Chapter 21
Searching, the practiced familiarity of it, the purposefulness of it, brought back a little bit of calm, let Zach feel his mother’s skill in his own.
He moved between Dave, some fifty feet away, and his father, about thirty feet away.
Bram, unsteady, held his beacon up to the sky as if trying to get cell-phone reception from the air instead of trying to pick up a low, buried beacon signal.
Pike lay behind them near the edge of the debris field, completely dug out now but sprawled on his back.
Dave’s voice came through the radio. “There’s someone buried here!”
Zach hurried toward Dave, who was stabbing his probe into the snowpack. Was that a leg? Yes. A black-panted leg.
“He can’t be far down,” Dave told Zach. “I hit something here with the probe.”
Zach took up his shovel, but then Bram was there, shoving his son aside.
Useless, an obstacle.
Shovel in hand, Pike limped across the snow as if the legs he’d freed were only half back to life.
He went to his knees next to Bram, who shifted to give Pike space to dig.
Unsure of what to do but needing to do something, anything, Zach kneeled next to Dave and dug, even though he knew it was unlikely from the leg’s orientation that any part of the buried man lay beneath his shovel.
Across from Zach, ice crusted Pike’s facial hair, his eyelashes.
His lips were still purpled. He kept pausing, drifting, gazing uphill, around him, then would shake himself as if he’d been about to fall asleep, and return to shoveling.
Bram appeared to be recovering more ably, working with a maniacal focus that was only interrupted when he coughed, a cough so deep Bram’s body heaved with it, the sound enormous and dry, ricocheting around them like a live thing.
Bram’s shovel skidded against something hidden, then exposed the collar of a coat; a sliver of throat skin and clavicle. Which meant the head was—
Zach waved a hand at a spot on the snowpack. “Here! His head it has to be over—”
“Yes, yes,” Dave muttered, repositioning himself.
Bram moved opposite Dave and hacked away with his shovel.
Out came a flash of a silver helmet and then hands, one folded over the other. It was Shane, and he’d had the presence of mind to clap his hands over his mouth and nose to try to create an air pocket. Dave and Bram, invigorated, scraped his head free, both repeating, “Shane? Do you hear me? Shane?”
Shane’s goggles sat askew, half hiding a blue eye that stared at the heavens as the falling flakes landed on it, sticking then melting.
“Shane? Shane?”
Shane didn’t respond. Didn’t blink.
“Let’s get his chest out, so he can breathe,” Bram ordered.
Zach felt as though he were floating somewhere far away. Shane was dead, even if the adults didn’t realize it yet. Zach had seen an eye like that before. But he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t breathe that reality aloud because then he’d be the one making it true.
Together, Bram and Dave tried to sit Shane up in the snow. His hands fell away from his mouth, and he slumped black, limp.
“No.” Bram gripped Shane’s shoulders. Shook him. Shane’s head lolled, eye still staring.
“No, no, no. This can’t happen.” Bram whipped off a glove, wedged his fingers into Shane’s collar to feel for his pulse.
“Do either of you know CPR?”
The men shook their heads.
Zach had taken a CPR class at school. There was something about a song you could sing to remind you what to do.
Zach couldn’t remember it. But it didn’t matter, because Shane was so obviously dead.
Pike and Dave knew it, too, now, exchanging a stunned but heavy glance as they stood up, took a step back from the body.
Bram laid Shane down flat. He began chest compressions, alternating with mouth-to-mouth.
The rhythm, the pattern, the force—though Zach couldn’t recall what was right he did know all of this was wrong, his father imitating things he’d seen in movies. On television.
“Shane? Wake up, Shane.”
“He’s gone,” Dave said at last, putting a hand on Bram’s shoulder. “Look at the neck. It’s not—it’s not right.”
The force of Bram’s efforts had jolted Shane side to side, pulling his neck gaiter down to reveal a discoloration; an unnatural angle.
“This can’t be happening.” Bram turned to Pike and Zach. “This is—he’s Arlo Oliver’s son!”
Bram’s eyes moved rapidly, frantically, as if tracking specters and invisibles that would allow him to rewind time.
“We should keep searching,” Dave said, unable to look at Shane’s body, already turning his back.
“I can’t.” Pike shook his head. “I think—I’m in bad shape, here. I was buried. And he’s dead! He’s dead.”
Bram stood and tightly paced beside the body, his hands in fists.
