Caroline
Hiking fourteen miles through a blizzard starts off exactly as bad as it sounds.
And then it gets worse.
The snow wails back like the angriest jury that's ever been summoned.
Afon walks in front of me, breaking trail. That means he plows a furrow through knee-deep powder with his body so that I can walk in his wake like the ugly duckling. Every few minutes, he checks over his shoulder to make sure I haven't died yet.
Wolf ranges ahead and behind, materializing out of the white like a furry cryptid, then vanishing again.
By the second hour, the imaginary jury has been dismissed. My world has narrowed to the back of Afon's jacket and the placement of my next step. My ankle, which Afon wrapped this morning, is more pissed than ever. Each step stings.
"How are you doing?" Afon calls back.
"Living the dream," I shout. "Five stars. Would descend again."
"I thought we agreed not to bullshit bullshitters."
"It'll hold," I say.
He nods grimly and keeps on moving.
The creek shows up around mile three, and let me say: whoever wrote poetry about babbling brooks never met this one.
This asshole body of water doesn't babble or chuckle or any of those merry little verbs.
It sorts of snarls menacingly beneath a layer of jagged ice.
Afon hauls me across the bad sections. I don't even bother pretending I can do it without his help.
This is the plan, and the plan is working. That's what I keep telling myself. Miserable was the forecast. It's right on schedule.
And then Wolf stops.
He goes rigid in the trail ahead of us, one paw lifted mid-stride, ears swiveled downslope like satellite dishes, and his hackles rise in a slow ridge from his neck to his tail. I've seen this exact posture once before, in the cabin, the morning everything went wrong.
Afon's fist comes up. I have absorbed enough of his wordless military semaphore by now to know this means stop and shut up, and I do both.
For a moment, there's nothing but the wind being litigious.
Then, under the storm: a whine. Mechanical. Rising and falling in pitch, somewhere below us and to the east, working back and forth like a sewing machine stitching its way across the mountain.
A snowmobile. Maybe two.
My stomach goes parasailing off the nearest cliff.
Afon doesn't move for thirty full seconds. He stands with his head canted, the snow piling up on his shoulders like the world's worst dandruff. Then he comes back to me, close enough that he doesn't have to shout.
"They're running a search pattern," he says. "Lower slopes. East side of the drainage."
"In this?" I gesture at the apocalypse around us. "I thought the whole point of the storm was that nobody sane would be out in it."
"Nobody sane is."
"We are."
"My point stands."
I'd laugh if my face still worked. "Okay. So what does this mean? Math it out for me."
"It means we can't follow the creek." He looks downslope, into the churning white, and I watch the route in his head get crumpled up and thrown away.
"The creek bends east in two miles. Right into their pattern.
We'll have to go west instead, around the high shoulder, and come back down behind them. "
"How much does that add?"
He doesn't answer right away, which is his version of trying to get out of answering at all.
"Afon. No bullshit, remember?"
"Three miles," he sighs. "Maybe four, depending on the snow up top."
Four miles. On top of fourteen. On an ankle operating with way fewer ligaments than normal. I close my eyes, but then, behind my eyelids, I see the bench in Pike Hollow, the white van, Buzzcut's hand over my mouth, and the decision gets very easy, actually.
"West it is," I declare. "I always wanted to see more of this mountain. It's been such a charmer so far."
That doesn't get a smile out of Afon.
"Stay close," is all he says. "There's no telling what could happen next."
The detour is even less fun than anticipated.
The high shoulder of the mountain is exposed in a way the drainage wasn't, and the wind up there is in a way worse temper.
It scours the slope down to rock in some places and piles the snow into thigh-deep drifts in others, and there's no pattern to which is which, so every step is a gamble with my ankle as the stake.
Afon shortens his stride to match mine without being asked. Wolf stops ranging and walks pressed against my left leg, a hundred and twenty pounds of mobile windbreak slash furry crutch. I love him so much in that hour that I would put him in my will.
I stop talking. All I'm capable of doing is watching Afon's boots and putting mine where his were. Somewhere along the way there, the snowmobile whine fades
Somewhere in there, also, Afon slows down.
