lock on the floor – tap out. He’s so used to it in training, he might just release you from force of habit, then you can hit him and run away.”

  He moved on to thumb strikes, showing me the location of the most vulnerable points. He was a surprisingly good teacher, and I told him so. Without mentioning my surprise, naturally.