Dusty agrees but then says no more, looking all around, trying to make sense of the maze before us. There are two more apartment buildings in front of us, the same as the rest, and the road splits in two directions. We can go right or left. Dusty says the left is the way we came in originally. And that’s the way to go. It’s also in the opposite direction of the cooling tower, he tells me, and that means it’s away from the man on the roof too. I don’t argue, I just grip the leg of the chair in my hand like my life depends on it. Together we start to plod through the cold and the wind, numbing our limbs all over again. The mindless search for rubble.
I think about what must be happening to Ernest if he’s still alive. My mind has found it impossible to imagine him dead. I see him in all his forms—waving the white flag at sea, offering peace, bonding with Russell, confronting Clint, waiting anxiously for Clemmy and Russell to return, braving the storm of the waterspout, getting Voley ashore, marching through the snow’s punches so we didn’t have to, and finally, taking the bad risk—confronting the snow walkers. And now, after all of that, I see him trapped in a room, bound by wires, unable to move. Being saved for food. Why they wouldn’t kill him first and save his carcass for later my mind doesn’t attempt to reason through. It’s just the fantasy I can’t stop in my head. And I only feel a stronger compulsion to find him, like he really is trapped in one of these white-capped buildings, maybe in the radiation tower itself. I sense it like our duty, like we owe him that much for taking us all the way in to find Russell. I tell Dusty this as simply as I can, that we have to go after Ernest. I say it like we should drop this crazy hunt for bricks and march the other way right now. He tells me we can’t deal with that until we deal with the fire. There’s no point in thinking about anything until we can make a fire, he says. I don’t say anything else and start planning the rescue in my head. I visualize sneaking up on them, just like Ernest tried to do, but doing it at night. When they won’t see me coming. Doing it better than he did, more carefully. And I won’t give them a chance to talk first like he did.
We push on slowly and I think of our conversation with Ernest, camped out on the snow, about what I used to like to do when I was little—to find the bad guys. And now it’s like my purpose is real—I know they’re here. The worst kind. Just a couple blocks away. Some of them outside with us, up on the roofs. Some hidden inside these buildings. And here’s the chance I’ve been waiting for all my life. To make a difference. To wipe something evil away. To change things from what they are. To put a dent in the fucked up part of the world. As if one girl has the power to do anything meaningful with her life. I trick myself into thinking I have the power though. Because it’s what Russell thought I had. And I push through more snow knowing somehow that Ernest and Russell are both still alive here. Waiting for the rescue. It’s all I can think about as Dusty scours the walls that open up to us as we turn bend after bend and see building after building, all of them identical and solid.
Finally, when I think we’re almost at the edge of town where the trail leads all the way into the mountains, toward the waterspout sea and the Resilience where it patiently bobs and waits for us, Dusty says, “There.” He says it softly but with relief. He sees the rubble wall. It’s a corner of one of the first apartment buildings, and it’s been caved in by something, exposed to the advancing dunes of white. There is a pile of bricks submerged under snow, and he’s right—there are at least a hundred bricks altogether. He’s brought both of our bags, their contents emptied into the upstairs hallway by our tent so we can fill them up here. We dig up bricks and put them in two at a time. I keep testing mine, making sure I don’t make it too heavy to carry. He tells me to put more instead of less, and we can dump them along the way if we have to. I say that dumped bricks would be a trail leading to our tent. You’re right, he says, and then he tells me to dump what I need to here, and forget his idea. Take what you can.
At last we push out, and I glance at the wilderness behind us. There’s nothing but the murky white. The mountains appear only in my imagination. I can picture them clearly though, out there in the nothingness. Enormous. And you’d never know they were there. Or Clemmy’s body, halfway to the ship, stuck in the ground. Or the broken shoreline after that, with the Resilience floating nearby on the water, a black phantom, staring at the rocks. And somewhere to the south of her, in pieces among the rocks, the splinters of the motor boat. Russell and Clemmy’s life vessel shattered to pieces by Poseidon. And then, in an instant, my imagination closes and the view of the town and all its monotonous buildings surround us once again. My eyes keep drifting to the roofs, waiting for a head to appear over an edge, a dark face staring down. And when it sees us it will shout some cry of alarm, or fire a rifle down at us. But nothing happens and we make it back faster than it took to get out, following our own footsteps that even the driving snow can’t cover up fast enough. Voley seems to know the way best, without the aid of our footprints, and he bounds way ahead. I worry someone will spot him jumping through the snow. Pick him off. But neither of us want to make a call to bring him back. We don’t know who’s listening.
