Before I had a chance to adjust my grip, the branch sprang upward, trying to buck me off. I clung like a squirrel in a thunderstorm. When the motion calmed, I called down to Darla, “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.”
I inched out to the fork in the limb and slid off, dangling by my hands. I bent my knees a little and let go. When I hit the snow, I let my legs crumple so I wouldn’t jam my ankles or knees. Practicing falls at the dojang, we used to roll or slap the floor to break our momentum, but the snow was so deep there was really no surface to slap. Still, for once I was glad for that deep snow-it cushioned my fall.
Darla grabbed my hand and hauled me to my feet. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I looked around-we were at least sixty feet from the path. I hoped that would be enough of a break in the trail that nobody would notice our new track. With any luck, they’d assume we went into the river with Bikezilla and drowned at the base of the roller dam.
I struck out on a course perpendicular to our old path. Pushing through the deep snow was hard, cold work. Soon both of us were shivering again.
We left the clearing and entered a dense wood. The trees were all dead and leafless, so it didn’t offer much cover. I pushed onward for twenty or thirty minutes, breaking the trail for Darla.
I heard a clicking sound behind me and turned. Darla was shivering violently.
“Crap, I’ve got frozen peas rattling around where my brains should be. We’ve got to get you out of the wind.”
“I’m ’k-k-kay,” Darla said around the rattle of her teeth. Her lips were turning blue, and the legs of her coveralls were crusted in ice and snow. She was definitely not okay. But even if our fire-starting kit hadn’t gone down with Bikezilla, we couldn’t afford a fire now-we were still too close to the barges and the Black Lake guards.
“Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered. First things first-I could take care of the wind and wet clothes-maybe. I looked around for the deepest drift, a spot where a cluster of trees had captured and held the blowing snow. “Come on.” I took Darla’s hand and led her toward the drift, using my body as a plow.
When we got well into the drift, I dug a foxhole, shoveling away the snow with my hands and arms. Darla tried to help, but her arms were shaking so badly she could barely control them. My wet arm in particular was freezing, and I was shivering, but Darla had nearly been dunked. I had to get her dry somehow. Now.
As I finished digging, I hit the ash layer under the snow-a grim reminder of the cause of this abominable winter, of the volcano’s eruption ten months ago. Some of the ash came up with the last few armloads of snow and left dirty gray blotches on the white ramparts of my foxhole.
We squatted in the foxhole for a few minutes. I wrapped my arms around Darla, hugging her from behind and rubbing her arms. The foxhole kept us out of the wind, but it wasn’t warming up Darla-if anything, she was shivering more.
“Stand up,” I said. “Let’s get these wet clothes off.” I unlaced her boots and gave one a tug. It came off with a crackle of breaking ice and squelch of wet sock. When I finished with both boots, I reached up, unzipped her coverall, and started pulling it down off her torso.
“I’m n-n-not really in the mood,” she said.
“Yeah, me either,” I said as I pulled the coverall down over her legs.
“That’s a f-f-first.”
I forced myself to smile. I was terrified she’d freeze to death as I watched, helpless. I started stripping off her jeans. Water had gotten through her coverall at the waist and ankles, so only the knees of her jeans and long johns were dry. When I got her long underwear off, I put my hands on her hips against her pink panties. They were sopping wet with river water.
With both my hands against her icy skin, I realized she wasn’t shivering as hard. I took that as the worst kind of sign: When the body quits shivering, it’s preparing to die.
Chapter 21
I stripped off Darla’s panties and socks, so she stood bottomless in the frozen air. Her bare feet were porcelain white, streaked with blue. She set them in the snow without protest-obviously she couldn’t feel her feet at all. I had maybe a minute before she started to get frostbite, and not much longer than that before the hypothermia would kill her.
I stripped off my boots as fast as I could and squatted on them to keep my socks dry while I pulled off my coveralls.
I jammed Darla’s feet into my coverall. She was so far gone now I had to lift each foot and put it in the pant leg for her. I had two pairs of socks on, a wool outer pair and some nylon liners. I stripped off my wool stocks and forced them over Darla’s feet. My boots didn’t fit right without the thick wool socks and my toes hurt terribly, but I figured that was a good sign. If they quit hurting, I’d know I was in trouble.
I thought about what to do with Darla’s feet. If I left her in socks, her feet would get wet from the snow. But her boots were sopping. I wrapped my hand in the dry part of her long johns and pushed it up into her boots to try to dry them. I don’t know if it helped much, but it was the best I could do. I put the wet boots back on her feet and tied the laces.
“Come on, Darla,” I said. “You’ve got to run now.”
She started to shamble into the snow at the edge of the foxhole. I threw an arm around her waist to stop her.
“No, just run in place. We’ve got to stay hidden until dark.” It wouldn’t be long. The day was already fading.
Darla lifted one foot and set it back down.
“Faster.” I wanted to yell, but I knew I shouldn’t. Black Lake might have people out looking for us.
Darla started stepping desultorily in place. She lurched from side to side as if drunk, her balance so bad that I kept both hands on her waist, ready to catch her if she started to fall over.
“That’s it. Faster, Darla, faster.”
She started moving more quickly. I concentrated on holding her upright and trying to jog in place without kicking her. When she started shivering again, I breathed a sigh of pure relief.
“W-w-what now?” she asked.
“It’s maybe an hour ’til full dark. We can sneak out of here then and head back to Uncle Paul’s farm.”
“N-n-no.”
“What do you mean, no? We just lost all our supplies. It’s going to get even colder after dark. I don’t even know if we can survive tonight. We might have to turn ourselves in to Black Lake. Better to wind up in a FEMA camp than frozen to death.”
Darla didn’t reply. Instead, she started running in place faster. She was shivering hard-her arms made unpredictable spastic movements. I backed off a little so I wouldn’t get brained.
We ran for fifteen or twenty minutes. Darla steadily picked up her pace, while I stuck with a comfortable, warming jog. Her shivering gradually subsided. She started pumping her arms instead of waving them around, and her teeth quit clattering.
Without any warning, she spun back toward me and quit running. “We are not going back, Alex. We’re going forward.”
“Bikezilla’s at the bottom of the Mississippi with all our supplies.”
“I know. You still have the kale seeds?”
“Yeah, and the wheat, but even if we ate all of them, they’d only last a few days.”
“Not to eat, to trade.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. We hoof it back to Warren, trade the seeds, and get outfitted for another expedition.”
“No-we go forward to Worthington and resupply there.”
“How do you know anyone’s still in Worthington? They might all be dead-or locked in FEMA camps.”
“They might be.” Darla’s shoulders hinted at a shrug. “But they’re my people-I know them. They’re farmers, used to coming through hard knocks and bad weather. They were already well organized last year. They had water and were digging corn. If anyone’s still alive and free in Iowa, it’s the folks in Worthington.”
“And the bandit gangs, and Black Lake-”