by Sean Stewart
There was no trace of the people of the North Side, those that had perished there in the Dream, or the Southside’s dead since collected by John Walker. No ghosts in the houses, no spirits in her streets. No sign of any animate thing, dead or alive…
…Except for the birds. In all that empty landscape, only the birds remained. Winter wrens huddling like cold children in bare hedges. Cedar waxwings searching for shrivelled berries like women combing thrift store sale racks. A portly, good-natured owl hunkering in the chairman’s office at the Edmonton Journal building. A white hawk, of the kind men called a harrier, wheeling high over the Bridge.
A single magpie fluttering through the darkness of an empty hangar at the airport.
When they were done talking and John Walker had left, Nick considered what to do. It was 2:45 A.M. according to his watch and very cold.
The dress boots he had been wearing for last night’s banquet were better than nothing, but their fleece lining was still a far cry from the self-heating thermal work boots back at his apartment. His toes had begun to stiffen while he was tapping fuel for the helicopter, and during the whole conversation with John Walker he had been subtly rocking back and forth, trying to press blood into every part of his feet. He kicked his booted toes at the tarmac a couple of times each.
He wished he knew the temperature. Close to -30° C, he guessed, and still falling. Overhead the sky was clear and hard. Stars driven into it like nails.
He wished Magpie were here. But Lark was safe. So.
He could try to walk through the haunted city, heading south until he hit the river valley. Then walk along the bluff to the Bridge, then over and home. But his hands and feet were already stiff. Between the collar of his coat and the bottom of the cap jammed over his ears, his face was tight and hurting. It would be very difficult to find his way through the North Side in the dark. He would have to expect frostbite if he tried the trip. And there were the ghosts. He would be better off to build a fire for the night, and make the trip the next day, when it would be warmer and he would be able to see.
All this presuming he wasn’t dead already.
He didn’t feel dead. True, he had spoken with John Walker, who brought the souls of the city’s dead back to the North Side to rest. But Walking John had not told him he had died. Had not seemed to kill him, either. Nick didn’t know what to make of it. They had talked about duty, some. John Walker asked him why he had taken Lark, his only precious child, down to the Bridge. Nick hadn’t answered that.
Then there was the bundle of clothes John Walker had given him: a shiny black waistcoat, pants, a top hat, and a pair of gleaming black boots. John Walker’s famous black suit. “Take these from me,” the king of North Side’s dead had said. “I will not wear them anymore. The North Side’s long night is nearly done. Dawn is coming. I do not mean to bring back any more of the Southside’s dead but one.”
“What one?” Nick asked.
“My father,” John Walker had said, with a curious, cold smile. And that had been the end of their speaking. Strange.
Well, if Nick was dead he was dead. He didn’t think he would feel the cold so badly if he was, though. He tucked the bundle under one arm and headed for the nearest hangar. The fronts of his thighs burned with cold. He walked stiffly, trying not to let them touch his pant legs. His steps were beginning to jar as his feet stiffened and stopped flexing and rolling smoothly. Strides like the thump, thump, thumping impact of crutches, or wooden legs.
He would definitely need to build a fire.
He had two main problems as he saw it, the cold and the dark. In the hangar he would be out of any wind, thankfully. As for the darkness, he was already working with no more than starlight and the blue runway-indicators. Inside the hangar it would be very dark indeed. He had an excellent service-issue igniter and compact flashlight, along with eight unused Hot Spots, in the pockets of the military grade heavy-duty foil parka he had given to Wire. No doubt currently lying over the toolbox in the helicopter. Or possibly serving as a pillow for Lark.
The second hangar turned out to have a major advantage over its neighbors. Weighed under by a century’s accumulation of snow and ice, a large part of its roof had collapsed, letting in the starshine. The drifting snow that covered every surface inside also helped reflect the light. It was terribly dim, but it was a long way better than pitch black. Nick went looking for a prop plane near some kind of light. The old Piper he settled for was farther from the hangar doors than he would have liked, but standing only a few meters from the debris of the collapsed roof, it got a lot of starshine. He couldn’t read the lettering on its fuselage, but at least he could see where it was.
