A Great Tribulation
Page 7
He was still speaking when bangs of gunshots tore through the air—not from the walkie-talkie this time—from the frozen lake.
CHAPTER XI
By the time Eustace and company arrived the cabin, the once thought lessening condition was worsening into a whiteout. They could barely see five feet in front of them.
While Eustace went in to get the tools he needed, Michael and Caroline remained by the snowmobiles to keep the engine going. The last thing they wanted was a breakdown in these extreme conditions.
“Are you are all right?” Michael asked of Caroline who's only visible parts were her uniquely blue eyes under her heavy layers for the weather as he was.
She shook her head without a word as usual. Since meeting the Grimes, he wasn't sure if he'd shared five-words worth a sentence in conversation or one worth as such in reply from Caroline. She was friends with Keira, but Keira was the one doing most of the talking most times. Not that he cared—she wasn't even his type. She was too blond and too hippie. Her hippie wasn't even the modern hippie; it was sixties hippie with Amish aesthetics. If not for Keira, Caroline's hair would have remained the tangled mess it once was when they first met. He didn't think she cared much for him either. She was always looking away from him. Although he sometimes felt a beacon of furtive looks favoring his way from her or maybe it was his imagination. He thought about it for a moment and found himself favoring the latter.
Just then Eustace came hobbling—favoring his right knee—with a tool box in hand.
“The dang cold!” made his bones hurt. “Go get the rest of the equipment youse twos. They are in front of the cabin. I'll keep the machines running.”
And off they were pacing back and forth as they loaded the snowmobile drawn cart. Michael was so excited he almost tripped if not for Caroline holding him back. They were on their last trip when something about Eustace's countenance changed.
“Don't look. Get on. Now!” Eustace called.
Michael didn't understand until he made the classic mistake of looking back and he saw...
Bloodcurdling canines glaring. Gray wolves emerging from the white.
He did as he was told, hitting the gas, he sped past Eustace and Caroline who were both sharing a snowmobile. He was out of sight or so he thought. After only a mile of running—into what he suspected was a frozen lake, Michael heard his machine puff and puff before going cold under him.
He smacked the engine compartment, trying to restart it, but he was answered with clicks. He was still in delirium when he heard Eustace and Caroline revving up. He raised his hand to stop them, but they shot past him like a bullet. They mustn't have seen him from their speed. Hopefully, they would come around when...
He heard a growl. He looked behind to a rude awakening.
A wolf.
His troubles were only beginning he realized. At first, he saw the one—a dark one— emerging closer and closer to the realization that the other wolves were circling behind him.
“Heavens,” he breathed, stumbling for his rifle. Dread washed over him with a measure of surprising calm. He had to be “calm” he reminded himself as he kept his eyes fixed on the rather larger alpha that was slowly stalking for him. The beast seemed to be shrewdly assessing him, trying to find a weakness and calculating the right moment to swoop in.
Michael wasn't going to wait for that moment. He cocked the rifle when he heard a snarl and felt a smack across the face from nowhere. He was knocked off the snowmobile to the ice making him shoot aimlessly. A heard groaning whine as a snowy, furry mass followed him to the ground, causing the ice to crack beneath him. There was blood.
His?
The wolf on top of him?
Or a combination?
He was unsure.
The dark wolf was clearly a distraction, he realized as he crashed through the ice to the icy waters beneath. He was in the figurative 'between a rock and a hard place'—death by drowning in frigid waters or ravaged by savage wolves...
“Golly! I think that was Michael,” Eustace screamed at the top of his voice over the loud chattering of his snowmobile. “Hang on.”
Caroline held on to his father as he spun the snowmobile.
“Ready the rifle,” he told her.
The sight that greeted them was nightmarish. Michael was no longer on his snowmobile and surrounded by wolves. There had to be a dozen of them.
“God, no! Shoot in the air.”
She did just so, shooting several warning shots, and the wolves scattered in all directions, safe for one, lying lifeless on the ground beside a massive crack in the ice...
There was blood.
There was a hand barely holding out of the water.
Michael's hand.
Stopping at a safe distance with the engine still running, Eustace jumped from the snowmobile, skidding towards the crack in the ice. He reached for the hand. Miraculously, there was a response as Michael's hand gripped his. Eustace pulled, hoping this wouldn't be both their demise in the instance of both of them falling into the ice.
“Michael?” he called to the pale, stiff body he'd pulled from the ice. When there was no response, he dragged him towards the snowmobile and placed him awkwardly on the cart, driving from the cracking ice to safety.
“Don't you give out on me, son!” Eustace cried.
Eustace hit the gas, but not so much—with experience—to prevent the snowmobile from giving out on him like Michael's did. That would be a double-whammy.
The wind was picking up, swirling the fallen snow in every direction, further compromising visibility. He sensed they'd made it out of the lake when he began hitting slight, uneven bumps. In the haste to get away, they'd lost the path they came on. Had he known the conditions were going to worsen after the respite they thought was going to last, he wouldn't have made them come. Now he was going to lose a good young man.
