The Dinosaur Chronicles

by Erhardt, Joseph

Fifteen minutes later, Sam hobbled from the kitchen into the bedroom, threw an overnight case onto the bed and began stuffing it with clothes and assorted objets de femme. “While I’m doing this,” she snapped, “you could salt the walk and throw out some kitty litter!”

  It was too cold for calcium chloride to do any good, but Fisher knew it was pointless to argue. He trudged out the back of the house to the storage shed and grabbed one bag of melt and another of litter. He walked around the house, avoiding another confrontation with his wife. He put extra melt on the steps and the front porch. He wanted to be sure Sam saw it. Then he worked his way toward the street, pouring out the contents of the bags.

  By the time he was done, Sam was standing at the front door with the suitcase at her side. For a moment, neither spoke. Then Sam said, “I’m not going to carry this thing myself!”

  So Fisher carried her suitcase with his right hand as he held her upright—with her grudging acceptance—with his left. If she noticed the ice melt, she didn’t show it.

  Sam dropped into the driver’s seat and Fisher stuffed the suitcase into the back. As she fished the keys from her purse, Fisher said, “Drive carefully, okay?”

  Sam looked back, and for a moment her dark eyes softened. But she put the key into the ignition, cranked the car and pulled away without a word.

  —

  Following the quake and the loss of power, the hundred-odd families of the town had borne the cold and dark for several days before taking to their cars and leaving. The Strickers had been the last to go. Fisher had coaxed Sam into staying by promising her a clutch in the town square—an encounter under the ridiculously grim, reserved statue of the founder—at high noon, in flagrante delicto.

  The coquette in Sam had laughed at the idea, and the rebel in her had embraced it.

  The ice on the walk had shattered it.

  The goddamned ice.

  Fisher clenched his fists. Anger and disappointment ran through him, and without thinking he found himself back at his shed. He picked up the snow-shovel and the axe. He wouldn’t be chopping any wood, but if he held the axe vertically, with the head down, and worked it as a pile-driver, he could crack ice on the walkway.

  He’d use the shovel to clear away the pieces.

  And for the next hour, Evan Fisher did just that. The six-foot slab of ice yielded to his anger, and the chips glistened in the sun as the snow-shovel tossed them into the bank.

  Only when he was done, standing and admiring the results of his work, did Fisher hear the ice behind him.

  Ice doesn’t sound. Ice is silent. But Fisher turned and saw a new sheet of ice inching its way across the walk, and as it moved, crystals of frozen water, forced into a motion they resented, screeched in protest.

  “Damn!” Fisher cursed, and for the second time that afternoon he moved without thinking. He took the axe and pounded the moving ice. Pieces scuttled by his boots, and the screaming of the ice grew until his ears heard nothing else.

  Fisher pounded and pounded, and chips flew left and right.

  He didn’t notice the chips accumulating around his boots until it was too late.

  Fisher tried to move. He couldn’t.

  The ice sheet had begun as a half-inch slab creeping across his walk. Now it was two inches deep and encasing his boots in a solid glassy block.

  Fisher stopped pounding the walk and began pounding on his boots. The screaming of the ice grew again, and as quickly as he cracked the ice it would seal itself.

  And each time the ice resealed, it grew just a bit taller.

  Fisher turned the axe around and swung it edge-to-boot.

  This time the crack in the ice lasted long enough for him to yank his boot up a whole inch before the ice grabbed it back. He repeated the operation on his other boot, but by then the ice had regained its loss from the first boot. Cold sweat dripped from Fisher’s brow as he switched tactics again.

  He turned the axe sideways and swung to cut the metal clasps that sealed his boots. He swung too deeply and yelped with pain. But there wasn’t time to cry or whine—he swung again.

  He strained, and his right foot, bare and bleeding, emerged from one boot.

  Like a crazy man, he danced on his bare foot to keep the ice from grabbing it, while at the same time trying to cut open his left boot. He swung and missed, putting a six-inch gash into his dancing foot. He swung again, catching several clasps, and yanked his other foot free.

