by Ray Gorham
The scale of the map in the atlas he carried had made it seem like Wyoming would be a quick conquest compared to Colorado, and he hadn’t given the difficulty involved in crossing it much thought, especially since he was more focused on the four hundred and fifty miles ahead of him in Montana. His Initial estimate for crossing Wyoming had been that it would be a fourteen-day trek, but he was on day fifteen now and figured he still had a good week to go. Kyle also knew from the map that the elevation was increasing, and after each day’s pulling, the sore muscles in his legs and the tightness in his chest from the thin air reaffirmed that knowledge.
As he looked around, Kyle noticed a threatening wall of purple-gray clouds to the west rolling slowly towards him. The wind had also begun to pick up in the last hour, slowing his progress and peppering him with a sandy grit that found its way under his clothes and into his mouth, and eyes, and ears. After two weeks of Wyoming, he was tired of the conditions and anxious to have the state behind him.
A number of semis had come to rest at the bottom of the hill, and he took shelter from the wind between them while he rested and drank some water, all the while eying the hill that loomed ahead. He put on another shirt as a shield against the cold, then continued on, anxious to cover a few more miles before stopping for the day.
The grade of the hill was steep and seemed to go on for miles, making it one of the hardest he had tackled to date. He lost his footing on the grit-covered road three times, nearly losing control of his cart, but each time, he managed to hold on and avoid catastrophe, finally, two hours after he began its ascent, he conquered the hill.
The ground leveled out at the top and Kyle dropped to his knees, exhausted, legs feeling like Jell-o and his lungs raw from sucking in the cold thin air, which had developed an icy chill as he’d climbed. The wall of clouds he’d seen earlier was much closer and even more ominous than before, promising a change from the mild autumn weather he’d been enjoying over the past few weeks to the first blast of winter. Watching the front move in, Kyle knew his streak of good fortune was about to come to an end, a thought that greatly alarmed him, especially considering how far he still had to travel. As the storm approached, streaks of rain glowed in the mid-afternoon sun just a few miles west of where he sat.
Kyle climbed wearily to his feet, grabbed the handle of his cart, and after a long, deep breath, resumed pulling. The stretch of highway he was on seemed unusually barren, with fewer vehicles, no houses, and a complete absence of fellow travelers. A few miles ahead, Kyle could see a semi that he hoped would provide good shelter from the bad weather. There were a few smaller cars and a pickup closer, but past experience had proven that they would be too small and uncomfortable to wait out a storm, especially if it lasted more than a few hours. He scanned the horizon and spotted a couple of homes off in the distance, set back off the road, but there was no guarantee that the people, if there were any there, would be willing to help him.
The wind blew harder, and the temperature seemed to drop with each fresh gust. About a mile from the semi, Kyle felt the first hints of rain, tiny drops that stung his cheeks in the driving wind.
By the time Kyle reached the semi, he was in the middle of a driving rain, and his clothes were soaked completely through. Cold and shivering, his only thought was to get somewhere dry and out of the wind. The word “DEAD” was scrawled in large red letters on the driver’s side door of the cab and struck Kyle as unusual, but he was too cold to care what it meant. After quickly parking his cart under the trailer, he hurried back to the cab.
The door was locked, but the triangle window had been broken out, making it easy for Kyle to stick his arm through and pop the lock. Hurrying to escape the deluge, Kyle tugged the door open just as another gust of wind whipped up, catching the door and ripping it from his hand and knocking him from the step. He quickly recovered and climbed inside, then had to fight against the wind to get the door pulled shut behind him. Kyle was leaning back in the seat, shivering and wet, when an overwhelming feeling of nausea swept over him.
He twisted to the side and vomited onto the floor between the seats. Another heave wracked his body as he braced himself on the passenger seat for support. He took a deep breath and become instantly aware of a sickening smell and an unfamiliar buzzing sound. With a quick glance around the back of the cab, Kyle spotted a cloud of flies swarming over a dark object on the bottom bunk. Covering his mouth and nose, Kyle sat back up, fighting the urge to vomit again.
