Ernest says, You’d have made a good cop. And I think of what a cop is. I know what a cop is. But it’s imaginary, an image I’ve built from the stories I’ve heard about when there used to be law, and how it used to be everywhere. Do you remember the law? I ask. Of course I do, says Ernest. And I remember the day it died too. All the grids went down. At least in Montana. No more communication. And the police simply stopped caring about holding up the law. They couldn’t anymore. They each had families to protect, and that’s where all their time went then. Fighting for their own. The reach of the law came back to just your own family. Happened that way for everyone.
My dad was a cop, Dusty says. Salt Lake City. He left the job a long time before I was born. But he used to talk about it—the day the law stopped. I wonder if it was the same day everywhere. I don’t know how it could have been, Ernest says. I think it’s all just happened in pieces. The end of everything.
As Ernest continues to talk about the way things used to be, before the rain, and before the law died, I think, like I always do, about how I’ll never know the world that he’s talking about. And whenever I’ve heard old timers talk about it, they speak about it like it was magic. Like it was the greatest thing ever—a perfect society. To me it’s only a fantasy. Like a place I can know exists but only in their imaginations. I can never reach it. I can never know it. So I have to forget that it ever existed. And it’s not hard for me to do. I’ve never seen it anyway. I remember that Russell and I were supposed to find it again. And that part of me does believe I’ll see the old world. Find things somewhere just as they used to be. It was supposed to be here—only a couple miles away. Leadville. And now he’s not even with me anymore. And I’ll never know what Ernest is talking about.
Chapter 6
When I wake up, I can’t breathe. The air hurts too much. It’s stabbing my rib cage. I look to my right and see that the stove has gone out. Ernest said he would keep it going, refill it if it needed more fuel. He’s asleep though when I look at him. Frost is covering his face. It’s everywhere inside the tent. Like white dust that flutters up and hangs in the air when I move. I hear the ramming wind—it’s charging into one of the tent walls, hissing in protest, angry that it can’t knock it down. It hurts but I shout to wake them. Ernest shakes the dust off his face and comes to life like he’s been hit by lightning. Damn it, he says, disappointed that he’s let the stove go out. My body feels like it’s on the edge of hypothermia. I slowly start to flex my fingers and in a minute they begin to burn from nothingness. I know the pain is a good sign.
I wake Dusty up, and he opens his eyes to the frost. Voley is under his blanket, providing him with extra warmth that we didn’t have—didn’t need last night when the stove was on. Finally Ernest has the stove going again, but it doesn’t seem to do a thing to warm us up. With shaking fingers, Ernest draws out his thermometer, cautious enough so that it doesn’t break. He double-checks what he’s seeing, and I know something’s changed. Not only did the stove go out, but the weather turned. We all hear the gusts screaming outside the tent. What is it? I ask as he puts the thermometer away, ready to carry on without telling us. Fifteen degrees, he says hesitantly. Come under, Dusty says. I feel a tinge of guilt as Ernest remains alone, rubbing his arms by the stove, as I crawl under the blanket and feel a small rush of warmth from Voley’s body. We are icicles, nearly frozen to death, but Ernest tells us we have five minutes. It’s like the rigid clamps that have sealed our body’s joints don’t mean anything to Ernest—he intends to push on as planned. For the moment, I can’t think one way or the other. I can only think of the shivering, my body’s contortions, its desperate attempt to keep me alive.
Finally, after fifteen minutes of no words and steady shaking and rubbing and breathing on my fingers, I feel the warmth of life return. My mind returns from panic and sets into our horrible task. From the beating wind against the tent, I think we’ll lose ourselves in the snow and never find the city. What I find as I poke my head out the tent is even worse—the direction in which we intend to travel is directly into the wind, and when it blows, Ernest assures us it will be much colder than fifteen degrees.
