13. All Is Lost
All Is Lost
IRIS
The cold has teeth.
A living, malevolent thing, it bites through my coat, through the denim of my jeans, sinking its fangs straight into the marrow.
It doesn’t chill. It devours. Every breath knifes in like a razor blade, crystallizing the moisture in my lungs before I exhale, turning the simple act of breathing into a battle for survival.
The wind threads through the trees with a high, thin wail. A chorus of dying things, a ceaseless keen drowning out the crunch of boots on ice and the rasp of my own laboring lungs.
To my left, Boyd drives us forward.
He isn’t running. He moves with an economy of movement that defies the conditions.
Hunched low, keeping his broad profile beneath the wind line, he uses the shadows of the ancient pines as if they were solid walls protecting us from the storm’s gaze.
He steps where the snow is shallowest, near the trunks of the firs, avoiding the deceptive drifts that would swallow us whole.
I track his movement through the lens of a physician making a diagnosis. It’s the only way I can keep the panic at bay, reducing him to mechanics and physiology.
He’s injured.
Blood dried in a dark, crusty streak on his forehead where the windshield cut him during the rollover.
It tracks down into his eyebrow, matting the hair.
He favors his left leg, an antalgic gait he tries to hide by pushing hard and dragging the limb slightly with every step.
The quadriceps aren’t firing correctly. Soft-tissue damage, perhaps a tear or even a hairline fracture.
He runs on structural damage and a reserve of violence I can’t comprehend.
My own body fails.
The shivering, violent an hour ago, has stopped.
That’s bad. I’m sliding from mild to moderate hypothermia.
My body gave up on generating heat. Blood shunts to the core, abandoning my extremities to keep the heart and brain alive a few minutes longer.
My fingers turn to clumsy, frozen claws inside my gloves, bereft of sensation.
My toes are gone, phantom appendages I can no longer feel striking the frozen earth. I walk on stumps.
“Keep moving.”
Boyd’s voice comes as a rough vibration against the wind, cutting through the white noise.
“Don’t stop. Never stop.”
We exist as ghosts in a world of white and black.
The forest feels ancient here, the trees towering like pillars of a ruined cathedral, their branches heavy with snow, bowing under the weight.
The darkness remains absolute, broken only by the faint luminescence of the snow itself, reflecting the nothingness of the sky.
My boot catches a buried root.
Proprioception fails. Gravity takes over. I pitch forward, going down hard. The impact knocks the air from my lungs in a sharp grunt. Snow rushes into my collar, shocking and brutal, melting instantly against the warmth of my neck, sending rivulets of ice water down my spine.
“Iris.”
Boyd’s there in an instant.
He doesn’t offer sympathy. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He grabs my arm, grip iron-hard even through layers of wool and down, hauling me upright with a force that nearly dislocates my shoulder.
“Up. If you stop, you freeze.”
“I can’t feel my feet.” I sway, my center of gravity lost in the vertigo of the storm.
“Move.”
He pushes me forward.
Pure calculation. He knows exactly how much time we have before the metabolic processes shut down, before the heart enters a fatal arrhythmia from the cold.
He spends every second like currency, and we’re overdrawn.
He’s the triage doctor now, deciding that pain is acceptable as long as the patient remains ambulatory.
We move for another ten minutes. Or maybe an hour.
Time has lost its shape. The terrain gets steeper, the trees denser.
My lungs burn with a chemical intensity, as if I’m inhaling acid.
The initial crash-shock, the screech of metal, shattering glass, the roll down the embankment, faded long ago, leaving behind a hollow, aching exhaustion heavy as lead.
My body wants to lie down. It wants to curl up in the soft white drift and sleep. The snow looks comfortable. It looks like a bed. It promises an end to the pain.
Boyd grabs my shoulder, steering me toward a small overhang, a shelf of granite jutting out from the mountainside like a jagged tooth.
“Rest. Two minutes.”
I collapse against the stone. Freezing. I pull my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them, trying to conserve the meager warmth left in my core.
Boyd doesn’t rest.
He moves to the edge of the shelf, peering back the way we came. He pulls the Glock from his waistband.
Click-clack.
He checks the action. The metal sounds impossibly loud in the silence, a mechanical intrusion in the natural world. He presses the magazine release, drops the mag into his palm, checks the load, and slams it home.
He inspects his tools, preparing for a surgical strike.
“Are they following?” The words slur slightly. My lips feel like rubber, unresponsive and thick.
