James Axler - Red Holocaust

He slipped and rolled forward, feeling snow all around him. A boulder hit him on the knee, making him yell with sudden pain. As he whirled down the slope he heard screams from behind, and men calling in Russian.

His mouth filled with powdery snow, and he coughed and choked as he rolled. With an effort, he managed to spread his arms and legs into a star shape, checking his slide down the hill.

The tremor passed, and he sat up, checking his blasters. His long coat was torn, his knee hurt, and there was a dull throbbing where the horse had kicked him. He could taste blood from a cut near his mouth.

But he was alive.

The patch over his missing left eye had shifted and he tugged it back in place. He stood, trying to determine where he was. He was at the bottom of a steep ravine, with water a few inches deep under his boots.

He'd fallen a couple of hundred feet and had no idea where Krysty and J.B. were. There were Russians all around, blundering in the darkness.

Ryan was alone with no food, no water and no way to keep warm in a land he didn't know, with a night to face with temperatures that might drop to seventy or eighty below.

Survival was going to be hard.

One of the Trader's sayings came to Ryan as he moved cautiously through the stygian gloom away from the camp of the Russian butchers.

"The will to live is quite simply a matter of your personal courage."

One of the things that the Trader had always insisted on was each war wag having a number of experts: on explosives or first aid or food or armaments or driving — or survival. Finnegan had been the survival expert. Trader had spent a lot of time lecturing Finnegan, using old manuals and books, drilling into him what should be done in heat or cold or a nuke attack or an ambush, a flood or a fire or a fall. In turn, every few weeks, Finnegan would give a talk to the rest of the crew — as would the other experts, checking that everyone knew what to do.

Now, kneeling in the slush, feeling it soaking through his trousers, Ryan recalled some of the things that Finn had told them.

Panic was the biggest threat. Fear made a man move too fast in the wrong direction. He should stop if he could and draw a breath.

Ryan stood, fighting to control his breathing, still hearing the ground rumbling miles below his feet. Also catching the sound of the Russians, running and calling. Now he saw a couple of flaming torches as they started to search for their lost prisoners. He guessed that J.B. and Krysty, if they'd stayed together, would be making for the south to meet with the others. But his fall had put him on the wrong side of the enemy. Now he'd have to try and loop around.

Ryan took stock. Guns and ammo, check. Clothes and knives, check. Health, bruises here and there but nothing too threatening: check. Compass, check. Food and drink.

"No," he said to himself.

Nor heat.

The land was so barren that his chances of finding food were remote. But he knew from experience that he could exist for several days without food, even in the bitter cold. But he had to drink. He stooped and cupped some of the water around his feet, tasting it cautiously. The fact that it was flowing and not frozen was a sign that it originated higher up — probably near the dam that he'd spotted earlier — and had been melted by heat from a volcano. The taste was bitter, iron with a dash of sulfur. If he could drink now and fill his belly, it would last him a couple of days.

If he didn't find the others after a couple of days in the lingering nuclear winter, then he was going to be dead anyway.

He knelt and lapped like a dog, lifting his head every now and again to peer into the gloom. At the bottom of the steep valley he was sheltered from the bitter wind, but he knew that he couldn't stay there long. The Russians would be searching. Judging from what he'd seen of him, their amber-eyed leader wasn't the sort of man who gave up easily.

Far above Ryan, there was a burst of automatic fire that raked the far side of the ravine, bullets ricocheting and whining into the darkness. Someone shouted and Ryan ducked, huddling against the cold rock, wearing his hood so that his face wouldn't show white.

But the shooting wasn't repeated, and the voices moved toward the south. The earth finally ceased shaking, and all he could hear was the faint whistling of the wind.

"Time to move," he said.

Back in the Deathlands, winter had been a time of bitter hardship, with blizzards and fiercely low temperatures. But here in Alaska the long nuclear winter still had the land in its thrall. In places there were deep snowbanks that had been piled up by the endless winds, and in other places, just bare rock, scoured and shattered by permafrost. Gray and dull green lichens clung precariously to the more sheltered places, but life was almost extinct, clinging to the edges of an abyss.

Either a man found protection or he tried to keep moving. After an hour of walking steadily west and then curving cautiously back toward the south, Ryan was feeling exhausted. Much of the time he was battling against a shrieking gale that plucked at his hood, blasting splinters of ice into his eye. Such a buffeting soon cuts away at the senses of even the strongest man. It becomes difficult to think rationally, and all a man wants is to lie down and rest a little, just sleep for a few minutes.

A few long, long, long minutes.

Ryan tried to keep moving, without going too fast. He remembered that Finn had urged care. To sweat was to lose body heat; to lose body heat was, eventually, to die. He knew the signs of frostbite: small, gray-yellow patches on the skin, accompanied by numbness, later leading to the blackening of gangrene and finally to death. That was something he didn't need to fear. Either he'd find the others in the next day or so, or he'd be dead anyway.

To counter the cold on his face, Ryan exercised his muscles, alternately scowling and smiling, so that his cheeks wouldn't freeze and lose all sensation. He checked the small chron on his wrist, finding that he'd been away from the Russians for nearly three hours. Unless they scattered, he figured he was safe from stumbling back into their arms. Once, he heard the distant sound of gunfire. It lasted only a few seconds and wasn't repeated.

With little light, it was hard going. He was constantly slipping and falling, slogging on, pausing now and again to listen. Once there was the sound of running water, but it seemed to come from his left, away from the direction he'd taken.

Ryan knew all the survival tricks of lighting a life-saving blaze using a lens, or even by taking apart a couple of bullets to ignite tinder or paper. But in that desert of ice and stone there was nothing he could burn. No wood at all.

"Shelter," he said, panting hard. A pale sliver of moon danced above him, occasionally visible through the shreds of high, gray clouds. It gave enough light for him to see a big drift of snow banked against the overhanging lip of a ridge of rough stones a hundred paces ahead of him.

With his panga, he began to carve the white bank, cutting eighteen-inch cubes, stacking them to make a wall to break the wind. He worked steadily, creating a tunnel, gradually expanding it until it was large enough for him to climb into. The wall of snow bricks, which had grown higher and higher as he'd carved out the tunnel, was arranged around the entrance. If he'd had better tools, he could have tried to make a full house of snow, or "igloo," as Finn had called it. But he also remembered that there was a danger of such places melting and caving in, trapping the occupants.

Ryan sat down, making sure his coat was tucked beneath him. Immediately he was aware of the shelter that his snow cave provided against the weather. Out of the gale, there was no longer the bitter numbness in his face. Every few minutes he stood up and shuffled his feet, swinging his arms to keep his circulation going.