It takes me twenty minutes to find the lighter. When I roll the flint nothing happens. I tell him it’s dead, and that we’re going to freeze if we don’t huddle together. Come here, he says, and I walk over. He tells me to hold his oar where it’s wedged deep in the ice. Whatever you do, don’t let go, he says. But I feel like I couldn’t take it out if I tried. It’s welded to the ice. And my hands can hardly close around it anyway. If it stays in place, it won’t be because of me, but I don’t tell him. I just wait for him to figure something out before I fall asleep. He takes the lighter and I hear him breathing loudly, like he’s using his breath to dry it out enough so that it sparks. I hear the clicking, over and over. And when nothing happens, he sets it down on the seat and comes back to me. Then he stops, turns around, and finds Voley at the other side of the boat. All alone. Still and lifeless. He lifts him up, and brings him back to me, and then, I feel it—a thin sign of life: He licks my face. Russell holds him close, smushed between our bodies. Sit, he says. His voice is dried out and raspy, and he barely gets the words out. I don’t want to leave the oar, but there’s nothing we can do anymore. He tells me again, and I sit down. It’s like the oar doesn’t matter, because Voley’s so close to death. And I know Russell’s risking our lives, but there’s no other way to warm him up.
The boat sinks so low with us all huddled together on one end that the ice shelf rises above the rail. Somehow, the oar stays in place on its own. Russell extends one hand to see how firm it is, and then he checks that the rope is tight. And then, once he’s satisfied, he just lets go.
In a sort of dream that pushes in against my numbness, we’re flying off the face of the earth. It’s space and that’s why it’s so cold here. But it’s not really happening. We’re glued to the ice. And into Voley I push, because Russell says he needs both of our bodies. We form a ball. The lighter will dry out, he says. And then, we cling to Voley. Thoughtless. A last act of hope that together, our bodies can keep us alive.
Chapter 23
When I wake up, it’s to a kiss. Voley again, letting me know he’s still alive. Refusing to let himself go after all. And he doesn’t want me to go either. His snout is nearly all white, but he’s moving it, sniffing, and he wants me to wake up. I realize why right away—it’s morning, and Russell is standing over the stove. A lit stove.
Tanner, he says. I’m up, I tell him. He tells me what my eyes already see—the flame is going. I try to unstiffen but no part of my body cooperates. He walks over and helps me stand up. It takes a long time and then he moves me to the stove. The tarp is off to the side still, a wet and useless bundle. The center of the boat is just the exposed stove. But that’s not what really reminds that I’m awake and alive—it’s the day-lighted vision of the ice. Floes are on every side that go on forever. And the ocean itself has disappeared. Not a shred of open brown in sight. Just long flat tables of ice, some rising much higher than our boat. I think we’ve found land, but when I ask Russell, he tells me no. We’re stuck in the pack. And then I hear a soft groan, like two sheets of ice are trying to crush each other somewhere out on the white. Russell tells me it’s been like that for the past half hour. His face is pale and lifeless, and snow covers his hair and beard completely. A living piece of ice.
Not too close, he tells me when I shove my hands directly on top of the flame. It takes a slow hour until I start to feel something again. A long, throbbing sting. But there’s still nothing in my feet. Easy, Russell keeps saying every ten minutes, as if I have control over how fast my body warms up. He takes out the water jug. I drink and then he drinks and then Voley drinks. By the time the sky is full bright gray, I feel the pain in my feet too. I can tell I’m moving my toes. But I don’t want to see what they look like, or my hands. And looking at Russell and Voley’s frosted bodies, I know how everything must look. All of us the same impossible, stubborn sacks that refuse to surrender the last of our heat.
When my mind is alive from the water that clears my throat, and it registers that what I thought could never get worse has gotten worse—that I’ve woken up to the worst chances of survival that we’ve ever known—Russell points off to a small and distant miracle. He doesn’t have to say anything. Because there are no words to describe how out of place it looks, hanging all the way out there, way above us, dangling its hope in the sky.
“Is it real?” I finally manage to squeeze out. It’s real, he tells me. And then he starts to rub Voley’s paws with his hand, pulling them in over the stove, gathering friction, and then cracking off the ice where it’s frozen to his fur. All I can do is stare.
Blue.
Just a thin sliver in the sky. Something I’ve only seen once before in my life. But this time, there’s something more—a long golden shaft of light. It splits into five smaller ones that radiate through clouds and down to the sea. Long beams of gold against the empty gray and brown.
That’s where we’re going, Russell says. I don’t even stop to ask him if he means to walk out onto the ice. Because I can’t imagine there’s any other way to reach it. And I know that even if we could move toward it, it would disappear long before we ever reached it. So I don’t say anything, I just sit and wait for my body to warm up, watching the blue. And it makes sense somehow—if we can just feel the sun once before we die. It would make the whole thing worth it. Life would have been worth it.
I point Voley’s head toward it—you see that boy? But Voley doesn’t seem to be so sure. He turns his head back, more interested in what Russell’s pulling out of his fur. We’re going the right way, Russell tells Voley as another piece of ice cracks away. And then he starts to laugh. Madness and delirium. Contagious, because it’s so clear—we’re not going anywhere. The ice is going. It’s not up to us at all. I laugh too, because all we have is our craziness and those beams of light and that blue slit in the gray.
We eat again in something like quiet happiness and drink small sips of water until Russell decides that we’ve had enough. We have to put the rest away. The snow barely sticks to the boat now, and I tell Russell that I think it’s stopping. He looks up and opens his mouth. No words come out, just his tongue. The white reminders of Nuke Town fall onto his face and melt away. I think it is too, he finally answers. And then, we fall into a trance with no words for the longest time. Russell refills the stove quietly and checks how much fuel we have left. He sorts all of our supplies, like the color in the sky is coffee in his blood. He double-checks the guns, the food, and spreads the tarp out so it can dry. Then, when he’s done everything, we just stare at the blue. All of us together. Watch it pass. Until at last we realize…
It’s not passing. It’s not drifting by this time. It’s in one place—stuck. A scar in the canvas. Reachable. The most out of place thing Colorado has known in nineteen years.
When I realize that the whole day is passing in one long, dumb stare, and that we’ll use up the rest of our stove fuel sitting in place, watching it, in a trance, paralyzed by its beauty, he tells me what we need to do.
“We can’t wait for the ice to take us, can we?” And I know that he does really mean to leave the boat. To walk out onto the ice. The shifting floes that hide their monstrous bellies underwater, that wanted us dead last night, and today make us think they’re our final hope. And for all my mind I can’t think of one single reason to object. All I can think of is how I wish Ernest had brought more of the drug. Because where we’re going, it doesn’t seem like human power will help anymore. But then I realize, and it comes in Ernest’s voice. He speaks to me.
The blue is the drug now. And as if Russell is listening in on my mind, he says it: The blue. Let’s go.
Continued in the final book of The Rain Trilogy, The Blue
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Table of Contents
THE SNOW
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part 3
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part 4
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part 5
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
AUTHOR’S MESSAGE TO THE READER
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 23