Ashen Winter (11 page)
“Go! Go!” Darla yelled as she turned Bikezilla directly toward the Humvee. It was braking—the tires carving two shallow troughs in the ice. We picked up speed, heading directly toward the truck’s back bumper.
I thought I understood what Darla was doing. The Humvee would have to turn in a wide arc to get lined up to try to run us down again. By then, maybe we could make it into the woods.
But the driver wasn’t cooperating. He skidded to a complete stop, almost putting the nose of the Humvee into the woods. But instead of turning around, he started backing up. Straight toward us.
“Christ!” Darla screamed. “Male drivers!” She kept accelerating directly toward the Humvee as it raced backward toward us. Playing chicken with a truck fifty times our size didn’t seem like a great idea to me, but I wasn’t in the driver’s seat. And Darla had dodged the truck twice now—one more time and we’d make it to the woods.
“Yeeaaah,” Darla screeched a banshee wail. “Faster!”
I was already white-knuckling the handlebars, pumping for all I was worth. A drop of blood oozed out between Darla’s right hand and her handlebars and was whipped past me by the wind.
The back of the Humvee loomed. I wanted to close my eyes. I couldn’t close my eyes. At the last second, Darla swerved left. The driver of the Humvee swerved, too. The truck’s front quarterpanel sideswiped Bikezilla’s load bed just behind my right leg.
We were thrown into a spin. I was sure we’d roll, but Darla steered into the skid, pedaling like mad, and somehow kept us upright. She shot between a pair of trees that were too close together to admit the Humvee.
We were racing along a tiny frozen creek, forest lining either side. I looked back and almost got knocked off the bike when an overhanging branch smacked me in the side of the head. I didn’t see any sign of the Humvee.
Both banks of the creek were overgrown with leafless bushes and trees. I had to watch Darla carefully; when she ducked, I had a split second to follow or get whacked by a branch. Several times Darla threw an arm up to block them instead. The branches were dead and shattered easily, bits of dry wood spinning away as we whizzed past.
Drifts of snow had covered the ice here and there. I felt these as much as saw them—it got much harder to pedal, and Bikezilla rose and fell slightly, following the contours of the blown snow.
Suddenly we burst out of the narrow confines of the creek onto another lake. Darla steered the bike in a broad left turn. We’d been following this new course less than a minute when I started to hear a faint new sound under the chatter of our rear track: the roar of falling water.
I yelled, “Is that—”
“The roller dam, yeah,” Darla yelled back. “We’re headed right toward the barge and all those soldiers. Look for a place to turn left.”
“Up there?” I pointed.
Darla was already steering toward the break in the trees I’d seen. We turned into the new channel, a broad, straight stretch of river. It would have been easy to pedal down it except for one thing: The Humvee was again accelerating across the ice, directly toward us.
The Humvee was about a mile south of us but racing north fast. Both banks of this stretch of river were densely forested—I didn’t see any place we could get off the river ice. Darla braked hard and spun us into a tight turn, and we stood on the pedals, accelerating north away from the Humvee.
“Darla, look!” I yelled and pointed.
“I see it.”
To the north, there was a break in the trees: a path barely big enough for Bikezilla, its opening flanked by two huge cottonwoods that would prevent the Humvee from following us. Darla steered straight toward it.
My legs burned. We’d been pedaling flat out since we left the guard shack more than a half hour ago. My body was coated in cold sweat—from exertion or terror, I wasn’t sure which. I tried to coax one more burst of speed from my body, but I could barely maintain our current pace.
Darla was exhausted, too. I could hear her gasping for air even over the clatter of Bikezilla. If anything, we were slowing down. But then I heard the Humvee’s engine revving behind us and discovered I did have some hidden reserve left.
I bore down on the pedals and we shot forward, a missile homing in on the safety of the trees ahead. There were no tricks left, no fancy maneuvers. If we kept playing chicken with the Humvee, eventually we’d lose.
There was no gunfire. Maybe I’d actually done some damage by throwing the pistol. The rumble of the engine behind us crescendoed. I looked back—we weren’t going to make it.
