Steve Hamilton - Winter of the Wolf Moon

“Where are you going?” I said.

“To the car,” he said.

“You don’t have the keys.”

“I have my own keys,” he said. “I asked you to take Mr. Pearl’s keys because I wanted to see what you would do with them. If you had given them to me, I would have been very disappointed. But you didn’t. I believe you when you say that you don’t know where Miss Parrish is. As for the matter of Mr. Fulton, I will need to look into that situation a little further. I believe I see some unique… opportunities there. If you really are a private investigator, I assume that your services are available for hire. Sometime in the future, I may wish to retain those services.”

“You’re going to leave me here,” I said. “I’ll freeze to death.”

“Perhaps you will,” he said. “Perhaps you won’t. If you survive, then that will tell me something very important about you. It will tell me that you are a man who may be of great use to me.”

I stood there watching him. There were no words to say.

“If you survive,” he said, “we will have something in common. Something very rare. You see, I was in a similar situation myself once. I didn’t freeze to death. But I must warn you. The cold can take away a piece of you. Not just your physical body. I mean inside of you.”

He opened the door, then stopped. The brutal air rushed in. I could feel my shirt frozen against my chest. “Once you freeze all the way through to your soul,” he said, “you will never feel warm again. You’ll see.”

He closed the door, leaving me in the cold darkness.

I was alone in the ice shanty, alone except for two men dead on the floor and Bruckman underneath us somewhere, wearing my coat, either sinking to the bottom or bobbing against the ice itself. The heater was dead. Molinov had taken the lantern. It was completely dark and getting colder by the minute.

Okay, think. You’re alive. You want to stay alive. What do you do?

I started to remember something. I’m sitting in the barber shop, waiting for the chair. An old copy of Michigan Out of Doors there, pick it up, there’s an article about hypothermia and frostbite. What the hell did it say? I wish I had paid more attention…

I felt my shirt, frozen solid where I got splashed, like having a block of ice strapped to my chest. That was the first problem.

No, wait, my hands. They are so cold. Where are my gloves? I went down on my knees, felt around on the floor for them. I couldn’t even remember taking them off. Maybe when I went digging in the dead man’s pockets for the car keys.

I felt around on the rough wooden floor. There! There’s one of them. I put it on my left hand. Now, where’s the other one? I felt around with my bare right hand. It’s here somewhere.

What’s that? Oh fuck! I shifted my weight before I realized what I was doing, felt the icy sting of the cold water all the way up to my elbow.

That’s just what I need right now. Fall through the fucking hole in the ice. Say hello to Bruckman on the way down.

I sat back and shook my hand. When I put it back down, I felt leather.

Great, it was right under me. I put it on. Okay, now what do I do about this wet shirt? What did that article say? Something about how snow soaks up water. When you’re wet, you’re supposed to roll around in the snow.

No, I don’t think so. I’m not going out there and rolling around in the snow. I don’t care what the magazine said.

The dead men. What about their clothes? Molinov took their coats. What a wonderful thing to do. But what about the rest of their clothes? Two shirts, two pairs of pants.

Yeah, I’m going to go find the two dead guys in the pitch black, strip their clothes off.

Easy, Alex. Listen to your breathing. You’re using up all your energy. Just sit here for a minute. Relax and think about it.

I found the bench, the one I had been sitting on from the beginning. My hands felt cold even with the gloves on, especially my right hand after the ice bath. I tucked them under my armpits. The wind picked up again outside, rattling every inch of the place. I put my head down and felt the shivers take control of my body.

This is not good, Alex. This is not good at all.

I tried to remember what the place looked like. I went down on my hands and knees again and crawled toward the back corner, feeling for the heater. When I came to it, I picked it up. It was too light. I shook it. Nothing. Maybe there was more kerosene somewhere. I felt around the back wall. I came upon the heavy metal ice spud that they used to break through the ice. I kept feeling against the wall.

There! A metal can! I picked it up. It was empty.

Matches. Could there be matches somewhere? I could start a fire, burn some wood or something. I came to a wooden box, took my gloves off and opened it. A fish hook bit into my finger. It was just a tackle box.

What a stupid fucking sport, anyway. Sitting in a little shack in the middle of a frozen lake with a fishing pole.

As my eyes became adjusted to the darkness, I saw that there was some light coming through the back window. It was the faintest light you could ever imagine, just one shade above black, but it was enough for me to start making out the general shape of the room. I stood up and looked out the window. There was enough ambient light from wherever the moon was hiding to see an endless expanse of snow and nothing else.

All right, you’re going to have to do this. You have no choice.

The two dead men were just shadows on one side of the floor. I went down on my hands and knees again, crawled over and reached out toward them. I touched a hand, recoiled from the shock of it.

You’ve got to do this, Alex. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

I reached out again, felt the arm, moved up to the chest. I started to unbutton the shirt. I could feel the blood. It was still warm enough not to have frozen.

Blood. This is all I need right now.

I made myself breathe in and out a few times. Then I kept unbuttoning the man’s shirt. When it was unbuttoned, I struggled to lift the man’s body. I had to get the shirt off him. His arms wouldn’t bend. It’s just a mannequin, I thought. A big heavy mannequin with some blood on it.

When I finally got the shirt off, I thought about what to do next. Take my wet shirt off, put this one on instead? This one might be just as bad, now that this blood is freezing. I tried putting the shirt on over my own. It smelled like cigarettes.

Core body temperature. That’s what the article said. That’s the number one priority. Keep the core body temperature up. When it starts falling, you’ve got big problems. There was even a little table with the different temperatures, what kind of symptoms you get as your core body temperature goes lower and lower. When you’re shivering, when your hands are starting to go numb, that’s mild hypothermia, right? That’s me right now. I’m off to a running start.

I moved over to the second man. It was harder to unbutton the shirt this time. My hands were getting worse. Not a good sign. He was the heavier of the two, so I had to strain to lift him, working the shirt off his body. I put it on over the other shirt.

Okay, Alex, you’re all set now. You’ve got three shirts on now, one wet with water, the other two with blood. Now you’re all ready to freeze to death.

Do I take their pants, too? I could stuff them inside my shirt.

Yes, Alex, you have to.

“I hope you gentlemen will excuse me for what I am about to do,” I said. I took the boots off of each man, unzipped their flies and then pulled the pants off them. I stuffed one pair of pants inside my shirt, between the frozen fabric and my skin. The other pants I wrapped around my neck.