6. Banks
BANKS
The dark is warm. That's the first wrong thing.
Warm dark means dying. I know this. I've pulled enough frozen corpses off enough mountains to know the exact sequence.
First the shivering stops. Then the pain stops.
Then the dark goes warm and soft and it feels like sleep and that's when the tissue starts dying, the capillaries collapsing, the organs shutting down one by one in quiet mechanical surrender.
I'm in the warm dark. I know what that means.
Don't care.
"Banks. Banks, no. No, no, no, no, please."
Her words come from somewhere above me. Muffled, like she's speaking through water.
The fingers on my jaw shake violently but they don't let go.
They push harder, digging into the hinge of my mandible, and the sharp pressure sends a spike of pain through my skull that cuts through the warm dark like a blade.
Pain is good. Pain means alive.
"Banks, please wake up, please, I don't know what to do, I don't know where we are, I can't, I don't, please."
She's crying. Not the controlled tears from the cave. Real crying. The kind that comes from the gut, ugly and animal. She keeps repeating "please" between sobs.
I can't die here.
The thought arrives fully formed. Not a hope.
Not a prayer. A tactical assessment. I cannot die here because if I die here, she dies here.
In roughly four hours the blizzard will bury us both.
The mercenaries will find a way around the ravine.
She has no navigation equipment, no survival training, no radio, no knowledge of the terrain.
If my heart stops beating she will sit next to my body and freeze to death because Hadley Fence will not leave me.
I know this with absolute certainty. She will stay and she will talk to me and she will curl against my cooling body for warmth that no longer exists and she will die in this snowfield in her ridiculous pink boots.
No.
I drag myself up from the warm dark. It fights me.
Every cell in my body screams for the sleep.
My blood pressure is cratered. I can feel it in the hollow thudding of my heart, each beat pushing less volume, each pump moving less oxygen to my brain.
The wound in my side burns with a cold fire that tells me the bullet fragment tore through the external oblique and possibly nicked the lower rib.
Not fatal if treated. Fatal if ignored in minus thirty with continued blood loss.
I open my eyes.
White. Blinding, total white. Snow on my face, packed into my nostrils, caked across my eyelashes.
I blink and the world assembles itself in fragments.
Snow. Her knees. Her gloves, stained dark red with my blood.
Her face above me, blotchy, swollen, snot running from her nose, tears frozen in white lines on her cheeks. Her eyes enormous and wild with terror.
I try to speak. My tongue is thick. Dry. I swallow once and force air through my vocal cords.
"Stop crying."
Her whole body jerks. Her mouth falls open. Fresh tears spill and she slaps both hands over her mouth.
"Oh my God. Oh my God, you're alive."
"Need you to listen." Every word costs something. I can feel the blood still leaking, slower now with the cold constricting the vessels, but steady. Too steady. "Can you listen?"
She nods. Fast. Her hands drop from her mouth. She leans closer, hovering over me, blocking the wind.
"My pack. Left side pocket. Black compression bandage. Velcro seal."
Her hands scramble at my pack straps. She fumbles with the buckle for three agonizing seconds, then gets it open. She digs through the side pocket and pulls out the vacuum-sealed bandage pack with shaking fingers.
"Rip it open. Press the pad flat against the wound. Wrap the tails all the way around, tight as you can. Tighter than you think."
She peels my hand away from my side. I hear her breath catch when she sees it. The fabric of my layer is shredded in a four-inch gash, the skin beneath split open where the ricochet fragment carved a shallow channel through muscle. It's not deep. But it's long and it hasn't stopped.
Her hands are shaking so badly the bandage almost slips. She catches it. Shoves the pad down. I grunt. The pressure is white-hot. She flinches.
"Don't stop. Wrap it."
She wraps. One pass around my torso, then another, pulling the elastic tail with everything she has. For a woman with no training, she cinches it hard enough to force a sound out of me that I can't swallow in time. Good. Pressure on the wound. The bleeding will slow.
"Quarter mile." I have to say it now, while my head is still partially functional. "Northwest. Down the slope, through the trees. Trapper's cabin. Abandoned."
"I can't carry you."
"Don't need to carry me. Unclip the drag strap from my pack frame. Bottom loop. Yellow carabiner."
