by Nick Lake
“Is there anything to eat?” asked Aidan, standing at the entrance to the plane. He was wearing a blanket like a shawl. He got cold very easily.
There was a whoosh as Bob doused the fire with gasoline. Flames rose into the air, standing on their own, glowing pondweeds, undulating, and Emily felt a surge inside her. The wood crackled. She noticed that her hearing was getting better; it had been muffled since the crash, sounds made fuzzy and faraway. From the woods came creaking noises—the trees buckling under their coats of snow. She beckoned Aidan closer to the heat: she didn’t want him collapsing on her. That could raise a lot of questions.
“Here,” said Bob. He threw a package of bread to Aidan, who fumbled it and dropped it. He bent and picked it up.
“Might as well eat it now,” said the pilot.
Aidan ate a slice of bread; handed one to Emily. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, a real smile. He was learning to do that.
Despite herself, she edged a little closer to the fire and held out her hands to warm them, staring into the wild, fickle flames. Because she of all people knew that fire had two faces: the one that said home, and the one that burned things down.
She thought of that fire, part of the reason she was here on this mountainside. How her mom had stopped jogging, because people on the street would stare at her. How her dad came home early from school every day, because, he said, he couldn’t go into the staff room anymore.
She hadn’t meant it to happen. She didn’t like fire: though, when it had happened, she found she liked the way it took ordinary things—clothes, wood, a whole building—and made them flare, made them glow, made them beautiful; and then made them nothing but ashes. It had been…cathartic.
Anyway, she didn’t care what people thought of her. She hated them all. Small-town kids. With their friends, knowing only each other, knowing what they wanted. Or just wanting what they were given.
Never wanting more. Never wanting to get out.
She looked around, at the wilderness. Although, she thought. Be careful what you wish for.
Now she was stuck on a mountainside in the Alaskan spring, which was not as full of warmth and new growth as that season suggests elsewhere. It was barely above zero, even with the sun up.
“What’s that?” said Aidan, and she put away her memories, swish, like minimizing a window on an app, and turned back to him, the little boy maximized. Bright. Backlit.
“What?”
He was pointing downhill. There was a kind of rumbling sound coming from that direction, something rhythmical, deep and beating.
“That,” he said. He looked scared.
CHAPTER 6
BOB FROWNED AT the noise. Emily’s eyes flicked to the rifle leaning against the side of the plane. Deer. She knew how to shoot. Had done it a lot with her dad, her mom too. Dressed in bright orange, so other hunters would see them. During the season. All day out in the woods; the whole thing. Her parents’ dream—her nightmare.
Her eyes still on the rifle, she took Aidan’s hand and held it. She could feel his heartbeat through his fingers. Da-dum. Da-dum. It felt so real; the only thing that was real.
Then from the treetops below them rose dark spinning movement, wide and flat. Rotor blades.
The body of the squat black helicopter followed its blades into the murky sky; heavy and unlikely seeming. Its nose angled downward, and it roared forward, then lowered itself toward the slope of snow in front of them, on the clearest patch, where the rocks and trees were thinnest.
Emily’s eyes were scopes, her mind a calculator. A hundred yards, she thought. Hundred and twenty, maybe. Wind strong. From the—she thought back to the sun and where it had risen, the wind blowing from the opposite direction—the west.
It was stupid, she realized afterward. It was stupid, but she just expected, somehow, that Bob would know. That he would do the same as her. She pulled Aidan back, started to fade into the plane. To disappear. She knew how to do that; it was how she’d survived at school. Until Brad saw her. Until they suspended her.
Men in white snowsuits jumped down from the helicopter. They began walking up the slope, slowly but with purpose in their movements. They were wearing black masks. To protect them from the snow whipped up by the rotors, maybe.
Or to stop people from seeing their faces.
Maybe.
But Bob didn’t know anything, of course, so he didn’t do what she did. He didn’t fade into the background.
He stood tall, arms up, and waved his hands in and out, almost crossing, the wave of every person wanting to be rescued. One of his arms didn’t quite reach the other, dangled awkwardly when he lowered it: the lingering pain of his dislocation.
“No—” Emily started to say.
But there was no time.
One of the white-clad men raised something, a long black stick that had been down by his side, blending in with the shadows of the low sun, the always presence of night, here in Alaska, in the corners of things.
He put the stick to his shoulder in one smooth movement and fired, and Bob fell backward, blood spraying in what, Emily thought in the strange clarity of that frozen moment, seemed awfully like the explosion of a red firework against the white background. But she didn’t have time to worry about Bob.
She dived into the snow, pulling Aidan behind her like a small dragged mannequin, then yanked him to his feet and ran, half carrying him, away from the fire, into the shadows. Where they would be harder targets.
CHAPTER 7
EMILY, STILL TOWING Aidan, hunkered down behind the broken-off wing of the plane. She peered over it, down the mountainside. The men in white suits were moving steadily up, sweeping with their guns, taking no chances. She counted them: one, two, three, four.
Four men.
And on their side: her, a wounded or possibly even dead pilot, and a seven-year-old boy. Apparently.
