“And…and I want you to know how much you are loved. By me, by Reese, by everyone who knows you. We all love you, Mac.”
Mac remained silent, his eyes looking out the window as Imran went around the truck releasing some of the air from each tire. Finally he turned to look at Dublin and squeezed her hand that was still holding his own.
Dublin was surprised to see tears moistening the corners of Mac’s eyes as he struggled to tell her something. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him cry before.
Mac looked back toward the window, whispering a response as he did so.
“Thank you, Dublin. Thank you.”
XVIII.
After releasing some of the air out of each of the tires, Imran happily hopped back into the transport vehicle and continued driving slowly across the large valley they had been travelling through for the last hour. In the process, he explained his purpose for removing air from his tires.
“You see, the less air, the more of the rubber can grip the ice. So when I approach the glacial area, I lower the pressure. Once I am past the glacial area, I use a portable compressor and re-inflate the tires to allow us to travel faster and get better mileage. Simple!”
Dublin was the only one who heard Imran’s response as Mac was sleeping deeply. She glanced out the back window of the truck and saw Reese, Bear and Cooper also sleeping in the truck bed. She smiled to herself as she saw Bear’s arm draped over Brando.
Imran’s conversation with Dublin continued as the miles slowly passed beneath the wheels of the truck.
“I’ve been back and forth across this glacial field, oh goodness, at least thirty times! At least! One time I did it during a terrible storm. Ice storm! Froze my windshield wipers. Couldn’t see! Even with the heater on, I was cold! That trip took forever! Hour after hour driving in that storm. And then – it was gone! The sun came out like the storm had never been there! And I made my delivery. I always make my delivery!”
Dublin couldn’t help but be amused by Imran’s enthusiasm for his business.
“Do you have family, Imran? In Wilfrid?”
Imran hesitated for a moment before answering.
“No…no family. I have friends though. Many friends. Business associates. It is a good life, considering.”
“Considering what?”
Again Imran paused before replying to Dublin.
“Considering that…that we all must live in a world that makes so little sense. A world that killed my parents, that separated me from my brothers and sisters. A world that tried to destroy your former home in Dominatus. Considering all of that, I consider what life I do have is blessed. To get to know others like yourself and Mac, and Reese and Bear and Cooper, I am blessed.”
Even though his name had been spoken, Mac remained sleeping, his breathing somewhat uneven.
“Well, you certainly have a positive attitude about things, Imran.”
As Dublin gave her compliment to Imran, the truck was jolted hard by a large rock that the right front tire drove over. This jolt was followed by yet another and another. The ground was growing increasingly uneven, and even the large transport truck was having difficulty crossing over it.
Mac awoke when his head banged up against the side window as yet another hard bump passed through the truck’s cabin. He winced as a shot of pain gripped his lower back.
“We gonna be getting a lot of this shit, Imran?”
Imran was looking intently in front of him, trying to navigate around the worst of the terrain.
“I apologize, Mac. We are about thirty minutes from the glacier. It will get worse… before it gets worse.”
Mac scowled as another hard jolt was felt in his lower spine.
“Don’t you mean it’ll get worse before it gets better?”
Imran shook his head.
“No…worse and then worse.”
Mac let out a long slow sigh.
“Great.”
As bad as it was for Mac, for those sitting in the back of the truck it was considerably more difficult. The temperature continued to drop to well below freezing, and a chill north wind made the air around them feel even colder. Cooper Wyse took out a large horse blanket from one of the packs and covered all of them under it, including Brando who for the first time during the journey was indicating he was uncomfortable. Every few seconds the dog would tremble with a shivering shake of his body.
Bear growled his own dissatisfaction as he pulled the horse blanket over his chest.
“Well ain’t this about the shittiest vacation we’ve ever had?”
Cooper chuckled.
“Give it another half an hour. It’ll be a whole lot worse. I’ve only made a few of these trips. Hated it every time. Imran though – he loves it. Crazy little bastard.”
Reese, feeling just a little warmer under the blanket, wanted to know more about Fort Wilfrid, and the man called the godfather.
“Coop, this place called Wilfrid, when was the last time you were there?”
Cooper didn’t open his eyes as he responded to Reese.
“Been a couple years.”
“Do you like it there?”
Though he couldn’t tell, Reese sensed Cooper shrugging under the blanket.
“It’s interesting. Too many people though. Don’t like any place that has too many people shoved into one place. Makes me itchy to move on. I like the cars though, the ice cream shop, the school and all that. Pretty cool what he’s done out there. Or crazy. Probably plenty of both.”