  But to do so he had to keep his right foot on the ice, for leverage, and now it was frozen in the screaming white.

  Fisher made one mad pound of the axe on his gashed foot.

  Desperation and adrenalin, and the loss of several inches of skin, made his escape.

  —

  Fisher sat on his sofa and stared through the window. On the walkway, his boots, his snow-shovel and his axe lay covered in a taffy-pull of tormented ice. Nothing moved, and in the last rays of the setting sun only the stray snow-crystal twinkled to give the bleached tableau any life.

  After making it through his front door, Fisher had washed and cleansed his right foot, using nearly all the peroxide in the medicine kit. He’d screamed when the astringent hit the inches of missing skin—it was like pouring fire on a broken blister. No one heard him, however, and his male ego did not suffer.

  What did suffer was his ability to think. After bandaging his foot, he should have called for help, for while the electric was out, telephone service had survived. But he thought, What am I going to tell anyone? That ice tried to kill me?

  They’ll put me away.

  He should simply have lied. He’d had an accident with his axe. His foot was infected. Come and get him. But the benefits of constructive prevarication had not occurred to him.

  Now, as he sat watching the shadows swallow the valley, he wondered if his old pair of boots still lay in the attic, and if the right of that pair would fit his bandaged and swollen foot.

  That could wait until morning. For tonight he had enough wood for the fireplace and enough gas in the generator. He got up from the sofa and hobbled to the back door. He unlatched the wall panel housing the generator control and held down the start button until the yellow “Running” lamp stayed lit.

  Fisher switched on the kitchen light. It flickered a little but threw off the encroaching shadows. He found his laptop and plugged it into a free socket. Generator power—at least at the level of his generator—was lousy for computing equipment, but this was a matter of urgency. The cell towers were out, but his Internet provider still offered land-line service. He plugged the PC’s modem connection into the phone jack and logged on.

  For hours, Fisher searched the Internet for information about ice and ice phenomena. He learned much about many things but nothing about the one thing. Finally, around two in the morning, to the crackle of the fireplace in the living room and the hum of the generator in the back yard, he happened upon an obsolete, no-longer-supported web crawler and the query combination “earthquakes & ice.”

  The query brought up just one link. And the article had been pulled or deleted. Still, Fisher felt certain now he was not the only one ever to have experienced the phenomenon, and his evidence was a broken link, a brief description and an orphan title: Crawl Ice.

  —

  Fisher awoke as the last log in the fireplace was turning black and the first rays of the sun scratched their way across the wallpaper.

  He’d slept, fully-clothed, on the sofa in the living room, his bad foot elevated to control swelling. He hobbled to the fireplace, stoked the embers, and put on a new log. He’d pulled the breaker on the baseboard heat the day the electric went out and had become dependent on the fireplace. The generator couldn’t handle the draw of the electric heaters anyway.

  After changing his bandage, he climbed into the attic and retrieved his old boots. These zippered up the sides, but one zipper was rusted, and he couldn’t zip the one on his right boot because of his foot. But he stuffed his feet into them anyway and tied lengths
of rope around the ankle-points to keep the boots from slipping as he walked.

  Two bowls of cold cereal in rancid icy milk made him feel just a bit better, and he wondered if what had happened to him yesterday had all been a dream.

  He rose from the kitchen table, grabbed the broom from its nook behind the refrigerator, and returned to the living room.

  Cautiously he opened the front door and looked out.

  The snow-shovel, the axe and his new boots were still there, encased in white.

  Otherwise, nothing moved.

  He pulled on his jacket and stepped out three paces.

  There, he pounded the broom handle against the walk.

  Then he waited.

  For a moment, nothing stirred, and he thought—hoped—that the crawl ice had gone, gone back to whatever bizarre world had spawned it.

  But Fisher moved—moved with the first harsh squeal coming down the walk toward the door, moved so quickly the pain in his right foot was, for the moment, quite forgotten.

  And then he stood, shaking, shoulders against the inside of his front door. He covered his eyes. It won’t come here. It’s too warm. I’ve got the fire.

