Trapped (15 page)

So I was on board, but Jason still needed convincing. He was already sitting up in his chair waiting for us when we pushed our way in the door. His thick, dark fire blanket was draped over his lap, and his look was somewhere between annoyance and anger.

Everyone was up now. How could they not be with the entrance we made? We banged the thing against one side of the door frame and then the other, turned it sideways and tried again. We were huffing and puffing and swearing under our breath the whole time.

The kart was about the size of a bumper car, with a flatter bottom and a more skeletal frame. It was lighter than you might think, made mostly of metal pipes, curved aluminum, and a riding-mower engine. But it was unbalanced and awkward to carry.

The argument started as soon as we put it down.

“Do enough damage to it?” Jason said, and I realized that he thought I was in on the whole thing. He had no way of knowing that I’d just found out about it myself, out in the hallway not five minutes ago.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m just helping him get it into the room. I told him he’d have to work it out with you.”

That was sort of true. Jason thought it over for a few moments and then turned to focus on Pete.

Pete basically told him what he told me, without all the I-need-this stuff. He laid out the argument for going, but it still didn’t explain why he was the one who should go or what right he had to take the kart. Jason pointed that out.

The rest of us mostly just listened to the argument. Our expressions shifted between skeptical and convinced, annoyed and sympathetic, depending on what point was being made and who was making it, but we let Pete and Jason settle it.

“Come on, man, I built the thing while you were up here playing video games and trying to hook up,” said Jason, his eyes flicking over to Julie. That hit a little too close to home and pretty soon Pete started shouting. Before we could step in, Jason shouted back, and just like that:
GRRRRRRRRRMMMM!
The roof. It was no little whine and click this time. It was a big sound like the ones we’d heard before the first collapse.

Everyone froze for a second. Jason stopped mid-sentence, and he and Pete stood across from each other, red in the face but silent.

I know the snow above us was probably responding to the noise or its own internal dynamics or just the passage of time. But what it really seemed like to me was that it was responding to our anger. It seemed like it was growing angrier too, and unlike us, it had the power to do something about it.

“OK, go,” said Julie in an urgent, hissing whisper. “Go. Someone go and tell them we’re here.”

“I’ll go,” said Pete, mouthing the words more than speaking them.

“No,” mouthed Jason, shaking his head so there’d be no confusion.

Neither of them moved for a few moments. It was a stalemate. It was no longer about whether to use the snow-kart but about who would do it.

It came down to this: Pete wanted to do it, but it wasn’t his kart. Jason had built the kart, but he didn’t really seem to want to do it. It just seemed like he didn’t want Pete to.

“Come on, man,” I said as loud as seemed safe. “He dragged the thing all the way up here on one good leg. Give him a shot.”

Jason looked over at me. His expression was that mix of hurt and surprise that is reserved for the betrayed.

“Yeah,” said Julie, “give him a shot.”

She was throwing in with Pete again, after all. I saw a little spark flash in Pete’s eyes. What was it: joy, hope, life?

“Yeah,” said Les. “Let the idiot kill himself.”

Jason looked shocked. He couldn’t believe what was happening: The kart he’d spent so long building was being taken away from him. He looked around for someone to take his side but no one did.

Let the record show: I cast the first vote for Pete. I did it because I thought Jason was being petty, like taking his ball and going home. I was wrong about Jason’s motives, but it was settled now, and motives didn’t seem to matter anymore. Now it was about logistics: getting the thing over to the windowsill, getting the window open wide enough, lowering it down to the snow.

It took forever, like, seriously, forever. It was mostly Pete, Les, and me lifting, with Jason giving directions. About the best thing you could say about Pete and Les’s teamwork is that they weren’t actively taking swings at each other, and Jason seemed to be punishing us with bad directions.

And it’s not like it was an easy job anyway. It wasn’t that big, but it was an awkward shape. It was made of metal, and some of the edges were still sharp, so you had to be careful where and how you held it. I found that out the hard way, when the edge of the sled cut a long slice in my jeans.

“Put it down, put it down,” I said halfway to the window.

