by James Kiehle
“No rush. We’re not late for anything,” Judy said, voice at quarter-power itself. “Have you heard anything about the Ice Shelf? If it melted?”
“I have no idea. The radio has been down since the attacks. TV, obviously, is not really available—the cable doesn’t reach,” he joked, but saw neither female even crack a smile. “Is your husband near the ice?”
Judy, wearily holding it upright, shook her head. Her words seemed soaked in quicksand, almost unintelligible. “Hundreds of miles away, but who knows. The town was half underwater just from the local river.” Without apology, Judy began to drift, eyes closing without protest, then her head and hands lowered to the table as if gently pushed. Sleep would feel so good now. Like Iris, head on arms, snoring at the table. Roger, sensing that fatigue usurped libido, moved away from the table and kissed Judy’s head as she cloned her daughter’s posture on the formica-topped table, both fast asleep.
The smell of her hair aroused him and Roger walked away with a slightly funny gait.
•
Two hours later Russ found the van.
The Dodge had fallen from the trees, landed on its nose, then fell upright, but backwards, so it appeared to be parked against a fir. The front end was crumpled flat and the driver’s door was open invitingly. The Caravan would never run again, but would certainly provide shelter for the night.
In the big plastic bags, Russell found all kinds of useful objects, things like a Coleman lamp and a hibachi, along with some coals, three boxes of matches, some canned goods and a flashlight.
Best: A sleeping bag.
After he learned about the attack on Hawaii, Russell had bolted from Cap Dreibeck’s house, then stumbled around town like a vagrant before he returned to his own home, where he mindlessly threw things into bags and tossed the sacks into the back of the van. He’d rummaged through the clothes hamper to retrieve sets of dirty tee-shirts his wife and daughter had worn. Judy’s was a salmon-colored shirt with I’m Not Her written on it, while Iris’s white one read Bend Over, Oregon, which made Russ cringe but that she had loved, maybe for that reason. Russ wanted a reminder of their physical aromas, if nothing else.
Now he realized that his confused mind had apparently thought things through without his help. He found crackers and chili and toilet paper, a cast-iron pan and his newspaper’s cellular phone. He popped it open and pushed some buttons but nothing happened. He did this again and again but finally gave up.
The system was still down. Worse, there was no one to call.
Perry pulled down the back seats and made a bedding area in the rear of the van. At least he wouldn’t freeze at night. He also brought a pair of newish Denner hiking boots.
How had he known he would go hiking and camping?
He crawled in the van and instantly fell asleep.
The one thing Russ failed to bring along was enough fresh water, only a big Dasani and a six-pack of Arrowhead twelve-ouncers, and he realized that could be a problem. It’s not like there were fresh water streams on this mountainside.
For breakfast, just past sunup, Russ snacked on a bag of trail mix and washed it down with a bottle of Gatorade Ice. His plan, such as it was, was to find the ski lodge and see if anyone there was still alive.
Russ tore strips of red cloth from an old shirt to tie around trees so he could mark his way back to the van. He wore a parka, in case it got cold, and carried a knife and some saltines, along with a flask of Gatorade, a fluorescent pen, and his worthless pistol, a non-working, unloaded forty-five. Judy had been deathly afraid to have a gun in their house, but this had been a gift from his dad and Russell brought it with him, apparently for sentimental reasons. He didn’t know what good it would do to have a useless weapon except throw it at someone, but he carried it in his waistband and trudged up the muddy hill until he was again on dry land.
Russell marked his path with the red bands and carved an arrow pointing to the van site on the side of larger, damaged trees, then crudely filled in the carvings with the green fluorescent ink. Behind him, Russell dragged the rake, hoping it might better mark the path. The noise might also scare away bobcats or cougars, not to mention make a sound a human might recognize.
At least, Russ could hope.
It was still early, though Perry never wore a watch and didn’t know the hour for certain. Time didn’t seem to matter much just then. He didn’t push himself, just ambled along the path he was making until he suddenly came to a real road; a walking trail built for hikers. Russ had to decide which direction to go: Up the hill or down? Where had the road to the lodge been?
