A Hero's Reward (4 page)

He finally gave up and opened the door,
it wasn't locked but he still had to force it since it was frozen
shut. He leaned in to speak to Margaret and got a good look at her.
The light of the moon shining off of the ice illuminated her clearly.
She was lying on her back. Her angel's face showed a hint of blue,
her exposed hands were red and blue, and he could see tracks of
frozen tears flowing down the sides of her face, leading from the
corners of her eyes down to tiny pools of ice where the tracks
intersected her ears. Her ears had redirected the freezing tears
towards her ear lobes which were now decorated with miniature
icicles, shimmering in the moonlight.

Not again! What is with this lady? Doesn't she care if she
lives or not?

“Margaret!” he said shaking
her shoulder lightly.

There was no answer.

“Margaret!” he tried again
louder.

A soft exhalation came from her mouth,
but she didn't move. And didn't answer.

Oh, Fuck!
He thought,
This
is gonna hurt so much.

Greg reached in and took her by the
shoulders. He started to drag her out of the car, pausing momentarily
when his back screamed at him. She still didn't move or react in any
fashion. He continued to slide her from the car, her progress
accompanied by the light tinkle of her icy tears cracking and falling
away to the ice coated asphalt. When he had her all the way out and
she still hadn't moved at all he considered his options and thought:
Oh, to hell with it! Guess I won't be off the painkillers as
quickly as I thought
before slinging her into a fireman's carry
again.

Biting back a scream of agony, Greg
slammed the car door and started moving towards his house. After
trying two normal steps and nearly falling with each one he went back
to the skating move he had used to get here in the first place. The
streets were empty and no-one was in sight. With his only distraction
being the internal screaming of his back, he made his way across the
street. The slight incline to his front door proved a problem until
he remembered the skiers' herringbone pattern. Turning one foot
sideways to the slope gave him a moment or two to move his other
foot, so in a hesitant, yet rapid as he could manage, shuffle he made
it to his front door. Moving to open the door caused Margaret to
start sliding from his shoulder. He moved through the door as quickly
as he could and helped turn her slide into a gentle, controlled fall
to the floor.

He closed the door quickly and wanted
nothing more than to collapse to the floor himself. He knew, though,
that if he didn't get a fresh dose of his painkillers into him he was
going to be useless and he had a lot more to do. Shuffling painfully
into the kitchen he grabbed his painkillers and downed two of them.
Moving back out into the living room he grabbed his blanket from the
couch. He placed himself on the floor next to Margaret and covered
the two of them with the blanket. There was more he should be doing
but until the pain in his back eased, this was going to have to
suffice.

Greg pressed himself against Margaret,
trying to warm her with his body heat. He kept reviewing what he
remembered of treatment for hypothermia, which he was pretty sure was
the problem. The clothes would have to go. Then he would need more
blankets or anything else that might get her core body temperature
up. He remembered from his time as a boy scout that you needed to get
the core body temperature back up slowly. Too fast and you caused
even more problems. He planned as best as he could while waiting for
his medication to kick in. Margaret was still breathing, but very
slowly and shallowly. He had felt drips of water as the tear tracks
on her face melted away so she was at least starting to warm up.

In time his back pain eased and as soon
as he noticed that, he began to move. The first thing he did was to
remove his boots and outer clothing so his body heat could get out
easier. Then he tried to remove Margaret's coat. It was soaking wet,
not to the point of dripping but it was still frigid to the touch and
would drip when it thawed out. He wrestled it off of her. In the
middle of moving her to get the coat off, she let out a groan.
At
least she's still alive
he thought. He removed her shoes as well,
to find that her socks were soaking wet. She had a dress under her
coat and it was damp as well. He needed to remove that, but not yet.
He tucked the blankets around her and headed up the stairs, groaning
at his back on the way. The worst of the pain was gone but taking the
stairs still sent tiny little knives darting along his spine with
each step. He grabbed as many blankets as he could carry from the
hallway linen closet and headed back down.

Once he was downstairs again, he laid
out the blanket they had been wrapped in, it was warmer than the
others so he wanted it on the bottom. Then he rolled Margaret onto
it. He removed her socks, then her dress. Her undergarments were
moist and chilled as well and he winced when he thought of her
reaction upon waking up but he removed those also. He once again
hesitated at his next action but gave in and stripped himself down as
well. Lying next to her, he covered them both with the other blankets
he had brought downstairs. He tucked them in as best as he could to
avoid any stray breezes or heat leaks and then snuggled in next to
her, trying to get as much skin contact between the two of them as
physically possible. He was embarrassed to find himself reacting to
her, his erect penis pressing against her forcefully.

Not a hell of a lot I can do about that if it's trying to be
hard while I'm already in this much pain. Hopefully it subsides
before she wakes up. It'll be difficult to explain otherwise.

Greg simply concentrated on trying to
remain still and in contact with her. His thoughts were not exactly
the purely chaste ones he thought he should be having in this
situation. All he could think was that this was a far more intimate
position than any he had been in with his ex-wife, even when he was
getting her pregnant with their children. Slowly, all thought faded
and he drifted off to sleep with Margaret wrapped in a bear hug that
kept them in as much contact as possible.

Some time later he woke up to find
Margaret shivering violently. He remembered that shivering after
treatment could mean one of two things. Either the cold blood from
the extremities was moving back in and causing it or she had been
beyond the point where the body stops shivering so it can conserve
energy and was coming back to that point. He reached for her hands to
feel them, they were still cool but much warmer than earlier on. He
couldn't get to her feet to check but he also placed a hand on her
stomach to check the temperature there. Warmer than the hands, that
meant that she had probably come back into the shivering stage from
being worse off. Good, he knew how to deal with that, if she had been
getting worse he didn't have anything else to try.

