With the sled on both skis again, I reached for the steering wheel and guided us away from a downed telephone pole across our path. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.
The engine coughed—no, hacked—and as Ell took over, we coasted to a stop. The headlights had dimmed, and so had the lights on the dashboard, but my mind was in too much of a frenzy to think anything of it.
Besides our frantic breathing and the sound of Mia and Stone’s sled, the world around us was, for the moment, quiet.
I inhaled shakily and expelled clouds of opaque vapor that filled the cab, and I thought about the thunder. Part of me knew what had caused it, because the sound was a familiar one. I heard it many times since the world had ended.
Ell’s hat had fallen from her head. Her hair was everywhere, and a couple of strands stuck to the paths the tears had taken down her cheeks.
Absentmindedly, I reached out and brushed them away.
“I-I—” she began. “I almost killed us.”
“Ell,” I said, trying to sound calm (and failing), “it’s okay, but I think there’s someone shooting at or very close to us. We need to get moving again before something really bad happens. I can drive if—”
She shook her head, took in her own deep and shaky breath, and said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
That, I wasn’t so sure about. Still, her hand moved under its own power, going against the fear evident on her face, and tried starting the engine. It didn’t purr to life, but click-click-rattled instead.
It was dead.
And I feared we were next.
2
The Theater
The shots had stopped for a few minutes, and in that few minutes, Stone pulled the other snowmobile up next to us, then swung around so its headlights illuminated a good portion of the surrounding area. The logic was that as long as we stayed in this bright circle, we were safe.
As I stepped out into the snow, prepared to either try to get a quick view of what was wrong under the hood of our sled or move into Stone and Mia’s, the whipping wind momentarily knocked me off balance. I stopped myself from face-planting—gee, wouldn’t that have been the cherry on top of this fucked-up sundae—by clinging onto one of the side mirrors and waiting until the gale passed. Outside in that terrible cold, seconds felt like a millennium, minutes an eternity, and although my bones seemed frozen, I made myself crouch so as not to be a blatant target for any shooters.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if there was a shooter. I thought so, but if someone wanted us dead, wasn’t now the perfect time to pump us full of lead? The silence said that we were in the clear, but my intuition said get the hell out of here, don’t risk it. I mean, why shoot at a moving target—albeit, a fairly slow moving target—and then lay off the trigger when said target stops? It didn’t make much sense. Regardless, I couldn’t stand out here any longer. If it wasn’t a bullet that did me in, it would be the cold.
Head down against the wind and trudging toward Stone and Mia’s snowmobile, I sank a little deeper with each step until the white nearly came up to my waist. Again, as I usually did whenever I had to travel by foot through the snow, I thanked whatever entity in charge of the universe for the base layer of ice under the fresher powder that prevented me from being swallowed entirely.
Stone cracked his door open. The tip of his nose and part of his cheeks had turned reddish and chapped, lit up by the glow of the flashlight Mia was holding.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“What?
“That thunder,” I said. “Gunshots, I think.”
“No shit?”
I shrugged. “That’s what it sounded like. Seeing as how I’m able to stand out here without taking a slug to the back, I don’t think we were the prime targets if gunshots were the case.”
Stone pulled his hat down around his ears and scratched the back of his neck.
“Doesn’t mean I wanna keep standing out here, though,” I added, hugging myself to suppress a shiver.
“Is the sled dead?” Stone asked.
“Yeah, Ell got so scared when we heard it, she almost flipped us trying to get away. Soon as we stopped, the engine cut out on its own.”
“Like it did at the ski place,” Mia said, nodding. “Told ya we shoulda got that taken care of.”
Stone closed his eyes. “The snowmobile repair shop isn’t exactly open now, is it?”
I wondered if there even was such a place before the blizzards.
Mia flipped Stone off. “Wouldn’t have hurt to give it a look and try to fix it.”
“With how little Grady and me know about engines, we probably would’ve made it worse.”
“Good point,” Mia agreed.
“Can we save the conversation for another time?” I asked. “I am, to quote Stone here, ‘freezing my nuts off’.”
“What do you wanna do?” Stone asked.
“I think we’re gonna have to pack it in for the day. Find shelter, hope for some sunlight, and do what Mia said we should’ve done a while ago—fix it.”
“If we can’t?”
“Then we’re S.O.L.”
Stone glanced at the dashboard. His eyes lingered on the gas gauge. It hovered around a quarter of a tank, and he and I both knew what that meant. It was the last quarter of a tank we had left without siphoning the bit from the other snowmobile. Unless the engine miraculously fixed itself, or a wealth of mechanical knowledge struck one of us like a lightning bolt, siphoning was exactly what we’d be doing.
I think maybe it was how I was raised—by a