Russ decided on downhill. There had been a lot of cars on the road; perhaps others had survived. He marked the final tree at the junction of the makeshift path and the main trail, and then headed downhill. About ten minutes later, he saw the road, then through a gap between trees he saw a building and quickened his pace.
When he got to the road, Russ stopped in his tracks.
Temple Mountain Lodge.
Wow.
•
What felt like a broken neck awakened Judy, still at the table on the ship, Iris nowhere to be seen. Dizzy, half-asleep, Judy tried to turn her head just a little and felt pain race down her neck and into her shoulder. She held back a shriek and the noise came out as a squeak. Then with a move, rattlesnake quick, she forced her head to turn sideways and then back again. There was a crack and the tension and strain left her body, just like that; an invisible wisp of forgotten pain.
So where was Iris? In the cabin? On deck? Flirting with that new kid she met on the bridge? Judy went to find out.
Because so many had lost their lives on the ship after the blasts, and for all their help, Judy and Iris had been given a larger stateroom, making it hard for Judy to spend any time with Roger, both a big plus and a minor minus. But right this second, her worry was for her daughter and this moment smacked of a deja vu from days before at the pool, when Iris almost drowned. That same urgent mother-bear instinct swept through her, though Judy trusted her daughter more and more. Cooler than Judy was during chaos, Iris handled her end of triage with capable hands and quick brain.
Pushing against panic, lowering the threat level to orange, Judy still raced down the main hallway towards their new room and spotted Iris standing with a hand propping her up against a door frame, looking into a cabin with a fixed, bewildered five-yard gaze.
Judy approached quietly and put her hand across her shoulder.
“Iris, honey, everything okay?”
Iris moved forward, softly saying, “This was their room.”
“You mean Arnold? Roger’s nephew? The boy who—” her mother asked.
“Saved me. Saved us. Arnold. Yeah. They’re all dead.”
“I’m sorry, Iris.”
“They were washed overboard. This was their room. That’s his iPad.”
Iris sighed, then looked straight into Judy’s eyes and asked point blank, “Are you and Mr. Lind having an affair?”
•
Temple Lodge, impressive, was certainly charming. Old-fashioned, built in the 1930s for the WPA, it was a sister building to Timberline Lodge, much smaller in scale, but whose exterior echoed the motif of Mt Hood’s famous hotel.
From the outside, the place didn’t look occupied. There was no sign of life, though a mangy-looking yellow dog with a bushy tail poked his head out from behind a porch, then barked strangely before dashing off towards the woods and Russ realized that it was more likely a coyote than a hound.
He walked to the lodge, up the stairs to the front porch and saw that the door was chained and padlocked. Perry knocked loudly and waited for a long time but got no response. He walked around back, peering in windows and checking to see if they, too, were secure, but found the entire place was almost bolted down. He came to a side door, tried it, but it was also protected.
Somewhere, a burglar alarm was going off, weak and intermittent, using the last of its reserve power in a hopeless cause.
At t
he back of the lodge, a large patio deck overlooked the easy slope of the skiing hill, the perfect grade for beginning skiers, the resort’s bread and butter. The vista itself was spectacular. The lodge sat in the shadow of Mt. Hood, yet it was far enough away to have felt the blast only marginally, catching just the outer fringe of the explosion, if that. Prevailing winds from an upper-level low had carried the most severe radiation away from the lodge, though the heat from the fireball had rendered the slopes clean of residual snow and the north grade was covered by detritus blown over from other peaks.
Perry saw, too, that the forests on the side of the hills in the middle distance were flattened down like fir-bearing pickup sticks, a fan of bushy green logs. From this vantage point, the gully below was filled with water and seemed to stretch to the horizon both east and west.
It was both beautiful and shockingly grotesque.
Not long ago, the expansive patio had been a place for skiers to gather while they drank hot toddies and watched the snow bunnies fall on their butts. Now, all the chairs were put away and it looked like a lonely place.