I braced myself uselessly, thinking a collision was inevitable. But suddenly the gap between us and the Humvee widened. The truck braked, sliding toward us across the ice. We shot between the cottonwoods and up a snowy slope. The Humvee slammed into one of the trees with a shriek of tortured steel.
We reached the top of the ridge we’d been climbing, and the trail leveled out, leading into a large clearing with a huge oak. Its branches spread so low we had to duck to pass beneath it. At the far side of the meadow the trail dove back into the woods, down the other side of the ridge toward the river.
Blood rushed in my ears, and my breath came in gasps. But even over the noises of my body, I heard a roar ahead—water rushing over the roller dam.
We came around a bend and the woods opened up, the trail suddenly ending at the frothing pool at the base of the dam. Darla slammed on the brakes, but Bikezilla slid inexorably toward the pool.
“Darla!” I screamed.
“Jump!” She swerved, trying to miss the open water. I jumped and landed with a thud in the snow on the hillside. The bike fell sideways, trapping Darla’s leg and dragging her in a rush toward the deadly, roiling water at the base of the dam.
Without hesitation or forethought, I jumped. I stretched out in a flying leap, Superman-style, hurling myself down the hill toward Darla. I landed half on top of her, our arms entangled, both of us sliding toward the frothing water.
Darla was digging her fingers into the snow, desperately trying to stop her slide. But the weight of Bikezilla, trapping her leg, dragged us toward the edge. I dug my toes into the hillside, groaning with effort.
We slid to a stop. Bikezilla’s rear track hung out over the water. Ice from the spray was already freezing on our gear.
“I’ve. Got. You!” I whispered through clenched teeth.
Darla wrapped one arm around my shoulder. “Maybe you could pull me away from the water now, numbnuts?”
I heaved a huge sigh of thanks and started tugging Darla back toward the bank. A sound like a gunshot rent the air, and the ice under Bikezilla broke. I watched in horror as the whole sheet was instantly sucked under by the vicious undertow.
Darla’s legs fell into the pool. She twisted, clinging desperately to me. I scrabbled backward, trying to stay on the unbroken ice. Bikezilla slid off her, sucked down into the gray, foaming water.
The undertow pulled at Darla. It was surprisingly strong—I felt like I was playing tug-of-war with the river, with Darla as the rope and both of our lives hanging in the balance. I couldn’t get enough leverage on the icy bank to drag her out of the river. I tightened my grip on her. I would
not
let go. If Darla got dragged into the river, I’d go with her.
Darla heaved her right knee up, trying to get it up over the ice shelf, but she bashed it instead against the edge of the ice. I plunged my left hand into the icy water and got a grip on the back of her knee. I howled and dragged her leg up onto the bank, and she rolled toward me, heaving her other leg free of the pool in a splash of freezing water.
She lay on her back, gasping. I looked across the water and ice of the Mississippi—I didn’t see anyone at the barge. Maybe they’d left for the evening.
Bikezilla was thrown to the surface. It slammed into the concrete base of the dam and was sucked back under. The churning water coming over the dam was tossing it around like a tennis shoe in a washing machine. I shuddered—if we’d fallen in there, neither of us would have survived.
“S-s-so c-c-cold,” Darla said.
She was sopping wet to her waist. The water was already starting to freeze in little icy patches on her coveralls. I moved my wet left arm experimentally—I could barely feel it. Flakes of ice fell off my sleeve. “We’ve got to get out of the open.”
“All our s-s-supplies.” Darla stretched one arm toward the roller dam.
“It’s hopeless. They’re gone.” I stood and helped Darla up. She was shivering violently. We had to hide. Had to get warm—and do it in a way that Black Lake couldn’t track us. “Come on. Try to stay in the tracks.” I pulled her back up the hill, trudging along the path Bikezilla’s rear track had made.
Darla stumbled and fell. She lay shivering in the snow. I hauled her to her feet. “Can you jog?” I asked. “You’ve got to warm up.”
“I’ll t-t-try.” Darla stumbled up the hill in a shambling half-jog. We were moving a lot slower than I would have liked, but at least we were out of sight of the barge.
