The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  His plan was to get down to the frozen gravel, where he could plant the foot of his rescue jack on something solid. With the back bumper braced, he could excavate the rear wheels and get his sand ladders wedged underneath to bridge the soft snow. Because the truck sat on a slope, it would want to slide backward, so he’d almost certainly have to jack it up a few times. It would be a long night, but with a solid platform under the tires, he could coax the truck out of the drift and onto flat ground, where he’d work his way across the lumpy, barren snowscape until he found a place to get back on the raised road.

  It would be a lot easier if he could use the winch, he thought. But there was nowhere to attach the hook. No trees, no rocks big enough to stay put. No other truck to use as an anchor.

  The thought of another vehicle made him automatically glance up to the road. He didn’t want to see one. He doubted that the men inside would be there to help. Thankfully, the road was dark and empty. He shook his head at the idea that being alone in this situation, with the snow eating his car and the wind stealing his heat, was the better option.

  Well, hell. He’d dug his share of Humvees out of the sand using these same tools and techniques. He could do this.

  Then the engine coughed.

  Peter knew he still had plenty of gas. The angle of incline wouldn’t be a problem, not for a Land Rover. What would make the engine run rough? Then he realized that the backward slide had probably packed the truck’s tailpipe with snow. If the engine couldn’t expel the exhaust and bring in new combustion air, it would die. Without that big diesel power plant, things would get a lot colder. He attacked with the shovel, trying to get down below the bumper.

  The blade was too wide for this thick, dense drift. He tried to take small bites, but it was taking too long. He should have bought a regular mason’s spade instead of trusting this fat scoop. The engine’s cough got worse. Trying to take a bigger bite, he felt the telltale crack through his gloves as he overleveraged the fiberglass handle. Fuck. No amount of duct tape would make it strong again. He snapped the handle against his knee, dropped into the hole with the naked blade in both hands, and kept working.

  It was a calculated risk. If the truck settled abruptly, he could get pinned, and the cold would kill him. But if the engine died and he couldn’t restart it, he’d almost certainly be dead anyway. At least hypothermia was a peaceful way to go. He dug harder.

  He finally found the tailpipe just under the left bumper. Totally clogged. The engine was gasping now, unable to bring in combustion air, smothering on its own trapped exhaust. He banged the pipe with the bent shovel blade, hoping the hot metal of the tailpipe had partially melted the plug and the snow would slide out. The snow didn’t move. He needed some kind of ice pick.

  He grabbed the shovel handle and worked the sharp end into the pipe, trying to clear as much as he could. The handle was too thick, and only packed the snow in tighter. Now the engine began to truly choke. It needed an emergency tracheotomy. He leaped out of the hole, pulled open the truck’s rear door, and fumbled inside for a telescoping hiking pole and pulled it apart. The sections were hollow. He jammed the largest section into the packed pipe and pulled it out, filled with snow. He got a gasp of exhaust through the small open core. The engine didn’t die.

  He whacked the pole section against the truck, knocking it clean, then jabbed it into the tailpipe in a new place, expanding the airway. The engine still wasn’t happy, but it was catching again. He made two more holes before he’d gotten enough free space that the rest of the snow would slide out. The Defender let out a noxious cloud, then settled into its regular cheerful rumble.

  Peter knelt in the snow, wiped out by the effort. He hadn’t even truly started digging himself free. His face was freezing and the rest of him was soaked in sweat and snowmelt. He really missed the mechanic’s yellow jacket. He needed to get into better clothes. When he got to Akureyri, he’d gear up again.

  Clearly, he hadn’t been paying Iceland the proper respect.

  It wasn’t just Bjarni and the enormous uncles that Peter had to worry about.

  Turned out, Iceland was trying to kill him, too.

  * * *

  —

  He climbed into the Defender to grab the E-tool he’d taken from Bjarni. When he climbed back out, he found that the storm had somehow found a new gear. The snow came faster. The wind blew harder. Its wild, unearthly cry was unlike anything Peter had ever heard. A screaming choir of demon sopranos who couldn’t carry a tune.