We move slower and slower as the weight of the bricks starts to wear on us. We battle the for each step over the sinking white sand. At last we catch sight of the corner of our building, and even from a distance we can see where we carved out the snow from the broken door. Do you think they’ll be back tomorrow? I ask, my mind back on the snow walkers. Why? Dusty asks. Because that guy, the one who came to the door. He saw Ernest now. And he’s seen the door here. They’ll come looking to see if there are more people, I say. Unless he’s still alive, Dusty says, And he’s told them he’s traveling alone. And I think that Dusty must be holding onto the same hope as me that Ernest is still alive, trapped somewhere—that they needed him for something more than just food. But it’s all so farfetched, I realize. All of our hopes.
They probably will be back to investigate, Dusty finally admits with a groan, but I’m too exhausted to keep the conversation going anyway. And there’s nothing else to do besides get the bricks inside and make a fire before we lose our last bit of fuel. Part of me thinks we’ll come back to a dead primer stove, and find that the cold has decided our fate, and we will freeze to death tonight. Dusty was too afraid to turn the stove off before we left even though I told him we should—he said it might not relight at all. If the flame’s gone, there’ll be nothing for us to do, except walk to the nuclear building with a white flag raised, like Ernest and his crew did when they found us in the motor boat. But I have a dark feeling in my gut about how that would go. And I only want to sleep again now, and get warm one more time, even if that’s all I get before I die. And to drop these horrible bricks.
We reach the window in silence. I look around for snow walkers but the coast is still clear. One at a time, we help each other raise the brick bags to the height of the window and drop them to the other side. I can feel a panic start to rise with the thud they make as they hit the floor. We hurry to send the next bag through. Then Dusty lets me step on his hands and I climb through the window. The apartment is quiet but I get the feeling someone is hiding in one of the empty apartments, waiting to surprise us. Like they waited for us to leave and just hid here. I pause to listen, thinking I will hear footsteps or a door opening or breathing. There is nothing.
Suddenly, slicing through the silence, Dusty’s voice calls me. He says to get ready for Voley, he’s going to lift him through now. I snap out of my head and extend my arms so that Voley can get inside. He struggles and flails at first but then finds my arms and uses them as a step to hop down to the rug. He runs over to the pile of furniture against the door and starts to sniff the snow that drifted inside earlier. Then Dusty finally climbs in. Behind his body I expect to see some form moving on the street, following us this whole time, just waiting to make its strike, but there’s nothing out there but the constant gloom. We shut the window and haul the bags to the end of the hallway, up the stairs, and around the corner
into the second-floor hallway to find out if the flame has survived.
I feel the heat right away as we approach the tent, even before I see through the wall the tiny glow of the stove. It’s still lit. Dusty hauls in from the neighboring apartment a small pile of wicker he salvaged from one of the lobby chairs. Lay the bricks out, he tells me. And already, before we even have our flooring, he’s lighting the wicker. He says there might only be a couple minutes left of the fuel. I spread the bricks out and then try to push them neatly together for a platform. Keep going, we need five more layers, he says. I can’t believe we’d need that many but he assures me we’ll warm the rug too much if we don’t. We’ll burn the building down if we’re not careful, he says, and then he curses the place for having any metal trash cans. Finally, he tells me to hold the end of the wicker as it burns, and he moves in to take over the construction of the fire pit. He arranges the bricks in a square, and from how fast he works I can tell he’s done this many times. Then he keeps piling more around the edges. He tells me to put the wicker into the center. I drop it in on the bricks and Dusty breaks his chair spear in half on his thigh. He drops in both pieces and asks for mine. He says there’re plenty more where these came from. Then he adds mine to the fire, and soon one of the pieces of wood starts to catch fire. Already the smoke is rolling out and it hits me as I’m breathing in and I cough. I ask if he thought ahead about the smoke, because we’re probably going smoke ourselves to death. But he tells me to look at the ceiling. The smoke is starting to glide down the hallway, trying to find open space somewhere else.
