Chapter 35
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was here before it got dark. Before it got really cold.
Zach ran a hand over the sign, knocking snow from the words, trying to confirm it was real, to accept that the cabin was close, that he’d get to rest soon.
He scanned the area where he remembered the mine shaft waited, a sneering, dangerous emptiness. The heavy snowdrifts had reduced its mouth to a small, benign puddle.
Zach shivered. There were so many unknowable, unseeable dangers in the world. He pressed uphill and in minutes stood in front of the cabin, only a sliver of it visible between the snow on the ground and the feet of powder on the roof.
He sagged in relief. He was safe.
Though could anywhere really be safe?
Zach swung the door inward and peered through the gloom.
He bit his lip hard at seeing “Zach + Grace, 2021” written on the wall opposite the door. The words had gone as gray as all the other carved names and dates. He’d scratched his name in the wood yesterday. He’d done it a million years ago. He’d written it in a different life entirely.
But he’d made it. His mom would have been proud.
And the creature wouldn’t find him here.
It had become ever less a monster as he climbed, put distance between himself and whatever stalked the mountain.
It was an animal. Just some animal. Not one he could identify, but what did he know?
He’d thought human lives couldn’t be exchanged for money.
He’d thought his father and Pike were normal men.
He didn’t know anything.
After the exertion of his climb, every touch of wind brought pain. But if he lit a fire would it give away his position? If it stayed cloudy, smoke would be hard to see. And once it got dark?
Zach was so unbearably cold that it didn’t matter. Fire was a necessity.
The frozen air, the ache of his punctured neck and bruised side, all his misery latched so deep he felt sure he’d never heal or be warm again. And the knowledge of everything he had to do before he could rest, could sleep, made tears eke out.
It had been such a grueling climb.
He had to focus on the fire. On the possibility of warming up. Sleeping.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
Because one side of the cabin was encased in a drift, Zach was able to simply ski up onto the roof.
He knocked snow off the chimney with a mitten, then poked inside the pipe with his unfolded avalanche probe.
It slid in easily, then hit something. Zach stirred the probe around with a clink, clink, clink of metal on metal until he heard and felt something dislodge and fall into the woodstove below with a soft whumph.
A chipmunk’s winter food cache, dead leaves?
He fed the probe farther down the chimney until he hit the stove’s bottom. He rattled it around, up, down, but there was only the shiny clang of metal.
It was as cleared as he could get it. It might be safe.
Zach folded the probe and skied to the edge of the glade, looking for any dead branches he could snap off, any dry wood that might be hiding under canopies or beneath fallen trees.
The pickings were thin; most of the wood wet, moldy, or alive, all of which would create little heat and cause billows of smoke.
He had no way to cut any large pieces smaller so they might fit into the stove.
Every time he found wood he thought might be burnable, might light, Zach threw it inside the cabin, growing less and less selective as the sun lowered and the world grew ever more frigid around him.
At last he admitted he was too cold to keep searching. He relieved himself, hoping that his bladder wouldn’t force him outside again, took off his skis and poles and leaned them against the wall, then sat on the snow and dropped off its ledge into the cabin, shutting the door behind him.
Though it was only four o’clock now and still light outside, the cabin was almost completely black, illuminated only by the beam of his headlamp and a sliver of dim, fading sunlight that cut through the one tiny window. Zach stomped his wet boots. Knocked snow from his coat and mittens.
Everything looked the same. The half-broken bed, the miner’s boots leaning beneath a chair.
The rusted cup with its rusted utensils.
The smell of mushrooms, metal, and faraway rot.
The same sense of being tucked into a spellbound refuge.
And though the door didn’t lock, though he knew his tracks led straight to this place, though he could feel the air whistle through the unpatched chinks studding the place, he felt lighter.
Felt a safety that was unfamiliar, new, wrapped tight by his aloneness, by the low ceilings and close cabin walls.
Zach opened the stove. His stirrings above had dislodged a mouse nest. An old one, because among bits of stolen quilt and a mass of leaf fragments were skulls the size of his pinkie nail. Bones tiny as pins.
What had happened to the mother mouse that they’d been left behind this way?
Zach decided to leave the remains where they were, not wanting to touch them. But also because what was left of that nest was dry, and might make decent kindling.