Not good odds.
She held Aidan’s hand, got ready to run, to scramble, up the mountain and through the trees.
Closer by, between her and the soldiers—or whatever they were—she saw Bob struggle to a sitting position, hand clamped over the top of his arm where, she guessed, he’d been hit.
Shit, she thought. Shit, shit. She couldn’t leave him here. But he was going to slow them down.
Her eyes flicked again to the men with the guns.
“Can you…?” she said to Aidan.
He shook his head. “Too far away. I can’t do anything.”
“OK. OK.” Her mind seemed to want to repeat things, to stutter. Like it was trying to go back in time to before any of this was happening. Going back in time was what she’d wanted for ages, of course. To Minnesota, to dance exhibitions, to Jeremy. Although now that would mean losing Aidan, and she wouldn’t do that, couldn’t do that. With Aidan, it was like her heart had been taken out of her and given a body, so it could move around the world on its own.
“Wait here,” she said to Aidan.
Then she came out from behind the wing at a running crawl, moving down toward Bob. She got one arm under his good one, and—while hissing at him, “Don’t say anything, just move”—she hauled him and he hauled himself back up and away from the men with guns. A percussive bang echoed off the mountains, and a bullet zipped over their heads. Then another kicked up snow by her foot. The figures in white were moving.
“Move,” she said again. Freeze-frame. Rewind. Stutter, stutter.
In the glow of the fire she saw the rifle from the plane casting a long, thin black shadow onto the fuselage. She gave the pilot a push in the back, to safety behind the wing, and jagged left as a bullet grazed her elbow—she felt nothing for a moment, and then hot sharp pain and a warm bloom as her sweater soaked with blood.
Ow.
But she was moving that arm, swinging it to grab the rifle, so she knew the wound wa
sn’t serious. She held the gun by the stock and booked it toward the separated wing, boots slipping on the snow; dropped by the fire to rake her fingers through the ash at its edge—she didn’t want a clean reflective scope lens giving away her exact position—wincing as it burned her skin; then on to the shelter of the wing. A bullet thudded into it as she flung herself down.
No time to think, no time to consider.
The gun was loaded. It was a Browning with a detachable box magazine. Her dad would have been contemptuous. You’re hunting deer, he’d have said. Not fighting a war. What do you need a magazine for?
Well.
Emily took a deep breath; held it. She was counting on surprise. She kneeled, wiped the soot from her hand on the scope. She had to improvise. Her dad’s hunting rifles all had modern multicoated antireflective scopes, but this was an old rifle—single-coated, if that. She had to cut down on the glare of the glass from the fire or it would give away her location.
Then she raised her head over the wing, swung the rifle up in a smooth, practiced movement, every reluctant hunting trip with her parents singing in her nerves, living in the memory of her muscles. Her dad liked her to practice things, like aiming a rifle, over and over again. Until the memory was deep inside her, had become physical. He’d kneel beside her, sweating from the pain in his knee: wanting her to be perfect, strong, the warrior he didn’t get to be anymore. It was a pain. Literally. Her mom was the same, obsessed with strength. Emily guessed it was one of the things that had drawn them together.
Still, that discipline was coming in useful now.
Emily looked down the scope, found the first man, twenty yards away. He wasn’t looking at her; the soot would keep any gleam from the flames off her scope, she hoped.
She didn’t want to kill him. She aimed at his leg, his thigh, tracked it as he moved. She let out the breath she’d been holding but didn’t breathe in again. Perfectly still. If she hit his femoral artery, he’d die, but his calf was too small a target.
Half squeeze on the trigger. Breath still held. She thought of something her dad had said: It isn’t until you’re right there, in the theater of war, that you find out if you can do it. Whether you could shoot a man; whether you had that coldness in the core of you. Whether all your training was for nothing.
This wasn’t war, but it was close.
She felt no hesitation, just calm.
She centered the man’s leg in the scope, dimmed by the ash but perfectly visible. She thought of Aidan, and getting him to Anchorage, and then to safety, forever. She thought of Pastor Norcross, quoting the Psalms. “Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the wicked.”
She was rescuing Aidan, wasn’t she?
Fire.
The gun was well looked after. It kicked, but the bullet flew true; the man went down with a shriek, the other three men swinging around to look at him instead of looking up toward Emily, which was a mistake.
Well, she thought. It turns out I can do it.
I’m cold.
I’m ice.
She just missed the second guy she took a shot at—he moved as she fired.
She allowed herself to pause, to think—but only for an instant. The other three men were running now, keeping low, moving up the hill toward her. Fast. She was impressed. Training over fear, after that initial confusion.
Through the scope, she could see a yellow tank attached to the struts of the helicopter, about the size of a big courier box. Preparation. A long search. Impossible to return to base and refuel. So they had brought fuel with them. It was a spare tank.
She let out another breath, held the scope steady, aimed at the yellow cube. And fired.
The explosion was a breath made manifest, the whole field of snow a lung: there was a crump! as it sucked in cold air, and then the shock of the exhale, the shivering boom! as the helicopter stopped being and became a ball of fire instead; a primary explosion and then an even bigger one, as the main fuel tank caught.
