“Tony’s fine.” Carter tucked his beacon back into his coat. “He was above me when the snow pack broke.” He examined the small shovel in his hands, then stabbed it down next to him. “I knew that slab looked wrong.”
Matt tried to stand but his legs felt like water. He was too shaky to trust them yet. “Where’s Sid?”
“Leah’s looking.” Carter wiped his eyes with the back of his glove, looked over at Julie, who stared blindly at the wide expanse of field, now littered with chunks of ice so big they resembled boulders. She was crying.
“He was a good hundred yards ahead of me,” Matt said, remembering how he’d been trying to catch him. “Dylan was to my left. I ended up veering right into the trees.”
“Leah saw you go down,” Carter said. “But we still have no idea about Dylan.” He dropped his voice. “We can’t find him without a beacon.”
The beacon. The one Dylan gave him—the one he handed over with a nod and a smile and without a second thought. The one that just saved Matt’s life. “Oh.” Vomit built suddenly in his throat and he had to roll over onto his stomach to swallow it down.
“It’s not your fault, Matt.” Carter grabbed his shoulder, but Matt didn’t answer. He knew from Carter’s voice that he didn’t blame him. Carter blamed himself. He was the one on the slab when it broke. “Dylan was in the middle and he got hit by the full slide. Hard.” Carter swallowed loudly. “I don’t think a beacon would have made a difference.”
Matt nodded, unable to disagree. He wanted to believe Carter, but they would never know.
“You were on the edge of it,” Carter continued. “It clipped you and you were buried under two feet. That was a huge slide. Probably fifteen feet in the middle.”
When Matt turned to look at him, Carter’s eyes were huge and wet, bright grass green. Matt didn’t really understand what he meant. He shook his head, staring at Carter’s eyes, realizing that they weren’t deep dark brown like Leah’s.
“It would be like having a building fall on you,” Carter said finally, blinking away tears. “She knows that too.” He glanced at Julie, who was holding tight to a tree trunk, head bent, still crying. Her shoulders shuddered up and down with her sobs, the only movement in an otherwise stationary landscape.
Matt struggled to his feet, amazed nothing really hurt when he moved, only a few sharp twinges of heat in his neck and lower back. Carter gaped at him, disbelieving. “I guess you’re tougher than you look.”
“I don’t feel very tough.” He watched Julie, unsure of what to do, what to say. He thought they should look for Dylan, but when he examined the aftermath of the avalanche, he realized trying to find him would be almost exactly like looking for a needle in a haystack. “If you hadn’t found me when you did . . .” He turned away. He couldn’t think about Dylan right now. He had to believe Carter—that there was no hope, there was nothing they could do about it now. He had to believe it or he really would be sick. “We need to find Sid.” Matt propped himself up, and using his poles for support, forced himself into a forward lurch down the hill.
• • •
Sid’s beacon worked—Leah and Tony found him within minutes, made easier by the fact that he wasn’t completely buried in snow as Matt had been. Sid’s head and shoulders were free, but from what Matt could tell it looked like the force of the slide had knocked him directly into a huge timber, pinning him against it like a bug.
He was unconscious when they found him—moaning by the time Carter, Julie, and Matt finally arrived at the base of the run.
“Carter!” Leah barked, ignoring the rest of them. “I need you!”
Like brother, like sister, Matt thought as he watched Leah shoveling snow as if it was the tryouts for the shoveling Olympics and there was only one spot left on the team.
“We need a doctor!” she yelled at him.
“I’m not a doctor!” Carter ran over anyway.
“You’re premed, right?” Leah quickly but carefully moved the snow away from Sid, alternating between using her shovel and her hands. Tony cleared snow from the other side.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Carter argued.
“We need a stretcher.” Matt leaned heavily against a tree. The hike down the hill had just caught up to him—he was sweating again, and the pack he wore felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Sid’s face was the color of ash. Not good. Even if nothing was broken, Matt doubted Sid would be able to walk.
No one spoke. Only the sound of digging and heavy breathing and Julie’s crying. A part of Matt wanted to shake her, slap her into silence.
