Avalanche

by Melinda Braun

  Tony balled up the matching pair of sweatpants. Then he emptied Sid’s pack to use as many pieces of clothing required to get the angle right, before going outside to fill his brother’s water bottle with fresh snow.

  “Is that comfortable?” Carter asked Sid.

  Sid nodded, eyelids fluttering. “Better.”

  “Good.”

  “Should we build a fire?” Matt wondered aloud. “Maybe the smoke will send up a signal.”

  “Can’t hurt, I guess,” Carter replied. “But it’s almost dark now, so no one will see it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Won’t matter if they do see it,” Leah said, putting everything back in the footlocker. “No one’s looking for us.”

  “Won’t they come looking?” Matt asked her, confused. “At least by tomorrow?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Won’t they notice we didn’t sign out? Plus, the cars are still in the lot.”

  Leah slammed the footlocker lid shut. She took a deep breath. “Dylan didn’t sign us in.”

  “What?” Carter asked, stunned. “What did you say?”

  “I heard him tell Julie,” Leah said slowly, watching Julie, who was sitting cross-legged in front of the small stone fireplace, staring blankly at the hearth. “Said he didn’t want anyone to know about this place, so he didn’t write down where we were going.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Carter sank to his knees like someone had just punched him. “Julie! What the hell? Is this true?”

  “Is what true?” Tony reappeared with the water bottle.

  Julie didn’t answer. Instead she rocked back and forth like a stubborn toddler who refused to listen. She even put her hands over her ears.

  “What the fu . . .” Carter didn’t finish. His head collapsed into his hands as if he couldn’t bear to have anyone see his face.

  An icy churn stirred Matt’s stomach, and the floor seemed to shift under his feet. “But the cars,” he insisted. “Someone will see the cars and call it in, right?”

  Carter looked up and nodded. “Yeah, I hope so. But it could be days before they’ll find us out here.” He glanced at his sister, then Sid. Matt suddenly understood Carter’s real distress.

  Sid wouldn’t live that long.

  “We’ll just go back to get help,” Matt said.

  Carter shook his head. “Someone needs to stay here.”

  “I’ll stay with him.” Tony shook the water bottle until the snow resembled wet slush.

  “I need to stay too,” Carter said. “If I’m the only one with first aid training.”

  “Then I’ll go back myself,” Matt volunteered without thinking. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t even something to think about, it was just something that needed to be done.

  “Matt . . .”

  “Someone has to go. I can do ten miles.”

  “Not right now you can’t,” Carter said. “You’re exhausted. You’re practically falling down. Plus, it’s dark out. You’ll get lost.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Leah drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around herself. “I know how to get back.”

  “I know you know,” Carter said, frustrated. “But I don’t want you going out there now.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I know that too.” Carter raked his hands through his hair, as if there were another option he hadn’t thought of.

  “Do you have a map or something?” Tony wanted to know. He gave Sid small sips from the water bottle.

  “Don’t need one,” Leah replied. “I know how to get back.” Her words had a calm intensity, coupled with a hardness that made Matt believe her.

  “Wait, wait.” Carter waved his hands. “Let’s just slow down here. Let’s think about this.”

  “There’s not much to think about,” Leah answered. “The phones don’t work here and there is no radio.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “Carter,” Julie sat up and stopped rocking back and forth. “Leah’s right. We need to go back.”

  “Julie.” Carter sighed her name. “Someone has to stay with Sid.”

  “Tony will,” Julie replied, nodding at Tony. “Of course he’ll stay.”

  “I’m not leaving them on their own,” Carter argued. “Plus, you’re in no condition to leave either.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  “Okay.” Julie put her head back down on her knees. “I’m not fine. But that doesn’t change the facts.”

  “I know,” Carter sighed. He crossed his arms and turned back to the dark cave of the fireplace. “Okay, I’ll stay here with Sid and Tony. I want you to stay with me, Julie.” He turned around and dropped his arms. “That’s what I want,” he repeated. To Matt it almost sounded like he was begging.

