First Light
Page 21
He counted to twenty, letting himself have that much time for self-pity and no more. Then he knelt on the pine boughs and put his gloves back on. He might be stupid, but he wasn’t suicidal—nor was he going to forget what was at stake here. If the weather wasn’t going to cooperate, then it was up to Daniel and Bob to find help for the passengers, and there was no time for self-pity in that.
When Daniel’s hands were properly covered again, he tried to think what would be the best way to treat them. Soaking them in warm water would be best, but they didn’t have a basin in which to put it, just a couple of flimsy plastic water bottles they carried in their armpits to keep enough snow melted for drinking. The dry heat of the fire wouldn’t work as well—first-aid advice for frostbite was always warm water—but it would be better than nothing. Daniel knelt over the ashes of the fire, hoping to get the coals to blaze, but as he stirred it with the tip of his glove and blew on it, he could see that it had gone cold in the night. Dead and cold as the frostbite on his fingers.
Bob had been the last awake, had promised to bank the fire the way Daniel had shown him, had sworn to wake Daniel up the moment he’d started to feel sleepy, but none of that had happened. He’d let it go out. Goddamn it all, Bob had let the fire burn out. The one thing they really needed out here, their one bit of good luck and essential tool against the cold, and he’d neglected it when they needed it the most.
Daniel tried to choke back his anger once more, but he couldn’t, not this time. What was the point of having two of them traveling together in the first place if they couldn’t even take turns tending something as fundamental as their fire? Why hadn’t Bob stayed back with the others instead of burdening Daniel with his slow, useless old ass all the way up the ridge?
Daniel kicked his foot to wake him. “Get up,” he said, barely able to keep the anger out of his voice. “Bob, wake up. Now.”
He should have come alone. He should have left Bob back at the crash site with the others, but he’d allowed himself to be swayed by sentimentality: he knew the old man’s pride had been wounded when Daniel suggested he wasn’t up to the trip. He’d figured that Bob would have realized he wasn’t up for it and turned back. He thought Bob might find a way to make himself useful. He’d counted on it, in fact: Daniel had gone to sleep in the middle of the night believing Bob when he said he’d stay up and tend the fire, and now look where that trust had gotten him.
The other man sat up straight, pulling the scarf away from his eyes and rubbing his face with both gloved hands. “What happened?” he asked. “Did they find us?”
“No,” Daniel said, clipping off the word like a bit of dead skin. “You let the fire go out.”
The tip of Bob’s nose and both cheeks were bright red, as if he, too, might be suffering the beginnings of frostbite, but Daniel wasn’t ready to let go of his anger just yet.
“Wait, what? What happened to the fire now?” Bob asked.
“It went out,” said Daniel. “You must have fallen asleep without waking me. Now my hands are frostbitten and we don’t have a fire to warm up to.”
“No, no,” Bob said. “I woke you up. I distinctly remember you saying you had the fire under control.”
“You never woke me, Bob.”
“I did, I know it.”
Daniel gritted his teeth and said, “There’s no point arguing about it now. The fire’s out, and I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose the tips of these fingers. We needed that fire. You’re going to have to remake it now, because I can’t.”
“Shit,” said the old man. “All right, hold on.” He rummaged around in his coat and came up with the cigarette lighter and a twist of dry paper. Daniel reached into his breast pocket and took out a portion of the bit of kindling he’d stashed there to keep it dry. While Bob lit the corner of the paper and put it on the cold ashes of yesterday’s fire, Daniel added his bit of kindling, then a few more twigs from the pile he’d gathered the night before, not entirely dry but better than nothing. In a minute they had the fire going again, small and smoky but significant, and Daniel put his hands out in front of it, feeling the skin on his fingers tingle and ache as they came back to life. He only hoped they weren’t too damaged.
He stole a glance or two at Bob, who had leaned back to put his booted feet up to the fire and was now engaged in eating half of the last bag of pretzels, chewing each one so slowly and thoroughly they must have been turning to pulp. Daniel’s boss didn’t look too healthy—pale and puckered, naked almost, like a turkey that’s been plucked and prepared for the pot. There were heavy shadows underneath each eye, and his lips were so chapped they were cracked and peeling. Daniel felt a moment’s regret—the old man didn’t want to be out here any more than Daniel did, of course—but it was followed quickly by anger. This whole cockamamie adventure was Bob’s idea, his brilliant plan, and here he was jeopardizing it on the very first night. He didn’t know how to do anything, be useful to anyone. He’d spent his life behind desks or on camera, not in the field.
“So what’s the plan?” Bob asked, swallowing the last bite of pretzel and handing the rest of the bag to Daniel.
Daniel looked back over his shoulder, out across the valley toward the crash site. They should go back—that would be the smart thing, the cautious thing. Go back and wait for the weather to clear and the rescue teams to find them. The fuselage of the downed plane, crowded with passengers, was a far better shelter than the hollow under a fir tree.