With his arms braced on each of the seats, Kyle avoided his pool of vomit and stepped between the front seats towards the back. With his second step, he froze in his tracks. What had at first looked like a dead dog lying on the bed was instead a human corpse, gazing up through eye sockets filled with writhing maggots, its skin blistered, wrinkled and raw, and swarming with flies. He dropped to his knees and vomited again, heaving so violently that the bitter bile drained out of his nose. As he gasped for air, flies swarmed around the fresh, steaming vomit and up into his mouth. Doubled over, Kyle coughed and swatted at the flies, and felt his hand brush against a cold, meaty object. Revolted, he turned and saw an arm hanging from the bunk, its shriveled flesh hanging from the bone, the fingers resting in a dark, fly-covered stain on the carpet. Kyle’s own hand seemed to burn from the contact with the decomposing flesh, and he wiped it feverishly on the back of the front seat.
Pulling himself to his feet, Kyle lunged for the door, rushing to escape the unexpected sepulcher before another bout of vomiting commenced. Desperate to get out, he fumbled with the door handle, opened it, then dove through the opening and crashed roughly onto the wet pavement. Dazed and ill, Kyle lifted himself onto his knees and crawled through the rain towards the back of the truck, heaving twice more along the way.
Huddled behind his cart, Kyle shielded himself as best he could from the bitter wind that whistled around him. Unable to purge from his senses the smells and images from inside the truck, he sat for a long time, vomiting until there was nothing left in his stomach but a clear, bitter liquid that burned his sinuses and hung in strands from his nose and lips. He had seen more dead people during the past seven weeks than in his previous thirty-seven years, but nothing to this point in his life had prepared him for this ghastly experience.
In the time since he’d arrived at the semi, the rain had turned to sleet, and then to snow, and now the air was filled with thick, heavy flakes that fell more sideways than down and accumulated in the grass along the edge of the road in fluffy piles and in a thin, slushy layer on the road.
The wind had shifted from the west and was now blowing in hard from the north, biting sharply through Kyle’s wet clothing. He pulled out his bag of clothes and dumped the contents in front of him on the cart, searching for something to replace his drenched clothing that was providing little protection. The shirts left in his bag were wet in patches from where water had leaked into his duffle bag, but were drier than what he wore. He stripped off his shirts and put on the dry ones, along with his thin, cotton jacket, all the while wishing he’d been able to find a heavy coat somewhere along the way.
He had hoped to make it home before the weather got too severe, but it felt severe already as he crouched under the trailer of the semi-truck, with the wind cutting through his layered shirts. Kyle wrung out the shirts he’d removed and put them on over the dry ones to add layers. He took off his pants and put on a mostly-dry pair of sweats, followed by a drier pair of jeans.
He tried to get into the trailer, but a thick, round padlock kept it tightly secured, even after taking three shots at the lock with his pistol. With the semi offering no practical shelter, Kyle wrapped his sleeping bag around his numb body and stumbled down the road, looking for someplace to keep him warm and dry.
The sky had dulled to a charcoal gray, and as the temperatures and snow continued to fall, the slush on the road thickened to the consistency of oatmeal while the snow on the sides of the road accumulated to three and four inches, even approaching a foot in plac
es where it drifted in the raging wind. Kyle spotted a sedan a mile away and trudged stiffly towards it. His feet, wet and cold from the slush, felt like cinderblocks tied to the ends of his legs.
When he arrived at the car, Kyle tugged desperately on the door, which, to his surprise, swung open effortlessly. Bending to climb inside, he saw that the seats were filled with snow that had blown in through a broken out window on the passenger side. He yelled in a fit of anger at his bad fortune and slammed the door shut.
Kyle jumped up and down in the driving wind and stomped his feet, trying to restore some of the sensation he had lost in them. His toes had quit tingling, and while he didn’t miss that discomfort, he knew in the long run that no sensation was worse than the discomfort. Kyle weighed his options. He could curl up in a ball in the front seat of the car, or he could continue on. If he stayed in the car and the weather improved, he would be okay, but if it didn’t, he knew there was a good chance he would freeze.
