“Shut up.” That seemed to be Vernon’s favorite phrase. “Come on, hand over the keys. Your packs, too, and that tablet and solar charger.”
Cortez had been napping, too, curled up on the ground like a cat. Now he sat, one knee up, remarkably unflustered. “We can’t,” he said. “We need our kit. We’re on a rescue mission.”
“We’re kind of on a rescue mission ourselves,” Low-vocabulary Vernon said. “Rescuing ourselves.”
Little Brother added, “That effing volcano fouled our plane’s engine. It spoiled the water and ruined our crop.”
“Shut up!” The man with the gun was not the patient sort.
Wide-eyed and pleasantly helpful, Cortez said, “Just draw the water and let it settle. It may have a taste, but the ash won’t hurt it. And vegetables will wash off.”
What’s he doing? Cortez was handing out advice like a state agriculture agent to a weekend gardener. Was he brave or just crazy?
“I don’t think their crop is vegetables,” Kanut said. “Now, son, I’m not interested in your pot plants. Be sensible and put the rifle down.”
“You think I’m joking, Smokey?” The rifle barrel wavered.
That’s right, boy. The Browning gets heavy, doesn’t it?
“All we want is a way out of this volcano shit,” the pot grower said. “Just give up the keys to your truck and nobody gets hurt.”
Cortez shook his head. “We don’t have a truck. You can walk out, northwest. You’ll hit the Dirty Dog River in about ten miles, you can follow it to Mankeeta. Take the rifle, if it’s any use to you, but leave us the rest of our gear.”
Kanut’s teeth ground at Cortez, so ready to give away Kanut’s rifle. Twenty-two years he’d had that gun, and he wasn’t about to see it walk away in the hands of a weed farmer.
Vernon shook his head. “Quit stalling. The packs and the tablet, hand them over, along with the truck keys.”
Cortez sighed. “All right, if you insist.” He punched a code into the tablet and laid it on the ground.
The tablet emitted a terrible cry: eeeAAAAhhhaaa! Half siren, half scream, and half yodel.
The nervous brother jumped. “What the hell?”
Cortez stood.
Kanut tensed. Didn’t Cortez realize he was making himself a target? That little bit of noise wouldn’t be enough of a distraction to tackle a man with a gun.
Kanut hated stupid heroics.
The tablet sounded that weird cry again. Vernon raised the rifle to his shoulder, pointing it at Cortez.
Oh, hell. Kanut got his feet under him, preparing to launch himself at Vernon to save the dumb-ass civilian. And me with no damn body armor. Maybe they’ll give me a medal posthumously.
From the forest came echoing cries. The ground shook with the pounding of stampeding feet.
Now that was a distraction. Gun-toting Vernon spun right, trying to focus on what was coming.
Kanut stood stiffly, preparing to leap on the pot grower.
Cortez grabbed his arm to hold him back.
Out of the bush burst a mammoth—a huge monster, a head taller than the one Kanut had ridden. High shoulders, fur streaked and stained with gray ash, its long tusks curved like overgrown devil horns. It looked like a demon from hell.
The monster splashed across the creek and up the bank, screaming like a banshee—and headed straight for the man with the rifle.
The little brother broke and skedaddled. Kanut scrambled backward toward the nearest tree, but Cortez just stood, unmoving. Courage? Or crazy?
Vernon swung the rifle toward the charging mammoth and pulled the trigger.
It clicked on an empty chamber.
The pot grower threw down the rifle and ran for his life, a raging mammoth on his trail.
“No, don’t!” Kanut cried.
Too late. The mammoth’s fat foot came down on the rifle with a terrible crunch.
“My Browning!” The steel barrel, irretrievably dented. The beautifully polished wood stock, cracked.
Kanut turned to Cortez, mouth scrunched in anger. “My father gave me that rifle!”
Cortez shrugged. “I warned you. Diamond hates guns.”
Shivering in the breeze, the three women stripped out of their wet clothes and searched the suitcases for anything dry and warm.
It was stupid to leave the plane. True, at their new campsite the air temperature was far warmer than it had been on the glacier, but now they’d all been thoroughly chilled. It would take hours to recover: hours that translated into lost calories as the body tried to warm itself. And they had very limited ability to replace those calories—the power bars in the emergency box were now down to four, the rest having been lost in the slide down the glacier. And they’d lost the firestarter kit as well.
Stop fretting over what’s done. Concentrate on what to do now.
Ash still sporadically sifted down. They needed shelter. While Sera wrung out wet jackets, pants, and sweaters and spread them over the ash-dusted grass to dry, Estelle used a scalpel to cut open and flatten the emergency supplies carton for a ground cover. Then she and Sera cobbled together a tent of sorts with the suitcases and tarp.
There Annie huddled, wrapped in a reflective blanket over a flannel nightgown, topped off with the fluffy robe and fuzzy slippers.
“Maybe we should build a fire?” Sera asked.
“With what?” Estelle looked around. “No trees in sight and grass doesn’t give off much heat.”
The temp wasn’t bad—mid-fifties—and Annie had lived a lifetime above the Arctic Circle. She didn’t complain. Neither did Sera, but her life had been spent in balmy New Orleans, where fifty degrees counted as the depth of winter.
Estelle stepped away to call Alaska Eagle Med Central again. “Look, our situation is pretty dire. We had to abandon the plane, so we don’t have shelter. We’re cold and short of food.”
“I’ve got good news!”
