And then, very slowly, as if my focus is making it happen, a wide gap starts to cut into the mist. I can see a lead of water, extending into the fog like a road from the boat, brown and calm, slicing deep into the abyss. I almost wake up Russell to tell him the weather’s letting up, but I know it’s not. That this is some kind of trick. And that the fog will slide back at any moment. The wind dies so much I can barely feel it, but the snow falls as hard as ever, and I can’t go ten minutes without getting up to clear the boat again. I wipe down the top of the tarp and the seats and the rails and the moving keeps me warm. I want to ask Russell if snow is heavier than rain, and if it can sink us faster than the rain did, but I let him sleep. And I make sure we won’t find out.
I watch Russell and Voley through the tarp. Wishing I could have my turn now. But I let him dream and watch the opening path. And then, like a mirage, something slides through the lead of open water, way up near the point where the mist cuts back in. Something big and blue and white. I step to the bags and take one of the pistols, then shake Russell until he’s awake. I tell him what I saw and he jerks up, gets the rifle, and sits next to me on the edge of the boat, leaning out, trying to see the form. But it doesn’t come back. Nothing. Like a phantom tricked me. Like I’m losing it. Maybe it was the whale, I tell him. But he doesn’t ask me if I really saw something, or if it could have been a whale. He just leans out, as far as he can without tipping us, pointing the rifle into the lead of water. He tells me it’s a good sign—the fog opening up. Won’t be long now, he says, until we can see the shore again.
He asks me what it looked like. I tell him I’m not sure, other than the color. Blue. Blue and white even. against the brown. Did it make a sound? He asks me. No, I say. Just appeared and passed through the mist. Then it was gone.
We fall dead silent and watch. Waiting. And then, together, we see it return. Break into the same patch of open water ahead. Russell says it right away: Iceberg.
I tell him that it’s too small to be an iceberg. I’ve seen pictures of them in magazines and they’re the size of islands. He tells me that where there’s a small one, there has to be bigger ones. And that most of the iceberg can be underwater. Then he takes the oars and digs into the brown, slowing the boat down. But the drift of the sea kicks up and we keep moving toward it. And then, like it was a fear tactic of the sea, fog closes in and covers everything up again. The lead of open water and the thing hiding in it disappear.
Russell tries to steer us from drifting toward the ice, but there’s no way to tell where it is anymore. He tells me to keep my eyes peeled, look all around, for any sign of the ice. A shadow. Something to let us know where it is. He tells me again that there’ll be more than one. He says it calmly, like he’s certain, that it’s not just a rogue iceberg. In my mind I see the map still—the dotted lines, and how we’re in the middle of them now—icebergs for hundreds of miles in every direction.
We can’t split out here, he says, as if he’s just realized the danger. Like the tarp and the stove and a boat that doesn’t have a crack in it would have kept us safe. But not now, not with the ice. And then he works frantically to try and keep the boat from going too far in any direction. Like he can keep her in one place, going in circles. But I know the ice is drifting in anyway, and all the rowing in the world won’t do a damned thing.
Voley barks from underneath the tarp. I ask what he needs but don’t look at him. I have to keep my eyes on the gloom. I scan the entire horizon a couple more times, trying to guarantee for myself that the empty gray fog will stay empty if I turn away to check on Voley. Then, I duck down to see what’s wrong. And there it is—a yellow mush of snow. Somehow, he still didn’t want to go to the bathroom in the boat. Tried to get up and go somewhere else. Dusty trained him well.
I try to shove him out of the mess, but it runs in a small river, following him, and then spreads and becomes part of the snow. No use. He looks at me to tell me that it’s okay. I tried and that’s enough. I wipe the new snow from my forehead and give him a pat, telling him not to worry. Then I look back up to the mist and realize I’ve been distracted for too long.
Russell stops rowing us in circles and says it’s useless now. He doesn’t know whether or not he’s pulling us into the ice. Maybe we didn’t see anything, I tell him. That it was just an illusion made by the fog. He doesn’t answer because he’s locked onto something. I can’t see anything where he’s looking.