They were in the clear he thought when he spotted a figure ahead. He hit the breaks. It might be a helpful encounter he thought—two figures actually. Then a third. That was odd. It was usually one person per eight miles in these parts...
“Who is it!?” boomed a distinctive, loud voice he would never forget and vehemently never wanted to hear.
Jud.
Eustace cursed. What were the odds? He made an about-face, speeding away.
An uproar of voices called after them:
“Hey!”
“You there!”
Eustace looked back to make sure all his life cargo was still intact. Caroline was holding on to him for dear life. Parts of Michael's unmoving body was sporadically hitting the ground as they revved away. He had to think fast...
The cabin.
Eustace hightailed for the lake, and across for the cabin, hoping the wolves would have skedaddled far by now, safe for the one lying lifeless on the ice. Their fate was hanging in a balance between two distinct groups of beasts. If he had to re-do this whole ordeal, he would have remained at Turtle Island, despite the cold. Better yet: kill this beast-of-men when he had the chance.
Poor Michael.
Conceivably, the young man was still hanging on to life. The cold and ice must have stunned his body into shock.
They were at the cabin. He almost missed it. Hopefully, their pursuers would.
“Check if he's breathing,” Eustace said as he dismounted from the snowmobile.
Caroline shook her head with an affirmative “yes,” after checking.
“Good,” he inhaled with relief. “He needs some heat. Help me get him to the cabin. Quickly.”
They both pulled him by the arm and legs for the cabin until Eustace thought better of it— “to the shed.” The shed was a little hidden and virtually obscure in the white-out condition compared to the main cabin to a foreign eye.
And for insurance, he was going to distract their pursuers from the cabin. “Start a fire to warm him. I'll be back.”
Caroline was saying something, but he didn't have the luxury of another second to answer her.
She had to do something.
She was so scared; her heart was racing.
Catching her breath, she ran through the shed looking for a heat source: a lighter, a matchstick, wood, paper, something to start a fire with.
Anything.
“Please don't die on me, Michael.”
Caroline was disoriented and out of ideas as she stood in the fairly dark space. By chance, she stumbled on what felt like a pelt. She took hold of it and draped it over him. After which, she felt around the shed for whatever she could find to help. There were so many woodworks, she tripped over one. She remained still on the ground where she fell, more out of fluster than pain.
It was getting colder as the wind whipped around the shed threateningly, some of the air penetrating into the shed through the slits between the split logs that held the structure. She needed cover as well and soon, but Michael needed it more.
She went to his side once more to check for signs.
Caroline inhaled sharply. His breathing was shallow.
If only there was a way both their needs for warmth could be reached. Then it came to her: the caught in a snow storm cliché.
“This better work,” she prayed, removing her clothing to her underpants, improvising them as blankets for insulation from the cold ground.
God! It was chilling.
She removed Michael's wet clothes—something she should have done much earlier—stripping him down to nothing. She tried not to look, but she was alarmed at what she saw. The bottom dropped out of Caroline's stomach. He was much paler than she thought as suggested by his bereft torso that was quite flat and outlined with not-so-solid slabs of muscles of an average body.
Caroline allowed him his shorts—not just for his dignity—but for the fear of what might meet her eyes. However, she was as naked as the day she was born when she lay on him, covering him and herself in the pelt. To secure the warmth she rolled within the pelt until she was back on top of him and nestled in as if in a tortilla wrap.
At first, it remained cold and uncomfortable before gradually becoming cozier. His body beneath her was just right—finding a sweet spot between soft and firm. Something was happening though, she was unsure what it was. It was as if all the furtiveness and hauteur between them had somehow disappeared, leaving them to their primality as boy and girl. Not the decency of morality or the formality of dignity. For a moment it didn't seem as though any of all that mattered. This was someone she could care about. They had to survive.
Somewhere in the oddity of the moment, she found herself breaking into a smile. What if her father walked in and found them like this?
Eustace had been leading Jud and his hooligans on a wild goose chase around the cabin area for hours. It was getting dark. He tried not going too close to the cabin so they wouldn't spot it or strain too far from the cabin, perhaps he would get lost in the whiteout and pray not run out of gas too far-out from shelter. He was running on empty the last time he checked. Any time now the engine would go puff.
He stopped the engine momentarily, wiping his mouth and beard that had become frosty with ice. And blowing into his palm through the gloves for warmth he listened for anything as he did. All that was to be heard was the whipping of the peaking wind. He must have lost them.
Or were they onto him?
The thought struck him with terror. He turned on the engine, speeding for the cabin, praying as he did. When he arrived the cabin, the sight that greeted him was well, just “great,” he said with an ironic note. “Beasts.”
It wasn't Jud and his lot this time, but wolves. The wolves were back. Though it might as well have being them—they were both a cruel and rapacious bunch.
