“I never thought this trip would be easy.”
“Look, I don’t even know how we’re going to survive tonight, let alone get to Worthington.”
“You still have a hatchet and knife?”
“Yeah, on my belt. But we need a fire, and the flint went down with Bikezilla.”
“We’re okay then. With a knife and hatchet, we’ve got fire.”
“How?”
“Easier to show you. And we should wait for dark and get someplace farther away from the lock, so Black Lake won’t spot the fire.” Darla started jogging in place again as if the conversation were over.
I stayed still. “I don’t want to get us-get you-killed, Darla.”
“We’re only in this situation because you insisted on going after that wheat.”
Much as I hated to admit it, she was right. “I know. . I’m sorry.”
Darla shrugged. “It’s okay. We’re tougher to kill than you give us credit for. We’ve got money-kale seeds and wheat kernels-we’ve got a knife, a hatchet, and some clothes. We’ll get to Worthington, buy supplies, and then go break your mom and dad out of the FEMA camp in Maquoketa. We’ll be okay.”
Half an hour ago Darla had nearly frozen to death, and now she was trying to talk me into continuing our trek. She was certifiably grade-A, prime-cut crazy. “I love you.”
“Love you, too. Now get your ass jogging so you don’t freeze.”
“I’ve got to figure out something to do with these clothes.” I picked up Darla’s coveralls, thinking I’d wring the water out of them, but they were frozen solid. They crackled, and ice flaked off the legs.
I beat the coveralls on a nearby tree trunk to loosen them up and knock off more ice. I thought for a moment about how best to carry them. I could stuff the coveralls into my coat, but they’d melt and get my chest wet. We needed to keep the coveralls and dry them out, but I couldn’t afford to get hypothermic.
Finally I loosened my belt and tucked the coveralls through the back, so they dangled along the back of my legs. I repeated the process with Darla’s pants and long johns, beating them against a tree and tucking them into my belt.
Darla was still jogging in place, but now she had a silly grin on her face.
“What?” I said.
“You should see yourself-you look ridiculous.”
For a second I was annoyed, but then I realized that, yeah, I probably did. “What, you don’t appreciate my superpowers? I’m Clothesline Man! Faster than a tumbling dryer, stronger than the scorching sun, saving the day by flying across the snow to dry all your clothes.” I rotated my hips, making the clothing swing around me in an arc.
Darla was laughing now. The joke seemed pretty lame to me, but probably anything would have been funny after the past few hours.
“I can even dry these!” I picked her pink panties up out of the snow.
Her mouth curled at one side. “Usually you have the opposite effect.”
I thought about that for a moment and then felt my face heat despite the frigid temperature.
“Actually, forget about those. I’ll just go commando for a while.”
“Okay.” I pushed the panties into the snowbank to hide them, although I couldn’t have said why I bothered. Then I resumed jogging; I needed to warm up.
Despite our jogging, we both started shivering again as night fell and the temperature dropped. It got so dark I could barely see the piles of snow around our foxhole.
“How are we going to figure out which way to go?” I asked.
“Shh. Listen.”
I stood still, suppressing my shivering for a moment. I heard the susurration of rushing water very faintly in the distance.
“Which way is it coming from?” Darla whispered.
I pointed.
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought, too. We can use the noise to figure out what direction we’re going.”
“Lead on.”
Darla pushed her way out of the foxhole into the deep snow. I followed, watching the snow, trying to place my feet in her footsteps. After a few minutes of that, I looked up and felt a surge of panic when I couldn’t see her.
Our chances were bad enough together. If we got separated, I didn’t see how we’d survive. Well, Darla might, she knew how to make a fire. I fought down my fear-all I had to do was follow her trail.
I ran for twenty or twenty-five feet, high-stepping through the snow. I almost bowled into Darla’s back. She was trudging along, oblivious to my panic.
Another half hour or so brought us to a break in the trees. A steep slope led down to the frozen river. I heard the roller dam faintly to my right. I could see a little farther here without the trees overhead, but the other side of the river was completely shrouded in darkness.
Darla got down to the river by sitting down and sliding on her butt. I waited a moment for her to move out of the way, then slid to join her.
Walking across the Mississippi felt like exploring an alien planet. The darkness hid everything but the tiny circles of ice on which we planted our feet. Our boots made weird squeaks and crunching sounds. I feared we might walk through this dark limbo forever, slowing gradually until we froze in place, statues lost from their museum, admired by no one.
Chapter 22
I saw Darla’s shoulders trembling and said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”
“Yeah. C-c-christ, I’m cold.”
“And hungry,” I added.
“Thirsty, too. I’d even eat some s-s-snow, but that’d just make me c-c-colder.”
We started jogging across the ice. Darla fell twice. Both times she took my hand, levered herself up, and kept going without comment. Wiping out had to hurt, but she ignored the pain, determined to keep us moving forward.
It seemed like it was taking way too long to cross the river. I mean, yeah, the Mississippi is huge, but we’d been jogging twenty or thirty minutes.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“How should I know? Keep moving.” Her voice was huffy from exertion-or annoyance.
Not five minutes later we finally reached the bank.
“Head downstream following the bank?” Darla said. “That’ll take us farther away from the barge.”
“Yeah.”
We jogged south, away from the lock and barges, skirting around big snowdrifts. After a while, the bank started to curve to the right. As we followed it, I noticed the trees were bigger here-their branches hung far out over the river ice. When I caught a glimpse of a tree to our left, I figured out where we were: traveling into an inlet, a frozen tributary of the Mississippi.
Darla stopped. “Let’s make a camp here. That bend should shield us from anyone at the lock.”
“Okay. So how are we going to build a fire?”
“Rubbing sticks together.”
My chest sank. “Um, that’s going to take for-freaking-ever.”
“Not the way we’re going to do it.” Darla explained what she wanted me to do.
I had to do most of the work. Darla was still shivering badly and spent a lot of time running in place or slapping her legs, trying to stay warm. I split a small cottonwood log twice, forming a roughly flat plank that Darla called a fireboard. Another piece of the log became a small rounded grip-a thunderhead, again according to Darla. I whittled an eight-sided spindle out of a cottonwood branch. A long, curved oak branch became a bow, and one of my bootlaces served as a bowstring. I discovered that the inner bark of cottonwood trees would shred nicely to form a fine, dry firestarter or bird’s nest. It took more than an hour to gather and make everything we needed.
Then we put it together and tested it. I wrapped the bowstring around the spindle, which I placed vertically between the fireboard and thunderhead. The idea was that I’d use one hand to hold the thunderhead in place and the other to pump the bow back and forth, to rotate the spindle. In turn, that’d generate friction between the spindle and fireboard and, hopefully, create a spark.
Of course it didn’t work. The bootlace slipped on the spindle, and we had to tighten it. Then the spindle kept flying off the fireboard, and we had to cut a deeper dimple to keep the spindle in place.