  He jumped back in the hole and began to dig again, working to clear the drift from under the car and behind it. The roaring snow stung his eyes and face, and the whiteout hid everything outside the reach of his hands. He quickly realized that, while the folding shovel was tough enough to take any punishment Peter could dish out, he wasn’t making much progress. The blade was barely larger than Peter’s cupped hands, and fresh snow blew into the hole almost as fast as he could take it out. He couldn’t get ahead of this storm, not for long. He was going to have to stop for food and sleep. His swollen eye ached in the cold. His head pounded. The vodka bottle’s divot felt hot.

  Breathing hard, he leaned against the drift and watched the hole he’d made fill again.

  He had enough food and gas to stay fed and warm for a few days. Eventually the plow driver would pass through again and either stop to help or call one of Iceland’s famous volunteer rescue crews.

  Unless the uncles showed up first.

  He jammed the broken shovel blade into the snow to act as a windbreak for the exhaust, packed the rest of his tools in the truck, then climbed the icy slope to the driver’s seat, where he turned the heat up as high as it would go. He stripped off his wet things and hung them over the passenger seat to dry. Shivering in the cold, he pulled on fresh long underwear and laid out his sleeping bag in the tilted back. He wouldn’t be comfortable, but he’d survive. The storm couldn’t last forever.

  The wind was so loud it was like standing inside a cymbal’s crash. He’d never sleep in all that noise. The only thing he could see outside was swirling snow. He might as well be locked in a small, white room. The only thing missing was the padded walls. The static rose, sending sparks up his brainstem as it complained about the enclosure.

  “What,” he said aloud. “You’d rather be outside in that miserable weather?”

  As if in response, the static crackled higher, jabbing electric tendrils into his brain. Despite the cold, Peter began to sweat again.

  “I thought you were supposed to be watching my back,” he said. “Now you’re just trying to get me killed.”

  Great, he thought. He was talking to himself.

  If he couldn’t get the truck dug out of there, it was going to be a long few days. Just him and his broken brain and the white static screaming like a banshee.

  He was pouring sweat but couldn’t stop shivering. He dug for warm socks and discovered the handful of little packets he’d taken from Bjarni, the same shit Bjarni had dumped into Peter’s beer.

  Why had Peter taken the packets? He was a beer and bourbon guy. He didn’t even smoke pot. But he’d liked that MDMA. He understood why it was called Ecstasy. He’d felt connected to every other person in that place.

  It had also damped down the static in the club.

  He sure wouldn’t mind feeling like that again. Even if there was nobody here.

  It would be dumb as hell to take one of those packets now, right? Stuck in the snow in the middle of nowhere? He wasn’t that desperate. He wasn’t.

  He told himself this while the inside of the truck got smaller and smaller. First a psych ward, then a detention cell, then a coffin. The glass had fogged from his panic sweat and wet clothes. He cracked a window to vent the moisture but felt the temperature plummet and rolled it back up. The static rose higher. He reached for the door handle and had to invent reasons not to pull it. As if the killing weather w
asn’t enough.

  The static’s electric roar grew louder than the wind.

  Fuck it. The club drug wasn’t Peter’s only option.

  He riffled through his groceries and found the small bottle of Reyka vodka he’d bought. He cracked the seal and washed down four Valium from his dwindling stash.

  Only four pills left.

  He needed sleep without dreams.

  Just a few hours of peace, that’s all he wanted.

  38

  He dreamed anyway.

  The dusty street in Baghdad, so real he could smell his own rank sweat and the acrid stink of spent gunpowder, could feel the road grit under his bootsoles. The dead stared back at him. His heart racketed in his chest.

  He woke shivering in the early morning, aware of some change in his environment. It took him a moment to realize that, aside from the bass rumble of the engine, the world outside was silent and echoing in his ears.

  The wind had died. His clothes had dried. The windows had unfogged and he could see outside again.