But then he thought of Kerry, the bruise on her temple, the pale flutter of her eyelashes as her body struggled against its injuries. Of the baby growing inside her. She was in real trouble. She might not survive this situation, whether or not he risked his neck to save her, but the truth was that he’d never be able to live with himself if he didn’t do everything in his power. He had to try. As long as the downed plane was invisible to the rescue teams that were out searching for them, Daniel had to keep pushing forward, toward something. Toward life.
I can’t go back yet. If this is the only way I can help her, then I have to do it.
“I’m going to send you back to the others,” he said. “Go on back down the ridge and tell them I’m going on. If the weather breaks, I’ll head back in your direction, but until then I’m going to keep looking.”
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. You need a backup.”
Daniel wanted to answer that Bob was more of a noose around his neck than a helping hand, but he didn’t want to argue with his boss. “I’m going to keep looking for a road or a house. Sooner or later I’ll have to come within range of a cellular tower, or else the rescue teams will pick up my signal. Something. Either they’ll find me first and I’ll send them after you, or they find you first and you send them after me.”
“I’m not going back,” Bob said, almost to himself. “So you can forget it.”
“I need you back there,” Daniel said. “Someone needs to be ready to light a signal fire if the weather clears up. They need someone to take charge.”
“There’s Phil.”
“Phil can’t handle himself, much less all those people.”
“Phil can handle a lot more than you give him credit for. I’m not going back. I’m coming with you.”
Daniel sighed. He’d known the minute the old man opened his mouth what he would say.
“All right, then,” he said. “I need you to do something for me, then.” He reached into his pack and took out a small gray plastic device.
“What’s that thing?”
“My cell charger. If we take turns cranking it, it will charge my phone faster.” The battery to his cell was depleting quickly, probably exacerbated by his turning the phone on and off and using it in the bitter cold. Still, Daniel had no choice; the phone would give him a far greater range in looking for help than two men alone on a mountaintop. It was both his lifeline to the world and the world’s lifeline to him.
Daniel set the charger on his lap and connected the phone to it, then cranked the handle for several minutes as hard as he could. When his arm tired out, he let Bob take a turn. Between the two of them, they were able to get the phone to about half power—not bad for two exhausted, underfed cube jockeys.
He stopped and turned the phone on. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see if we can pick up a signal.”
Daniel held it up in the wind to see if there was even the barest hint of a signal. Nothing—the bars remained dark. He left the shelter and walked around the hilltop for a few minutes in the blowing wind, his eyes never leaving the face of that phone, waiting to see if the bars would give even the slightest jump.
Bob poked his head out of the shelter, feeling the temperature change in the wind. “Anything?” he asked.
Daniel shook his head. He stood on the top of the hill and surveyed what he could see of the world in the first light of morning. Down the ridge, the crash site wasn’t even visible any longer—the snow and the clouds obscured everything, turning the world white, as if he’d suddenly gone blind. He passed a hand over his eyes, but the world was still there, a hazy gray that shifted and whirled like smoke.
He wondered if Kerry was all right. He wondered if Phil and Beverly had been able to warm up the IV bags enough to give them to her. He hoped that she would simply open her eyes and sit up, and for a moment it was all he could do not to turn around and go back to her.
The best thing he could do for Kerry, and for all of them, was to find them some real help. He’d have to press on. He’d survived one night in the cold; he could survive another, and another, and another. He had to.
What he wasn’t sure about was whether Bob could. Daniel’s boss was looking a little pale and haggard this morning, four days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin, deep gray bags under each eye. He’d had some pills, Daniel recalled vaguely, something he used to take every morning at breakfast; Daniel had seen him shake something out of one of the distinctive orange bottles once or twice in Barrow, but he didn’t do so now. Had Bob run out of his heart medication? Would Daniel end up with a dead man on his hands because Bob was too stubborn to go back to the plane and wait with the others? If something happened to Bob out here, there would be no help, nothing Daniel could do.
He nudged the other man with the heel of his hand. “Hey,” he said. “You don’t look so good this morning.”
“I’m fine. Let’s get moving.”
“No, I mean it. Are you sure about this, Bob?” he asked. “Once we head over the other side of this ridge, it will be pretty hard to get back.”
“I told you, I’m coming with you.”
Daniel looked over at the coals, still glowing, and crouched down beside them, warming his hands and feet against the last of the fire. “All right, then,” he said. “You can get warm for a few minutes, but we need to get as much distance in as we can while it’s still daylight.”
The two of them sat in the last warmth of the fire until the heat died down, then Daniel buried it in snow. Bob hoisted his pack onto his back and left the shelter. Daniel saw his eyes flick briefly to the crash site down the hill, then away. “So what’s the plan?”
“We’re going down the hillside to that creek,” he said, pointing to the valley opposite the crash site. “We should head downstream. Sooner or later we should find a road or a house or at least a bigger creek leading somewhere. Walking on the ice will be easier than trudging over the hills, too.”