  Julie didn’t answer at first. “I’ll stay, then.”

  Carter nodded and quickly wiped his eyes. He turned to Matt. “Leah will go with you,” he said. “She’ll lead you out.”

  “It’s okay,” Matt said, wondering why Carter thought his little sister could handle the trek if he couldn’t. “I don’t need—”

  “Leah goes with!” Carter was firm, on the edge of a shout. “No one’s going out there alone.”

  “Okay,” Matt agreed. “When do we leave?” Outside the dirty window it was past dusk, shadows blurring into one another.

  “Right now.”

  “Now? It’s almost pitch black out there!” Tony exclaimed.

  “Then we’ll need this.” Leah clicked on the flashlight, making a moonbeam on the ceiling, and tossed it over to Carter. “Pack us light. We need to go fast. We need a good phone.”

  Shockingly, Matt’s phone was deemed the best, with slightly more battery power than Carter’s. Tony’s phone hadn’t even gotten a signal up on the last ridge. Carter took Leah’s backpack, emptying out anything extraneous, before adding a few things from his own pack. Matt wondered how he could decide what was necessary and what wasn’t. Right now it seemed all the bare essentials they had weren’t nearly enough.

  Leah struck a match, lit the oil canister in the lantern as easily as if she’d done it a hundred times before, then set it on the footlocker. A wavering golden glow illuminated the cobwebs in the corners.

  “So what should we do?” Tony asked.

  Leah watched the light move like waves across the ceiling. “Build a signal fire.”

  Tony stared at his brother. “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.” Leah shrugged her shoulders, then readjusted her hat, tucking her curls underneath as she gave him a sad smile. “Pray, I guess.” She nodded to Matt. “You ready?”

  “Yeah, I am,” he said, not having the heart to tell her that Tony was an atheist. “Bunch of bunkum,” he liked to tell Matt whenever the subject came up, and Matt would always agree. He wondered if Tony would pray now. Yes, Matt decided, he would. Tony would pray to God, Jesus, Allah, Loki, Kali, Buddha, Odin, Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny if he thought it would help his brother. Tony would pray to Obi-Wan Kenobi and try to use the Force. And Matt knew he would do the same. “I’m ready when you are.”

  Ten minutes later they started out, skiing fast in the moonlight, backtracking over the trail with such intensity that Matt felt the now-familiar sensation of building nausea. He couldn’t keep going at this pace, but ahead of him Leah showed no signs of slowing. “Hold up!” he finally shouted, his voice frighteningly loud in the still woods.

  “Sorry.” Leah pulled to a stop. “I know. I’m exhausted too, but it’s bad, Matt.”

  “You mean Sid, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” She leaned over her poles, taking big breaths. “We need to get a call out before morning. They won’t send out rescue until first light and they need to know where to find them.”

  “What’s going to happen to Sid?” Matt knew she had an inkling of how serious it was. He sensed she had been holding back, maybe to prevent Tony from panicking.

  “His lung is probably collapsed,” she
said quietly. “And who knows what other internal injuries he has from hitting that tree. If he doesn’t get to a hospital, he could suffocate to death.”

  “So what is the plan?” Matt tried to keep his voice calm. Immediately he remembered what it felt like to slowly lose air, to have to fight for every breath. And now that was happening to Sid. He squeezed his poles in a vise grip, forcing the memory from his head.

  “We get up on a ridge and make the call. And if that doesn’t work we’ll head back to Berthoud Pass and find help.” Leah pointed off into the darkness, although the combination of moonlight and snow made everything quite bright. Even though Matt couldn’t see the mountains, he could feel them looming ahead in the distance. “I remember the coordinates of the cabin, so don’t turn on your phone until we get up there.”

  “Got it.”

  They continued on, making no sound except for the swish of skis through powder. Matt concentrated on Leah’s back and her smooth stride that he did his best to match. She went on like a machine, never flagging. He was both frustrated and awed by her robotic determination.