The rearmost of the three men in white was thrown to the ground, face-first; he didn’t move at all. Dead, Emily guessed, but she wasn’t sure. She felt a lurch in her stomach at the thought, like the world had come away from its hinges and was swinging wildly. The other two men turned in shock, guns waving uselessly at their sides.
Emily, ears ringing, ducked down next to Aidan and Bob.
“What the hell?” said Bob, face white and drained of blood, because of the pain, she imagined. “Who are they? Who turned you into Rambo Girl?”
“Later,” said Emily.
“What?” said Bob. “We’re getting shot at and you want to explain later?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because we’re being shot at.”
His eyes closed for an instant; then he opened them again. “OK…so what now?”
“I have no idea,” said Emily.
“But you…all of that…you just did…”
“I grabbed a gun. I didn’t have a plan.”
Aidan tapped her on the arm. “I do,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
“YOU DO?” SAID Bob, turning. Skeptical but hopeful too, deep down. That was Emily’s whole mode of being—the skeptical part anyway; it made her warm to him. She was working on the hopeful part, since Aidan. She still hoped, even now, that she could get him out of all this.
“The wing,” said Aidan. “Use it as a sled. To go downhill.” He was hugging the blanket around him, and Emily was horribly conscious that they were far from the warmth of the fire. She edged closer to him, pressed herself against him.
“That’s…that’s not bad,” said Bob. “If we can get it moving.”
Emily looked at him, then at the wing. It was big. Heavy. But the slope was steep—at least it was once you got past the fire. The wing was almost upright—they would have to push it over, so that its smoother side was against the snow. Damn it. Everything was going so fast, and it was the only plan they had. “I’ll fire twice,” she said. “Then we push.”
“Wait,” said Aidan.
“What?”
“I need something.” He started to move back toward the plane, away from the shelter of the wing.
“No—” began Emily, but it was too late; he was running now, hunched over, head ducked down. Shots streaked above him, turning by mechanical magic into bullet holes, like silver flowers, in the blue body of the plane.
Aidan disappeared into the torn opening in the fuselage. Moments passed. Emily couldn’t have said how long; the world was reduced to her breathing, in and out. She glanced once, over the wing, and saw that the two men still moving were only a dozen yards away, maybe a bit more. Then the small figure of her brother appeared at the gaping mouth of the plane, and began hurrying back to them.
“Thanks,” he said, hitting the snowy ground beside them in a surprisingly impressive knee slide. He must have seen it in a film or something.
Emily popped up. The first guy was too close for her to use the scope; she just fired in his general direction, and he ducked. Turned, fired again at the other.
“Now!” she said.
She and Bob got their shoulders against the wing. Emily thought she heard the man sobbing—one arm dislocated and the other with a bullet in it—though her hearing was not good now, everything echoing and muffled, as if the snowy mountains were inside her, their blurred acoustics, damped by frozen water.
They heaved, feet slipping in the snow, the effort turning Emily’s body into hard, taut sinew and muscle, something engineered. The wing tipped, then sloshed down onto the slush near the fire. They kept going—and it began to slip downhill.
“Go, go, go!” she said. She got an arm under Aidan, and Bob did too, and they slung him up and onto the top of the wing—he was exposed then, but there was nothing else they could do, and he clung tight to it, flattening himself as a bullet whined over hi
s head. Then Emily threw herself up and forward, got her top half onto the wing, squirmed up until she was lying facedown next to Aidan, an arm around him to hold him tight. She glanced right and saw that Bob was on too, and they were accelerating, gathering speed down the slope.
They passed one of the men in white, and he spun, rifle pointing at them, fired an automatic burst that hammered against the wing. Emily clutched Aidan’s hand, pulled herself even closer to him and him closer to her, so she was wrapped around him, almost, as they swished over the snow, going quickly now, toward the tree line.
She pressed him to her. For warmth. For protection.
Suddenly she realized: they would hit a tree and stop and that would be it.
But they didn’t.
They shot smoothly through a stand of pines, and on the other side was a wide, long expanse of snow, almost like a ski run, all the way down to a forested hill above a river, far below. Faster and faster they went, snow whipping their faces, the cold air rushing, a thing of form, not emptiness, like water, flowing over them and into their eyes, the hiss of the wing as it glided downhill like anxiety and relief made into sound.
It was then that she realized their mistake: they had only the clothes they were wearing, no blankets, nothing to wrap themselves in. The cold air hummed against the wing, as if singing of how it was going to kill them.
She hung on: to the wing; to Aidan. And balanced, feeling every shift and slide of the wing. Holding on was something she was good at. Balanced she had been, once.
But she was working on it.
It felt like a mile, two miles, they must have gone, down that long slope of snow, until they hit a rock just before the forest and were slingshot—a moment of pure weightlessness, tumbling, Emily trying to enfold Aidan with her body, to encase him in her strength—and crashed into a snowbank. Where the impact made her let go.
Aidan Aidan Aidan.
She fumbled desperately for his limbs, for the outline of his body. He was wailing with pain…until she realized he was laughing.