Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

And Iker was yelling into his police radio, “Sam, where the hell are you?”

The radio shouted back, “Dave, I got you visual. We’re on the dock but it’s like looking through oatmeal.”

“This guy’s looking real bad here.”

“Hey, we’re lucky to get wheels turning. The Suburban broke down and I had to commandeer a vehicle. We got out fast as we could.”

Milt lay curled in a ball with his face pasty as chalk, and was gripping his injured arm. Sommer hung from the stretcher straps. The pilot pointed to Milt. “There’s blankets in that aft compartment. Looks like we got some delayed shock there. And get the ropes.”

Broker lifted the stretcher to open the compartment door and Sommer screamed and they all gritted their teeth because there was too much scream and not enough cabin. But Broker kept moving and got the blankets, covered Milt, and went back for the coils of rope. Then he turned to Sommer.

“Hurts Jesus hurts,” Sommer said, rocking in his straps as the sweat popped and streaked his scalded face.

“You’re going to be all right,” Broker said, and suddenly Sommer’s hand groped up and clutched Broker’s arm.

“Tell Cliff. .” Sommer muttered through clenched teeth and his eyes were wide-open yellow jets. Not seeing.

“We gotta do something quick. He’s out of his head,” Broker yelled as he pried off Sommer’s fingers. Then, getting his voice under control, he tried to calm Sommer. “Okay, tell Cliff.”

“Tell Cliff to move the money. Don’t let them. .” Sommer reared on a needle of pain, licked his cracked lips, and blinked away sweat. “Gotta tell Cliff. .”

“What? Cliff who?”

“Cliff Stovall.” Sommer collapsed back on his restraints.

Broker rested his wrist on Sommer’s forehead and came away jolted by the clammy hot flesh. “C’mon. C’mon,” he shouted to Iker.

“Working on it,” Iker yelled back. Then-“Oh shit!”

They collided with something hard and as the rivets holding the plane together groaned, Broker flashed on the claustrophobic but also indignant vision of scuttling and drowning in a blizzard. Another violent crash shook Sommer awake, screaming. What? Had they lost a pontoon?

“Bingo,” the pilot yelled triumphantly. “Quick, help me with the rope.” He clambered over the seat, tunneled through the crowded bodies, and grabbed the coils of rope. “Think fast. Move. Open the hatch.”

They struggled with the door, pushed it open, and squinted into the blowing snow and saw that one of the pontoons had snagged on the deck and pilings of a boat dock.

The pilot yelled, “C’mon, we gotta tie her down before we float away.”

Two bundled figures waiting on the dock turned out to be a county deputy and a paramedic, a woman. They helped Broker, Iker, and the pilot struggle up onto the slippery planks, and they all commenced to fasten ropes to secure the plane.

Broker concentrated and tied a bowline. He squinted at lights that hurt his eyes and realized he was staring into powerful low beams that showcased the churning snow. A huge maroon Chevy Tahoe with tire chains idled at the end of the dock.

When the plane was anchored, they hauled Sommer and Milt up to the dock. The robust brunette paramedic took one look at Sommer and yelled, “C’mon, let’s get him in the truck.”

The pilot accepted a thermos of coffee and, armed with a Louis L’Amour paperback, stayed with his plane. Everybody else piled in the Tahoe. As they plowed back toward Ely, Sommer screamed and writhed and drew his knees up to his chest at every bump and shift. After three tries, the medic gave up running the saline IV. Sommer just thrashed them out.

Broker huddled in the back, wrapped in a blanket next to Milt, who made a cramped pile on the cargo floor beside Sommer. He sipped a sloshing cup of hot coffee gratefully, but he couldn’t shake off the bone-deep chill from his last dip in the glacier water. He shivered and figured it was a sign of getting old.

Iker and a deputy sheriff the size of a pro wrestler hunched in the front seat. The way the windshield was catching snow it looked like Star Trek when the Enterprise accelerated to warp speed.

“Get ready for a hot belly,” the paramedic shouted into her radio. “His pressure is one eighty over a hundred. Pulse is one twenty and he’s running a temp of a hundred and four.” She listened, rolled her eyes, and poked Iker in the shoulder. “ETA?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Iker said.

“Make that one five minutes,” the paramedic said. Then she punched off the set and shook her head.

“What?” Broker asked.

“Procedure,” she said in a weary voice. “Obviously, the helicopter’s out from Duluth, so the administrator wants to throw him in an ambulance and put the ambulance behind a snowplow and ship him down the road to the nearest hospital where there’s a surgeon.”

“In this weather? What about Falken, the surgeon who paddled out with me?” Broker asked.

“They’re arguing about that right now. His license is current and they made some calls.”

“So what’s the problem?” Broker asked.

“Mike. The administrator. He wants to poll the hospital board before he signs off on surgical privileges. One of them’s in Florida.”

Iker turned from the front seat and glowered. “Yeah, bullshit! After all we been through, this fucking guy isn’t going to croak because of red tape.”

“Hey. What the hell,” said the huge deputy behind the wheel. His name was Sam and he rolled his eyes. “It’s like these Yuppie jerks come up here and tell us how to live. They run up the real estate and open Starbucks and bean sprouts. They tell us where and how we can fish. They want to take our snowmobiles and rifles away. They love the wolves from Minneapolis or Chicago or wherever the fuck they live, never mind the fuckin’ wolves eat our dogs on our porches. Then, when they get their asses in a sling they expect us to hang our balls over the edge and pull them out. And who foots the bill for all the overtime? Them in their gated fuckin’ suburbs? No, we pay it out of our dwindling fuckin’ tax base.”

Sam’s rant broke the tension in the Tahoe and they burst into deranged frontline mirth. The truck accelerated, slipped, and sideswiped a mass of overhanging spruce branches. The swerve brought them out of their laughing jag.

“Where’d you get this beast, anyway?” Iker asked, suddenly realizing they weren’t in a county vehicle.

Sam grinned. “Tell ’em, Shari.”

The paramedic smiled. “The ambulance couldn’t handle the drifts. The Suburban was down and we saw this thing parked in front of Vertin’s Cafe, had the chains on and everything. So we went in and liberated it off this swampy from the Cities.”

They were still wiping tears from their eyes when they saw the fluorescent glow of a deserted Amoco Station, and it looked like somebody left the door open to an empty freezer the way the lights burned white on white. Soon they glimpsed chimney smoke flapping over the rooftops of Ely like tattered sheets and abandoned cars loomed up, mired in knee-high drifts. Nothing moved except the Tahoe and the banshee wind and the reeling shadows of the trees.

Finally they approached Miner Hospital, an obstinate red-brick relic of mining-company medicine that vanished and reappeared in whirlpools of snow. They came closer and saw a bright orange wind sock whipped out rigid as metal sculpture from a corner of the flat roof. And a double garage door opened and the Tahoe lurched inside and the doors closed.

The engine quit and for the first time in three days Broker was in an enclosed, dry, quiet place that smelled securely of radial tires and clean concrete, only more so because it was a hospital with a red cross.