“I promise to take it easy on you today, then,” Bob grunted, taking out the duct tape and taping the snowshoes to his feet, his face already red with exertion.
Daniel knelt and fastened his own snowshoes on as tightly as he could, checking to make sure he still had the extra laces. When he stood up, he looked down at Bob, struggling to wrap the jerry-rigged snowshoes to his feet, and said, “Your pills. Did you run out?”
Bob ignored that question. Instead he stood, facing Daniel, and said, “Can we go now? I’m tired of all this standing around.”
“Bob—”
But he was already starting down the hill, his feet sinking into the snow, leaving the valley and the rest of the survivors behind. From now on they were on their own.
Still, Daniel kept watching the sky, hoping the weather would clear, that it wasn’t too late for them to turn back. But the snow kept coming, the clouds still thick, and so he shouldered his pack and went on.
20
Phil stayed up with Kerry that whole night, refusing to take his turn sleeping when Beverly came to relieve him. “Go back to sleep,” he said when she tapped him on the shoulder. “You need your rest, too.”
“It’s only fair that we take turns,” she said. “You can’t do it all by yourself.”
“I don’t mind. I’m not going to sleep anyway, so you might as well.”
“Your belly still bothering you?”
It had been growing so painful that he was having trouble sleeping, even though he felt so exhausted he could barely move. And he was still pissing blood—but he wouldn’t tell Beverly that, wouldn’t trouble her with it.
“A bit. Enough to keep me awake, not enough to worry about.”
“You let me decide if it’s something to worry about,” she said, but for once she didn’t demand he lift his shirt and let her examine him; instead, she watched him from her spot on the floor, looking over the setup he’d created, the line running from the IV in the warmth of Phil’s armpit downward into Kerry’s veins, her face impassive with sleep. Phil ran his hands back and forth over the line, slowly, to keep the liquid from cooling too much after it left the bag and sending Kerry into hypothermia. It would be better to be outside by the fire, which one of the other passengers had promised to tend through the night, but that would expose them all to the wind, and Kerry would be difficult to lift without a stretcher. Better to be inside, where the warmth of fifty human bodies made the space bearable, if not livable, and the wind couldn’t get in.
Beverly’s eyes were heavily shadowed; he knew how tired she was, and he knew even more how badly they all needed her to stay well. She was their best asset in getting through this ordeal.
“Really, Bev. Go ahead and close your eyes. I promise I’ll wake you if I need you.”
She leaned back against the fuselage and closed her eyes. Then she said, “It’s no wonder you’re in love with her.”
“What?”
Beverly gave him a look that said, Don’t play coy with me.
“I’m just doing what I can,” Phil said. “What anyone would do under the circumstances.”
“Sure. Anyone.”
Phil felt the plastic of the line moving slowly under his hands. It unnerved him, how Beverly was able to lay open the things he wanted so desperately to keep secret. Like everything he felt or thought was just there for anyone to see.
He said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Believe me.”
“Well,” he said, the line smooth as Kerry’s skin under his hands, not sure how to finish the thought without saying something he’d regret. Back and forth he moved them, keeping the liquid flowing, as if it were her blood he was warming.
Beverly yawned. “You promise you’ll wake me if you start feeling too tired?”
“I promise,” he said. “I’m too restless to sleep. You go on. You’ve been doing so much by yourself, you need to rest, too.”
“Thanks,” she said, the last part of the word obscured by another enormous yawn, and then she was asleep again.
Phil rubbed the plastic tubing back and forth, back and forth, the friction and the warmth from his hand keeping the liquid at something close to body temperature, the rhythmic movement and heat keeping him calm and letting his mind wander.
For the first time since he could remember, he felt a momentary happiness, sitting here next to the woman he loved, doing something tangible and real, something that was helpful. Even if she never knew about it, never understood how Phil had cared for her when she needed it most, he wouldn’t mind. He felt like a useful person, a good person even, and that was something he hadn’t known in a long time.
He felt for a moment like he had in the early days of Emily’s illness, when he’d always assumed that the treatments would be successful, that she would recover. It was the twenty-first century; people survived cancer all the time, didn’t they? Phil had busied himself with the minutiae of her treatment, the dosages and the weights and the white-blood-cell counts, the appointments and the specialists. He hadn’t realized at the time that he was happy, because it had all been covered with the haze of worry over the seriousness of Emily’s illness, but he could remember it now and recognize it for what it was. He had been determined to be her savior then, and when he hadn’t been able to save her, it was himself that he blamed.
He looked down at Kerry’s sleeping face, a white moon in the dark inside the cabin. And would he blame himself again if another woman he loved slipped away despite his efforts? Probably. But Kerry was not his—even if she lived, she loved someone else, she was marrying someone else. There was never going to be a place in her heart for him. Strangely, the thought made him feel a little bit better. He was helping her not to keep her for himself but for her own sake. He would never tell her his feelings, he would never confess his love for her, but he could do this much for her. He would be the one who kept her alive.