by M K Dymock
“How’d you get from Stanford to here?” he asked, wanting to get her talking about something that wouldn’t make her mad at him.
She flinched at the question, and he realized that wasn’t the subject to do it. “I graduated pre-law during the recession, 100K in debt. I could go to law school and double that, but the lawyers I knew graduating were either working as waitresses or making under 40 grand as lawyers.”
“Not the life everyone promised, was it?”
Mina stopped her incessant pacing and took a seat on the log next to him. “I work two jobs at a time, four or five in the year,” she said resignedly. “I still owe 60K on a worthless degree. I’ve watched countless kids over the years come here for a season after college, swearing they’ll never be like their parents. Then get tired of living with ten people and go back.”
“And you think they gave up?”
“Everybody would say they grew up.” She took off her mittens and blew into her hands. “Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t time for me to grow up as well.”
“I’m grown up and I work twelve-hour days, and I live for the weekend and the chance to have miles between me and civilization. We all do the best we can.”
With a wry smile that didn’t reach her eyes, she stood. “They ought to be here soon, but we need stay warm and awake.”
He tried to stand, but a sharp pain shot through his leg and out his teeth. He groaned as he collapsed back down.
“What is it?” Mina asked.
“My feet.” He let out a breath in hopes he could let the pain out with it. He didn’t. “They’ve been hurting on and off for a few hours, but I’m okay.” His ego needed her to know he’d kept from complaining for a while.
He’d read stories of people whose feet had frozen, and when they took off their shoes, their toes came off in their socks. With that thought hanging over him, he untied the laces on his boots and pulled one off.
Ryan stared at his blue sock, wondering what it looked like underneath. Would the toes match the sock?
He didn’t want to know and took out the now-lukewarm hand warmer from his glove and placed it in his boot. When he placed it in, his foot screamed in agony.
Mina sat down next to him on the log. “No, you can’t warm it up.”
“I really think I should.”
She yanked on his boot. “If you warm it up and it freezes again, you’ll be in even worse shape.” He reached down to push her hand away, but she grabbed him and looked into his eyes. “You got to trust me on this.”
He relented and pulled the warmer back out, hoping she was right.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said. “By night we’ll be sitting in front of a fire somewhere sipping on coffee, warming up from the inside out.”
“Hot chocolate.”
“What?”
“Coffee is so bitter unless you sweeten it. Why not go for hot chocolate?”
“Because we’re adults.”
“Which means we can top it with as much whipped cream as we want.”
She stopped her laughter and looked pensive. “Can I have three giant marshmallows?”
“You can have a tower of marshmallows.” He scooted closer to her to share some warmth, and although she stiffened, she didn’t move away.
“My mom never let me have more than two,” Mina said. “When she wasn’t looking, I would sneak into the pantry and grab two more.”
Ryan rotated his ankle, trying to find some position that didn’t cry out to be cut off.
Mina glanced down at his feet. “I shouldn’t have told you to walk. If it is frostbite, it’s better to sit.”
Somewhere above them and beyond their sight, the sun met the horizon. “It’s the winter solstice today. I’d forgotten,” Ryan said.
“Yep, I was supposed to be working all this week with people coming in for Christmas, but they canceled when I found…” She kicked the frozen ground. “When everything happened.”
After a moment of uneasy silence, she asked, “Why did you ask me about the body?”
They had come to a truce, one that he didn’t want to violate. He didn’t trust their tentative relationship enough with the entire truth, not yet. “I’ve done a lot of research on mountain predators. You can tell a lot about the predator by the condition of the remains.”
“You seem like a sort-of intelligent person. Why are you chasing something that doesn’t exist?”
“Our entire lives are spent chasing something that doesn’t exist. You chase it in the hopes it will exist.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It could be something as simple as a paycheck, or maybe as complicated as falling in love.”
Mina straightened up to give him the full effect of her skepticism. “There’s a difference. You have past evidence to prove future outcomes.” That was the first time he could hear the pre-law in her language.
He’d learned a long time ago to pick and choose whom to talk to about certain things. Even with the fact he had past evidence, he’d pick another time.
They alternated pacing and sitting while the darkness crept in. Mina did a series of burpees while Ryan hopped up and down on his foot that still had feeling.
But exhaustion took over and the cold crept in.
19
Mina awoke in a stupor of darkness. Feeling as if a house of frat boys had drunk her under the table, she pulled herself to consciousness. The black offered no clue of her whereabouts to her weighted brain.
Only a warm mound of clothing jogged her memory. The storm, the walk, the cabin, and Ryan. Ryan. That thought shone a flashlight through the haze.
She’d fallen asleep against Ryan, who leaned against the only solid wall in the shack. “Wake up.” She shook him, but he didn’t budge. Stupid, she berated herself. Sleep led to death.
She grabbed his shoulder, her fingers digging into him. “Wake up.” This was now a command. She would not fail someone again. “Ryan, open your eyes.”
His skin shifted under her fingers as he pulled himself out of unconsciousness. “I’m awa…” He rolled his head but couldn’t lift it.