Immediately, his face burned. He knew she just lost someone, someone important, someone she might have loved. Matt had never been in love. He didn’t know what it felt like, what it looked like, and if it looked like anything, the image Matt had in his head was the way Carter’s face looked at Julie’s when he had drunkenly interrupted them in the hallway last night. Naked was the word that had popped into Matt’s mind. Carter’s face had looked purely naked, blazing with passion. And if Matt was being honest with himself, he knew he’d never had that feeling before. He certainly had never seen his parents look at each other like that, and then wondered if they ever had. Maybe once, a long time ago. Had Julie been in love with Dylan? With Carter? With them both? Matt dropped his head, turned, and leaned against an aspen trunk and closed his eyes. Who the hell was he to tell Julie how to feel, how to be?
Still, he couldn’t stand the sound of her whimpers, as if she was in physical pain. “Here . . .” He came up behind her, hands opened up. “Julie? Can you help me find some big branches?”
She blinked at him, shaking her head as if not understanding his meaning. Her face and eyelids were swollen, cheeks stained where mascara left inky streaks. Snot glistened on her upper lip.
“C’mon,” he tried again, touching her shoulder. “Sid needs our help now.”
The look she returned—pure hatred. Or was it pain? Matt couldn’t tell. She looked as if she just got her hand slammed in a door and it was all his fault. “What did you say?” Her eyes were enormous, black pupils swallowing up violet irises.
Is she in shock? Matt had heard that people can just lose it, or they disappear into themselves without a sound, becoming vacant. But he’d never seen it. And he didn’t know what to do to stop it. She wasn’t freaking out, not yet, but he could see in her face how it would go if he said the wrong thing.
“We need to make a stretcher,” he repeated, slower this time. It was important to stay calm, stay logical. “Or something Sid can lie on so we can carry him.”
“Stretcher,” she said dully, wiping her face with her glove.
“Yes.” Matt saw that Tony and Leah’s digging had Sid almost free, and Carter was asking him questions.
“Can you move your arms? Your legs? Your head? Your neck?”
“My left leg,” Sid gasped, his face bleached of color. He inhaled deeply and started coughing. “My chest,” he said after his hacking fit subsided. “It really hurts to breathe.”
Carter unzipped Sid’s coat, lifted his shirt, and from Matt’s position he could only see Carter’s and Leah’s faces as they examined him. Their expressions didn’t look reassuring.
“Do we have a first aid kit?” Matt asked Julie, but she didn’t answer. Her eyes had the flat effect of a blind person. She stared straight ahead without seeing him.
“First aid kit won’t help,” Carter said. “It’s internal, I think.”
“What do you mean?” Matt forced himself to walk over and look, prepared for something ghastly—blood, guts, bone fragments protruding. Something gory and irreparable.
In the middle of Sid’s chest a dark splotch, like a giant purple island, extended from the right shoulder down to underneath his rib cage. If anything, it looked like a really big, really painful bruise.
“Definitely a hematoma,” Carter told Leah.
“Hema what?” Tony asked. He held his brother’s wrist in his hand, monitoring his pulse. Tony was breathing fast h
imself, without a rhythm, and Matt knew Tony only ever did that when he got really upset. The last time Matt had seen Tony look like that was when he got a C- on a physics exam—a combination of sheer bewilderment and sudden terror.
“Bruise,” Leah said.
“Probably cracked ribs. Pneumothorax. I can’t really tell.”
Leah didn’t answer. She looked away as if she already knew the answer.
“What’s a pneumo . . . ?” Tony looked like he was going to scream. He inhaled sharply. “English please!”
“It means a collapsed lung,” Leah told him, and Matt wondered how she knew that.
“Okay,” Tony held a hand to his face, covering his eyes, “so what do we do?”
“We need to get him out of here. He needs a hospital.”
“How much time?” Leah asked Carter.
“Time?” Tony jumped up. “Time for what?” Frantic, he pulled out his phone. “We need to call nine-one-one!” He spun around, moving in circles, a nonsensical dance between the trees. “I can’t get a signal!”