What? I ask him. And he tells me he saw it again. Just a shadow, a splotch in the mist. Are you sure? I ask him, and he just nods. I watch where he’s looking, waiting for the shadow. For the smoke to disappear. For the gods to offer us a lead of visible water again. Something to see other than the ten feet surrounding the boat. Then, the enormous dark shadow glides back into view. It looks twice the size of the first floe I saw floating through the lead.
Keep her off it, Russell tells me, and he hands me one of the oars. Just poke us off if we get close, he says. I lean out into the haze and thrust my oar like a spear, ready to stab the ice and push the boat back. Any moment, Russell says, as the shadow draws up to the boat.
The shadow rises above our heads, and keeps enlarging, until it must be ten feet above the water, and then, in one quick miracle, the smoke vanishes and we see it. White and blue, strange and beautiful against the murky brown swells. A sharp crystal claw that’s turned up toward the sky. Russell says more of it will be under water than above, and to get ready to stab before it’s actually on top of us, not directly at it, but deep into the water. But I can hardly pay attention to him. It looks so gorgeous to me. So out of place. Like a small floating mountain peak. And then, nearby, with the mist retreating, I see the smaller one too. It’s shaped like a table. When the ice has me in its trance, more small bergs float into view. Each of them flat, close to the surface. Some of them ride under the water with the swell and then resurface. Without our help, the boat glides toward them, like it’s drawn by a magnet, until Russell decides there’s too much ice this way, and we have to turn around fast. He figures it out quickly, like he thought we could take the iceberg until the smaller ice appeared around it. No shoving off that, he tells me. He takes the oar from me and sits down, beating the wood into the sea. We start to rotate, but as soon as we turn around, through the deep gray, we see more shadows. Blocking us in. They’re not as tall, but we know. Russell says it: Surrounded.
I ask what we can do, panic rising in my gut. They darken the gray in each direction and it looks like we’ll be crushed no matter which direction we run. Just keep them off us, he tells me, Time to stand and fight.
And I start to think about the building we left in Nuke Town—how warm that last night was there. The fuel left behind in those basements. The meat—radioactive or not, it couldn’t have crushed us alive. And there were the foxes. They were making it. The last snow walker died in the snow when we had just left—he was old and couldn’t hurt us. And he was the only real threat. Why didn’t we turn back then? Why did we think we could beat the sea again?
I push the regret out because the ice has us now. But I know the radiation wouldn’t have been able to do this. Surrounded. Nowhere to go but down into the cold snow sea.
I slide my glove off and lean over the rail, dipping my fingers into the water. The cold bites back at me, like some preparation for what’s about to come. The same thousand needles I felt when we left the Resilience and had to swim to shore, still waiting for me. But I know that this time there’ll be nowhere to swim to. No one on the shore to root me on.
Eyes open, Russell tells me, seeing that I’ve let my guard down. I stand back up, ignoring the pain it causes, and hold out my spear again. Gonna hit this time, he says. And he’s right—I can see it now too. The small table iceberg is running up along our side, and before Russell can even tell me, I stab out blindly. Something hits under the water. I can’t tell if I pushed the ice away from us or us away from the ice, but we start to drift apart. A line of water opens, but it’s only a mom
ent of relief, because Russell is splashing behind me, already fighting against a new monster. Somehow, from out of the clouds, there’s another needle floating toward us. And then, all at once, the boat rocks and a slop of water falls in over the rail, washing through everything.
Russell screams something about the stove, and that he needs me to make sure it doesn’t wash overboard. I get down on my knees while he stabs again into the ice. I wiggle past Voley who tries to stand up from the icy water sloshing back and forth across the floor. I see the stove and it’s half submerged. No flame. It’s out. And then I look over our bags, all of them soaked. Not the waterproof stuff from the Resilience. Just plain fabric that’s too dark now. Color of sea-soak. I think about the dog food, and that if it gets wet, we’re dead. My hands battle through the water to pull the bags up and place them on the edge of the tarp, causing it to sag down into the water. I lay the bags one by one and once they’re all out, I rip through them for the dog food. I find it and yell to Russell we’re okay, because the food is safe, sealed in its plastic bag still. No water inside yet. But he doesn’t answer or seem to care. When I turn to see why, he’s half over the rail. Leaning into something. Russell! I yell as I get to my feet and start over. Then I look up and see it—a massive floe that’s all of the sudden dead ahead of us. But it’s still too far away to jab. Russell tells me that’s the mother ice, and then, as if on command with his voice, the boat rocks again. We roll to one side and then bump back to the other, and tumble back to the center, more sea spilling in. Ice floats in with the brown this time, knocking around on the rail and then spilling back out. It’s riding under us, Russell says. And then, like a buoy, the boat pops back up.