  Fisher dropped his hands and looked at the fireplace.

  He needed to haul in more logs. And refill the generator. Those weren’t options. Those were life-or-death necessities.

  He picked up the broom from the living room floor where he’d dropped it. Time to try the same trick out back.

  Three paces out the back door, he tapped the frozen ground with the broom handle—twice—and waited.

  Two minutes later, he gave it another two minutes.

  When those were up, he propped open the back screen door and house door and, as quietly as he could, carried several armloads of firewood into the house. Before carrying in the last load, he stopped by the generator to refill its gas tank.

  He had just closed the back door and was ready to take his first full breath when the ring of the telephone tore his last few nerves from their proper neurons, and he stumbled across a kitchen chair, knocked the telephone from its cradle on the wall of the living room, and fell to the floor as he scrambled for the handset.

  “H-H-Hello!”

  “Evan?”

  “Sam! My God, you—”

  “Oh, c’mon. You couldn’t have been in bed. Mr. Self-Reliant rises with the Farm Report.” Sam’s sassy, impudent tone was almost welcoming in its banality.

  Still, she didn’t sound completely like herself. Fisher said, “Are you okay?”

  “Dammit, Evan, we should’ve left days ago!”

  Don’t I know it.

  “The motels in Pineway are crammed,” Sam went on. “And the gas stations are sold out—otherwise I would’ve driven up to Denver. I spent the night in a 24-hour pancake house and my hair smells like fried eggs and maple syrup!”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “So I’m coming back.”

  “What!”

  “I’ve got enough gas for that. Spending a week in the boonies with you is still better than sharing a bunk at the Y. So expect me in a couple of hours.”

  “No, Sam! Don’t—”

  But she had already hung up the receiver.

  —

  Fisher watched the frozen landscape outside his front window with trepidation. Once Sam arrived in the car, he might have but a minute before the two of them had to be in the car and gone.

  After Sam’s call and a wasted moment of panic, he’d dialed the number on the phone’s caller ID screen. It was a pay phone, as he’d expected, and when a passerby finally answered, no one matching his wife’s description was nearby.

  With a two-hour arrival warning, and with Pineway only 40 minutes away at a careful 30 miles per hour, Fisher figured Sam would be going for breakfast before driving back.

  So he pulled out the area telephone directory and called every eatery open in the a.m., and some not open. With busy signals, unanswered rings and the occasional poverty-wage hash-slinger who had to be told three times that no, he wasn’t placing an order but only looking for his wife, Fisher wasted an hour trying to warn Sam off.

  After hanging up the last call, Fisher accepted the fact Sam was coming back, and he made plans for their escape.

  First, he doused the fire.

  Second, he put the few things he really needed—like a change of clothes, some underwear and a few valuables—into a backpack.

  Lastly, he sneaked out the back door and carried two full 5-gallon gasoline cans to the back porch. This was from his stock for the generator. Fisher figured ten gallons of gas would get them at least 150 miles, even with bad roads and detours.

  When Fisher saw Sam take the turn up their block, he tossed on his jacket and backpack. By the time Sam was pulling up in front of their house, he was already out the back door and lugging the two five-gallon cans in a wide arc around the house and to the road.

  And by the time Sam had climbed out of the driver’s seat, Fisher had lobbed his pack into the back seat and was emptying the first of the two five-gallon cans into the car’s tank. “Get back inside, Sam. We’re getting out of here.”

  Sam blinked. “I like your change of attitude, fella, but this kitty is changing her smelly clothes and soaking her sore leg, first!”

  “What? There’s no time. We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “And I need to go potty. You got a problem with that?”

  “Dammit, Sam, get in the passenger seat and I’ll drive. You can hang it out the window!”

  “You’re kidding, right? Just when I thought you’d come to your senses. No,” she sniffed, waving her hand. “I’m taking a break before we drive off.”

  “Sam, the crawl ice!”

  “The what?”

  “The crawl ice! It’s what made the walk ice over. It nearly got me yesterday before I realized what was going on! See my boots there in the walk? Look!”