Matt had the sudden urge to knock him down, a need to restrain him somehow. Tony twirled around like a top, trying to get his phone to work. He looked like he was swatting away an imaginary swarm of flies, and the more Matt watched, the more he felt the panic swim inside him. His vision blurred. His knees quivered. Did he have injuries of his own—something not immediately apparent? He took a breath and checked his own phone, surprised to find it wasn’t broken, but the battery was on its last bar. Here, down at the base of the run in the heavy cover of trees, the signal was nonexistent. “I can’t get one either.”
“All right,” Carter said, checking his own with the same result. “Does anyone have a working phone?”
Leah bit her lip. “I didn’t bring mine.”
“What?”
“It was already low so I left it in Dylan’s car, in the charger.”
“Shit.” Carter exhaled. His eyes landed on Julie. “What about you, Jules?”
“Dylan had my phone and some of my stuff in his waterproof sack,” she answered, then convulsed into a fresh round of tears at the mention of his name.
“Sid? Sid?” Tony squeezed his brother’s shoulders, patted his cheek, but Sid had passed out. His breathing was wet and thick. Tony fumbled in Sid’s pack, finally retrieving the shattered phone, cradling it in his palms as if it was a dead baby bird. “Oh no.”
“So we have three phones,” Leah said. “All low on juice.”
“Mine’s fine,” argued Carter.
“Yeah, but it’s useless if we can’t get a signal,” Leah told him. “We need to get out of here.”
“I know.” Carter grimaced. “But I don’t want to move him.”
“We have to.”
“Maybe we can get him to the cabin.” Matt suddenly remembered their destination point. He turned to the left, wondering if that was north or east. “Dylan said we were less than a mile away. Maybe there’ll be something there. Maybe there’ll be a first aid kit or a radio or . . . something.”
“You think?” Tony was hopeful.
“There could be some emergency supplies. Blankets. Something we can use. Maybe the phones will work there. We can’t stay here.” The sunlight had faded—afternoon was gone and the shadows grew longer on the snow. “And we need to go if we want to find it before dark.”
“I have a two-person tent,” Carter said, and Matt realized how much Carter really didn’t want to move Sid.
“Cabin’s better,” Matt said quickly, giving an anxious glance at Julie. “Better shelter. We should at least try to find it.”
“Okay. You’re right.” Carter popped off his skis and handed them over to Matt, whose skis remained buried somewhere up on the ridge. “You, Julie, and Leah try to tamp down a track for us,” he explained. “Tony and I will wear the snowshoes. That should help.”
“What?” Julie wiped her face. “You mean we’re just going to leave? Without Dylan?” Her voice was thin and high, dangerously close to breaking. “We have to keep looking!”
“Julie, I know.” Carter threw up his hands. “I did look. We all looked. We could be out there all night looking. It’s too late. . . .”
“It’s not!” Julie screamed. “It’s not too late!”
“Julie,” Leah tried, “it’s been over an hour. It’s a miracle that we found Matt, and he had the beacon.”
Matt’s face went so hot at that fact, he had to look away. He couldn’t meet Julie’s eyes. He couldn’t even swallow his spit.
“It’s also a miracle that Sid’s still alive,” Carter said. “And he won’t stay that way unless we get help.”
Tony’s face went as pale as his brother’s, and for a moment Matt thought his best friend was going to faint. Tony wobbled back, considering Carter’s diagnosis, and then sat down with a plop.
Julie kicked the snow with her boot, punched the side of the tree, then grabbed her skis and started off between the trees without another word. Her face was a mask of nothing, but her eyes said otherwise.
“Good,” Leah said quietly, more to herself. “All right, let’s go.”
• • •
“Do you know where you’re going?” Leah asked Matt. Matt was skiing somewhat haphazardly. Right then left, then stopping and starting, turning around to check on Tony and Carter’s progress with Sid, which was slow and plodding but steady.
“No. Not really.” He tried not to show his exhaustion, but his head was pounding again. He needed to find the cabin. After all, it had been his idea. He was certain they were headed in the right direction, but then again, the landscape had a uniformity to it that was disconcerting. Every tree and ridgeline looked exactly like the next. The sun had set—his clue they were going west, but soon he would have no light to guide them.