It takes me a while to notice it. With a man like Afon, who keeps so much close to the chest, every bad thing is subtle… until it's very much not subtle at all.
He's still breaking trail, still handing me over the bad spots, but his pauses get longer.
He starts using trees for support. A hand braced against a trunk here, a shoulder against a deadfall there, always disguised as checking our bearing or listening.
At one point, he stands with his hand pressed flat against a spruce for a count of ten, and I think, He's tired, and with good reason, because he's been doing the work of a plow truck for seven hours.
But it's only when we reach the lean-to that I realize just how bad it's gotten.
In theory, it's four o'clock, but if you looked at the sky, you'd think it was five 'til midnight on the eve of the apocalypse.
Underneath that dark, ominous overhang, a three-sided shed of weathered planks appears, tucked under an overhang of rock.
Compared to this thing, the miner's hut was the Ritz freaking Carlton.
But I'll take it.
"Oh, thank God," I croak, and stagger the last twenty yards on an ankle made of crab meat and Elmer's glue.
Afon doesn't stagger. But he puts his hand on the lean-to's corner post when he reaches it, and he leaves it there for too long. That's when I finally look at him and see the source of all his silent misery.
The left side of his jacket, just above the hip. The fabric is dark there. Darker than the snow-wet dark of everywhere else. When I take a step closer, the smell reaches me through the cold, faint and coppery, and my whole body goes numb.
"Afon."
"It's nothing," he barks at once.
"You're bleeding." My brain runs the tape backward and suddenly sees everything it missed. "How long has it been open?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It does if you die! Sit down."
My horror only grows when he listens immediately instead of arguing with me.
Afon Satyrin, who has never once in our acquaintance done a single thing I told him to, lowers himself onto the plank bench at the back of the lean-to and bows his head.
Wolf crowds in after us and plants himself across the open side, head out, on watch, because at least one male in this party has sense.
"Jacket off," I order, kneeling in front of him.
There's a horrible déjà vu to it, except this time his fingers fumble the zipper. My dread deepens, more and more.
"Hey." I catch his hands. They're cold. He runs hot—I've slept against the furnace of him for three nights, I would know—but right now, he feels like a corpse-in-the-making. "Hey. I've got it. Let me."
"I can do it," he says. But he lets me do it anyway.
I get the zipper down. The sweater underneath is soaked through over his hip, the bloodstain the size of a bread plate, and when I peel the layers back, the gauze from the hut is hanging by one strip of tape, the graze beneath it raw and seeping.
"You absolute jackass," I breathe. "You knew! And yet you let me complain about my ankle for the last—"
"I needed the distraction.
"I am going to kill you myself and save Reznik the gas money," I announce.
He chuckles, but it quickly turns into a wince. Then his eyes find mine, hazy, and they turn soft and sorry. "You don't have to worry about me," he insists.
"Too late, you mule. Where's the first aid kit?"
I'm digging through his stuff before he can even reply. His head is bowed again and he's breathing like the mule I just accused him of being. Shallow, pained snorts through his nose and open mouth.
I'm fishing through everything we have with us, tossing aside all the shit I don't need, when my fingers graze something familiar.
Something hard.
Something plastic.
Something rectangular, with a stub of antenna at one end.
I pull out the satellite phone.
This time, it's turned on. The screen glows. I pause for a second and glance backward, but Afon is still doing that labored breathing with his eyes closed.
So I tap the contacts.
There's one stored number. No name, simply a string of digits and a country code.
He had this. The whole time, he had this. A literal fucking lifeline.
When I was zip-tied to a folding chair in a bunkhouse that smelled like propane and bad intentions—he had this.
When his cabin, the one he built a new life inside, went up in a column of black smoke—he had this.
When a bullet drew a hot line across his hip and he drove a snowmobile up a mountain without mentioning it—he had this.
This morning, while calculating about beans and kerosene and how many days of kibble Wolf had left, as he was deciding to march a woman with a bad ankle fourteen miles through a blizzard—he had this, riding against his chest like a second heart, charged and working, one button away from making all of it stop.
One call could have saved us.
And he chose the blizzard instead.
I don't know what calling this number would require or cost. I only know that a man who jumps in front of bullets for me does know, and that price scares him more than dying does.