  “We need to get to the top before midnight,” she said.

  “Why?” He did a quick mental calculation, assuming it was past nine. That meant three more hours of skiing, which mostly meant hiking up a mountain, and the way she said it implied they wouldn’t be stopping if they wanted to make it on time. Defeat simmered through his bones like an ache. It sounded impossible.

  “Storm might be blowing in early,” she puffed. “We’ll need to be off the summit if it does.”

  Matt glanced up at the navy sky, bright with moonlight, completely cloudless. “It’s so nice out.” It was nice. Not too cold and barely a breeze. It was another reminder that despite their desperate situation, things could be a lot worse.

  “That was yesterday. Yesterday was clear.”

  She didn’t have to elaborate—his brain filled in the rest.

  Yesterday was clear and look what happened.

  “Just let me know what you need me to do and I’ll do it,” Matt said, suddenly thankful she was with him. He didn’t know too much about survival in the wilderness, nor did he have any practical experience. All his knowledge up until this point had come from books—books his father had given him and told him to read. Like his Ultimate Book of Famous Quotations. “Useful for any situation,” his father had said when Matt unwrapped the present. It was an early twelfth birthday present, and the last thing his father gave him before moving out of their house the following week. True to his father’s word, he thought of a quote from the book. “Energy and persistence conquer all things.”

  “Nice,” Leah replied. “So who said that?”

  “Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Did Benjamin Franklin ever climb a mountain?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Leah turned away and began the long, slow ascent. Up and up and forever up.

  THE HUNTER

  Location: Avalanche site, Two miles north from cabin

  The night air was still soft. Warm and wet. The cat stood still, watching the moonlight shift over the ground and the expanse of snow. No movement, no sound. The trail had been easy to follow all morning, but here the scent vanished. Something had changed.

  The cat sniffed deeply, tasting the air. It didn’t like the look of the field; it smelled wrong. The ground here was bad. Not solid. And the cat would not cross it. Instead, it turned back, going around through the trees, finding a different way, and after a few minutes a new smell twitched its nose.

  With a flick of its tail the cat trotted on, hunger moving it forward.

  TONY

  Location: Abandoned NFS cabin, Arapaho National Forest

  Elevation: 9,000 feet

  “Try to find dry pieces,” Carter told Tony. “Dead stuff. As much as you can carry.”

  “Got it.” Tony peered into the growing dark. Thankfully, the moon was full, easy enough to see by, and he headed for a wall of thick fir trees twenty yards up the slope from the cabin. As he trudged uphill, he noticed how the cabin was situated almost like a pebble in the bottom of a giant bowl, and he plowed through the knee-high drifts with steady persistence. Halfway up, he pulled out his phone, turned his back to the trees, and held it up. The battery was still at half, but the signal was nonexistent. Carter had said something about the mountain interference, and while Tony didn’t doubt him, he was the type of person who always needed to test things for himself. No matter what he’d been told.

  But in this case Carter was correct. “Shit,” Tony muttered and slid the phone back into his front pocket, careful to zip it shut. He certainly wasn’t going to be the idiot who lost his phone in a snowbank, even if it didn’t work. Still grumbling, he headed back up to the trees, realizing the ultimate irony was that when you really were depending on technology to rescue you, you only learned of its limitations.

  Tony pushed away a snow-covered limb, wondering how he would find anything dry under so much frozen water. With a grunt he scooted under the branches, and once underneath realized he could barely see his hand in front of his face. “Dammit.” He waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and when they did he noticed that underneath the branches there was a wide open space, big as a tent and nearly tall enough to stand up in. Upon closer inspection he noticed dull-looking stubs jutting out from the main trunk, and to Tony’s relief they broke off easily in his grip, like stale crackers. Dead wood. Exactly what he needed. He quickly removed every available stub and stick until he had a whole armful. He even stuffed some withered-looking pinecones into his coat, and as he turned to exit the tree shelter, he heard something that froze him still.

