When next he awoke fully, for there were many moments in his sleep where he awakened at the sound of crackling wood or a strong gust of wind, he found his eyes wet, and his heart was pumping as if he had just run a mile. But he felt better. He took a deep, shuddering sigh and waited for the blue of the morning to turn into a more solid gray.
When the sky brightened, he pushed himself off the ground and threw some more logs onto the fire. Using a few more pages from Moby Dick, he raised the fire back to life. He spent the next fifteen minutes working the kinks out of his body. He walked back and forth across the hardwood floors of the living room, spinning and turning. He bent his knee several times, holding a squatting position even though it hurt him to do so. He flexed his shoulders, stretching his arms out wide and reaching up to the sky until the tightness there went away. He flexed his neck from side to side, breaking the stiffness loose.
After Mort finished his exercises, he grabbed a packet of mustard, bit it open, and squirted its contents into his mouth. He winced from the pungent flavor of the mustard and repeated the process three more times. "I hope they got some food over there," he said to no one in particular.
He walked through the house, retrieving all of his belongings. There wasn't much. His backpack held a can opener, a fork, a spoon, a couple of those lighter guns, and some rolling papers he had no real use for, as he had run out of tobacco some time ago. In addition to this, he wore his jacket, his rifle, his hammer, and his shotgun secured about his body. He thought about bringing Moby Dick along, but he left it behind. He was already carrying a fair amount of weight due to the fact that he had to carry the rifle and the shotgun.
He stepped to the front door and peeked through the boards to see if there were any surprises waiting for him on the porch. Seeing none, he threw the door open with his free hand while his other held his hammer ready just in case.
The sign was gone, as if it had never been there, and snow still fell from the sky. It was going to be a cold day. That much he knew.
Venturing out onto the porch, Mort sighed as the warmth of the fire was pulled from his body by the howling wind. He stomped through the accumulated powder on the steps, holding onto the railing carefully so he wouldn't slip on the compacted, icy snow underneath the soft powder on top.
He made it to the bottom of the stairs and scanned the snow for signs of the dead. Seeing none, he breathed easier, though not entirely easy as a gust of frigid wind snatched his breath away for a second. He walked down the barely visible path to the main road, enjoying the feeling of his muscles warming up. The heat from exertion was the only way to stay alive out in the wilderness. If he sat down for an hour or two, he might never get up again.
There were no signs of life on the main road at all. The blanket of snow was pristine, unmarred by footsteps, though occasionally he would see the dainty hoofprints of a passing deer or elk. He saw no bear prints, which was fine by him. He had seen one prowling around in the area behind his house one day, and it just about made him crap his pants. The dead he could handle, but if a bear got it in its mind to come after him, he didn't think the rifle in his hand would do much to deter it. The shotgun would most likely just piss it off unless he got lucky.
As Mort pondered what he would do in case of a bear attack, he came to the spot he dreaded most, the washout. He stared at the washed-out section of road. Ten, fifteen-feet across maybe. He walked up to the edge of the road and peered down. It was a good twenty-foot drop, and there was no way around it without climbing the cliff to his right. Or he could backtrack for a mile or two until he could make it to the river, then come up the river bank; although that would involve traipsing across a questionable crust of ice for a couple of miles. He might not survive a trek like that.
He could see two of the dead down there, but just barely. The tops of their heads poked through the white blanket of snow, their legs trapped in the mud that had solidified around their bodies sometime in the past. The snow had drifted down there, filling up the empty space where the road used to be.
Had the dead been alive when they fell, or were they already dead? The red bumper of a beat-up old pick-up truck was the only source of color down below. He figured they must have been alive when it went down. Maybe they had stopped to drink from the small waterfall when the road disappeared from underneath them. The plummet must have been terrifying. He hoped their deaths had been quick. No one should have to die slow.
He pulled the straps of his backpack tight and arranged the straps of the rifle and shotgun so he could be flat against the cliff face. He was going