I looked down at a patch of skin on the middle of my right thigh that my jeans used to cover. A thin red line of blood appeared like a slow smile.

“You ever think of sanding this down, man?” I said to Jason.

“It was on my list,” he said. “Did I ever say it was finished? Before you frickin’ hijacked it?”

Note to self: Do not complain to Jason about state of the kart.

Once we got it over to the sill, we realized that the bottom of the kart was wider than the windows. We had to set the thing down on the floor again and figure it out. We had to turn it, obviously, but we couldn’t really hold on to the bottom edge to do it, not without cutting up our gloves and hands.

The wall had two big windows. We opened one, just so we could hoist the nose of the kart through and start rotating it. The windows opened upward and faced the exposed front of the building. As soon as we opened the window the three feet or so that we’d need to get the thing through, the wind blasted in like it had been waiting for us.

One thing was clear: The snow might have died down, but the wind was still going full strength. The force and cold were shocking and we quickly scrambled to close the window. Then we spent some time talking it out, so that when we opened the window again, we could get it through quick and get it closed. The fact that we were going to be throwing Pete out there, too, wasn’t mentioned.

The talk was like, “OK, if you hold it here and I hold it there, then we can go, like, sort of three-quarters, right? See what I mean?”

“No, no, no. I’ll hold it up by the nose and you two get it back by the engine,” and round and round it went.

Pretty soon, it wasn’t so early anymore. We were all hungry and the roof hadn’t made any noise for a while, so it seemed like we might as well stop and eat something. Again, not mentioned, but that seemed especially true for Pete. We couldn’t send him out into all that wind and cold and snow without, you know, some crappy pudding.

So we ate and listened to the radio on low volume, just in case there was some news that would make all this unnecessary. There wasn’t: Rescue operations were still going to start with at-risk populations, and we still didn’t know if anyone realized there was a population at the high school at all, much less how at-risk we were. It’s not like Andy came on and said, “Hang in there, Tattawa, we’re comin'!”

He just said the same things as before and got the Led out. It doesn’t make much sense to play Led Zeppelin on low volume, but we left it on anyway. It was that Viking song, and it seemed appropriate: “We come from the land of the ice and snow …” Two minutes later, we were back at the window, lifting the kart up different ways, trying to eyeball what would work best.

“I’m not sure about this thing,” Jason said. He’d said it a few times that morning, but I just thought he was fishing for compliments. The kart actually looked pretty slick. Krista and Julie hadn’t seen the thing before, and they were all like, “This thing is cool!” and “How fast do you think it’ll go?”

Elijah hadn’t seen it before, either, and he signaled his approval simply by not saying anything morbid or overly apocalyptic about the idea. Basically, we ignored Jason’s protests and
a little before noon, the
Flammenwerfer
was sticking nose-first into the snow beneath the window. The extra heat we’d spent days building up in the main room had flown out the window with it, and Pete was preparing to follow.

This guy I’d known since he was literally not even four feet tall retied his boots and adjusted a pair of safety glasses he’d taken from the shop to use as ski goggles.

“What could possibly go wrong?” he said once he had them on securely. It was a joke, but none of us were in the mood to laugh.

He turned to Julie, said something that I’m sure he’d spent a lot of time thinking about but that none of us could understand. The fear was setting in, I guess, and before it dug too deep, he swung up onto the windowsill, took one last look back at us, and was gone.

We ran over and looked and he was past his waist in snow. I think he might’ve gone all the way down over his head, except that he’d grabbed the kart and was holding on to the side like a swimmer at a raft.

As soon as he hauled himself most of the way up onto the thing, we closed the window. That probably sounds bad, but then you’re probably sitting in a warm room somewhere, not standing there with the freezing wind blasting the feeling right out of your face and knocking things over in the room behind you.

So yeah, we closed it and went right back to hoarding our body heat in that little box. Every heartbeat and every cloud of fog from every dumb thing we said made the room just a tiny bit less cold than it had been the moment before. Which meant
that nothing we said could be all that dumb. We were literally saving our breath.