Look, Dusty says. He’s pointing to the primer stove. It’s finally out. All the fuel spent. We just made it, he says. And now I know we’re trapped here. There’s no getting back to the Resilience, because we can’t carry a fire. It’s staying here, in the hallway of this dark and empty building, and before it keeps us alive for very long, its smoke will kill us or tell the roof men where we’re hiding. I wonder if the darkness of night will prevent them from noticing smoke coming out of the windows. And how they’ll see the smoke in the morning when there’s light. I tell all this to Dusty, and he says he knows but that he’s not sure what else we can do right now. We have to keep some windows open, he says. He hasn’t figured things out that far ahead. He has a couple ideas, but he’s just not sure. I ask him to tell me what they are, but he says he hasn’t slept in more than a day, and that I should wake him up after he sleeps for just an hour. Just one hour, he asks me. He lies down next to Voley, and together they fall asleep, sharing each other’s warmth by the fire.
The fire crackles and eats the wood, and I watch the flames dance, dissolve and strike up again. And when the wood looks like it’s almost all burned up, I go into another room and break off more pieces of a chair by smashing it against the floor. The noise doesn’t wake Dusty, and it barely makes Voley turn his head. I am starting to feel confident that the roof man doesn’t hear any of our noises from three buildings away. Part of me wants to close some of the windows, but Dusty said we need them open or we’ll suffocate. I don’t think it’s really working anyway though, because the smoke is starting to stay in the hall and fill it up, even with so many of the windows open. And the thought of the roof man makes me go back to the original tent room after I’m done adding wood to the fire. I want to check if the stick is still poking up into the sky on the roof. I crawl along the apartment floor up to the window, and then I slowly stand just high enough to peek out. No more stick. Either his watch is over, or something has disturbed him enough to come down to the road for investigation. And all at once it hits me that we’ve thrown our only weapons into the fire. I have to go downstairs alone to get more of the chair legs.
Chapter 9
It’s as I’m going downstairs to find more chair legs that I hear the noise. At first I think it’s the wind. Everything is dark downstairs, and I have to walk very slowly and keep my arms out. I walk toward the lobby, passing door after door of the lifeless apartments. When I reach the lobby, I can see down the hall to the furniture blockade. All the chairs are there, stacked up. The snow on the floor hasn’t melted at all. There are two couches on their sides, pushing against the door with their broad sides, and a tangle of chairs meshed on top. There are even small coffee tables that Dusty piled on the couches, wedged in at steep angles. And it looks like the whole wall will topple with one strong budge from the outside.
I keep telling myself that the noise I heard was only the wind. I wait, completely still, trying to hear the fire crackle upstairs but I can’t. Just the occasional howl of the snow wind beating against the windows in the lobby and by the front door.
I jog down to the wall of furniture and convince myself, even though it doesn’t feel like it, that nothing is inside the building with us. I take down one of the chairs. I try to twist off a leg so that it will still have a screw sticking out at the end, just like Dusty did. It’s slow to turn and I feel weak. After a few small turns it won’t budge at all. Without the fire nearby the cold starts to work on my hands and feet and face. Instead of fighting the chair down here in the dark I decide to bring it back up where it’s warm and do it there. I start back through the darkness. As I get to the stairwell at the opposite end of the building, I’m hit with something—some deep sense that someone is just outside on the street. I don’t have any reason for the feeling, but I’m afraid to go into one of the empty apartments and look out a window because I’m sure I’ll see a face staring back at me. All I want to do is get back upstairs with Dusty. When I hit the steps inside the stairwell, I think I hear coughing. The smoke must be smothering the hallway by now, and I rush up thinking Dusty might be in trouble. A wall of choking fog brakes me when I get there, and through a gray haze Dusty and Voley are moving frantically. Get the bricks to the window! Dusty shouts at me.
