Snowblind

FIRST EDITION

Snowblind
© 2012 by Michael McBride

Cover Artwork © 2012 by Daniele Serra

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DELIRIUM BOOKS

An imprint of DarkFuse

P.O. Box 338

North Webster, IN 46555

www.darkfuse.com

Special thanks to Shane Staley, Greg F. Gifune, Brian Keene, Gene O’Neill, Jeff Strand, my amazing family, and all of my readers…without whom, this book would not exist.

November 21st: Pine Springs, Colorado

Today

The man staggers through knee-deep snow, buffeted by the furious wind and a battery of ceaseless snowflakes. He can no longer feel his feet, which snag on buried vegetation and slip on hidden rocks. He falls, but manages to push himself upright with the knowledge that the next time he falls might be the last. His hands ache from the bitter cold and frostbite has already begun to erode the flesh on his nose and cheeks. The blood from his chapped lips has frozen to his teeth, and despite the snow that blows into his open mouth, his throat is bone-dry. His beard is white with ice and so many crystals have crusted in his eyelashes that he can no longer force them closed. His vision is burned red, save for the myriad white shapes that race past him, making the ground seem to tilt and the buried pine trees lean.

He repeats three words over and over in his mind.

Forward
.

Down
.

Help
.

They are the only conscious thoughts he’s capable of forming, the residue of the plan he formed when he set out. He had known at the time that it really wasn’t much of a plan, but its simplicity was what had allowed him to survive beyond the point when his faculties abandoned him. As long as he continued to move forward and follow the mountainous topography ever downward, he would eventually find a cabin or a town or someplace where he would be able to find help. And they would definitely help him…especially when he showed them what he had tucked under his jacket, against his chest.

They would have to believe him then.

He is on his face in the snow before he realizes he’s going to fall. He coughs out a mouthful of snow and pushes himself up to all fours—

—only to find the world black again. He can’t breathe. He panics and pushes himself up again on trembling arms. It takes all of his strength to rise to his knees so that he can claw the snow out of his eyes and mouth.

A light.

A distant golden aura through the shifting branches and blowing flakes.

He bellows in triumph. It is an animal sound that summons a warm trickle of blood from his trachea.

He manages to create momentum and wills his legs to carry him onward.

Forward
.

Down
.

Help
.

The light grows brighter and brighter until he bursts from the thicket and stumbles into the tire ruts on an icy road. There are silhouettes in the light, vague outlines that he recognizes only as help.

He doesn’t recognize the words painted on the plate glass window or the tables at which he and his friends had dined only five days prior, in a purple vinyl booth beneath mounted jackalope heads and framed yellow newspaper clippings featuring colorful local stories about notorious cannibals like Alferd Packer and George Donner and various Bigfoot hoaxes. He doesn’t comprehend the startled expressions on the faces of the patrons who witness his approach. He is focused solely on the door and somehow making his useless hand open it.

The warmth assaults him. The intensity of the light blinds him.

Shadows race toward him. He hears the clatter of plates and the thunder of footsteps on his way down. Voices everywhere—loud, penetrating—but he doesn’t understand the words.

Forward
has served him well and fades from the repetition.

Down
vanishes when he hits the tiled floor.

He is left with
help
and he knows how to receive it.

He opens his jacket and his proof falls to the floor with a thud.

There is a long moment of silence.

And then the screaming begins.

November 18th: Mt. Isolation

Three Days Ago

“Help me get him in here!” Will Coburn shouted to be heard over the shrieking wind. “Hang on. Let me brace the door.”

Joel Vigil groaned in agony.

“Would you just hold still?” Blaine Shore said. He was struggling to maintain his grasp on Vigil’s legs. “You’re just going to make it worse.”

“Cut him some slack,” Todd Baumann said. “It’s not his fault.”

The blizzard had descended from out of nowhere. One minute they were skulking through the forest under a cold gray sky, following elk sign that couldn’t have been more than a few hours old, and the next they were struggling to shield their eyes from snowflakes the size of moths hurled into their faces by thirty-mile-an-hour gusts. The forecast had called for scattered flurries in the high country all weekend, but the meteorologists had been wrong. As usual. Granted, the weather in the Colorado Rockies was the definition of unpredictability, but how any of these jokers kept their jobs was beyond him. Coburn only wished he had a job like that. As an orthopedic surgeon, if he guessed wrong, he got sued. And often even when he didn’t.

“Lower him down right here,” Coburn said. “Gently. Gently. Try to keep that leg as straight as possible.”

He lowered Vigil’s torso to the snow-dusted dirt floor in a gap between broken gray boards that had been planed before his grandparents were born.

“You should be the one holding his leg,” Shore said. “I can feel the bones shifting around under there—”

Vigil moaned.

“You have the light end,” Baumann said. “I’ve got all the weight balanced under his…there.”