“Goddamn it! He just couldn’t do what he was told. How could he do this to me? That selfish little—”
Pike retched into the snow, and though nothing came up the sound of it made Zach nauseous.
“Did he—Shane didn’t have a satellite phone, did he?” Zach asked.
Something seemed to click back together in Bram at the mention of technological aid.
He shed his dazed desperation and began searching his own coat, and Zach recalled Bram sliding his SOS device in a pocket up in the trees before the second slide.
Not as helpful as a phone that would allow them to talk to someone, but at least something they could use in another attempt to summon help, to hit a button and send a distress signal out into the void.
But at finding he’d failed to zip his pockets, Bram’s eyes widened.
The device was gone. Noticing Zach watching, his father glowered and pressed a quick finger to his lips to demand silence.
“Wait, yes! Shane told me yesterday he had his own sat phone,” Dave said.
At this Bram unzipped Shane’s coat, pawed through the pockets, then sat back. “There’s nothing. And his pack was ripped off him. Sat phone had to be in there.”
“Jon had one too. And the guide of course. But he already called, right? So they should be coming. Christ.” Dave swiped a hand across his forehead. “I should’ve just paid the five hundred for the thing they tried to sell me, paid for the stupid phone plan…”
There was no way to know if Steve’s distress calls had been received. No way to call for help. No way to call for rescue. Not without finding Steve or Jon, or Shane’s pack. But what did it matter?
“They probably can’t get here, anyway.” Zach pointed to the sky. “Not with a storm.”
“We can’t know that,” Bram insisted. “The guide called again from down here. Texted or something? Though maybe the bastard was lying and the damn thing wasn’t even working.”
Snow had collected at the edges of Shane’s nostrils now.
In the soft cartilage of his ears. A flake stuck to a blue iris and this time it didn’t melt.
Dave closed Shane’s eyes with his gloved fingers.
When he lifted his hand the eyes opened a sliver.
Dave turned off his beacon, which Bram had tossed in the snow as he searched the body. “Poor kid. Jesus.”
Zach ached where his body had pressed against the trees, where the stick had cut him.
He didn’t dare speak up again, but his mother had told him about people Mountain Rescue hadn’t been able to reach for days because rescuers couldn’t fly through bad weather, couldn’t safely hike up under slopes loaded with new-fallen snow.
But he didn’t know everything. Maybe far away in town things were happening.
Vehicles moving. Snowmobiles and helicopters deployed.
Maps laid out on tables, discussed among a tight band of experts.
Somewhere under the snow, Steve’s satellite phone might be ringing.
Did satellite phones ring? Above them, miles and miles away in even greater cold, Zach pictured a spinning satellite, shiny as Russ’s emergency blanket, rotating through the heavens and glossily informing the world that they were here. That they needed help.
Steve had been the only one to hesitate. To suggest Russ and Zach stay behind. They needed to keep searching, because right now as they sat around feeling sorry for themselves Steve might be rebreathing his own exhalations, slowly suffocating on his own polluting breath.
Zach gave voice to an awful possibility that struggled to the surface of his disconnected thoughts. “Before the second slide, Steve radioed that he’d found a signal. So that—doesn’t that have to mean his beacon isn’t transmitting?”
“Sorry, but, what? What do you mean?” Pike asked.
Dave’s defeated voice answered, “It means our beacons won’t be able to pick up any signal from the guide, because his beacon won’t be sending a signal. His beacon is set to search, not transmit.”
Barely louder than a whisper, Pike asked, “What do we do?”
“Keep searching,” Bram said, tired but matter-of-fact. “We might pick up Jon’s signal. Have to keep our eyes up. We could get lucky and see one of them near the surface.”
“Right,” Dave said. “Pike, you over there, me here, Bram, Zach, okay? And if your beacon starts beeping, call everyone over to search. That’s—that’s what we learned in my avalanche class anyway. Does—does anyone have any other input?”
“Walk in zigzags. And keep your beacon low,” Zach swept his beacon below his waist to demonstrate.
“Right, right,” Dave agreed. “Anything else?”
There was plenty more, all so clear in Zach’s head, the way the transceiver emitted electromagnetic flux lines, the way they curved out so that their center, the spot where a buried person would be, was the cross-point of a giant figure eight.
But he said nothing, because until they got a signal, none of the rest mattered.
They resumed searching. Plodding, this time, the hope sucked away from them by Shane’s broken body.