In my mind I see only the map. Know that it was right. The forecast was true. And all around us, I see the dotted lines. We’re deep inside them now, surrounded for hundreds of miles.
We’ve got to get north! I yell at him, panicking at the thought of drifting further south into the heart of the pack. I yell at him again as if we have any kind of mobility at all. But he doesn’t respond because he knows it’s useless, there’s no turning north. No turning in any direction, because the shadows cover each escape. And past them, there’s only fog. Even if we did know which way north was. Just keep her from splitting, Russell replies. Strange calm in his voice.
For a while, nothing comes at us. The shadows seem stuck in place, stuck in the fog—not disappearing, but not charging in to spill us again. Then I hear an awful noise—it comes from the belly of the boat, like it’s groaning with a stomach ache. It starts slow and carries on, then, as quickly as it began, it stops. We wait with nothing to do, our spears ready. Then the moaning comes back. And it disappears again. She’s clawing, Russell says.
The groan returns every ten minutes. Each time it starts I look at the planks of the boat floor, waiting for the water to start pouring in. But I don’t even see the wood bulge. Then the sounds come quicker. The creaking of the wood as it glides along the underwater table of an ice floe. We’re riding her, says Russell into the mist. And when I scan our backside, I see the shadow has returned. And that we must be gliding down its underwater arm. Drawing us in to be smashed. I slosh through the water and past Voley who stands with his hair on end, watching helplessly the chaos. With my oar pointed, I reach the opposite end of the boat and lean into the gray, stabbing at the ice that starts to surface. But the underwater ice I can’t reach makes the boat groan so bad I know it’s finally going to snap. It dawns on me that the snow walkers couldn’t have sailed to Nuke Town from this way. Couldn’t have come through the fog and the ice.
Each time I push us back from the ice table, it seems like more floes come into view, invading our small window of fogless open sea. When the boat escapes one chunk, a larger one meets us in the other direction. Russell kicks us back on his side, and then I send it right back to him. And the groan starts and doesn’t stop, like the back and forth has angered the sea. We rock and I grab on to the bench. Voley skids all the way down to Russell and I yell, just in time for Russell to crouch down and block him with his body. Slowly, the boat settles again. The groaning stops and we’re flat on the brown again.
What was that? I ask Russell. He tells me it must have been a rogue swell. The thought of waves courses through my head, and what this sea would be like if the ocean weren’t calm. If the waves started up and made the ice go surfing on breakers, driving down at us, dropping from the cliffs of the wave crests. The image doesn’t play out long because the next iceberg appears. Just a shadow. We both watch it appear, forgetting to poke away the smaller ones that now look like babies compared to this mountain. I think it might be an island when I first see it, and ask him if icebergs can be that big. Russell doesn’t tell me, either because he doesn’t know, or because he’s as terrified as I am.
It slices through clear air, like it’s repelling the mist itself with its size. Long and high and flat. It looks unstoppable, and if we could somehow climb up on it, we’d be safer than in the boat. But I don’t tell Russell because there’s no way to get up—where it drops into the water, it’s a sheer cliff. No slope or edges to haul ourselves up. Impossible.
It keeps drifting by until we realize it’s not aiming for us. Twice as high as the first ice needle, but a floating island. And then, after twenty minutes, waiting for it to decide it wants to turn, run us down, and destroy us, it passes. And then it’s gone. Back into the fog. Nothing but a moving shadow.
Russell suddenly says we should row in that direction, to follow it, because for the last ten minutes, the fog has cleared enough to show us a lead of open brown—no more ice that way, not besides the shadow mountain. What if it turns around? I ask him. She’s not turning, he says. She’s too big to turn. But he looks at the sky, like there might be a storm. Like only a storm could turn it around on us. I look up too. The sky is still bright, for all the gloom and the gray. Still midday. And that’s enough conversation for him, because he reaches down and asks me for my oar. Then he sits on the bench and shoves them in.
