Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Allen smiled. Then, with the help of Mother Church, they’d rooted out the village midwives and the herbalist “witches” and consolidated their hold on medicine.

He was not without history. He was not without wit.

A surgeon of his generation couldn’t wear a tattoo on his arm like the new kids coming up-or like Hank Sommer could, and Allen envied Hank the cryptic messages dyed into his skin. And if Allen could have a secret tattoo it would be a Bard/Parker number-ten scalpel blade and it would say: HEAL WITH STEEL.

Now he mentally stripped himself until he saw himself as nude as a Michelangelo anatomy study. Then he dressed himself in successive layers of knowledge, confidence, and control. Only when he was fully mentally garbed did he visualize the entire operation, starting from the first incision.

He absolutely believed that anything he could visualize he could make happen in the controlled environment of an operating room.

When Allen stood up, his brow and his palms were dry. The guide, Broker, did not look like he was intimidated by Acts of God; he would persist. He would bring Hank back and lay him on an operating table and, true to the oath he had taken, Allen would insert a blade of the sharpest stainless steel just above Hank Sommer’s pubic bone and slice him open, lift out his guts with his two hands, repair them, and save his life.

* * *

The pilot leaned back, grabbed Iker’s arm, and rapped a knuckle on the map. Broker climbed forward and put his finger on the point in Fraser Lake.

“The rocks are real bad. You’re gonna have to land in this bay where the point joins the shore, and we’ll carry him out to you,” Broker said.

The pilot shook his head. “No time. Lots of bad bush in there. We’ll take our chances with the rocks. The guy with the bad arm-can he walk?” he asked.

“Sure,” Broker said. “He can make it on his own.”

The pilot nodded. “Okay. Listen up. You two are going to strap him on the Stokes and haul him through the rocks and load him. We do it the first time or we’ll have to ride out this storm on the lake. Which will not be good for the patient.”

“Eh, Pat?” called a deadpan voice on the radio. “Be advised. I’m looking out the hangar window and I can’t see the wind sock on the point.”

“Outstanding,” the pilot replied.

At one thousand feet the clouds were clotting fast, and down below the snow rippled like cheesecloth over the pine crowns and water. What had taken Broker and Allen a day of paddling and portaging to travel now buffeted past in minutes and they came up on Fraser. The pilot knew the lake, fixed the point, and flew straight for the spot that Broker had indicated on the map.

Gray smoke smudged the snow and Broker figured Milt had dumped pine boughs on the fire. Then they saw Milt’s red parka jerking among the white turtles of rock, waving his good arm.

Iker grabbed the stretcher as the Beaver hugged a tight turn and bumped down into the waves. Iker and Broker edged through the open hatch and balanced on the pontoon as the plane maneuvered toward shore.

“Go. Go,” the pilot yelled, pumping his arm.

They tried to step onto a rock but it wasn’t going to happen, so they jumped at the most solid-looking footing they could see, and both of them splashed up to their waists in the ice-cold water.

“Jesus H. Christ,” gasped Iker, scrambling for shore.

They sloshed through the waves and stumbled up the cobble beach. Milt, unshaven, gray with pain, walked stiffly out to them.

“No water or food since midnight. He’s unconscious,” Milt yelled in the wind. “Thing is, the swelling went down an hour ago and the pain went away and he was feeling great-then he started screaming. Now he’s delirious, burning up.”

“Aw God, it perforated,” Iker said.

“C’mon,” Broker shouted. “He’s dying on us.”

They stamped into the rocky cul-de-sac, swatting at the smoke and, grabbing Sommer, roughly shoved the stiff stretcher under the sleeping bag and buckled him down. Sommer woke up screaming.

Ignoring the screams, they staggered back toward the plane with their clumsy load. Milt lurched ahead, tripping and falling in the surf until he made it to the aircraft and, using his strong good arm, pulled himself aboard.

Knee-deep in the rocky wash, Broker’s legs buckled and Iker, on the back end, tripped. The sleeping bag took a wave, and now their load was heavier, soaked with water.

They dropped him and barely managed to keep his head from going under but the screaming stopped. Sommer had passed out again. Broker and Iker locked eyes and were amazed that the brief exertion had sapped their energy, that they didn’t have the strength to lift the stretcher.

But they had to.

Desperate, they wrenched the weight through the rocks and waves and banged it on the pontoon. With Milt pulling one-handed, they managed to get the front of the stretcher into the tiny cargo bay.

“Fucker’s too big,” Iker yelled, frantic. Sommer’s feet, swaddled in the soaked sleeping bag, dangled over the stretcher and bumped against the cockpit seats.

“Wedge him any way you can, shut that hatch, we’re going ,” the pilot ordered.

Milt, Broker, and Iker worked in a frenzy with the stretcher, as the pilot banked into the wind and grabbed some sky with an impromptu aerodynamic magic trick. For a few minutes they bounced through turbulence, catching their breath, and then the calm voice on the radio said, “Pat, be advised, they’re getting heavy snow and ice-I say again-heavy snow and ice and sixty-plus wind gusts east of Lake Vermilion.”

“Roger,” the pilot said. Then he yelled, “Map.” Iker held it at the ready.

As the Beaver lurched at two thousand feet, Broker looked forward, between the tangled arms and legs, over the jittering dials and gauges on the console, out the window.

God had been busy.

God had built a solid, grayish-white churning wall all across the sky, and that wall was coming straight at them. Broker could see lakes and woods being vacuumed into its base.

One eye on the forest disappearing in front of the oncoming blizzard and one eye on the map, the pilot shouted in the radio, “Closest place to land with road access is. . ah, Snowbank. So. Okay. I’m going to drop into Snowbank ahead of this thing. Get a vehicle to the boat ramp. You got that?”

“You’re diverting to Snowbank boat ramp. Lay on ground transport,” the radio voice said.

“Right.” The pilot dropped the mike and yelled, “Hang on.”

Everybody groaned as the Beaver pitched over into a steep dive and the pilot bent forward, very intent on the churning white wall.

Broker was thrown nose to nose with Sommer’s corpselike face and Sommer’s eyes popped open as Iker, in the front, climbed his seat while Milt slowly moved his lips: “Holy Mary, Mother of God. .”

Their eyes were clamped shut and they were braced in the forty-five-degree dive, so they didn’t see the seething white wall break over the trees and chew inexorably into the western end of Snowbank Lake, as the Beaver leveled out and swooped down five, four, three feet off the waves, then skimmed the white caps, then bounced, rivets rattling, as it careened toward the boat ramp which was fast disappearing into the tempest, and they never saw the pilot smile as he cut the prop and coasted herky-jerky into the white churn.

It sure beat flying those commercial cattle cars.

“Next stop’s the dock,” the pilot yelled. “I put her down upwind to try and drift into the sucker, so be ready to jump out and tie us off.”

But Broker couldn’t see anything because the windscreen was plastered with snow as they bucked, blind, on the waves, and he was definitely swearing off small planes forever.