First Light

by Bill Rancic

  He felt the IV line slide through his fingers, smooth and slightly warm, and imagined it was her arm he was touching. If he closed his eyes, he could almost believe it was real.

  —

  The light outside was starting to go gray when Kerry’s eyes fluttered open. Dawn. Phil had been watching the last of the IV fluid going into her arm, the drip slowing as the bag finally emptied. For fifteen minutes or so he had been wondering if he should wake Beverly and ask her for the second bag, which she had tucked into her shirt to keep warm, when he saw the change coming over Kerry’s expression, not exactly wakefulness but consciousness at least—he could feel her thinking, almost. Could feel her listening.

  “Kerry?” he whispered, not wanting to wake the others.

  Her eyes flickered—he definitely saw it that time.

  “Kerry, are you awake?”

  “Hmmm,” she murmured, and her hand in its fleece glove reached out and found his own. Then she rolled on her side and wrapped the other around his legs, pulling him toward her.

  It was instinct, automatic—she wasn’t really awake yet—but Phil froze, feeling her fingers moving against his side, up under the edge of his coat, holding on. She had just mistaken him for Daniel in her confused, half-asleep state. Still, there was another, deeper part of him that wanted to think she knew exactly whom she was embracing.

  Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

  She blinked and looked up, saying, “I’m so cold.”

  Phil kept his voice steady and said, “I’m sorry.” He held himself rigid. He was afraid. He wanted very badly to take her in his arms, to kiss her, but he knew he couldn’t. She might still be sick, confused, but he was not: he was acutely aware of the boundary wall going back up between them. He couldn’t let himself cross that divide.

  “Please,” she said, pulling him toward her.

  Phil felt the wall crumbling, felt it turn into a landslide. He slid downward, stretching himself out along the floor next to her, until her head was even with his shoulder and their feet entwined. She pressed her nose into his chest and said, “Mmm, better, thanks.”

  He could smell her hair, faintly smoky and floral, the smell of her skin and the last remnants of her perfume, could feel their temperatures equalize as she pressed into him. It was much warmer this way, he had to admit, almost as comfortable as being home in his own bed. His eyelids were growing heavy, pulled down as if by gravity. How long had it been since he’d slept? He was in pain, he’d been hurting all day, pushing aside thoughts of taking care of himself because there were so many others who were worse off than he was. Maybe it would be all right if he closed his eyes just for a little bit.

  The woman he loved was in his arms, asleep. How strange life was, that here in the middle of nowhere, far from any safety or comfort, in fear for his life, he could find some happiness at last. Emily would have laughed, if she could have seen him.

  He felt himself drifting off, and the thought came to him: If this is the most we will ever be to each other, if this is the only time in my life I ever get to hold her, then that’s enough. It’s still enough.

  21

  It was much easier going downhill than up, so when Daniel and Bob reached the creek at the bottom of the ridge sometime around noon, they still had a good bit of energy and barely stopped to take a drink and refill their water bottles. The snow had tapered off, but the wind was picking up—coming from the west, still blowing off the Bering Sea. Daniel took a compass reading from Bob’s watch and noted that the creek flowed north and west, not south like he’d hoped. The wind would be in their faces the whole time, but downstream was still likely their best bet. Wasn’t it true that all over the world, humans had built their communities at the places where creeks became streams, and streams turned into rivers? He was sure he’d read that somewhere. Surely he and Bob would come to a cabin or a town before nightfall, a road or a wireless signal. Even this far out in the bush, the trappings of civilization would still reach, sooner or later. If they had even a little bit of luck.

  What would he do if they didn’t have any luck? He was making an educated guess about the right direction, but what if it was the wrong direction, and they never found a cabin or a road or a town, much less a wireless signal? What if they never came across help? What if he’d let Bob goad him into taking another dangerous risk, and this time it would cost them their lives?

  Then it would be the end of them. The end of Daniel, the end of Bob—and maybe the end of Kerry and the others.

  He couldn’t afford to think that way. This would work. It had to. Anything that went wrong—and okay, yes, something surely would go wrong, something always did—they’d deal with it when the time came.

  “All right,” Bob said when he’d refilled his water bottle with snow and replaced it under his jacket. “We have maybe three hours of daylight left at best. We have to cover as much ground as we can in that time.”

  Daniel looked up at the sky. The snow had started to taper off, but heavy clouds still covered everything. “We’re going to need to go fast if we’re going to cover much ground. Are you sure you can keep up?”

  The old man’s face was red from the wind or from anger—Daniel couldn’t tell the difference. “If you ask me that question again,” he growled, “I will personally rip off your head and shove it up your ass.”

  Daniel thought of several things he’d like to say, but finally he settled on, “All right, then. Let’s get going.”

  The creek they’d seen from the top of the ridge turned out to be little more than a trickle, a narrow patch of ice snaking along the valley floor between a series of low, barren hills. Small bushes and fir trees grew along its banks, and the snow was deep, deeper than they would have thought from above, the newness of it broken occasionally by animal tracks; but in places, the wind had scoured the snow away, leaving much of it smooth passage, almost like a path left just for them. A first bit of luck, Daniel thought, and his spirits lifted a little.