He started to put down the bundle John Walker had given him. Changing his mind, he tried the pilot-side door on the Piper. He found his fingers had stiffened badly with the cold. He could not make them curl around the handle. Instead he pushed his hand down inside it, then lowered his wrist. The fingers bent readily enough, and stuck. He pulled. Nothing happened. The door was jammed shut or iced up.
He placed John Walker’s shiny black clothes on the snowy floor as reverently as he could. Then he took off his gloves, stuffed them in the pocket of his coat, and thrust his hands inside his pants and down to his groin to get warm. He was going to need to use his screwjack, and he couldn’t afford to be handling its flaked diamond cutting blade with hands made slick and clumsy with cold. His scrotum recoiled, the skin on his balls puckering. He pressed his hands out flat, then rubbed them vigorously against the insides of his thighs. He shovelled a clear space in the snow with the side of his foot. Once again he kicked his toes against the concrete floor.
When his fingers were warm enough to grip, he took his hands out of his pants and pulled his cold gloves back on. He thumbed the screwjack’s control. Cultured ceramic pressed slowly out into a knife-blade shape, wrapping the flaked diamond band around one side to make the cutting edge.
Crouching down to peer at the Piper’s door as he worked, he cut the lock out first. When the door continued to jam, he cut a good-sized hole straight through it. He picked up John Walker’s fancy clothes and put them in the pilot’s chair. Then he retracted the screwjack.
Next he felt his way to the back of the hangar where there were bound to be chairs, rags, solvent; maybe even matches and paper, though he would have to get lucky to find them under the snow that had drifted everywhere. He hurt himself twice fumbling through the dark, once stubbing his toe painfully on a wooden chock block, once cracking his head against a plane’s wing, which promptly dumped a little pile of snow on his head. That seemed almost comical, until he thought of it melting against the exposed flesh on his face and neck, sucking off precious heat and maybe freezing again. Then he batted fiercely at the dry snow with his gloved hands.
He wondered why he hadn’t run for the chopper when he heard it starting to take off. Why had he sent it away without him? Thinking it over now, he was sure he would have had time to get in before it took off.
It was very cold. He poked his cheeks with his glove a few times. The skin on his face was definitely going numb. His feet shuffled and slid across the snowy concrete.
A step behind the tail of what he guessed was the hindmost plane, he almost ran into an oil barrel. He stopped and thought. Placing himself exactly behind the barrel, he took a measured step toward the back wall. Another. Another, and he was there; a faint white shelf, just at waist level: a counter, running along the back of the hangar, lightly dusted with snow. His eyes were tearing from the cold and the strain of staring into the darkness. He kept wiping off the tears, not wanting them to freeze on his skin. He brushed lightly along the countertop. He quite irrationally disliked the idea of the snow touching his gloves. He listened very carefully for the rustle of paper, the clink of glass or rap of wood. Nothing on the first pass.
He took one measured step to the right. He wanted to be sure he could find his way back to that oil barrel. This time he felt his hand encounter something ligh
t and stiff. It fell off the counter. He sank down very cautiously. The numbness in his feet was throwing off his balance. He very much wanted not to trip and get his legs snowy. If his body heat thawed the snow enough to get his pants wet, he would have to take them off and dry them on his fire, and he wasn’t sure he could survive that. Probably, if his fire was brisk enough, but he didn’t want to risk it.
He patted the floor until he found the thing he had brushed off. He raised it to his face; peered; sniffed. If his face could have moved, he would have grinned. A rag! Not just a scrap, either, but a piece of cloth the size of a tea towel. He stood, hoping there would be another nearby. His luck held and he found a second. Now, with the luxury of having two rags, he stuffed the smaller one into his coat pocket. The larger one he wrapped around his face, leaving only his eyes uncovered. It was too short to wrap all the way around and have the ends return to the front. His fingers were too stiff to knot it behind his head. Damn.