He paused to listen and noted that the
electricity was still out. He could try the phone but with the roads
bad enough that he couldn't walk on them he didn't want to try to get
an emergency vehicle out to someone who was improving and probably
out of danger. It wasn't light out yet but in the morning he'd see if
it looked better out there and call an ambulance then if the roads
weren't icy any more. Even that small series of thoughts had him
exhausted and he found himself drifting off once more.

Greg woke again when daylight started
peeping in around the curtains. It was a wan, pale winter type of
light but at least things should start warming up again. He
determined that the power was still out with a moment's pause and
wondered how cold it had gotten in the house. He was toasty warm
under the blankets, cuddled up with Margaret.

Margaret
, he thought,
How
is she doing?

He tracked down one of Margaret's hands
and felt it, cool but no longer cold to the touch. He still couldn't
get to her feet to check without a lot of movement so once again, he
placed his hand on her stomach to check the warmth of her torso. Her
torso appeared to be the same temperature as his so evidently her
core temperatures had warmed back up to normal. She moved slightly
under his touch, curling up into something close to a fetal position
from the straight position he had placed her in to share body heat
with her. Her movement swung her breasts so that they brushed against
his arm and came to rest against his hand. He carefully tried to
slide his hand out from under her breast. He was embarrassed to
realize that the touch of her breast on his hand had reinvigorated
his erection.

Evidently his attempt to remove his
hand unnoticed failed:

“Huh?” Margaret snorted as
she awoke, “What? What's going on? Where am I?”

As Greg removed his hand the rest of
the way:

“What are you doing?”

Margaret sat up, dragging the blankets
with her. They slid down off of her upper torso, exposing her breasts
to the cool air in the house. When the cool air of the house hit
Greg's back, he involuntarily flinched and let out a groan of pain.
His back had stiffened up as he slept and moving it was excruciating.
Margaret glanced at him when he groaned, noticing his erection as it
collapsed from the pain.

“What the hell is going on? What
are you doing?”

Margaret appeared to be trying to build
up a head of anger and it was reflected in her voice.

“Where am I, what's going on?”
she said, tugging the blanket back up to cover herself.

Greg groaned again and mumbled out an
answer:

“You're in my house because you
were freezing to death. I had to treat you for hypothermia.”

“What? What are you talking
about?”

“Go look outside the window, but
don't open the curtains too much, the power is off and we need to try
to keep the heat inside.”

Margaret got up, wrapped a blanket
around herself like a toga, and stalked over to the window. Pulling
it open and glancing outside, she gasped:

“Oh my god, I never noticed any
of that happening last night.”

“Well, I woke up when the power
went out and realized that you were still in your car. I was going to
go over and offer you my spare bedroom but when I got there you were
totally out of it, unconscious and unresponsive. Your body
temperature was dangerously low and the only thing I could think that
it might be was hypothermia, so I carried you back over here and
treated you for it. I'm sorry, but your clothes were wet so they had
to come off. I took mine off so I could share my body heat better.
Nothing else happened. Even if I had wanted to do something like
that, I'm in way too much pain. I strained my back again by carrying
you across the street last night.”

“Again? Wait, you're Greg aren't
you? You're the one that saved Jack and me from my house when it was
burning. Then you saved my life again last night? You injured
yourself more to save me again?”

Margaret sank to the floor and burst
out in tears. Through her sobs Greg could make out the words she was
muttering quietly to herself:

“You're still a danger to
everyone else. You can't get anything right. Daddy was right, Freddy
was right, you're a total incompetent. You endanger anyone who comes
near you. Jack is probably better off with Freddy.”

With that last sentence, Margaret broke
down into a full-throated sobbing that prevented her from doing
anything else at all.

Greg took the remaining blanket from
underneath himself and wrapped it around his body to try to retain
warmth and preserve whatever modesty remained in the situation. He
moved himself over to Margaret and, tentatively, leaned in and put
his arms around her. When she didn't pull away from him he spoke:

“It'll be alright, everything
will be okay.”

Margaret's sobs became, if anything,
louder and more vigorous. Greg continued to softly speak calming
phrases while holding her in his arms. It was quite a while before
she finally stopped crying and when she did she continued to sniffle,
her nose running badly. Greg stood with a soft groan and retrieved a
box of tissues which he handed to her.

“Here, let me go get some of my
painkillers into myself. I think the last batch I took has worn off.
Then I'll see if I can find my camping stove and Sterno and we can
make some coffee or oatmeal or something to help warm up. Your
clothes are draped over the couch and chair, you can see if they're
dry and get dressed again while I'm out of the room, if that'll make
you feel better.”

Greg shuffled off to the kitchen and
downed a pair of painkillers. He kept his camping gear in the garage
right off of the kitchen so he went to get the camp stove and Sterno.
When he got it into the kitchen, he set the stove up on top of his
electric range and lit the Sterno. He set a percolator on top of it
and filled it from one of the gallons of distilled water he kept in
the kitchen for making coffee. Once the water was warming, he headed
back out to the living room.

Margaret was still draped in the
blankets, but at least she was on the couch and not on the floor any
more. Her clothes had been moved so he figured they were still too
wet to put on.

“If you give me long enough for
these painkillers to kick in, I'll go upstairs and get you some
clothes to wear for now. They'll be too big but probably warmer and
more comfortable than the blankets.”

“Thank you, I'd appreciate that.”

Greg recovered his own clothing from
where he had piled it the night before and slid it on under his
blanket. He offered the blanket to Margaret, in case she was still
cold, but she shook her head. He thought he'd try to make small talk
until his back was up to taking the stairs again.