“You mean the godfather?”
Cooper gave a single nod. He wanted to go back to sleep but was too polite to tell Reese to stop asking him questions.
“Yeah.”
“So you’ve met him?”
Cooper’s voice was getting softer as sleep was overtaking him.
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do they call this guy the godfather?”
Cooper opened his eyes this time and looked over at Reese.
“You’ll see. He just…it’s a name he was given by everybody else and it stuck I guess.”
Reese was about to ask yet another question when his face wrinkled up in disgust. Cooper appeared to have gotten a whiff of the same thing Reese did as he too frowned and shook his head.
“That must have been Brando. He can get pretty gassy at times.”
Hearing his name, Brando stuck his head up and looked at Cooper. The Doberman appeared offended to have been wrongfully accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
Both Reese and Cooper noticed Bear’s shoulders moving under the blanket. He was trying to stifle his own laughter.
‘Sorry guys - can’t let Brando take the blame for that one. That was all me.”
Reese turned his head to take a gulp of uncontaminated air.
“Good God Bear!”
Satisfied he was rightfully found innocent of Bear’s recent gastro-intestinal crime, Brando lowered his head again and went back to sleep.
Before he joined Brando in his nap, Cooper Wyse glanced upward and made a mental note of the darkening sky. The day was passing too quickly and they were travelling too slowly. They still had another six or seven hours to go before reaching the safety of Wilfrid.
It would be dark sooner than that…
XIX.
Dublin was amazed at the sight of the glacial fields. For as far as she could see, there was bluish ice that cut in between darker colored, jagged rocks. Miles and miles of ice and rock. Imran drove the truck slowly down a steep ravine-like passage, before the vehicle finally settled onto the ice field itself.
Again stepping out of the truck, Imran reached behind his driver’s seat and took out what appeared to be some kind of folded, silver colored tarp. Unfolding the tarp, which was ten by ten in size, he handed it to Cooper.
“Safety blanket, same thing mountain climbers would use. As I pick up speed, it will get very cold back here. Stay under this and you’ll be fine.”
Bear looked at the thin material of the safety blanket and sho
ok his head.
“This little thing is supposed to keep us warm? Bullshit.”
Reese grabbed the blanket and spread it out over Cooper, himself, Brando and Bear.
“This material keeps in all of our body heat, Bear. Trust me, you’re going to be complaining it’s too hot underneath this thing.”
Imran offered up a wide smile, satisfied his passengers would remain comfortable sitting in the open truck bed as he crossed the ice fields.
Cooper was again looking up into the quickly darkening sky.
“Running out of time Imran. I recall it’s slow going across here. You got to be careful not to drive over a thin area of ice, right?”
Imran’s smile somehow managed to grow even wider.
“Oh, you don’t know all the work I’ve done out here do you, Cooper? Hours and hours marking the way. I’ve created a road right through this area. I marked the safest route through the ice fields. The thickest areas of ice. I can go as fast as Princess can take us! Have some faith in me cowboy! Faith!”
Cooper’s eyebrows raised momentarily before giving yet another shrug of his shoulders.
“Ok then. I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when get there.”
Imran chuckled and waived to the three men and one dog in the back of his truck.
“You’ll see. We’re going very fast now. Very fast!”
Imran returned to his place behind the wheel and pointed through the windshield at a row of orange flags, spaced about twenty yards apart. The row continued across the ice fields, disappearing on the other side.
“See that? That my friends, is Imran’s road! We simply stay close to those flags on either the left or the right, and we are safe! Who is ready to go fast?”
Mac glanced over at Imran and then back out to the row of orange flags. Imran caught Mac’s look out of the corner of his eye and turned to the older man.
“How about you, Mac? You ready to make good time?”
Imran tapped the top of his truck’s dashboard as he said the words “good time”.
Mac pointed his right finger toward the ice fields.
“Warp factor seven, Mr. Sulu.”
Both Imran and Dublin looked back at Mac with clear confusion.
Mac sighed and again pointed to the vast ice fields in front of them.
“Just go, dammit. All of you are too damn young to know about the good stuff.”
Imran’s smile returned as he put the truck into gear. Soon their speed had increased to nearly fifty miles an hour as the crunching sound of ice and snow beneath the wheels filled the truck cabin. The landscape, at first beautiful, became more monotonous as every mile travelled looked exactly the same as the previous miles – more and more blue tinted ice accompanied by the same outcroppings of darker colored rock.