With two hands clutching his coat, she straddled his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Open your eyes.” She slapped him and cried out as the pain ricocheted through her cold hand. “Wake up.”
His eyes half opened. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
Mina went in for a second hit, but a loud rhythmic bang interrupted her. It repeated every thirty or so seconds, filling the frozen night air. Too far apart to be a woodpecker, even if one was stupid enough to be out in this weather.
Was it the rescuers trying to signal them? Sol and whoever would come would know the way to the cabin; it was a popular landmark.
She slid open the door, its rusty-nailed hinge echoing across the snow. With each bang, her body tensed up. When it ceased, she tensed up more.
The incessant banging started again, this time closer.
Behind her, a disjointed voice came out of the darkness. “That’s him,” Ryan said, his voice a sleepwalker’s lament.
She stumbled her way back to him, using her hands to guide her feet. “What does he want?” she asked, telling herself she only asked to keep him with her.
“A warning. We’re in his territory.” His voice came through stronger, and he stood as Mina made it to his side. “Found a partial print earlier.” Ryan whistled a piercing call.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling.”
She debated slapping him again, even raised her hand a few inches. A guttural scream ruptured the deceiving safety of the cabin, a sound she recognized from that day. She leapt to her feet. “It’s a cougar,” she whispered.
Where were the rescuers?
Ryan fumbled around in the darkness while Mina tried to convince herself everything was normal. “I found a stick,” he whispered.
Banging her shins against who knows what, she made her way to the rickety door that couldn’t keep back the Mormons,
let alone a prowling cougar. Last fall a cougar had attacked a lone biker, dragging his body back to its den. That had been a recovery no one forgot.
She pressed against the door while kicking around with her feet for anything she could use to blockade the door. While cougars or whatever that was would usually back down from an aggressive human, the beast would have the advantage in the dark.
Ryan came up beside her, “Try this.” The “stick” he’d found was a small log about five inches in diameter. She wedged it up under what remained of a door handle while he attempted to push it into the frozen ground.
The incessant banging returned.
“If it’s Bigfoot, he’s not usually an aggressor,” Ryan said in a whisper. “This is more of a warning that we’re in his territory, and he’s the dominant.”
The urge to slap him returned in force. She took a step back, and had she enough light, she would’ve glared him to submission. “Aaaahhh!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
“What are you doing?”
“Asserting my dominance. Whatever is out there—and it’s not Bigfoot—already knows we’re here.”
Ryan grasped her sleeve. “You saw what happened to that missing skier. You don’t think he tried to yell?”
She pulled her arm out of his grasp. “You don’t know,” she said, giving up on any pretense of whispering.
“I know what killed him. I know it because I found a body like the one you did. Only I was too young or too stupid to run for help. I stood there, peeing myself, as the creature hunched over part of the body.”
They pressed against the door, waiting for whatever stalked them.
20
The rescuers came not long after dawn. They explained they’d attempted to come the night before but almost lost a snowmobile and its driver into a ravine hidden by a layer of snow. They needed time and light.
Mina credited the noise in the woods, which was not Bigfoot, with saving them. Had it not woken her and scared the bejeebers out of them, they would’ve slumbered their way to death.
Phil and James had been rescued the day before by a Snowcat brought up from the bottom of the canyon. James had to be life-flighted to the nearest hospital. Sol said he was unconscious when they found him, but breathing. Phil was cold but otherwise unscathed.
It almost cost two lives to save one. Mina didn’t like that math.
She sat at the clinic in a waiting room that doubled as an office. Ryan had been taken back first on account of his feet and there being only one nurse and doctor.
Sol sat next to her, alternating standing and sitting. Neutral and sitting was the only gear she could manage. Someone had handed her an egg sandwich from Beth’s, a café that opened each day at 4 a.m., filled with greasy goodness.
“Sol,” she said after eating too much too fast made her a bit queasy and forced a pause, “did I make the right call?”
“I don’t know.”
She’d messed up; she knew that and regretted asking his confirmation. The eggs caught in the back of her throat, and she forced them down. “We should’ve stayed in the car.”
“I don’t know.” Why had she picked this maddening man to be her mentor? “Nor do you, nor will you ever. Part of our job means making decisions under difficult circumstances, which you did. You’ll waste time second-guessing.”
She pulled off another layer she wore as her body realized they sat indoors. “So what, I just assume every decision I make is the right one?”
“When you make a mistake, you own it. But an imperfect outcome doesn’t necessarily mean you messed up. And when you weigh life, you accept that someone may be hurt by a decision you make.”
She shot to her feet, but dizziness of hypothermia and hunger sat her right back down again. She stood again, more slowly. “I’m going to go see how things are going with Ryan.” She needed to know she didn’t screw up, and didn’t want a philosophy lesson.
Down a small hallway, the voices of Ryan and the doctor echoed back. “Mind if I check in?” she called out.
“You got a bullet I can bite?” Ryan said with grit in his voice.
She turned a corner and had to swallow a gasp at what had been in Ryan’s boots. His toes looked purple, like someone dropped an anvil on them. He had them dipped into a tray of water. Ryan clenched the handles of the chair he sat in, his eyes squeezed shut.