He inspected the chimney pipe. No rusted-through holes visible.
No openings along its seams. Zach removed his mittens and ran his hands around it, the metal a new level of bitter cold, but his fear of smoke, of dying the way his never-known half brother had, was more intense than his need even for warmth.
He felt no thin spots or punctures. He’d have to watch closely, see if any smoke escaped into the room.
Tried not to think about what he’d do if smoke did slip out, and he was forced to sleep here with no fire to avoid suffocation.
The room was so still, so frozen and silent, it felt as though he’d been swallowed by a creature that now cruised ocean depths.
Zach stacked the wood in the stove, adding all but two of the fire starters he’d packed due to the wood’s wet condition.
With a grind of metal he forced open the stove’s intake vent, using the blade of his emergency kit folding knife as a lever.
For a moment, the orange flare of the camping match blinded him to all else.
He touched the match to the fire starters and with a woosh light traveled over the starters, the branches, and the dead things in the mouse nest. It all released a noxious, moldering smoke Zach closed the iron door against. He scanned the potbelly stove’s chimney with his headlamp.
No signs of leaking smoke. A slow but growing heat.
A creep of firelight through the vent at the stove’s bottom.
Zach warmed his hands. The cloud cover, the snowfall, should disguise any billowing smoke.
And his father was probably back inside the hut for the night, where the lights were on and the fire going and brightness made it difficult to see anything outside at all.
He’d be tending to Dave’s worries, explaining what happened to Pike. Pretending to be concerned about Zach.
In all the stories in school, the stories in church, the bad people lost. But in real life, the cruelest people always seemed to get exactly what they wanted.
Zach rubbed his eyes. He needed to sleep. Needed to lie down and erase himself from things for a little while.
He unpacked Steve’s sleeping bag. Although the cabin’s damaged bed still had bits of mattress and old quilt on it, he could smell the fabric’s corrosion, its oddly chemical-scented decay, and so unrolled the sleeping bag on the floor.
Within the growing perimeter of the stove’s warmth Zach changed clothes, his base layer soaked through with sweat and snowmelt yet again.
He put on Steve’s too-big dry things and hung his own long underwear to dry.
With the fire going well now, he filled the stove with as much wood as could fit inside so that it could burn as long as possible, warming him as he slept.
Zach slid into the cold nylon of Steve’s sleeping bag.
He tightened into a ball around Mr. Fantastic and gazed up at the outline of where his long underwear hung on the back of the old miner’s chair.
His mother always said staying dry and hydrated were paramount in the outdoors.
When Bram had raged at Pike after he’d swung at Zach, the boy had seen it as protection.
But now Bram’s actions were recast as territorial, and the small, boring tendings his mother had taught him shone with the light of true love, true protection.
Tomorrow morning he’d hide to watch the hut from the edge of the forest, so he wouldn’t be forgotten by rescuers.
Behind Zach’s closed eyes, a helicopter landed and he popped out of the forest, Surprise!
His father’s jaw dropped, eyes bugging to say How could it be?
as Dave and Russ celebrated his resurrection.
A mustachioed Mountain Rescue man wearing a badge like an old-timey sheriff patted him on the back as he said, Here’s a recording of everything, sir, and there’s DNA proof hidden in the hut.
He wasn’t quite sure how DNA worked, but he’d seen television so knew it was important. Incontrovertible. Came from blood and nails and…
Zach rolled over in the sleeping bag, uncomfortable. The chill of his body kept him awake despite the exhaustion that pressed his bones. He eyed the half-broken chair, the bed in pieces.
That all might make good firewood. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Nervous over these signs of his own errors, Zach switched his headlamp on and swung its beam over the stovepipe and around the body of the potbelly stove. No leaking tendrils of smoke.
Unlike his classmates, unlike the other children on his mother’s PTA trips, he’d never liked the fire-building part of outdoor education.
He’d dutifully learned how to efficiently light a fire in bad conditions (rain, snow, ice) and good (in a fireplace, in a stove), but that instruction had always come with ghosts.
Because although neither he nor his mother ever said it, Zach knew they both felt haunted by his father’s other, better family every time they lit a fire. Watched it lick wood black.
But here there were no leaks. No smoke. It should be okay.
He switched off his headlamp.
It would all be okay.