Kyle took one glance at the still darkening sky, shook the snow out of his hair, and plodded on. As he trudged through the snow, the misery compounded with each step. Snow melted in his hair, sending icy water down his neck and back, while slush splashed up his legs, numbing them even more.
Kyle slipped in an icy patch of slush and fell to the ground. Frigid water soaked through his pants and seized his legs in a cold, steel vise. As he struggled back to his feet, he felt the freezing water running down his legs and into his shoes. “Damn you!!” Kyle cursed into the wind in a desperate sob. “I don’t want to die!” He’d walked nearly a thousand miles and now he hoped desperately that it hadn’t been in vain. He shook his arms and hands, trying to loosen up his fingers that seemed to have frozen around the handle of his cart. He stomped his feet and jumped in place to get his blood pumping.
He knew that to stop here would be suicide. Kyle looked at the cart at his feet. The thing that had allowed him to travel halfway across the country, and that he had killed for, had now become an anchor on the frozen roadway, slowing him to a crawl and threatening his survival. He pulled his sleeping bag from the cart and wrapped it around his shoulders, then, in an act of cold indifference, Kyle stepped over the handle and walked away, knowing his chances for survival right now were better without it than with.
Unencumbered by his cart, Kyle stumbled down the road, moving faster, but unsure where he was headed. A mile up the road he came to a pickup and pulled at the doors, but they were locked. He pounded on the windows with his fists, succeeding in sending intense shocks of pain along his arms but doing nothing to the windows. He looked in the bed of the pickup and found a short 2x4 in a mound of snow. On his third swing with the 2x4, the side window shattered and glass exploded in every direction. Kyle clawed at the inside handle and opened the door, then struggled to climb inside, his frozen legs barely able to bend. Once inside, he slammed the door shut, slid across the seat, and huddled against the opposite door.
Kyle pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his dripping sleeping bag around himself. Out of the wind, he started to warm up, but still couldn’t control the shivering that racked his body. Pulling the sleeping bag even tighter around his torso and head, Kyle stared out through a narrow gap in the folds and watched the snow rush past in the howling wind and blow in through the broken window. His mind numbed by the raging storm, Kyle stared vacantly at the snowflakes, watching as they drifted softly down to the floor of the truck, free from the grips of the howling wind outside.
Kyle watched the snow for several minutes as his shivers subsided and his temperature slowly rose. Tired, sheltered, and warmer, he felt his head bob down as he started to drift off to sleep, a state he was afraid to succumb to. He shook his head vigorously, forcing himself to stay awake and assessing his surroundings, trying to keep his mind active. Wet, cold, tired, and with no external heat source, Kyle knew his situation was terribly grave. Even the sleeping bag he was wrapped in, while it helped to keep the wind and snow away, was soaked and cold and far from an ideal covering. As a young man, stories of frozen hunters, hikers, and skiers had appeared in the newspaper every winter, making him so wary of the cold that he had always over-prepared for any kind of winter excursion and had become the butt of plenty of jokes at the hands of his friends. How ironic, he thought, that he was now stuck in the middle of a fall blizzard with next to no equipment and unlikely to survive for more than a few hours.
Kyle inventoried the truck for anything that might be useful. The dash yielded a couple of screwdrivers, and the glove box held nothing more than a dead flashlight and an owner’s manual. Kyle reached behind the seat and felt a tire jack and some kind of cloth. He pulled hard on the fabric and, after a short struggle, pulled loose an old, grease-stained cotton jacket. Thrilled at this small bit of good fortune, he stripped off his wet shirts and replaced them with the jacket. It was cold and stiff, and had likely been in the truck for years, but it was dry and that was all that mattered at the moment.
With the sleeping bag removed, Kyle could see that his pants were soaked, but his legs were so numb that he hadn’t known. With stiff fingers, he removed his shoes, then pulled off his pants and draped them over the seat with his shirts. He wrapped his sleeping bag back around his body, curled up on the seat, and tried to block out the sound of the blowing wind and the fear that gnawed at the back of his mind. Reaching down to rub his legs, Kyle felt the wet sleeping bag on the back of his hands and realized that it was nearly as wet as the clothes he’d removed.