The dry dust of snow flies like a wall of pellets, digging and stinging, trying to devour my renewed warmth. Ernest heats a can of beans, one of two we brought with us. As he prepares it, our last meal, Dusty and I try to seal our sweaters into the waists of our pants and our pants into the rim of our socks. Airtight to prevent the death wind from shattering our iced skeletons.
We eat the beans slowly and like the living dead. I think of anything that might be trapped out in the wind and the cold and the snow. Death itself is blowing out there, as careless about what it kills as the rain is. I keep waiting for the discussion to come up, for someone to suggest that we should turn back now. Forget the push for the city. Russell and Clemmy. The temperature has dropped far too low. The wind is too strong and pointing in just the right way so that we’ll never make it. But those words are never mouthed. I question whether or not it’s my own conviction that’s weakest now, because Ernest simply orders us to be quick about breaking the tent apart and getting it in the bag. He says we march strong and steady until we reach the buildings. Once we get in, he says, we warm up. He doesn’t say about what we’ll do if we don’t find Russell, or whether that will make a difference at all for what we do after we reach the buildings. If there is more than one. In his voice is just the single task, the motion of our boots pressing up and down the slopes until we get somewhere out of the wind. And I know it as much as they must—today is not day to go back into the ocean. Surely the temperature has to rise again, the balmy thirty-two degrees that only yesterday seemed so unbearable, and that now seems like a wasted treasure. We should have kept going last night, while conditions were good. I don’t say it, but it’s all I think as we finally start to unpack the tent and expose ourselves fully to the wind.
Voley is desperate to stay in the tent—he pokes his nose out and retreats. His fur is thick, but he wears nothing but his fur, and he wants no part of the second half of the journey. My heart sinks as Dusty uses a stern voice and says, Dusty, outside! Finally, and with his nose to the snow, Voley wanders out into the piercing sideways snow. It’s whipping all of us, and after we pack everything up as fast as possible, partly in a race to keep our blood moving, we feel its true brutality. We face into it, looking at the cooling tower, and begin the march.
With every step, the wind fights against us, as if to say we are not welcome this way. Screaming that it is unwise to go where the pain is greatest, because as each new blast hits us, we pause and absorb the life-removing numbness. Keep the pace up, Ernest says over and over. He moves like some giant unaffected by the elements. He tells us that we must use our bodies to generate heat now, and that if we slow too much, we’ll never make it. We march into the spray of ice and snow, battling to place the next foot into the powder, where it sinks and finally plants so that the next foothold can be attempted. Each step is a battle.
Eventually my mind bleeds out all other thoughts but the motion of my legs. I find myself in a rhythm, despite the icicle that has formed on my nose and frozen onto the top of my lip. I feel a heat pooling within me, something that tells me I must go faster, because it’s what will keep me alive. And I don’t look at the tower—when my eyes glance at it, it never changes, as if for all our effort it isn’t getting any closer. So I keep my eyes down, out of the wind blast, focused on my feet. Ernest is scanning for signs of the tracks we followed yesterday, but they don’t return. Wiped away forever by new dunes of snow.
Every few minutes, the wind dies down. And more frequently, it unleashes some kind of stored up anger, lifting from the crests a top layer, and carrying it like a barrage of missiles directly into us. My feet are numb and I wonder if the skin slips off from the cold like it does from the rain. Or if the skin just breaks apart like glass, and if my foot will eventually snap off when I go to pull it out of the packed white.
For
some reason, I think of Russell’s love for running. He’d said he would run once we reached Leadville. He would just take off, and start running again, like he’d used to do. And he’d keep going. I wonder if he did—if he’d run all the way to the buildings. Leg infection and all. And he’s up there, waiting for us. Like he knew we’d be coming after him.