  The sun was nowhere in sight, but the night was strangely bright. The snow glowed as if lit from beneath. The clouds had washed away and a billion glittering stars shone in the sky. On the other side of the windshield, a shimmering green curtain stretched across the northern horizon.

  He pulled on clothes and boots, checked the gas gauge, and climbed out into the still, frozen night.

  The air was crystalline, as if there were no atmosphere. The milky spray of stars and the electric waves of the northern lights felt close enough to touch. Low, dark mountains wrapped the rim of the plain, making a jagged line against the sky like torn edges of the world. As if this small, high place had somehow ripped away from everything solid to rise into the sky and float unknown and aching through the universe, utterly empty but for Peter.

  It was profoundly cold, and getting colder by the minute. His stomach trembled, and his limbs shivered uncontrollably. His nostrils froze shut with each inhalation of breath. His eyeballs hurt, leaking tears that turned to ice on his lashes. Every bit of exposed skin felt scraped raw.

  He had to get the fuck out of this place.

  Back in the tilted truck, his skin burned as the cells thawed. Needing calories to burn for heat, he stuffed himself with bread and cheese and chocolate while he ransacked the car for the warmest clothes he could find. No coat worth a damn, but yesterday’s fleece had dried. He layered up like a polar explorer. When he pulled on his hat, he felt a wet spot on the back of his head.

  He touched it with his fingers. The wounded skin was spongy and weeping, definitely infected. He needed antibiotics. No wonder his head hurt.

  Fucking Vikings.

  They’d probably stopped to wait out the storm, too. With the change in weather, they’d get back on the road. They’d keep coming. Peter didn’t blame them. It’s what he would do, too.

  He climbed back outside, filled his gas tank from the jerry cans on the roof, and began to dig.

  He made it down to solid ground to set the jack and stabilize the truck, then started excavating the rear tires. He laid the sand ladders behind them and reversed the truck six feet to the edges of the ladders while the front tires sunk into the snow. Then he jacked up the rear bumper and moved the ladders and did it again. And again. Six feet at a time. Hoping with each iteration that the wide tires would finally float the truck over the snow and he could drive himself free. But the Defender was heavy, built for a beating. It sank every time.

  He’d managed to move the truck forty-two feet, maybe a hundred more to go, when he heard the sound of a diesel engine on the road at his back.

  He climbed up the drift to look, hoping for the snowplow.

  Instead he saw a pale SUV, slowing to a stop on the highway. Was it silver? It looked just like the Mitsubishi he’d rented and abandoned in Reykjavík. It came from the southeast, just like Peter.

  This was as good a place as any, he thought. Out in the open, the odds were better than on the pier with the killing ocean right there. Peter’s arms were tired, but he was fed and warm and dressed for action. He took the fish gaff from the back of the Defender, glad of its weight in his hand, and waited.

  The door opened on the SUV. A figure got out and looked at Peter over the roof of the car. Either he was very large, or he was standing on the running board.

  Then the figure gave a big wave and stepped down to the road. He still looked large, but it might have been the puffy white coat he wore, with the deep, fur-trimmed hood that hid his face. Avoiding the skating rink pretending to be a parking lot, the figure walked nimbly down the embankment and across the rocky white plain. As he came closer, he threw back the hood.

  It was Seamus, the Irishman, his black hair and unshaven face dark against the clean, bright snow, his breath steaming like a dragon’s. He nodded at the fish gaff in Peter’s hand. “Are ye catching any?”

  Peter stepped forward to shake his hand. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  * * *

  —

  The Irishman was good in the snow. He drove his pale rental SUV another quarter mile down the highway until he found a place where the land rose and the embankment was slightly less steep. He angled down the crusted verge, slowly but in total control, as if driving to the store on a fine spring day. On the wind-scraped plain below, where the snow was only a few inches deep, he navigated the scattered rocks and uneven ground to the deep drift where the Defender sat idling.