He starts out strong, rowing hard until he tires. I work on getting the water out of the boat and clearing the snow. The tarp is such a mess and everything is already starting to develop a coating of ice. As soon as I feel like I’m wiped out from clearing everything, he asks if I can give it a shot. I tell him I’ll go as long as I can. I don’t tell him I barely have anything left. And with that, I take the bench.
Check how Voley’s doing, I say, and then I throw the wood back into the water and push forward, digging my feet into the footholds. My back burns but I row fast enough to keep the mountain shadow in sight. My arms rise and roll, pushing us deeper into the lead of open water, and the sea is empty in every other direction. The mist starts to melt away, like the wake of the ice island is eating it up, until we can see one hundred feet in every direction. The ocean is in sight again. And just like that, we’re out of the ice. The island shadow gets farther and farther away as my arms burn out, but Russell doesn’t seem to care. Following it was our ticket out of the pack, and it worked. I hear the grinding of the lighter, and when I turn around again, the stove is going. I tell Russell that we made it through, hoping for some kind of smile. He looks up from the ball he’s formed with Voley, together under the tarp. They look so warm and he doesn’t reply and his face doesn’t change, like he’s in shock or on the edge of sleep again, so I tell him that the ice lines really were just bullshit. A couple icebergs and nothing more. As I say it, the boat starts to glide up and down a long swell. No more congestion. The return of the open sea. And no more hope of ever finding the shoreline. Russell tells me to get under while the flame’s running.
I put the oars down and let the boat drift so I can help get the tarp straightened out, retying two ends with more knots so the wind can’t blow it away. Then, with one last paranoid look to see if the ice is anywhere in sight, and seeing that it’s not, I get down to try to fit myself in with them. The fog’ll be gone in an hour, he says finally, calm and confident
. I crawl into him and Voley. But even if the fog all disappears, something tells me we still won’t be able to see the Rockies anymore. Just empty canvas in every direction for as far as the eye can see. Like we’ve already gone too far out to sea. But empty canvas is better than the ice pack, I tell myself.
From under the tarp I scan the sky. As I squirm around and finally find a half-comfortable spot against their bodies where I fit, pushed on top of Russell’s legs and into Voley’s side, I get the awful feeling that the ice will drive in again the moment we stop paying attention. Cut us out from underneath the hull, a hidden reef tearing out the wood, sending us to cold deaths. Or deaths by shock. I can’t make up my mind. I listen with my ear pressed to the hull, waiting for the groaning, the sign that it’s all over, but it’s just the soft splashing of the swells. And the draw of the warmth is too much. Their bodies seem to lend me all their heat, and the stove rolls out and over my body. I watch the smoke curl up and blend with the numb sky. And I nestle in even tighter, until the rifle, tucked by Russell’s side, stabs into me. Then I stop wriggling and lie still.
Russell breathes softly. I listen to each breath and watch the clouds roll from his mouth and by me and out into the dead outside. I ask him if I should keep poking outside to check for more icebergs, because they only just disappeared. Yeah, he says, but he doesn’t move. No sign that he’ll help. His hands are right up against the pilot stove, and he starts to rub them furiously, like feeling just came back. Voley closes his eyes, happy that we’re all here again. Together, inside, with the warmth again. The snow melts into a pool around our bodies, soaking us where we lie, and another minute passes, and then another. I want to check for icebergs again, but I keep telling myself to do it in one more minute. Just one more minute of rest, and I’ll go look. Russell doesn’t move and his breathing slows down. His hands fall to the floor of the boat. Finally, when I think he’s drifting off, I ask him if he wants me to watch first, since my hands and feet feel okay. But he’s sleeping already. Hey, I nudge him. He moans, and then he goes right back to sleep. And with that, I feel a swell lift us up more than usual. The boat glides down and up another, and then it drops again. We must be getting into the real stuff now, I tell him, hoping for a reply. But he’s dead silent. I remember what he told me in the canoe—never go sideways into the swells. They’ll twist you right over. Capsize you. So I force myself to wiggle back outside, before sleep takes me too. Voley stares at me like I’m nuts, and then he goes back to sleep. I tell him I just need to make sure the icebergs didn’t come back. And that the swells aren’t getting too big.
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 20