  For a while Daniel kept behind Bob, watching as the older man’s movements, which had started out so vigorous, began to slow more and more as the afternoon wore on. Each step in snowshoes required lifting the foot a bit higher than was comfortable, and the shoes were often heavy with clinging snow. It was tiring work under the best of conditions, but they were exhausted and hungry and going in a direction that was still mostly a hunch. The burn in Daniel’s own thighs was significant, and he started to feel more and more impatient that he’d allowed Bob to talk him into making the trek. There were more important things at stake here than one man’s pride, Daniel thought. There was Kerry, back at the crash site. Kerry with her brain swollen against her skull, the pressure building second by second, Kerry with their baby clinging to life inside her. There was Phil growing weaker and sicker from blood loss. Internal bleeding, Beverly had suggested, though she didn’t know for sure. Not to mention the countless others—the broken legs, the broken noses, the puncture wounds, the smashed-up hands. As long as the storm lasted and the clouds covered the sky, the crash site was invisible to search-and-rescue teams. Daniel didn’t like to admit Bob was right, but there it was. Going back was no solution at all.

  By midafternoon Daniel pushed ahead of Bob at a pace that felt to him vigorous but still manageable. His feet and hands and face grew very cold as the day wore on, the tingle moving up his fingers in a way that he knew was dangerous. He should put them under his armpits to warm them, but that would leave him all but unable to keep his balance, and the need to press on was outweighing the dangers of frostbite. He could tend to his hands once they’d found help—or stopped for the night.

  Daniel looked over his shoulder: Bob was red-faced with exertion and his breath came fast, but he was keeping up, at least so far.

  Periodically they stopped to drink more water and to refill the bottles, sitting together in silence—Daniel filled with urgency, Bob with a kind of coiled deter
mination—as if talking would be one more form of exertion, a waste of precious calories.

  Whenever they stopped, Daniel would take out the phone to check for a cellular signal, walking around a little to try to catch something, but there was nothing, not even a flicker of a bar on the cell phone’s flat, digital face. Afterward, he and Bob would take turns cranking the handle of the emergency charger, getting the phone up to at least half power and hoping it would be enough. Then they’d get up and get moving again, never fast enough, never sure of the way.

  He kept looking up at the sky, at the low clouds, and imagining the people who even now must be up there looking for them. The phone was his SOS into the gloom. Find us, it said. We’re still out here. We’re still alive.

  —

  All the rest of that day, they followed the ice downstream, north and west with the wind in their teeth until the sky started to darken little by little, first a deeper gray, then slowly fading to black. Occasionally they came across animal tracks, caribou or moose, and once Daniel and Bob caught each other’s eyes at the sight of a series of wolf tracks and scat, at the red blood of some small animal dead in the snow—rabbit, maybe. “Should we be worried?” Bob asked.

  “There are almost no fatal wolf attacks in North America. Wolves don’t like to be near people.”

  “Almost none. Which means some.”

  “We’ll worry about it if we have to worry about it, Bob. It’s far more likely we’ll freeze to death.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  They didn’t stop to make camp until well after nightfall, pushing hard even when the light began to change, hoping to get closer, just a little closer to some form of civilization. Around one bend he was sure they’d find a road or a town, something, but when he turned the corner and the way opened up, there was nothing but snow and rocks and trees, the incessant wind, and the great gray lowering sky.

  Finally Daniel picked a spot on the bank where the trees were taller and thicker and the wind lessened. The sound of Bob’s breath behind him was like the sound of some agonized animal struggling for life, and when he’d pointed out the campsite he’d chosen, Bob fell into a snowbank like it was a featherbed, his face nearly purple with exertion. For a moment Daniel thought he might be dead, except he could just make out the rise and fall of the old man’s chest under his coat.

  But they didn’t have time to rest. “Get up,” Daniel said. “I need you to clear us a spot for the fire. Break off any low-hanging branches that look dry and save them for kindling. Scrape the snow clean down to the dirt. Don’t leave any snow on the ground or the fire won’t burn.”

  “Why can’t you do it?” Bob asked between breaths. “You’re better at that kind of thing.”

  “I’m building the shelter, so you need to do the fire,” Daniel said, hunger and exhaustion making him lose his patience. “Come on, this isn’t a board meeting and I’m not letting you delegate. It’s dig or freeze.”

  For a minute, Daniel nearly expected an argument, but then Bob heaved himself to his feet and started scraping snow from the spot Daniel had pointed out. It was dark under the tree, and Daniel had to use his hands to dig a spot for them to sleep, packing the snow against the windward side of the pine to protect them against exposure. He had no choice about using his frostbitten hands—he had no shovel, and frostbite wasn’t fatal, usually. He hollowed out the spot and lined it with branches he broke off from the pine. He would be able to warm up at the fire afterward.