“They’re sweeping,” he answers without turning, gaze scanning the tree line below us, searching for movement in the static of the storm. “Grid pattern. Efficient. They have thermals.”
“Can we lose them?”
He turns to look at me. In the darkness, his gaze holds no comfort. Flat, black mirrors reflecting the snow.
“Not in this. We leave a trail a blind man could follow. They aren’t tracking us. They’re herding us.”
“Herding us where?”
“To the ravine. Box us in. Flush us out. It’s a kill box.”
The reality of it settles on me, heavier than the snow. We aren’t escaping. We’re just dying slower than they want us to.
“So what do we do?”
“We change the game.”
He abandons his post at the edge of the shelf. Moves toward me. Crouches beside me, knees sinking into the snow drift.
He takes my hands in his. His skin feels rough, calloused, impossibly cold, but his grip holds steady. He starts rubbing my hands, creating friction, forcing blood back into the capillaries.
“Listen to me. We’re going to move to the ridge. Gives us the high ground. Forces them to come up. Forces them to expose themselves.”
“And then?”
“And then I break their formation.”
“You only have one gun.”
“I have twelve rounds.” He cuts through the objection. “And darkness. And you.”
“Me.”
“You hide. The rocks at the base of the ridge. Get behind them and stay low. Cover your mouth with your scarf to mask the heat of your breath. Thermal sees everything. Become a rock. Become ice.”
The implication hangs in the air. He isn’t planning on us fighting together. He’s planning on fighting alone.
“Boyd—”
“If I go down,” he cuts in, the intensity of it silencing me. He leans closer, his breath clouding in the narrow space between us. “You run. You don’t look back. You don’t try to help. You head due north until you hit the river. The water hides your tracks. You go until you find a road.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
The refusal comes from instinct. The rebellion of the survivor.
“Iris.” He reaches out, cupping my face. His thumb brushes the bruise on my cheek, a tender, startling touch in the middle of the nightmare. A touch belonging in a bed, not a battlefield. “This is what I do. I’m the shield. You’re the life. That’s the deal.”
“I didn’t agree to that deal.”
“You did when you got in the truck.” He stands, breaking the contact. The warmth vanishes. He pulls me with him. “Time’s up. Move.”
We leave the shelter of the overhang and plunge back into the storm.
The hike to the ridge unfolds as a nightmare.
The snow sits deeper here, reaching my mid-thigh.
Every step fights a battle against physics.
I have to lift my leg, heave it onward against the resistance of the drift, and stomp down to find purchase.
My muscles scream. Lactic acid floods my thighs, searing hot.
I want to stop, letting the snow take me, letting the darkness have me.
But Boyd powers forward. A relentless force of nature. He breaks the path. He pulls me through the drifts. He doesn’t let me fall. He’s the engine keeping us both moving, burning his own reserves to fuel mine.
We reach the rocks. Massive boulders tumbled together by some ancient avalanche, forming a natural fortress on the slope.
He shoves me into the crevice between two of them. Tight, cold, and dark.
“Stay down. Don’t make a sound.”
He moves away.
He doesn’t stay near me. He separates himself, crouches behind a massive pine tree twenty feet to my left, bracing the pistol against the bark. He becomes part of the wood, silent and deadly still.
We wait.
Minutes stretch into hours. The cold deepens, settling into the hollows of my body.
I shiver in violent tremors rattling my teeth, threatening to give away my position.
I wrap my arms around myself, burying my face in the wool scarf, trying to hold onto the memory of warmth.
Trying to hold onto the memory of the fire and his hand on my neck.
Then, beams of light cut through the trees.
White, spectral fingers groping in the dark. They sweep back and forth, illuminating the falling snow like static on a dead channel. They move in silence, with discipline.
Their silhouettes emerge.
White camouflage blends perfectly with the landscape. Tactical gear. Night vision goggles give them the appearance of demons. They move in a diamond formation, covering their sectors, weapons raised.
Hunters.
Boyd waits.
He lets them get closer. Fifty yards. Forty.
He’s not just a shooter. He’s a predator waiting for the perfect angle, the perfect moment when their confidence makes them careless. He waits for them to commit to the slope where the footing runs treacherous.
One of the soldiers raises his hand. A fist.
“Heat signature. Eleven o’clock.”
A radio mangles the voice, but it carries in the crisp air.
They see us. Or they see him.
“Contact.”
The forest detonates.
Boyd fires.
Crack-crack.