Eustace wasn't sure if this was the same pack from earlier. There seemed to be more of them, he noticed as the sound of his snowmobile pulling up drew their attention from their sniffing around the cabin structures. They all seemed to be converging on the shed Caroline and Michael were.
Wolves had thrived in the Rockies for thousands of years and were by all standards wild and shy of humans until dying out. And subsequent re-introduction of the Gray wolves in the 1990s that had now grown into the thousands. Some generations of these retro wolves were yet to be shot at for the past hundred years, making them less afraid of people. There were rumors of wolves stalking and killing people. He wasn't sure how true, but he wasn't interested in checking the facts either. He wasn't going to be a statistic of nature.
He took out his rifle to shoot, but when he pulled the trigger, the weapon jammed. He smacked the rifle and tried again, but the only replies were the wolves snarling at him as if in a mischievous grunt at his misfortune. They were all singling in on him now. At the first pounce of one of the wolves, Eustace was about face, cowering. Wolves were practiced killers—killing machines—with a bite force enough to snap a bone in two. And they had a keenness for larger preys—Gray wolves, especially. Eustace wasn't so sure if he would measure up to a standoff in these extreme condition that was gravy to the Gray wolves. His bad knee wasn't for comfort either.
Some distance up his fleeing path, Eustace began noticing the outlines of figures in the snow, just when his snowmobile began to puff and huff under him before coming to a full stop. He didn't have to check; he was out of gas.
The figures in front of him began to steer towards his direction. He could feel their stares on him. Then came that blasted voice that had kept on giving more gifts of grief than his rodeo aggravated knees and all the pains of his life combined...
“Who goes there!?”
Eustace remained silent. At that moment Eustace realized he was caught between the hammer and the anvil as he approached the taunting voice. His senses buzzing as he felt the wolves getting closer and closer to him. He'd made up his mind. The natural affiliation of the hammer and anvil must occur, and he was going to be that catalyst to attract both elements to smithereens.
He could hear the wolves now, snarling as they came behind him.
His fists clenched, a hunting knife in one as he fumed forward on foot, veins bulging at his brow, and his eyes ablaze like the pits of hell. Jud was his. He had no life to go back to without his wife and God forbid his only daughter. For innocent Caroline and her likes, he would gladly sacrifice himself for a world without the likes of Jud, he thought as he mentally recited his favorite Shakespeare:
Once more unto the breach...
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of terror blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage...
Set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide...
Follow your spirit...
CHAPTER XII
It was cold and still the dark of dawn.
Rafel looked up from the creek before him to the ten-foot high privacy brick fence—encasing the Chamberlain Golf Resort—across the breadth of the snaking creek. His mission, for now, was to swim across the mile-wide creek and through a channel underneath the walls to the man-made lake within the golf course. Where he would take up a sniper position and await further instructions on his unknown target. He still had about an hour of darkness to his advantage.
He stripped to his dry-diving-suit, putting on his goggles, he took a deep breath and plunged in.
The initial jarring impact of the dive was always the worst. The sharp blast of the cold that forced a reflexive gasp from his lungs, numbing his body as an overwhelming chill penetrated his bones, and the lethargy that brought his insides to a crawl. Hi
s backpack and armor didn't help either.
Once the shock of the first few seconds of the plunge into the icy cold creek dulled, he began to swim—his mental toughness triumphing over the temperature. He focused on his strokes, breathing, pacing and the mission ahead.
Minutes later, Rafel gazed up at the walls of the golf course that now appeared to be towering because of the mound the walls were rooted in. Somewhere down the mound submerged in the water was a little channel that carried water into the lake in the resort. Taking a deep breath, he sank into the blackness once more—that was no more than eight feet deep at this point—and within seconds he was at the bottom. Devoid of light and sight from the darkness, he used his hand to feel his way through the bottom until he found the channel. He barely fitted through it as he forced his way through until he found open waters again—the lake—surfacing stealthily.
The swim and cold water had sapped his strength, but as Rafel hoisted himself out of the water and onto the clearing, his blood stoked with a renewed burst of energy. He scoped his surroundings to find a good skulking position. Despite the blast of cold air like shards of glass prickling his skin, a warm smile crossed his lips when he found a spot.
“The president and the first lady is going to be here!” Addi said in shock to Fred, as their vehicle arrived the Chamberlain Golf Resort that afternoon.
“of course.”
“And you didn't tell me?”
“I knew about the retreat, but I didn't find out about the location until this morning. Besides, you can't blame them for withholding information like that until the last minute. It's for our security,” Fred said.
“Hmmm.”
“You never know who a cheating wife might be trysting with.”
“What!?”
Fred laughed. “Relax, you not getting some from me, you have to get it from somewhere...Heavens know I am.”
Addi was appalled—the truth of the matter stung even more—but she kept her composure, remaining silent.
“The girl told me...she expressed her suspensions about the gardener.”