  Sam’s eyes gazed at the walk, then back at Fisher. “You’ve been at the booze.”

  Fisher tossed the one can aside and began emptying the second. “I have not. You can check. No, you can’t check. Sam, can’t you this once take my word for it?”

  “What did you do? Break something and not want me to see it? What a lousy story! Crawl ice, ha!”

  Sam stepped past Fisher and began a slow ascent up the frozen walk.

  “Wait!” Fisher pleaded. “All right—you can rest. Let me finish emptying this can and I’ll go with you.”

  Sam stopped and looked back. Puzzlement began to replace the arrogance in her eyes. Fisher emptied the second can and closed the gas port. He took Sam by the hand and began leading her around the house.

  “Wait! What are you doing?”

  “We’re going in the back door.”

  “We are not! I’m not slogging through this snow!”

  Fisher clenched his fists. She never saw it. She doesn’t understand.

  “All right,” he said. “You are not slogging through the snow.”

  Sam screamed when he picked her up. She screamed again when he tossed her over his shoulder. She was still screaming when they finally made it in the back door.

  Fisher kicked the door shut and put Sam down. She pulled back her hand, ready to slap him, when the rage in her eyes turned into a different kind of fire.

  She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, deeply.

  She whispered, “I like a take-charge kind of guy.”

  Fisher put his arms around her waist. “Ogg the Caveman must drag his wife around more often.” Then he sobered. “But later. I’ll turn on the generator so the water heater works.”

  “And start a fire?”

  “We won’t be here that long.”

  Sam put on a fake pout. “Party-pooper.”

  Fisher had run the generator the night before, so the water in the hot-water heater wasn’t stone cold. Still, it took an hour before the water was warm enough to steam up the bathroom, now the only room in the house where taking off clothes did
n’t result in nibs of goose flesh.

  At thirty-two, Sam still cut a striking figure, and Fisher invited himself and two glasses of Chianti into the bathroom with her as Sam soaked in the tub.

  “Why,” Fisher asked, handing her her glass, “do you have to be so damned stubborn?”

  Sam took the wine, sipped and twinkled her eyes. “You’d be bored to death if I weren’t.”

  Despite the raw skin on his right foot, Fisher took off his clothes and joined her in the tub. Half an hour later, they stood and rinsed in the shower, letting the soon-cooling water run over their bodies. The demand was outrunning the heater’s ability to keep up, so Fisher turned off the water and held her close. The moment was too perfect, the temptation too great. They spent another half hour in the bathroom, generating their own heat.

  Afterward, Sam put on the fresh change of clothes she had brought into the bathroom with her. Fisher had brought nothing fresh but the wine, however, and so hopped through the 40-degree house to their bedroom, where he slapped on icy underwear and stuffed his limbs into the first shirt and pants he could find.

  When he exited the bedroom, he found Sam standing in front of the living room window, looking out into the snow, with a pale expression on her face and her lips open in disbelief.

  The sun shone brightly, and nary a cloud marred the perfect mountain sky. Yet out at the roadway, shimmering in a glaze inches thick, their car sat, completely iced-over.

  —

  They stared at the scene for a long, long minute. Their car, edges smoothed by the taffied ice, looked like an ice sculpture from an era when cars ruled the road as slick, streamlined behemoths.

  Fisher put his arm on Sam’s shoulder. “It’s time to call for help.”

  She turned to him. “And say what? An ice monster has us stranded?”

  “Some ‘vandal’ has disabled our car. The authorities won’t like it, but they’ll send someone to help us.”

  “All right. Hey! Quit pushing—”

  They staggered. Glass rattled and a lamp tipped over. They made for the wall and held on until the shaking stopped. Sam gasped, “My God, that was as bad as the original quake!”

  “Or even worse,” Fisher said. He’d noticed a few small aftershocks over the past several days, but nothing to compare to the last. “All right. It’s done. Let me ...” Fisher’s gut twinged as a thought ran through him, and he cut himself off. He rushed to the telephone and picked up the receiver.