“Did he say it was west?” Leah asked, not ready to say Dylan’s name. For now, Julie was quiet, skiing calmly behind them.
“Yeah.” Matt looked back. Carter and Tony were about twenty yards back, Sid lolling between them in a basket carry, keeping up thanks to the snowshoes. The snow was not as deep here, but in some places the drifts went over Matt’s knees. “Maybe I should help carry.”
“No.” Leah watched the darkening sky. “We need to keep moving. There’s only about a half hour of light left.” She glided forward, peering between the trees. “He better have been right about this place,” she added under her breath.
Like a spell being cast with her last word, the cabin finally came into view. At first it looked like another boulder or a fallen tree—dark, squat, and small—with a stacked stone chimney on the far side. The roof, mostly covered in fresh snow, sloped deeply like a Swiss chalet, reminding Matt of something from a fairy tale. The place where a witch lives.
“That has to be it!” Tony exclaimed as they staggered up behind them. “Thank God!”
“There’s a chimney,” Carter gasped, somewhat happily. “That means we can build a fire and maybe send up a signal!”
Matt puffed a breath of relief, knowing he did something right. He pushed forward on his poles, skiing so fast he almost ran right into the front door. He jabbed it with his pole, but the wood slab was swollen with dampness. It didn’t budge. He clicked out of his skis as Leah arrived. “Open?”
“If not, I’m going to make it.” He jammed his shoulder against the door and it popped open, swinging into gray darkness. Against the far wall he saw a chair sitting underneath the one small paned window. He clopped in, floor squeaking and shuddering under his weight. It smelled of dry rot, pine, and something musty. Probably rodent. Matt unfolded a metal cot with squeaky protest. It was an old army cot—a double—with a sleeping bag rolled on top. “This will make a decent bed for Sid,” he mumbled, sitting down to see if it would hold.
“Are there any matches?” Leah held up an old lantern. “I think this has an unused oil canister in it.”
“I hope so.” The fireplace was an empty black mouth, devoid of wood. “Then at least we can build a
fire.” It wasn’t cold in the cabin, but it was damp. Matt knew the temperature would drop fast during the night.
Julie walked in, stared at the floor, the ceiling, then a large metal chest behind the chair. Like the cot, it appeared to be military supply, an old army-issue footlocker. “What’s in there?”
“Well, it’s not locked,” Leah said, snapping up the brass latches. It opened with a tinny creak. “Blanket. Matches. Candles. Soda.” She named each item as she removed it and set it carefully on the floor. “Tarp. National Geographic magazine. Flashlight. Batteries . . .”
“Batteries?” Tony asked from the doorway. He leaned heavily against it, catching his breath. “What kind?”
“Double D,” Leah answered. “Just for the flashlight.”
“Oh.” Tony shrugged, obviously hoping for a different kind. “Matt? Can you help us?”
“Of course.” Matt stood up, embarrassed to be caught resting, and the pounding in his head restarted its angry beat. “I think this cot will work for Sid.”
“Good. He needs to lie down.” Tony wiped his forehead. “So do I.”
Between the three of them it was easy to lift and move Sid. He let out a small groan as they shifted him onto the cot. His eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. “Water,” he whispered.
“Okay brother,” Tony said softly. “Hang on. I’ll get you water.” He put his hand gently on Sid’s forehead as if he were a small, helpless creature. It reminded Matt why Tony was his best friend, though he knew he wasn’t Tony’s. Tony’s admiration for his older brother was obvious, even if he never said so, and Matt thought again how nice it would have been to have had a brother growing up, or just another sibling—someone else who was on his team. Small, hot needles prickled in his throat. He’d always wanted that, wished for it, prayed for it. How did that line go? Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. He wasn’t sure who had said that one—it hadn’t been in his quote book. Shaking his head, Matt pulled his sweatshirt out of his backpack and rolled it into a pillow. Carefully, he lifted Sid’s head, slipped it under him, and gingerly lay him back.
“More upright,” Carter insisted. “I think he should be elevated more.”
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