The morning drizzle had ended, the wind had kicked up, and clouds of dust were being spread across the deck. Perry moved to the big French-windows and matching doors and tried the knob. When nothing happened, he broke a window with a rock and let himself in.
“Hello?” he called out. His voice echoed in a cavernous and empty room. The building seemed to be made entirely from wood and boulders. Thin layers of dust covered the aged leather furniture and oak tables.
Russell walked through the baby grand hotel and repeatedly called out for anyone to answer, but no one did. He felt an odd shiver of dread go through him as he paced from room to room.
Russ had to use the bathroom, went in search of one, found a sign and followed it, but as he turned a corner and entered a dining room, he noticed that a man and a woman were seated at a table, teacups in front of them, holding hands. The room smelled like a rat had died.
“Hi, I’m Russell Perry,” he said, approaching them cautiously. “My friends call me Russ.”
As he got closer, though, he knew they couldn’t hear him.
“You guys are dead, aren’t you?” he asked. “You can’t fool me. I went to college for three years.”
Perry sat down at the end of the table, shoulders slumped, and studied the deceased. The man had been in his middle-sixties, completely bald, dead from a bullet wound in his temple. A thirty-eight-caliber pistol lay on the floor beside him. His arm dangled above it.
The woman was younger by a decade and had a nice, if straggly, haircut. In her youth she probably had red hair and in patches still did, in those spots where the man’s blood had splattered. Her face was frozen in a state of horror, her eyes wide and surprised.
As near as Perry could tell, the woman had died of a heart attack, probably when the explosion happened. Russell guessed that the man had then shot himself in his despair. Rather than live without her, he chose to die as well.
Why not? Russ knew how it felt. Every second.
He picked up the small handgun, checked it for bullets but the chamber was empty aside from a single spent shell casing.
Russ found a bathroom and relieved himself. Not much came out—dehydrated.
He searched for a shovel. Temple was a small hotel but there were still a lot of rooms and it took him awhile to find the stairs to the basement. Russ inched down slowly. It was dark and he had to use the flashlight, but he soon found a workbench and numerous tools. Looking around, Russ discovered two lengths of wood. He cut them in half and built two rudimentary crosses.
Finally, Perry located a an old spade and some well-worn work gloves. He went outside, found a spot overlooking the gully and what remained of Mt. Hood, and began to dig. It took most of his energy, but eventually Russ had mined a final resting place for the couple. Perry chose to make just one grave, believing the deceased would prefer to spend their eternity’s side-by-side and not apart. He lowered their corpses to the floor of the hole, roughly six feet down, arranged them to look towards the sky, and covered them with soil.
Not knowing if they had been Christian, Russell still chose to mark their graves with a cross. Suicide was a sin, he had heard, but felt God might make an exception in this man’s case. Besides, the Lord probably had His hands full sorting out the endless souls of the dead.
Russ stood over the fresh mound of dirt just as the sun disappeared behind a far western hill, and lowered his head. He didn’t know what to say. Perry was not a religious man and had not spoken to God directly since he turned thirteen and begged Him to make Cathy Pride his girlfriend. When the deal didn’t come through, Perry became an agnostic.
Now he wasn’t even sure of that.
Russ just said, “Amen.”
•
Keeping their unseemly flirtation from Judy’s daughter was already proving harder as time progressed. The likelihood of crushing guilt also began to take its toll.
Earlier, before the Lind’s were killed, Iris asked why she couldn’t stay in her mother’s room, this after young Arnold Lind tried to kiss Iris on the mouth—icky—and Judy could find no excuse other than the size of the cabin, only slightly more roomy than their second bathroom back home—a mild excuse but winning, as Iris shrugged whatever and stayed put with the Lind family without protest while the liner crossed the seas slowly, as if propelled by sea otters pushing with their snouts.
Still, Judy kept playing Roger’s femme fatale at arm’s length, employing smiles and winks as seductive weapons, keeping him on his toes.