He forced himself to remain patient. He put the bigger cloth—stiff as papier-mâché—on the counter before him, and set about taking off his gloves. He couldn’t close the fingers of one hand tightly enough to pull the glove off the other, so he pinned the fingers of his right hand against the front of his coat with the palm of his left and then pulled the right hand free of its glove. He repeated the process and jammed the gloves back in the coat pocket that wasn’t full of frozen rag. Then he put his hands inside his pants again. They warmed up more slowly this time, stinging fiercely. It certainly was very cold.
When he had movement back he reached out, grabbed the rag off the counter heedless of snow, and knotted it quickly around his face. As his breath warmed the rag it began to soften, smelling of gasoline and methyl hydrate. It was good to smell something again. He put his hands back inside his pants.
It wasn’t everyone who met John Walker and lived to tell the tale.
He realized he had been standing still a bit too long. It was lovely, warming his hands, but he was doing it at the expense of his feet. In the long run, he needed the feet more. He would have to walk out on them tomorrow morning. He took a second step to the right, a third, then a fourth. On the fifth, he found what he was looking for: a chair. He wasn’t sure it was wood. He thought so. It might be a metal chair, but he thought it was wood. He dragged it five steps back. If he faced away from the counter, he should be able to find his oil barrel.
He had a rag to use as a wick. He could get a spark with the plane’s magneto. If the chair was wood, it would give him something to burn. Now all he needed was fuel.
He carried the chair back to the Piper, considering. He wasn’t sure whether or not he should put his gloves back on. He was certain they kept him no warmer than having his hands in his pockets. Still, he couldn’t very well carry the chair with his hands in his pockets. So. Now that he had something to cover his face he felt much better. More alert. Cold was only cold. It was only dangerous, not malevolent. There was nothing covert about it. Nothing evil. Just cold. And he had won the first battle.
Warming, his cheeks began to burn.
His first thought was to cut the plane open and siphon some fuel out of the tank, but he quickly thought better of it. What fuel there was would be frozen stiff by now. Sludgy, at the very least. The freezing point of decane was…what? -29°C? Something like that. He was very sure it was that cold. Of course, if this was a functioning airfield, he would try it anyway. Warm the sludge with his hands. But these planes had been here for seventy years or more. Every volatile gas would have evaporated long since in the eternal arid winter.
Besides, there was bound to be methyl hydrate. Not only had they used it as a common solvent before ’04, it was also their gas line antifreeze of choice, with a freezing point below -90°C, if he remembered right. It was cold tonight, but it wasn’t that cold. He’d been in colder weather. He had seen the wrong side of minus 50 a few times; -58 once, up in the mountains. It wasn’t that cold now. That time, when you spat, you could hear it crackling in midair, freezing before it hit the ground. It wasn’t that cold now. Of course he had been a lot better dressed for it then.
He was pretty sure he had glimpsed a line of plastic bottles above the counter at the back of the hangar. For a moment he wondered how he would find the right bottle, with it too dark to read. It would be disaster if he soaked his rag in soda pop or water, and then died waiting for it to ignite. A moment later he laughed out loud, shaking his head at his own foolishness. The smile jerked on the drum-tight skin of his face. He made his way back to the counter. When he found the bottles, he started squeezing. He had lost his grip strength again, so he squeezed them between his palms. The first bottle was hard. Hard. Hard. Soft. The fourth one gave between his palms. Because methyl hydrate had a freezing point of -90°C. Which was the whole point.
He stopped back at the oil barrel, warmed his hands again, and then used his screwjack to cut all the way around it, at about two hands height. The top four-fifths of the barrel boomed and crashed when he kicked it off its base. What was left would make a good dry fire pit.
He sheathed the screwjack and pulled on his gloves. Next he put the bottle of methyl hydrate in the barrel bottom and carried them both over to the Piper. He placed the barrel bottom in the shadow of the Piper’s wing, where a little less snow had made it to the ground.