Holding my breath, I drop the chair and rush into the smoke. I start to grab up the bricks, but they burn my hands through my gloves. I drop one, then another, and start to kick them toward the window. Ashes fly into my eyes and sting me. Don’t let it go out! Dusty yells. He starts to bring the bricks himself, tipping the ones from the rim of the pit. I follow his example and do the same thing after him, going back and forth to set up a new place for the fire by the roof man window. We get about half of them away from the fire and make a much smaller pit. After we transfer a few pieces of burning wood, Dusty returns to the old fire and stays there long enough to be sure the rug is safe and won’t catch the building on fire and burn us to death. Finally we settle in by the new fire and try to sleep. I don’t lie down until I’ve twisted off all four legs of the chair, working carefully so the screws stay in like tiny spear tips. I picture us stabbing out the eyes of the men who shot Ernest. Wooden legs against guns, I say to Dusty as I finally stretch out for sleep. But he’s already out. Voley is listening though, and he looks at me curiously, cocking his head, like I’m weird for not resting when the resting is warm and good and quiet like it is now. It’s like Voley thinks there could be nothing better than how we have it right now. And he’s right, I think, because the fire isn’t suffocating us anymore. The smoke rises and floats out the crack in the window Dusty opened. Some of it rolls back across the ceiling too, but I don’t think it’s enough to kill us in our sleep.
I almost wake Dusty up. Just to talk to him. I want to escape, but not to the sex he’s shown me. I want to escape into the future. Away from this time and place. Where we’ve found the real Leadville. Not the new one. And all of this painful loss isn’t happening. Where Russell and Ernest are still with us. I think about how Dusty could work on his electronics. I want to tell him he can still do it. Get more and more radios going. Maybe even start to use them to connect people again. Like Russell says people used to be connected everywhere. The magic internet he called it, that made millions of miles mean nothing. I think Dusty is good enough to do it. I want to wake him up to tell him I love him and I believe in him, because I wasted those chances with Russell, took every opportunity for gran
ted. And I wish more than anything I could see Russell right now, figure out what he needs, and tell him I’ll help. And then do it. Help him. Tell him that I love him too. And even Ernest. I’ve started to feel something for him and I don’t know why—I don’t even know if it’s love at all, or just respect, but it’s there, hanging like a pain in my gut.
My mind races through the fantasy I’m building of the future where Dusty is bringing the world together again through his electronics. He’s creative and unafraid. He even knows the mistake Russell and I made when we killed his parents. And he’s forgiven us. It makes me want to wake him up all the more, to tell him the truth right now in case I don’t ever get another chance. To come clean and then tell him I love him so that I can feel his forgiveness. Like I need it to make it through another night of hell. And in the future I’m building, my job is to weed out the face eaters and the snow walkers. Make sure they don’t kill anyone else. They don’t take away something that means something to someone—like a piece of someone’s family. And I come to the realization of what they really are, the face eaters and the snow walkers and every other thief and bandit I’ve known in my sixteen years. They’re the acid that’s eating away the veneer. But more clearly I see now what we are—we’re the repairers. Even Voley, because he has all of it in him too—no matter what anyone thinks about animals being separate from people. I get the clear sense Voley’s a part of it as much as we are. All of this future and past wells up in me at the same time, and I just want to escape the present. I think about all of the times I’ve spent with Dusty, even though we haven’t known each other for very long. He’s wiped away the confusion I used to have about the different kinds of love. Physical and emotional. I think back further—about Russell, and all he’s done for me. For us. And how I never showed enough appreciation. I nudge Dusty, and whisper his name. I need to tell him all of this. It’s my whole existence right now. He moves a little bit, but he stays asleep. And then I give up, too guilty to try again after he told me how badly he needs sleep. I’ll tell him tomorrow.
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 8