Just climbing the embankment naked, shivering, and one-handed proved to be nearly impossible. I slipped twice, once falling into Darla and knocking us both back down to the road. When I finally did reach the summit of the berm, I got the third worst surprise of the day: Bikezilla was gone.
Chapter 38
I whimpered and sagged to my knees, utterly defeated. Red must have used the day we had been held captive to follow our tracks and find Bikezilla. He had chopped off our hands, dipped the stumps in tar, and created a show of “law” for his people, but his ultimate intent was for us to die. It looked like he might get his wish. Darla topped the berm behind me. Her hand and feet were a sickly shade of blue-gray. She didn’t react much to the hole in the snow where Bikezilla had been, only nodded as if she had been expecting it. She hooked her hand under my shoulder and hauled me upright.
“F-f-farmhouse. On t-t-twenty,” she said.
I remembered it. “How f-f-far?”
“T-t-two, three miles.”
I nodded and sat down, sliding down the berm on my butt. When I looked back up the berm, I noticed that I had left pinkish streaks of blood in the snow. I tried to stand, but I was shaking so hard, it took three tries just to get up. By that time, Darla was down. Her teeth clacked like an old typewriter. I helped her to her feet, and we wrapped our arms around each other for warmth and support.
We had taken fewer than ten steps before we fell. I threw my arm out to catch myself—it’s almost impossible not to, even if your arm ends in a fresh stump—and screamed with pain so fierce that I nearly passed out. Darla had done the same thing. We lay in the road, shaking spastically like fish drowning in air.
I forced myself to my feet and helped Darla up. We took a few more steps and fell again.
We had fallen four or five times before I got to where I could keep my injured arm tucked in and allow my shoulder to absorb the force of the falls. After nine or ten falls, I looked back. We had come less than four hundred feet. The dark shell of the bank was still clearly visible despite the waning light. There was no way we were going to travel three miles before dark. I wasn’t sure I could walk another three miles at all. After dark the farmhouse would be invisible from the road. We could pass it and keep walking, oblivious, until our bodies gave out and only our ghosts could continue stalking the icy roads, searching for shelter in a barren world.
I turned Darla around and pointed at the bank with my stump. She nodded wearily, and we started retracing our steps.
Crossing the snow berm again to get to the bank was the worst part. I crawled up three-legged but still slipped backward over and over. I gritted my teeth against the pain, paying for every foot of height I gained with bloody knees and a bloody palm.
We found a hollow in a corner of the bank protected from the wind. The snow was shallow there. I dug downward. We needed a fire, something to help us survive the night. All I found were shards of glass from the bank’s windows and a few chunks of burnt lumber.
Darla was digging a hole in the side of the snowdrift at the edge of this sheltered spot. I picked up a large piece of glass and tried to carve a charred stick of wood with it, holding the wood between my numb feet. I had a vague idea that I could make a fire bow. Instead I cut my only hand.
Darla had almost disappeared inside the snowdrift. I grabbed a brick and started beating it against the wall. There were no sparks, no matter how hard I knocked the bricks together. Still, I kept trying until Darla laid a shaking hand on my shoulder and motioned for me to follow.
We crawled into the tiny space she had excavated inside the snowdrift. She kicked at the ceiling of the tunnel until it collapsed behind us, sealing us in. Our body heat warmed the small space, but not enough. We needed clothing—some kind of insulation from the frozen ground beneath us. My shivering eased, and I felt a wonderful warmth spreading through my body. That made me feel worse, though. When you get so cold that you feel warm, it’s a sign that your body is preparing to shut down. I knew—I’d been this far gone into hypothermia once before. I held Darla tightly, squeezing our bodies together, trying to conserve heat.
“We’re going to die here, right?” I said.
“Probably,” Darla sighed.
My mind wandered through a long silence. In the darkness and false warmth of Darla’s embrace, I imagined we were drifting through a surreal landscape of blue fields and emerald sky.
Darla’s soft voice called me back. “You… you think there’s anything after this?”
“I don’t know.” I’d been devout once, attending Sunday school and services, well, religiously. But that had ended about the time I turned twelve. Now I wasn’t sure. “If there is an omnipotent God, he’s an asshole for allowing all this to happen.”
“I hope there is something after this,” Darla said. “Mom was sure of it. She had unshakeable faith—even the eruption didn’t change her belief…. I’d like to see her again.”
“You think you can get married in heaven? Or purgatory, or whatever?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I wanted us to… I’d been, I thought that little jewelry store in downtown Stockton might have—”
“That’s why you wanted to go downtown—you must have asked me four times.”
“Twice. I wanted a ring. To propose the right way, you know.”
Darla kissed me. I was so cold that I couldn’t even feel it. Sad—that I couldn’t appreciate our last kiss. “When you were passed out back there in Stockton and I had to put my hand on the block, I had this strange daydream—just a flash, a single image. We were standing in front of a huge crowd, in a wedding dress and tux—”
“You’d look great in a tux,” I said.
“Shut up. Let me finish,” Darla said. “We were holding hands, your right and my left, in front of all those people, and I wanted that picture to be true. So I put my right arm on the block.”
“I wondered why. That’s a pretty stupid reason to give up your good hand.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re supposed to be more practical than I am.”
“Yeah.”
“I wish I’d gone ahead and proposed, ring or no ring. I’d have liked to see that picture you daydreamed. I’d have liked being your husband.”
“Look, Alex,” Darla’s voice had shifted, low and fierce now instead of wistful, “there are people who get married but live separate lives, people who marry and divorce before they’ve been together even as long as we have. They say marriage is a sacrament, that it’s a legal contract, but here’s what I think it is—a commitment. And by that standard, we’re already married, more married than most of the people who have the license. I’ve watched
Alyssa, I know she still lusts after you, and she’s far sexier than I’ll ever be—”
“No, she’s not.”
“Oh, bullshit. I’ve seen your tongue hanging out when she sashays past. Max worships the snow she walks on.”
“It’s hard not to look,” I conceded.
“That’s not the point. Even when you thought I might be dead, you kept faith with me. And sometimes I catch you looking at me, and even though you look nothing like him, you remind me of how Dad used to look at Mom.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I’m not sure what I ever did to be worthy of it—”
“You—”
“Never mind. You said God’s an asshole, but did you ever stop to think, if not for the volcano, we’d never have met?”
“And we wouldn’t be dying in a snowdrift.”
“It was worth it, Alex.” I felt her teardrop land on my nose. “It was worth it.”