I look at Voley. He’s braving the storm from behind, missing the brunt of the wind. Even though he’s out of the main blasts, he’s whining. Whimpering. I look back and screw myself up because I see him pausing every few steps. He’s holding his front paw in the air, and doesn’t want to plant it. And that’s what Dusty’s muttering has been, I realize now. Each time Voley refuses to place his paw back in the frozen waste, Dusty murmurs something, and just the tone alone forces Voley on. He trusts his master beyond all other things—even more than the protests of his own body. And I think of loyalty—to each other, and no one else, Russell had said after the Sea Queen. But right now, I’m nothing without Ernest and Dusty. And Voley. We’re carrying on by the strength of each other. Working as a unit. And it’s Ernest’s steady movement that inspires me most. He moves without pause, still acting unaffected by the knives and needles of the cold. And he says, every few minutes: Almost there, good pace. Keep it up.
He moves in front of us, and there he marches, bearing the direct line of wind. We walk single file now, Voley at the far back. The Snow God makes the path and leads us.
When I look out again over the horizon, I see that the building has grown very close. I can reach out and touch it. But it’s an illusion. It’s still so far away, across one last, unending stretch of valley. To either side of us rise white mountains. By their tops, a constant drift of smoke flies off into the sky, like an eruption that never ends. Blowing snow. The sky is muted white. I can’t even find the smear of the sun anymore. The snow sky keeps it hidden. And it’s as I’m looking at how close we are to the tower again that Ernest sees it: he murmurs, like yesterday, There! And we look, thinking he’s seen something besides the snow and the wind and the massive pinched tower. But there’s nothing, and we’re not sure that he’s seen anything at all, and I think maybe he’s losing his invincibility. The wind is stealing all of his power at last. And I wonder how we will do alone, without Poseidon, the one whose strength has been unflagging, as Russell’s always used to be.
Dusty sees it too now, and he says, What is it? I scan everywhere, asking, Where? I don’t see anything. I dread to think of what’s out there. I think about the conversation from the night before, and our talk of bears and wolves. Something’s out there, Dusty says. And he points to a small dark form, barely visible above the floor of the snow. It’s a dark bump and nothing more, but Ernest has increased his speed to double. We keep up and warm ourselves from the push. Each muscle rebukes the pain, the cold, the numb that wants to overtake us and put us to sleep. It is someone. They’re in the snow. Not moving.
We plow through up to our knees, pushing on in Ernest’s wake. No, says Ernest softly. I only half hear him, because he’s said it to himself. He says no again, but now with a terrible urgency, so that I know exactly his thoughts. I look out to the form in the snow, much closer to it now, and confirm for myself—it’s a person covered up to their shoulders in the snow, stuck in it, driven nearly underneath by the wind. I lose my stomach. The person is wearing a rain suit. It’s from the Resilience, the same kind Russell and Clemmy wore the day they left. There is nothing else around the man—no bags, no tent, no supplies. And the hood is drawn up, concealing the face, which is turned away from us and into the wind. And now Ernest has run ahead of both of us, despite my attempt to sprint. I yell at Dusty, who is carrying the stove, to get it out—we have to warm him up! But he ignores me and runs on. Together we come upon the body. I can’t bear to look, because it’s clear now that the man is dead. Next to his body are a snow-buried pile of clothes. He is naked other than his rain suit. Stripped his own clothes off in a last act of desperation. Ernest walks around, his back to the wind, and bends down to lift the hood of the rain suit. He drops to his knees and sinks into the snow, and from his mouth comes the name.
Part 2
Chapter 7
Ernest wraps Clemmy in his arms and leans into him. I stay back because I don’t want to see the frozen face. My eyes settle on the icy clothes, buried in a pile under a drift of snow. My mind plays the tragedy and I see Clemmy panicking—tearing off everything but his rain suit. Maybe because he thought it would make him move faster over the snow. Did Russell watch it happen?
My eyes roam over the last snow valley that we have to cross before we reach the building. I don’t see any more tracks—no sign of Russell moving on after Clemmy gave up. My mind swoops back to the wreck on the shore and I realize we don’t even know if Russell made it ashore. The boat was smashed to pieces. Maybe smashing him with it. And I picture him trying to cling to any surface, and the brown undertow pulling him out into the foam at the center of the wide sea. Or he did make it, but they lost the primer stove in the wreck. Had to make one great push without stopping, all the way across the ice and the snow and the wind.