Darla started to fall, and I caught her again. I looked down and saw I’d stepped outside of Bikezilla’s track. We were leaving a clear trail despite our efforts to stay in the path.
Darla fell once more before we made it to the top of the ridge. The woods were silent and still. On the mostly level ground at the top of the hill, Darla stretched out her pace, and we made better time. Maybe the jogging was warming her up, though she was still shivering. I rubbed my wet arm as we ran. I still couldn’t feel it.
I stopped when we got to the massive, spreading oak in the clearing. “We can get off the path without leaving a trail here.”
“How?” Darla asked.
“That branch.” I pointed above our heads. “I’ll boost you up. We’ll crawl along it to the trunk, climb around, and crawl out another branch on the far side.”
“G-g-good idea.”
I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. If Darla fell and hurt herself, it would be a disastrously bad idea. And I’d never been much of a tree climber—I don’t like heights. “Can you do it?”
Darla just nodded, shivering.
I squatted and grabbed Darla by her thighs. Water squished out of her coveralls onto my coat. I lifted her high enough that all she had to do was flop her arms over the branch to hang by her armpits. She kicked out—I had to duck to save my head—and got one leg up over the branch. Then she swung herself up on top of it and started dragging herself toward the trunk, inchworm-style.
I jumped and grabbed the branch in both hands, facing away from Darla. I swung my legs back and forth a few times, working up momentum, and threw them up and around the branch. Then I just had to roll over, pulling myself to the top of the tree limb. Darla was already about halfway to the trunk. I dragged myself along behind her.
“There’s a great view from back here,” I said.
“Q-quit looking!” Darla snapped, but I could hear a hint of a smile in her voice. Maybe my stupid joke had worked. I needed something, anything, to distract from the desperation building in my gut.
Darla stopped at the oak’s huge trunk. “There’s no way to climb around.”
“What about up to that fork in the tree?” I asked.
“Maybe. I might need a boost.”
Darla wasn’t stuttering or shivering as much. I hoped that was a good sign. I let my legs dangle over either side of the icy branch and scooched over to help. She sat up and threw one knee up on the branch and reached to try to get a handhold in the fork of the tree. I held her waist, trying to keep her steady. Darla stood up on the branch so she could reach farther into the fork. “Push me up.”
I put my palms under her butt and shoved. She pulled herself upward until her chest was wedged into the split in the tree. She rested there for a moment and then pulled herself the rest of the way up.
“There’s a branch here that goes the right way,” Darla said. “We can get at least another thirty feet from the path.”
“Okay, good. I’m coming up.” I pulled my knees onto the branch. Standing was tricky. I got one foot flat on the ice-coated branch, but I felt wobbly. I stood, trying to keep the unsteadiness in my knees under control and clinging to the trunk. I wasn’t that far off the ground—maybe ten or twelve feet. There was no real reason to be scared. I focused on the tree trunk and tried to get my breathing under control. In through the nose, out through the mouth—like I’d use for a sparring match in taekwondo.
I reached and got a grip on the fork in the tree. I bent my knees to jump and give myself a head start on pulling myself up, but I slipped—and suddenly I was dangling, my feet clawing futilely at the air.
I kicked out, bashing my toes against the tree trunk. Feet scrabbling against the trunk, I tried to pull myself onto the branch. I didn’t have a solid grip on the fork in the tree; my fingers were slipping on the icy bark. Darla’s hands wrapped around my left wrist and hauled upward. I strained, pulling myself up until my chest was wedged in the fork. Darla was sitting on a slightly higher branch, reaching down to help me.
“Thanks,” I grunted.
Darla turned and started inching away from the trunk on the new branch, saying, “I think this branch will work best.” I scrambled to follow her.
The end of the new branch looked none too safe. It was more than fifteen feet above the ground, and we couldn’t afford to fall and sprain an ankle or worse. But as we inched outward, the branch sagged until it was only ten or twelve feet over the snow.
Darla reached a spot where the branch forked into two smaller limbs that probably wouldn’t support both our weight. She grabbed the branch and swung off it, dangling for a moment. “Hold on tight,” she said. Then she let go, dropping into the snow below.
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.