They slid their arms out from beneath Vigil, who bared his teeth and clenched his eyes against the pain. He must have slipped on a rock on the steep escarpment. He had been right behind them on the path one second and crashing through the scrub down the hillside the next. They had followed his cries through the blizzard until they found him at the bottom of the ravine, his right leg crumpled beneath him, his left shoulder balanced on a chunk of ice on the frozen creek, while the water spilled out underneath his head. It was below freezing and he was wet, but the more immediate concern was that the sharp edges of the broken bones could slice his femoral or tibial arteries and flood his leg with blood. They’d been lucky to stumble upon this old homestead beneath the storm.

Coburn pulled his Model 700 CDL DM bolt-action Remington rifle over his head and tossed it to the ground.

“Shore…hand me your knife.”

Coburn crawled toward Vigil’s legs. The right boot was pointing awkwardly to the side.

“My knife? Why do you have to use my…? You aren’t going to attempt to perform surgery on him out here—”

“Just give me your damn knife!”

Coburn slipped off his gloves and held out his right hand. Shore slid the hunting knife from its scabbard and slapped the hilt into Coburn’s palm.

“Thank you,” Coburn said, and proceeded to cut Vigil’s jeans from the top of his boots to his groin. He did the same thing to the thermal underwear beneath, then carefully removed the boot and finished the job on the clothing.

“Jesus,” Baumann whispered.

Vigil’s leg was a reddish-purple and black mess of bruises, but there was no indication of pooling blood, or hypostasis. Coburn checked the strength of the pulse in Vigil’s foot and breathed an audible sigh of relief. They hadn’t clipped an artery. There was visible deformity, both superior and inferior to the knee joint itself, suggesting fractures to the distal femur and both the proximal tibia and fibula. He was going to have to reduce the breaks and run the risk of a whole list of potential complications as long as his arm, but doing so would only buy them so much time.

They needed to get Vigil off of this mountain, and they needed to do so right now.

“I know we’ve been doing this since we were undergrads,” Shore said, “but I think this is going to be my last year. The wife’s gone vegan and started pressing me about having a kid. And if I play my cards right, I just might make partner—”

“Why don’t you see if you can start a fire?” Coburn interrupted. “We need to get Vigil warmed up in a hurry.”

“How come I have to be the one to start a fire? I—” Vigil cried out when Coburn cautiously applied traction and inverted his foot. “I’ll round up some wood.”

Shore shed his .300 Win Mag and scampered over a snow-covered pile of wood that had once been part of the roof before the branches of the pines grew through.

“Kind of makes our ‘no cell phones’ rule seem kind of stupid now, doesn’t it?” Baumann said. He had paled considerably and couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of the lump where Vigil’s patella now sat, nowhere near where it should have been.

“We’d never get a signal up here anyway, especially with this storm. Besides, we can use the radio back at the camp.”

“If we can still find the camp…”

Coburn had no response.

Vigil’s teeth started to chatter. He mumbled something unintelligible. The skin on his face had taken on a waxy cast and beads of sweat were blossoming from his forehead.

“I need you to get some things for me,” Coburn said. “I need two lengths of wood, roughly thirty inches long and four inches wide. Are you with me, Todd?” He waited for Baumann to raise his eyes from Vigil’s leg. “I need one of the elk drag harnesses. And give me your flask.”

Baumann pulled the silver flask of whiskey from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Coburn, then began rummaging through the heaps of rotting wood.

Coburn spun off the cap and tipped the flask to Vigil’s lips.

“Drink this, Joel.” Vigil sputtered and coughed, but managed to swallow most of it. “You’re going to be all right.”

“What…?” Vigil gasped. “What are you…?”

“Shh. Shh.” Coburn scanned the ground around him until he found a stick about the width of this thumb. “Just try to relax. This is what I do for a living.”

“Hang on—”

“Bite down on this,” Coburn said, and pressed the stick sideways into Vigil’s mouth, between his teeth.

He gripped Vigil’s leg beneath the fracture line, then pulled down and twisted at the same time.

Vigil’s cry echoed in the confines and shivered snow loose from the gaps in the roof.

* * *

Vigil had mercifully passed out while Coburn applied the makeshift splint, which was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed to get Vigil to a hospital sooner than later, the storm be damned. One of them was going to have to brave the blizzard and hike back to the camp to call for help…and hope that an emergency vehicle would be able to reach them in time. If they had to wait out the storm in order to get a chopper up there…

At least Shore had managed to get a decent fire going. If nothing else, Vigil seemed to be resting comfortably, and Coburn was grateful for the heat. He hadn’t realized just how damp his clothing had become or how cold he was beneath it. The light was a blessing, too. The ramshackle homestead was larger, although much the worse for wear, than he had initially thought. The great room where they had entered was by far the largest, but in the worst condition. More of the roof lay in heaps of rubble around their feet than above their heads. Fortunately, the broad ponderosa pine branches spared them from the brunt of the storm, although the heat was now melting the snow from the needles in a steady downpour and granting access to the rising wind, which made the bare plank walls shiver with each gust. It appeared as though someone had made a halfhearted attempt to reinforce the outer walls with stacked stones, debris, and shingles and planks with bent, rusted nails protruding from them. There was a section of the dirt floor where it almost looked like some animal had tried to dig a tunnel straight down into the hard earth. Old furniture had been broken beyond recognition, save for the tarnished brass knobs and handles partially buried in the dirt.