S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"Ouch."

Havel nodded: "That means sixty miles on foot out to U.S. 12, after we get to the Centennial. Call that two days and nights and most of the next morning, carrying a stretcher; one long day and a half, again for fit men pushing real hard. Assuming we can get help there, that's a week or worse for you here-not much food even if we leave you all of it, and no shelter to speak of. The nights get real cold hereabouts in March and it could snow, snow hard. Plus if it gets warmer, the river could rise right to the cliff with snowmelt. If we got her out to the trail, at least there would be shelter and food."

He pushed down a whisper of cold apprehension. Of course we can get help on U.S. 12. It's a goddamned major road, after all.

"Mary could die in a week here," Larsson said flatly. "But she could die if we try to move her. Over country like this, carrying her-"

Havel shrugged slightly. "And it'll be a lot more than three days to the ranger cabin, with a stretcher. Call it six. It could go bad either way. That fracture is ugly. I've got antibiotics in the kit, but it needs a doctor to go in and fix things. The swelling looks bad, too. Moving will hurt, and it'll be dangerous. But staying here for a week, cold and hungry-" He spread his hands. "Your family-your call."

Larsson held out a hand. "Let me see your watch."

The older man turned it over and over; it had a thick tempered-glass casing set in stainless steel, and a set of tumblers in a row to show the day of the month.

"I know these. Good model." He sighed and handed it back. "Christ, there's no right decision here, but we can't sit around with our thumbs up our ass, either." He looked up at the streaked gray clouds. "We'll carry Mary out."

"Right," Havel said. It'll be a lot harder this way, but I'm glad he said that. "We'll rig a stretcher and I'll just test fire the rifle while you break this to your kids."

Ten minutes later the pilot stared at the weapon in amazed disgust. "Now, this is just-" He cut himself off, aware of the audience.

"Maybe the bullets got wet," Signe Larsson said helpfully.

Michael Havel thought there was the hint of a smile around her lips for the first time since the accident; normally, he'd have enjoyed that, even if the humor was directed at him. Now he was too sheerly disgusted.

"They're waterproof," he said tightly. "And the case was sealed and dry when I opened it. And I fired rounds from the same batch day before yesterday on the range."

Kenneth Larsson held out a hand. "Let me have a round," he said. "And do you have a multitool with you?"

There was an authority in his voice that reminded Havel that the older Larsson was more than a middle-aged fat man with plenty of money and bad family problems; he was also an engineer, and he'd managed a large business successfully for two decades.

Havel worked the bolt, caught the 7.62mm round as the ejector flicked it out, and flipped it to Larsson off thumb and forefinger like a tossed coin.

"This is a Leatherman," he added, handing over the multi-tool from his survival kit-something like a Swiss army knife on steroids, with a dozen blades and gadgets folding into the twin handles.

"Good make," Larsson replied. "I prefer the Gerber, though."

He took out his own, configured them both as pliers, and gripped one on the bullet and the other near the base of the cartridge case. Then he began to twist and pull, hands moving with precisely calculated force. When he'd finished he tossed the bullet aside and poured the propellant out on the dry surface of the rock.

"Looks OK," he said, wetting a finger and touching it to the small pile of off-white grains to taste it. "If I remember my chemistry courses: yeah, dry and sharp. OK, let me have a splinter from the fire."

They all stood back a little. Larsson watched in fascination as the nitro powder flamed up with a sullen reddish fizzle.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "Did you see that, Mike?"

Havel caught himself before he answered Yessir. "I did."

"Yes," Larsson said. "Whatever's happened, the stuff is slower-burning now. Not really explosive propagation at all, even if the primer had gone off, which it didn't. Hand me another, would you? One of the ones you tried to fire."

He repeated the process and returned Havel 's Leather-man with an abstracted frown. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear this stuff wasn't nitro powder at all! It's not burning at anything like the rate it should be: but that's a physical constant!"

Havel felt his mouth go dry. "So's what happens inside a battery, or an electric circuit," he said.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the guns everywhere have stopped working?" Signe Larsson said softly.

Michael Havel stared at her for a moment, his face carefully blank; but he was thinking so hard he could hear his own mental voice in his ears: Girlie, if I were a bad guy and coming after you with evil intent, would you rather shoot me or fight me hand-to-hand?

Something of the thought must have shown despite his effort at diplomatic calm; she turned a shoulder towards him and busied herself with wrapping her share of the group's load in a spare shirt before tying that across her back with the sleeves. Havel shook himself; once they got back to civilization, her opinions would mean even less than they did now. He removed the telescopic sight from the rifle and dropped it into a pocket of his sheepskin coat; it might come in useful. Then he recased the Remington and tucked it into a hollow in the rock face before covering it with stones.

Maybe it's useless now, he thought. He certainly wasn't going to lug an extra eleven pounds of weight through this up-and-down country. Still:

He wouldn't have admitted it aloud, but he just didn't like discarding a fine tool that had given him good service. His freezer back in Boise still had a fair bit of last fall's venison in it.

And maybe the freezer isn't working either, something whispered at the back of his head.

Making the stretcher wasn't too hard, now that he had the puukko knife and the saber saw from his survival pack. Two ash saplings nearby had the right seven-foot length; he looped the flexible toothed cable around the base of one and began pulling the handles back and forth, careful not to go too fast and risk heating the metal. It fell in a dozen strokes, and the second went as easily.

A cable saw was damned useful out in the woods and much lighter than a real saw or a hatchet, but if he had to choose he'd have taken the knife. The puukko was the Finnish countryman's universal tool, for everything from getting a stone out of a horse's hoof to skinning game to settling a dispute with the neighbors in the old days.

His was a copy of the one his great-grandfather had brought from Karelia a hundred years ago; eight inches in the blade, thick on the back, with a murderous point and a gently curving cutting edge on the other side; a solid tang ran through the rock-maple hilt to a brass butt-cap. There were no quillions or guard; those were for sissies.

Havel always thought of his father when he used it; one of his first toddler memories was watching him carve a toy out of white birchwood, the steel an extension of his big battered-looking hands.

He trimmed and barked the poles with the knife, and cut notches at either end for smaller sticks lashed across to keep the poles open-he had a big spool of heavy fishing line in his crash kit, light and strong. One of the ground-sheets tied in made a tolerable base.

Mary Larsson woke while they were lifting her in the bag, conscious enough to whimper a little and then bite her lip and squeeze her eyes shut.

"Take a couple of these," he said, holding up her head so that she could wash down the industrial-strength painkillers. Even then, she managed to murmur thanks.