Mina wanted to apologize, but that would be more about her than him. “What do you need?” She forced a light tone, uncomfortable to admit the seriousness of it all. She tried to heed Sol’s warning against second-guessing. Four people came out alive, she reminded herself.
“A knife to cut these toes off. Having them gone can’t be worse than this.” he said through clenched teeth.
She leveled a stare at the doctor, Kevin, who also moonlighted at the resort in first aid. He stood behind Ryan, hanging an IV. “Hopefully it’ll kick in soon.”
“You don’t have anything better than water to warm him up?”
“We have to warm him up slowly if we want to save the toes.”
Ryan didn’t react to this. That conversation must’ve already happened.
“Ryan,” Kevin said, “I’m going to check out Mina while the drugs kick in before we get to the next part.”
He managed a nod. “Don’t tell me what the next part is.”
Mina tried to protest. “I’m fine; stay with him.”
“Seen yourself in a mirror?” Kevin asked.
“Not if I can help it.”
“Follow me.” Kevin took her behind another curtain, where he soaked a Q-tip in disinfectant. “You’ve got a few patches of frostbite on your cheeks and nose that’s already blistering. By tomorrow, it’ll look like you had a major sunburn. I’m afraid you won’t win any beauty pageants for a while.”
She managed a shaky smile through the burning sensation as he applied the disinfectant to her face, a small glimpse of what Ryan must be going through. “What? My face is my moneymaker.”
“Speaking of which. You can’t be outside for very long for the next few weeks. And when you are—and I’m talking walking to your house from your car—your face needs to be covered.”
“Kevin,” she said without a hint of a smile, “being outside is my moneymaker. I can’t lose that income.”
“I know, but if you want to heal without your face sloughing off and scarring, then you’ll listen. Choice is yours.”
Sol called out. “How’s it coming?”
“Apparently, I’m on my way to being Scarface,” Mina said, casting a dirty look at Kevin.
“You’ll heal.” Sol came into the room as the doctor left it. “I got word from the sheriff in Summit: James is conscious. He’s responding well to oxygen and drugs.”
She let go of the breath she didn’t realize she’d started holding when she saw him. She would never forgive herself if what she put Ryan through had been for nothing. “I know his kids. Couldn’t imagine having to tell them I let their dad die. I don’t know if Ryan will find it a fair trade, though.”
“You have to learn to live with this decision. Otherwise you won’t be able to make the next one.”
She stared down at her bare feet, where she’d stuck on an adhesive foot warmer she’d stolen from behind the nursing desk. “Where’s my Jeep?”
“It’ll be a few days until they can dig it out. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll drive you home.”
“I need to go see Ryan; he’s in a lot of hurt.” She stood, and a wave of dizziness forced her back down. Sol reached out a steadying arm, but she waved him off.
Ryan’s voice carried from around the corner. “I don’t mind losing the pinky toe; it’s always been a crooked, weird-looking thing.” His drugs must be kicking in.
Kevin’s voice boomed back. “I’ll chop it off now, then.”
“You’ll need a bullet to bite on,” Mina called out as she stood, this time more slowly.
The irreverent doctor pushed back the curtain to allow her in
. She flinched at the sight of Ryan’s toes fully out of the water. Around the edges of the blue, the skin looked white and waxy, blistering into nasty round bumps. “That’s no good.”
Ryan shrugged but didn’t meet her eyes, but she could read the anxiety behind his joking. “Doctor said there’s a chance he might be able to save them.”
Kevin put a note into the iPad he carried. “There’s a treatment I’ve been using with some success. It uses a laser to get oxygen to the infected areas and helps save the skin, if it isn’t dead yet. I’m going to get you both some pain medication to get you by for the next few days.” He left them alone.
Mina stood next to Ryan shifting from foot to foot, unsure of what to say or do. “Sorry about your toes.”
“The tissue isn’t dead yet.” His face dropped and he took a breath. “But that’s not what’s worrying me the most.”
She dropped to the chair the doctor had abandoned. “What’s wrong?”
“What are you going to look like when your nose falls off?”
She stared at him, speechless, until a small smile broke through his moroseness. “You jerk.” She cocked her head at him with a smirk. “Lucky for you, I’ll be too busy running circles around your shortened feet to care.”
He stared back at his toes as if analyzing them. “I had the biggest feet in sixth grade, and that included the ninth-grade kids. I guess I could stand to lose a few inches.”
“You’d have to buy new shoes, and that gets pricy.” Mina took a turn to study her own feet, wrapped in purple hospital socks with rubber on the soles. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said without a hint of frustration.
Kevin pushed back the curtain. “Sorry, you two. It’s last call, and I’m the designated driver.”
Mina stood while Ryan fumbled for a pair of crutches sitting next to him. “You don’t have to take me home. Sol said he would,” she said to Kevin.
“I’m not. Stretch here should really spend one more night in a hospital, but we’re not set up for that and the storm isn’t letting anybody out of this valley for a few days. He’s coming home with me tonight.”