Then he cut the chair into shavings. Sharp as the screwjack was, it felt different cutting through metal than it did through wood. Though his hands were numb, he thought the chair was wood. The legs were too thick to be plastic. It was bound to be wood. It was surprising how much you depended on vision and texture to tell you these things. He took a chair leg and banged it against the snowy concrete floor, listening. Chonk, chonk. Definitely wood.
Making kindling required a great deal of hand-warming at the expense of his toes. His feet hurt terribly. It was also very delicate work, very still. Just at the end he started to shake. “No,” he said. He stood up quickly, sheathed the screwjack, and jumped in place until he landed so badly on his numb feet that he almost fell over. After that he did deep knee bends until he was breathing hard, sucking big gulps of frigid air through his facecloth.
He suddenly thought he might be breathing through his mouth too hard. He had been a cadet with a guy who had overexerted himself in extremely cold conditions and froze a lung. You were supposed to breathe through your nose as much as possible, to give the air extra time to heat before it reached your lungs. This fellow had lived. Discharged on a medical.
Anyway, the knee bends seemed to have worked. He had stopped shaking. His body must be using a lot of calories to keep warm. Well, he would eat when he got back to the Southside. And every dish would be hot.
Normally he would have taken great care getting to the Piper’s engine, but his hands were stiffening up much faster now. He formally apologized to the plane, and then used the screwjack to hack through to the engine block as fast as he could. He cut away great swaths of metal just so he could see. It had definitely been a good idea to pick the plane in the best light. Even so, he had to find the spark plugs partly by feel. He tried to unscrew one using the palms of his gloved hands, but the work was too fine. So he warmed his hands once more in his pants. They lay between his thighs like two pieces of cold wood for a long time. Too long. The cold closed over them like hard wax as soon as he took them out and put his gloves on again. He had to force himself not to hurry.
He unscrewed the spark plug, still attached by its wire to the magneto. He brushed a clear spot on the nose of the plane and laid the plug down gently, as if his life depended on it. Which it did.
He could no longer feel his feet. In one way this was a blessing, as the pain had made it hard to concentrate. Still, it wasn’t a good sign. Even if he got the fire going, it was possible he was going to lose a toe or two to frostbite.
He never had cared much for the boots on these dress uniforms. Ha ha.
It was cheering to find he still had a sense of humor. He went about his b
usiness with some energy. He piled the kindling carefully in his makeshift fire pit. All that remained was to soak the rag in methyl hydrate, that wonderfully flammable substance, wrap it around the spark plug, give a good pull on the propeller, which he could do even without much mobility in his hands, and he would have lovely, fat, hot sparks jumping into his rag, one after another.
He retrieved the plastic bottle. It still sloshed: good. He felt as if there was something else he wanted to remember. Perhaps his brain, too, was having trouble starting in the cold.
It was really too bad of Magpie to desert him.
He crouched down with the bottle between his knees. Too late to worry about snowy knees now. If he got the fire going, they would dry easily enough. If not, he would have bigger problems. He tried to twist the cap off the methyl hydrate. He had no play left in his fingers, so he had to clench the cap between his palms and twist. Nothing happened.
Patience.
Standing up, he shovelled up the Velcro tab over the screwjack, grabbed the handle between his palms, raised it to his face, and punched the “knife” button with his front teeth. The screwjack slipped out between his stiff hands and clattered to the floor. “Shit.”
Taking off his glove, he laid his right hand on the snowy floor, palm up, next to the screwjack. With his left hand he pushed the tool’s hilt into his right hand, and then pulled his fingers around it. He leaned on his fist, to make it tight. Then, kneeling with the methyl hydrate bottle between his knees he cut the top off. There. Simple.
Classic cold-weather slapstick comedy. Once when he was nine he had been out working with his dad, trying to get a combine to start for over an hour in freezing weather. When they finally gave it up for lunch and came inside, he desperately needed to pee, but even in the warm house he couldn’t regain enough strength in his fingers to unzip his coat in time. To his horror he had peed his pants standing in the kitchen. For once his dad had laughed instead of getting angry. Said it was his fault for keeping them outside so long, and that anyway it was a good lesson.