  A low growl. A curdling rumble. Tony held his breath. A sigh. An exhalation of breath. His? No. Not his. He counted his pulse and when it hit thirty beats he backed out from underneath the branches, muscles tight, eyes darting over the bright open sheet of snow.

  Nothing moved. Nothing there. No sound. No wind.

  “Carter?”

  Silence.

  He watched the cabin. The dull glow from the lantern was visible, and the place reminded Tony of a small island surrounded by a giant white sea. He blinked again, feeling that peculiar sensation shiver his scalp, tightening the skin under his hair. The sensation of being watched. “Carter?”

  “Yeah?”

  Tony jumped. Carter was right there, standing a few yards down the hill, off to the left with his own armload of sticks.

  “Oh,” Tony said, feeling disoriented. “Nothing.” He had been sure Carter had been behind him. That’s where the noise had been. Or had it? Tony pivoted around, wondering if now his mind was playing tricks on him. The woods were still. Nothing there. Must have been a bird, Tony thought, feeling stupid and relieved at the same time. “I found a bunch of dead sticks and some pinecones.”

  “Good.” Carter turned and tromped back down the hill to the cabin. “Let’s go make ourselves a fire.”

  Tony hurried after him, forcing himself not to look back.

  MATT

  Location: Byers Peak

  Elevation: 12,804 feet

  The last hundred yards weren’t the hardest, but to Matt they felt like the longest. At this elevation the wind was strong, freezing the sweat on the back of his neck as he gingerly picked his way along the narrow track until he reached Leah resting on a wide expanse of granite. She was perched on a section about twenty feet square. On either side the slope fell away into the air and a hundred-foot drop to whatever happened to be below. Matt didn’t know, and he certainly wasn’t about to look. He felt dizzy and lightheaded just imagining it.

  “You made it.” Leah sat cross-legged on the rock like a yogi.

  “How high are we?” Matt gasped. Every breath he gulped seemed to contain the absolute bare minimum of oxygen to prevent losing consciousness. It felt as though his ribs had turned into steel bands around his chest, slowly compressing so that every breath seemed smaller and more usel
ess than the last.

  “Definitely over twelve thousand feet.”

  “So where are we?” He sat down as gracefully as he could, managed to unclip his boots, and carefully stacked his skis on the rock. He didn’t want to do something stupid and have them go sailing off into the abyss.

  “Byers Peak, I think,” Leah turned her head, orienting herself. “To the south is Bills Peak. North is Morse Mountain.” She squinted into the distance, her diamond stud flashing in the moonlight like a beacon. “Over there is Sheep Mountain—I think that’s what it’s called.”

  Great, Matt thought. Everything is mountains.

  “Highway 40 is east.” Matt followed her direction, for some reason expecting to see it. But there was nothing but a gauzy whiteness, rolling out into dark sky.

  With a mumble on his breath that sounded like a prayer, Matt pulled out his phone and turned it on. Low battery but Leah was right, the signal was strong. Matt grinned, relieved. “It works!” One message was waiting—the message his dad had sent. “Who should I call first?”

  “Nine-one-one.”

  “Right.” Idiot. He punched in the numbers, the wind whipping and getting stronger. Little flecks of sleet stung his cheek.

  He heard a buzz, a click as the signal went through, and after two beats the operator answered.

  “Nine-one-one—what is your emergency?”

  “Hello!” Matt yelled, embarrassed, nervous, and excited in a way that suggested he was doing something illegal. He’d never called 911 before. His throat felt weird. His neck hair stood up. He couldn’t hear very well; he took off his ski helmet and pressed the receiver tight against his ear. “Hello! My name is Matt! I’m out at Berthoud Pass ski area! There was an avalanche. One missing!” He didn’t say dead. “One injured! Bad! We need someone to fly in! Um . . .” He was babbling—words coming out of his mouth so fast and so loud, wondering if the operator could hear him above the wind.

  “Where are you exactly? Please repeat and slow down. One injury?”