  After that, it was a simple matter to hook the Mitsubishi’s winch cable to a tow hook bolted to the Land Rover’s bumper. Peter laid the sand ladders ahead of his tires and put the gearbox in low. With the winch helping, it didn’t take long to haul Peter’s truck out of the drift. Peter followed the big Mitsubishi on the same wandering track back to the highway.

  They made it up the embankment without trouble and stopped on the road. Seamus stepped out into the killing cold. Peter did the same, looking over his shoulder at the highway stretching back across the rim of the plain. He’d lost sixteen hours to that snowdrift. The wind had scoured the pavement clean.

  Despite the temperature, Seamus stood with his puffy white coat unzipped, showing the black wool sweater and jeans beneath. He took a silver flask from his hip pocket, took a sip, then held it out. “Care for a drop?”

  It was barely eight in the morning. Peter shook his head. “Where’d you learn to drive like that? You don’t get this kind of snow in Ireland.”

  The Irishman took another sip. “I’ve been all over, lad. You pick up a few things along the way.”

  Peter was tempted to pull out his stove and make coffee, but he didn’t want to linger. “That storm’s not done with us. Let’s keep moving.”

  “Agreed.” Seamus climbed back into the pale SUV and roared off.

  Closing the distance, Peter saw the Mitsubishi’s license plates.

  They were from Great Britain, not Iceland.

  Which meant the Irishman’s milk-white SUV wasn’t a rental after all.

  39

  The sun rose low in the light blue sky as they dropped down from the high plateau. Ahead and behind, the cliffs stood caked in wind-sculpted white as if frosted by the world’s largest spatula. Seamus drove more slowly than Peter would have liked, but the road was unplowed since the day before and Peter didn’t mind keeping the Mitsubishi where he could see it. By early afternoon they’d passed through Reykjahlid, a tiny town still mostly buried in snow, and curved north around Mývatn Lake, shining like a tarnished silver plate.

  The Mitsubishi looked strange through Peter’s windshield, and he couldn’t figure out why. For some reason, it reminded him of a three-legged dog the platoon had briefly adopted at a combat outpost along the Pakistani border. The dog had run with its hips slightly out of line with its shoulders, as if whatever event had taken its back leg had also somehow bent the entire animal at a slight angle on
ly detectable at speed.

  The sun was long gone by the time they saw Akureyri, Iceland’s second-largest city, climbing the hills across the dark fjord. After three days in the wilderness, the bright-windowed buildings and the cruise ship strung with Christmas lights seemed like something out of a dream. Or maybe it was Peter. He had the Defender’s heat turned off, but he was still sweating. It was midafternoon but it felt like midnight.

  At the end of a long causeway where the river drained into the sea, they came to an N1 station with a few cars filling up before the storm returned. Peter tapped his horn and flashed his lights. Seamus turned off the road and stopped at an open pump. Peter looped around to the far side of the island. Diesel gurgled through the hoses, its fumes sweet in the thin, cold air.

  Peter looked across the pumps at the Mitsubishi. He still couldn’t figure out what was strange about it. It looked normal enough from the side. Seamus had his door open, head down, collecting food wrappers and crushed coffee cups for the trash. Peter walked around for a better view.

  The Mitsubishi wasn’t a camper conversion like Peter had rented, just a regular SUV with three rows of seats. He glanced down at the front passenger tire. It was worn unevenly, the tread almost gone on the outer edge. Which meant the front end was badly out of alignment. Which in turn might be why the vehicle looked somehow off, the front end rolling slightly out of line from the back. Like a three-legged dog.

  He ran his bare hand along the passenger side fender. Instead of a smooth clean curve, he felt the telltale ripples of a hurried repair. If he knocked on it, he knew he’d hear the dull thud of two-part epoxy rather than the metallic clang of sheet metal.

  Peter looked closer at the milk-white paint. It wasn’t opaque, but translucent. A cheap spray job, not a factory finish. Along the inside of the open door, he could see the original color. Silver.

  On the driver’s side, Seamus straightened up with his hands full and saw Peter standing there. “I believe we’re due a meal, lad. I’m thinking whiskey and red meat.” He was slim and pale inside his open coat.