Roger Lind’s offer to Judy for free passage was born of a fantasy interest in having the woman of his wet dreams, of course, but when he was honest with himself, also a simple desire to help two females in trouble. The icing on the deal was Judy’s blowjob in his office, of course, but even Judy had said she didn’t think of oral sex as sex. “I subscribe to the Bill Clinton ‘I never had sex with that woman’ school of thought,” she’d explained.
Roger’s retort: Give that woman a cigar, went unsaid.
Back to issues at hand. Desire. Roger wanted to ravage Judy, rip off that blouse and take a long look at those pert titties before trying to suck them dry, twist her nipples just to hear Judy moan.
Because, once his ex dumped left him a few years before and became a lipstick lesbian, Roger fell apart, took to drugs, liquor and a starvation diet. The once-dreamy class president with the cool hair and engaging smile was a physical and emotional wreck. His weight dropped from 190 to 148. He missed work at a real estate agency and was fired; only the intervention of his brother’s wife saved him. She had him move into a room over their garage, fed him, cleaned him up and got him a job with her father’s cruise ship company.
Roger fell in love with her, which led to complications with his brother, since patched up, now moot because he and his savior wife were both dead, washed to sea.
Worst of all, Roger hadn’t had sex in a year and a half. That sucked.
Back to his playing weight, all shiny and fresh with a positive outlook on life, women still spurned him and he didn’t know why.
Maybe I’m too good looking? he wondered and checked the mirror, laughing, Yep, that’s the reason. Just too damn handsome, but without a sexual outlet, Roger’s socket was not getting plugged. His stockpile of Viagra was probably going bad from disuse, though he always carried one in his jacket pocket.
So Roger, mindful that his longing for Judy was fueled in part by a crazier, unspoken chimera, walked on coals around her, not wanting to scare Judy off. It was only on the third night of the floating retreat from Hawaii that his fancy was pushed to the breaking point, this at a dinner hosted by the captain for survivors of the atomic tsunami and the terrible toll it had taken on board, reducing the size of the refugee contingent by half, including his brother’s family. Never close, Roger still cursed himself for not feeling more sympathetic, but was completely taken by Judy’s many charms and couldn’t look away.
> Seeing Judy, outfitted grandly in an almost-too-tight red satin blouse, her modest, perky breasts poking up and nearly out, made his night. Temptress Judy demurely rebuttoned the top, only to have the fleshy mounds leap up again when the captain told a joke and she laughed fully, leaning forward, then—pow—poking out like unbound prisoners. Judy strung him along with a direct gaze as she first latched the button, then purposely undid it again; the second button not quite setting her twin girls free.
“Mom, watch your top,” Iris had whispered. “What would daddy say?”
“No autopsy, no foul,” Judy replied, staring at Roger. “Most likely.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Iris asked to no answer.
•
Dark now, Russ planned to spend the night in the lodge, then start moving all his belongings from the van to the hotel. After that, he’d bury any dead he found. Burial would give him purpose.
He found a room on the second floor and collapsed on the bed. It was only a moment later when he fell asleep, the covers undisturbed, dreamless until a ray of sun hit his face and he awoke briefly. But he rolled away from the light and fell back to sleep.
Finally, after what seemed like centuries, he got up.
Yawning, Russ made his way downstairs and located the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator was far more food than had been in the Bend Safeway, some of which was starting to spoil. But there were also containers of water. Russ took one out and filled up a glass. Even though he actually tolerated water (try downing a glass of Arrowhead water after a round of golf instead of a Miller High Life—not a fair comparison, he thought) but this time, nothing had ever tasted so fine. He drank another full glass and then one more, feeling he’d been in the Sahara instead of the Cascade range—parched beyond reason.
While he quenched his thirst, Russ noticed the stove and saw that it ran on propane. He fiddled with the knobs and got it to light with a match.
“Hot meals,” he said happily.
Russ drank another glass of water in a toast.
Finally sated, Russ searched the cabinets and found cans and cans of food—giddy with the discovery. This cache would allow him to live for months, then, realizing that hotels have freezers, he checked around until he found a big silver refrigerator-style door.