She finds it. Her bloody fingers fumble the carabiner gate open on the second try.
"Clip it to my harness. Chest ring."
She clips it. The connection is solid. I test it with a weak pull. Holds.
"Drag me."
"Banks, I weigh a hundred and twenty pounds."
"Snow is slick. Momentum will do the work. Point me downhill and pull. Don't stop for anything."
She pulls.
I feel the snow compact under my shoulders, the drag strap biting into my chest harness as her weight leans forward against the slope. For two seconds nothing happens. Then gravity finds us. The snowpack gives, my body breaks loose from the depression my collapse carved, and I start moving.
The world tilts. Sky becomes trees. Trees become white streaks.
I keep my arms crossed over my body to reduce drag and lock my jaw against the grinding fire in my side.
Every bump sends a fresh pulse of heat through the bandage.
I memorize the sensation clinically. The pain is useful.
It keeps my heart rate elevated. Keeps the blood moving to my brain.
She's grunting with effort. Small, fierce sounds between ragged breaths.
Her boots punch through the crust with each step, sinking to mid-calf, and she has to wrench each foot free before planting the next.
The drag strap goes taut, slack, taut, slack in rhythm with her struggling gait. Not efficient. But relentless.
I track our heading by the treetops passing overhead. Northwest. She's holding the line I gave her, whether by instinct or dumb luck. The pines thicken. Wind drops. We've hit the trees.
"How far?"
"Close."
Two hundred yards. Maybe less. The snow is shallower under the canopy, which makes the drag harder.
More friction. She compensates by leaning almost horizontal, driving with her legs.
The pink boots slip on a buried root and she goes down on one knee.
Gets back up. Doesn't pause. Doesn't say a word.
I smell it before I see it. Old wood. Pine tar.
Decades of woodsmoke soaked into timber.
I crane my neck and catch the outline through the trees.
A squat, dark shape hunched under the snow like something hibernating.
Single story. Pitched roof sagging under the weight of three winters' worth of accumulated ice. Log walls black with age.
"Straight ahead. Twenty meters."
She makes a sound. Not a word. Just a raw, animal noise of relief. Her pace doubles. The drag strap jerks me forward and the last stretch of ground passes under me in a blur of packed snow and frozen earth.
The door faces south. Standard trapper's practice. Maximizes what little sun angle this latitude offers. The door itself is heavy pine planks, hand-hewn, secured with a leather latch that's frozen solid. She drops the strap and attacks the latch with both hands. Can't budge it.
"Knife. Right thigh. Velcro flap."
She pulls the fixed blade from my leg sheath without hesitation. Wedges the tip under the frozen latch and levers hard. The leather cracks. The door swings inward with a groan that sounds like the cabin clearing its throat.
Inside is black. Cold as the grave. But out of the wind.
She grabs the drag strap again. One final surge and she hauls me across the threshold, my boots catching on the raised doorframe, and then I'm on rough wood planks and the sound of the blizzard drops from a roar to a muffled hiss.
I roll. The movement sends a shockwave through my oblique that whites out my vision for half a second. Doesn't matter. I'm already pushing to my knees. Then to my feet. The cabin tilts around me and I slam one hand flat against the nearest wall to keep from going back down.
"Banks, sit down. You just, you were literally unconscious five minutes ago."
I'm already moving. The cabin is small. Twelve by sixteen, roughly.
One room. Stone hearth against the north wall.
A wooden cot frame with no mattress. A plank table.
Two shuttered windows, one east, one west, both covered by heavy pine shutters secured from the inside with iron cross-bars.
I can see the gaps where the wood has warped away from the frames.
Wind screams through the cracks like something alive.
East window first. I cross the cabin in three strides.
The iron bar has rusted but it's seated.
I grip it with both hands and wrench it downward into its lower bracket.
Metal screams against metal. Locked. I test the shutter with my shoulder.
Solid. Five inches of old-growth pine won't stop a rifle round but it'll stop eyes. Can't shoot what you can't see.
The movement tears something in my side. I feel the bandage shift, feel fresh warmth bloom under the compression wrap. I ignore it. Perimeter first. Bleed second.