Dusty and Voley walk ahead without a sound, ignoring Ernest’s soft sobs. I glance back at him and he’s still wrapped around his friend, but the noises stop. I didn’t think they were that close, or that Ernest could show any sign of weakness. But his enormous frame looks soft and vulnerable while he’s on his knees, half sunk in the snow. He sees me watching him and wipes his cheek, the only skin exposed. Then he stands up and sighs like he expected to go through this, and all his grieving is over with now, that fast. He looks away from me and across the valley. The building, he says. Then he watches Dusty and Voley shovel their bodies through thick drifts, fifty feet away from us now. We better not let them get too far ahead, he says. And then we start our slow motion through the white.
I pause after a few steps and let Ernest get ahead of me. I need to see the body. Part of me thinks it will be Russell, even though Ernest already said Clemmy’s name. But my mind nags me that it’s all a trick to keep me from losing it. I walk over and kneel down. It’s not Russell. I see a shade of white skin and ice hanging from a dark beard. Dust of snow has covered everything else that isn’t covered by the rain suit. Where did Russell go? I ask Clemmy now that we’re alone. I look at him patiently, like he’ll talk to me. I look at his pile of clothes and how sad they look. His bare chest is slightly exposed to the air, iced and white from the snow spray. I expect him to come back to life. For his icy lips to move. Maybe for him to suspend his death for a last communication, anything that can give me a sign of hope. The signs are all around you, my own head tells me. The white barren emptiness. No more tracks. It was just him. Alone. The thought rings clearly in my head. Russell never made it ashore.
I wonder if Ernest knew this all along but didn’t want to tell me. I’m convinced he’s keeping things to himself. He knew that the tracks were from people as soon as he saw them, but he never said they were wide enough that they could have been two people. And now they’re gone. And no one went on after Clemmy froze. But it’s just as likely the snow covered Russell’s footprints, I tell myself. Part of me wants to rummage through the frozen pile of clothes, like there will be clues in it. And part of me wonders if Dusty thinks this is a waste of food. I bend down, about to pick up the ice sheet of a sweater from the pile, when I hear a shout. It’s Ernest. Like he has an alarm on the body. Come on, he shouts, No time to waste. I drop the brick and stand up to say a silent goodbye to Clemmy. I tell him to let Russell know we came this way. And then I turn to catch up.
New buildings start to appear around the cooling tower as we march in. Dusty shouts in excitement, and Ernest picks up the pace. They look like apartment complex buildings, Ernest says. Two stories high, each of them. All the same.
We march toward the buildings through the white dunes, making slow and cold progress. The muted sky sends enough light for me to see inside some of the windows. They all look empty an
d dark—plain tan walls. No furniture or shelves or pictures or people. As we come up to the first apartment buildings, we stop and survey a wide road. It drops off from the valley, just as deep with snow, a flat and manmade valley. And in every direction it leads to more of the identical apartment buildings and branching roads. It’s like each one is a copy of the next, and we’re in some giant maze of them. Except in one direction. I stare that way—there are no apartment buildings that way—just a long straight line that leads off to the cooling tower, and another strange building that’s about a quarter as high as the tower itself. It looks like a control station or something. Those are the only two buildings different from the others, and I point it out to Dusty and Ernest. Ernest asks where the hell Leadville is, because this looks like a nuke town. I ask him what that is and he says he means a town built for the workers of a power plant, and nothing more. Leadville was a normal town, he remembers Russell telling him. No nuke town like this is. And I think he must be right now, because nowhere is there anything but the same buildings. And they don’t look very old, just tan cement and brick with giant hoods of white and windows half covered with snow drift. I look up at the sky and taste the snow. It’s still light and soft and pure. Innocent killer.
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 5