An hour passed, and then two. Finally Imran slowed the vehicle down again as they began to descend into what appeared to a very narrow valley. Here there were no rocks but only ice, though the blue tint had been replaced by a clear, almost translucent color. Reaching the bottom of the decline, Imran peered intently in front of him, marking where his orange flags had been placed. Instead of just one row of flags though, there were now two rows, and it was between those rows that Imran slowly drove the transport truck.
Mac opened his eyes again and leaned forward in the seat.
“Are we driving over a river?”
Imran nodded.
“Yes – large river. In this spot, it is almost always iced over.”
Mac continued to stare through the windshield.
“Almost?”
Imran waved his hand in Mac’s direction, communicating that he thought Mac need not worry.
“We’ll be fine. I have been very careful where to mark the road across.”
Mac gave a thin smile as he looked back over at Imran.
“So if we have nothing to worry about, why are you driving so slowly now?”
Imran shook a finger at Mac in a way that communicated how silly he thought the question was.
“I learned a long time ago, Mr. Mac Walker, to never go faster than your angel can follow.”
Dublin nodded at Imran’s words, and leaned into Mac’s left shoulder.
“Hey, Mac, that sounds like pretty good advice don’t you think?”
Mac let his eyes wander back to the truck’s side window, pausing before giving a low voiced response.
“Don’t believe in any angel watching over the likes of me.”
The truck suddenly lurched to the right, causing everyone to do the same. Bear’s voice called out from the back.
“What the hell was that?”
Imran had already opened his door and was making his way to the back of the truck. Nearly half of the right rear tire had fallen through and was hidden beneath the ice. Kneeling down to get a better look, Imran ran his hands along where the tire had fallen through, and then carefully looked over the entire area surrounding the transport truck. His face openly expressed his concern.
Cooper, Bear, and Reese were now standing next to Imran trying to figure out what he was looking at. After a few seconds, Cooper pointed to the ice just inside the partially hidden right wheel.
“There – that whole spot is weakened. If we keep it in four wheel, and spin that back right wheel too much, it could cause more of the ice to break up…enough that the whole back of vehicle could start falling through. But if we don’t keep it in four wheel drive, there’s no power to the front wheels, and we stay stuck.”
Reese was looking more closely at the area of ice around the right wheel.
“So what’s that mean? What’s our options?”
Before Cooper could reply, Imran gave his own somewhat brief and to the point answer to Reese’s question.
“Apologies for my language, but it means we’re fucked. I stay in four wheel drive and spin that rear wheel, and then create more damage to the ice and we could go from bad to much worse. There is a river of very cold running water right underneath us here.”
Mac and Dublin joined the others. Mac knelt down on all fours to look over the ice surrounding the half-hidden wheel as the others stood silently watching him. After a minute or so of poking and prodding around the damaged ice, Mac stood back up and nodded in Imran’s direction.
“He’s right. We’re fucked.”
Bear stepped toward the back right corner of the vehicle and grabbed the rear bumper and pulled up on it a couple of times, then stood silently for a moment, before walking to the front of the truck and then back again to rejoin the others.
“What if I lift the back wheel here while the other wheels pull it out? The front bumper is big enough for at least a few of you to stand on. That will put more weight on the front tires and give them more traction while the back corner here is being lifted so we don’t damage the ice any more, and you just drive on ahead.”
Imran looked at Bear and then the truck and shook his head.
“Too much weight. You can’t lift it. No way. You’re a big man, but you’re not that big.”
Mac’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Bear, and a slow smile crept across his face.
“You think you can lift this back corner up enough to keep that tire from digging too much into the broken ice?”
Bear took a deep breath and then pointed to the front of the truck.
“Get as many of you on that front bumper and that will help me to lift the back part. I can’t promise I can do it – but I’m sure willing to give a shot. It’s a hell of a lot better than us walking the rest of the way in the dark.”
Cooper Wyse glanced behind them toward the miles of ice fields they had already travelled that day.
“I’d agree with Bear on that – whatever those things were in the woods back there…something tells me they ain’t giving up on tracking us down. If we can get this thing moving again, we best do that as quickly as we possible.”
Imran was still unconvinced of Bear’s plan to free his transport truck from the broken ice.
Bear grew impatient with Imran’s disbelief.
“Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Look, I spent hours as a kid mudding. Got more trucks into and out of trouble than I can remember. Whatever end of the truck is stuck, you counter weight it to allow the other tires to dig you out. That’s all we’re doing here. Sure, this thing is bigger than anything I drove around in as a kid in Texas, but the principle is just the same, and we’ll have a bunch of you standing on that front bumper. And not to brag, little man, but I might be a whole lot stronger than you realize.”
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