Kyle shifted and found a drier section of the sleeping bag, and tried to keep that part closest to him, having to twist awkwardly to keep the wet areas away from his body. He lay back down on the seat, and tried not to think about the cold, but with every passing minute he felt it sinking deeper and deeper into his bones. A hard shiver shook him, nearly dumping him onto the floor of the truck. He pulled his wet clothes from the back of the seat and spread them on top of the sleeping bag, trying to add layers to block out the cold. Instead, his cold, wet shirt fell against his face, and snow drifted onto an exposed leg, all while the wind whistled even louder outside. A second hard shiver racked his body, and Kyle sat up, panic taking hold.
Trying to clear his thoughts, Kyle shook his head again and let out a fear-filled yell, the noise a distinct contrast to the steady drone of the wind. As Kyle looked out through the broken window at the swirling snow and pondered his predicament, he had an idea. He slid one of the truck’s sun visors off its rod and wedged it in the opening of the broken window. He grabbed the second visor and repeated the process, successfully blocking off most of the opening.
Next Kyle used one of the screwdrivers from the dashboard to tear at the covering on the seat. If he could remove that, he decided, both the cover and seat padding would provide some protection. He slashed at the seats, breathing in deep, panicked gulps as he worked. The seat-covers resisted his efforts, and it was several minutes before he loosened an edge enough to get his hand under it. Rising up on his knees, he jammed his hand under the flap and pulled as hard as he could, finally hearing a rip and feeling the fabric give way, but as the seat cover tore, Kyle lost his balance and fell against the door, knocking the carefully placed visors out into the snow.
A gust of icy wind swept through the broken window and wrapped its cold fingers around his neck, then down under the collar of his jacket, around his face, and seemingly into every pore of his body. Shivering, Kyle fell onto the bench of the truck and pulled the sleeping bag down over himself, the cold, wet fabric like sheets of ice against the bare skin of his legs. Shivers coursed up and down his body, his teethed rattled, and tears of pain and frustration ran down his face.
Beyond discouraged, Kyle yelled out and shook his head to clear it again, trying to rouse himself to action, any kind of action, and knowing that if he stayed in the truck without a way to stay warm he wasn’t going to last the night.
With great effort, Kyle dressed in his stiff, wet clothes placing the driest layers closest to his body.
He opened the door of the pickup, and an icy blast of wind hit him in the face, as if challenging his efforts to escape. Ignoring the affront, Kyle jumped to the ground. Pain shot through his frozen legs and up into his hips, but he disregarded the agony and forced himself to move forward, taking slow, painful steps. A dozen cold and difficult steps away from the truck, Kyle looked back and reconsidered staying in the truck to last out the storm, but the long, unbroken blanket of heavy, gray clouds extending beyond the horizon convinced him to move on.
With no good shelter behind him, Kyle moved forward towards a rise that was a half-mile north. From there he would determine the best course of action, whether to seek shelter in another vehicle or try to find shelter in a nearby home.
In his desperate state of affairs, moving gave Kyle purpose, and the flame of hope that had nearly been extinguished in the pickup flared again. With renewed determination, the wind didn’t seem quite so cold, nor the snow so deep. Even his arms and legs somehow felt warmer. At the top of the rise he scanned the area ahead of him using his arms to shield his face from the wind. He could barely make out the snow-covered mounds of a few small cars close by, and the hulking shape of a semi-trailer beyond the cars. Just past the truck and to the west of the highway was a house part way up a hill. To the east of the road and a little further along, lay another house, which was sheltered by a windscreen of trees. Kyle thought he could see more trucks even further down the road, but with the wind, snow, and growing darkness, he couldn’t be sure.
Neither house showed any signs of life, so Kyle set off for the truck, making his way as fast as he could in the ever deepening snow. By the time he reached the truck, his feet had lost all sensation, and he only maintained his balance by taking carefully focused steps.