  When Bob had a bare spot scraped with his boots and Daniel had at least a rudimentary shelter built, they repeated the careful procedure to start the fire, Bob with the lighter and paper, Daniel with the dry kindling he’d carried in his pocket all the way from the crash site. After a few minutes they had a decent small fire, warm enough in their small space, if a little smoky—the wood he was using was too green and too damp, but it was all they could find—so Daniel alternated putting his frozen hands in front of the flames and tucking them under his armpits until they tingled and started to come back to life, a little at first, and then more and more. In a few minutes they hurt like hell, and he worried about the tips refreezing and gangrene setting in, but he didn’t want to take a chance on peeling off his gloves to look at them, either. There was nothing he could do, and anyway, if he didn’t see his fingers he wouldn’t have to think about them. Instead, he squinted at Bob through a red haze of pain and remembered why he’d agreed to go on this suicide mission in the first place: for Kerry. Always for Kerry.

  He lay down and tried to sleep, but the pain in his hands kept him up. Instead, he shifted position inside the shelter, rolling over and over to try to find a warm spot, bumping into Bob so many times the old man threatened to tie him up.

  It was no good—he couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t relax enough to sleep. He was hungry and in pain and past normal exhaustion; he’d moved into a kind of restless wakefulness, as if he were afraid to sleep, though his body and his mind were in desperate need of rest. He rolled over one more time and with a grunt flung the airline blanket off himself, disgusted.

  He stood and pulled out his phone, turned it on, watching it blink to life, and then walked about the campsite and down the frozen creek a little bit, hoping for a signal. He was fully aware of what a strange thing the phone was out here, the screen illuminating everything in pale green, an incongruously modern piece of equipment lighting up the primitive darkness. But without a signal, it wasn’t much more than a block of glass and metal—it wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer. The one time in his life he wished for the phone to ring, and it wouldn’t.

  He walked back toward the campsite and past it in the other direction, all the while holding the phone aloft, looking for a signal. “Damn,” he muttered.

  Behind him, Bob stirred. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Not really.”

  “You should get some rest. We can try again in the morning.”

  “I’m always afraid there’s going to be a signal somewhere, and I’ll miss it.”

  “You won’t help her by wearing yourself out,” Bob said. “Come on, give me the phone.” He came out of the shelter and held out his hand to take it.

  Daniel couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “What?”

  “You need to quit thinking that thing is going to save us. The only thing that’s going to save us is finding people.”

  “The phone increases the chances we’ll be found. You know it does, Bob.”

  “It’s a distraction, nothing more. Give it here. I’ll keep it until morning. That way you won’t be tempted to look at it.”

  “The hell you will,” Daniel said. “I’m not a kid who’s been sent to his room. It’s my phone, and I’ll be damned if you’ll take it away.”

  “Put the phone away, Albrecht.”

  Bob took another step, then another. Did he really think to take the phone away from Daniel by force? Just who, exactly, did Bob Packer think he was?

  “Hold on—”

  Bob was marching toward Daniel. “I said put that goddamn phone away.”

  Daniel was holding the phone away, out of Bob’s reach. If the old man actually thought he was going to take it away, he had another think coming. “No.”

  Bob grabbed at it. The phone flew through the air, the green glow of the screen illuminated momentarily against the snow and the trees and the darkness. It spun, then fell with a resounding crack onto the ice of the creek.

  Both men froze. The crack could have been the ice breaking, but it wasn’t. Daniel went on his hands and knees along the creek ice until he found his phone at last. It had gone dark and he could feel a long rough crack running down the face from top to bottom like a jag of lightning. He tried turning it on again, but it stayed dark.

  “You sonofabitch,” Daniel hissed.

  “If you’d put it away like I’d asked, it would still be intact.”r />
  “If you weren’t intent on always having the last say, it would still be intact,” Daniel said. “Now what will we do?”

  “Same thing as we were doing before,” Bob said. “We go downstream. We find help. We bring it back to the others.”

  “Goddamn you!” Daniel exclaimed. He was angrier than he’d ever been in his life. “I should have left you back at the wreck. You’ve been nothing but a problem for me since the minute we crashed.”

  “I’m the problem,” said Bob, “when you’ve been kidding yourself about the phone this whole time? Walking around like a tiger in a cage? That thing’s nothing but a useless hunk of junk.”

  Daniel couldn’t hear, his whole body was buzzing so with anger. He could see nothing but the sight of Bob’s red face in the snow, his cheeks and nose white with frostbite and his eyes small and black in his round face, and he’d never wanted to hit another person so much in his life.

  He could do it, too—he imagined launching himself at Bob’s knees, taking the old man down, the two of them falling together in the snow, Daniel sitting on Bob’s chest and hitting him hard two, three times, the satisfying crunch of his knuckles hitting Bob’s nose until it bled.

  But that wouldn’t help. It would just expend energy he didn’t have on a lost cause. So he did the next best thing instead.

  “I quit, Bob.”

  “Don’t get emotional. You know you don’t mean it.”

  “No, really. I mean it. When we get home, I’m submitting my resignation. I won’t come back.”

  “Fine, you quit,” Bob said. “Now I’m freezing. Get in here and get to sleep.”

  I should keep walking. Just keep walking downstream and let him freeze to death out here. For a moment he was tempted to do just that—pick up his pack and keep going. It certainly seemed saner than spending the night under a fir tree with the world’s most selfish old bastard.