We watched Pete through the glass. He was bundled up as round and plump as a ripe berry, layered with anything he’d been able to borrow or trade for. He had Julie’s scarf over his own and my sweatshirt over his own and under his jacket. He had a pair of work gloves on top of his ski gloves, and a pair of gym socks over his regular socks and under Jason’s boots, which he’d exchanged for his own.

Jason had given him his cell phone too, which was pretty big of him, all things considered. “Try it once you get out there a ways,” he’d said. “You know how it is around here with all these hills.”

Pete had nodded, but he’d barely managed to stuff the thing in a side pocket with both pairs of gloves on. Now that he was out in the snow, his movements were even slower and clumsier underneath all those layers. He moved like a bundled-up baby. When he dragged himself up and into the little driver’s seat, it looked like the whole thing might tip over and deposit him back in the snow. But the kart had settled on its boatlike bottom and it was just stable enough.

He brushed some of the snow off his jacket and legs and turned around and gave us a thumbs-up. The guys gave him a thumbs-up back and the girls clapped. Then he went to work trying to start the engine with the pull cord. Four good tugs and nothing. I was about to ask Jason if there was gas in there, but the thing sputtered to life on the fifth pull.

Pete turned and faced forward in his seat, grabbed on to the
wheel, and prepared for the rocket start. The propeller was a gray metal blur, kicking up snow, but the kart just sat there for a while. It was dug into the snow but after maybe twenty seconds, with Pete leaning forward and making little scooting motions in the driver’s seat, it began to pull free. It moved a few inches at a time at first, but then it began to slide along its aluminum belly: slowly, slowly, and then a little faster.

I looked over at Jason with my hand up for a high five, but he left me hanging. There was more clapping around us now. “Go, Pete, go!” someone said. But Jason wouldn’t take his eyes off his little shop project, five yards away, then ten, then fifteen.

It was all planned out. Pete was headed to the center of town: the post office, the town hall, and the handful of stores that made up the wildly unimpressive downtown district of Little River. If it didn’t look like he was going to make it that far, he was supposed to go to the little power substation. It seemed like that would be a priority for them. And if it didn’t seem like he’d make it even that far, well, anywhere with people, anywhere other than this dead-end road in the middle of nowhere would do.

For now, he was headed northeast, toward the center of town. It seemed like a good start, and the kart was picking up speed now. The airboat design worked well on the snow, with the big propeller pushing the flat metal bottom along the surface. I looked back at Jason because, I mean, he had to be at least a little happy about that, even if it was someone else driving it.

He looked back at me and just shook his head: No. That’s when I knew. It hadn’t been pettiness that had made him try to stop Pete from taking
the kart. He’d been trying to save him.

I looked back, squinting through the lightly falling snow and trying to see what was wrong, why Jason was wearing that hangdog look. At first, I thought he might be wrong about it. Or I guess maybe
hoped
is a better word.

Pete was halfway across the Great Lawn, three quarters, almost to the road! He was making fast progress, clipping along, but something else was happening too. Now I saw it. The nose of the kart was riding lower than the rear.

“I had the weight wrong, the balance,” said Jason, almost to himself.

The pointed nose was digging into the snow, casting a little wake of white flakes off on either side. It was sinking in deeper as it went, maybe an inch down for every twenty yards forward. And then, at the edge of the road, it just went too deep. The point of the nose dug in and stopped, but the propeller kept going, pushing the back end up and over.

The snow-kart flipped; it happened fast. One second, we were watching Pete, hunched into the seat and leaning forward into the wind. The next, he was gone and all we could see was the shiny metal bottom of the kart, snow-scrubbed and sticking up toward the sky.

The propeller dug into the snow and ground to a stop. A few seconds later, thick black smoke started coming up from under the kart. We all shouted at the same time, some with words, some just screams. We forgot about the roof for a moment.

“No no no!” I shouted. “Pete! PETE!”

The smoke was coming up from underneath the flipped kart; underneath, where Pete was; where he must have been, though we could no longer see him.