T Connor: Bitter Cold Apocalypse

But I still felt her when she rammed against me, and with a superhuman effort, I forced my fingers to clamp around her clothing and pull upward. I felt her hands come around my hands, clinging on for dear life.

“I’ve got her!” I shouted. “Marlon, I’ve got her!”

His hands grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked, and a moment later, Angie was sliding up through the hole like an enormous trout. We all went flying backward and came to a stop on the shore, where I wrapped my arms around Angie and pulled her to me, caught between sobbing and laughing with the pure joy of having her with me again, her coughing in my ear telling me that she was indeed still alive.

It was either a lifetime or only thirty seconds later that Marlon’s hand was on my shoulder, shaking me.

“John, we have to get her warm,” he said abruptly. “We have to get a fire going. Now.”

Right. A fire. I could feel Angie shaking in my arms, and realized now that she was soaking wet—and that the water was slowly seeping into my own clothing. And in this sort of environment, being wet was the absolute worst thing we could be.

I sat up, pulling her with me, and took a moment to look into her enormous eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She gave me a shuddering, shaking laugh. “Are you kidding? I’m the farthest thing from okay possible. But I’m alive. And I guess that’s a start.”

Right. Sense of humor, intact. And that was a start, for sure.

I climbed to my feet and then stooped over to lift her up in a cradle position, bringing her back to my chest and looking for Marlon. He was already up on the shore, in the lee of several trees, and had managed to get a decent amount of wood together. He pulled something out of his pack and quickly began sparking a fire, and by the time I hauled Angie up to him, he had it growing and crackling.

“Get her out of those wet clothes, and get some dry clothes and blankets, then get her by the fire,” he said. “I’m going to get started on some sort of shelter.”

He was right. I needed to get her out of her wet clothes, then insulate her from not only the cold air, but also set a blanket between her and the icy ground below, remembering the rule that “heat travels to cold.” Once she was in dry clothes that I’d gotten out of my own pack, I laid a blanket out on the snow as close to the fire as I thought would be safe to ensure she wasn’t heated too rapidly. I left Marlon to his own plans for shelter, knowing that he’d be fine without me, and set Angie down within two feet of the fire, then started to rub her briskly, beginning with her hands, cheeks, and arms. I needed to make sure that her circulation was intact. That would be the best possible way of warming her up, in the end. If her own internal heater was working, the heat would radiate outward, up to a point. It would help the fire do its job.

“How’s the leg?” I asked as I worked.

“Completely numb,” she said through blue lips. “It doesn’t hurt, though. And that’s a relief.”

“Good. I was afraid that contraption was going to drag you down.”

“I was, too. Why do you think I worked so hard to stay so close to the shore? At least there, ‘down’ was only a couple of feet.”

I paused then and leaned in to kiss her cold lips, my own lips turned up into the start of a smile. Then I rested my forehead to hers and stared into her sparkling, very alive eyes.

“I love you,” I said. “I don’t know what I would have done if we didn’t get you out of that ice.”

She put her ice-cold hand up to my face. “But you did,” she returned. “And that makes you my personal hero. Now help Marlon with that fire. I’ve never needed it worse than I do right now.”

Half an hour later, we were sitting in a structure I never would have dreamt possible. When I’d found Marlon, he’d been in a pine tree, using his saw to cut branches off it and throwing them to the ground.

“Take them back to the fire!” he shouted down from the tree.

I didn’t argue. I picked up as many as I could carry and toted them quickly back to the fire, then returned for another round of branches. Five trips later, Marlon was down from the tree and helping me, and once we’d moved all the trees to our impromptu campsite, he started showing me what he wanted me to do with them. We buried the stoutest part of each branch in the snow, leaving the fronds sticking up into the sky, and built a rough circle around Angie and the fire, then ducked through the branches ourselves and sat down with her.

It wasn’t perfect. It certainly wasn’t airtight. But it was shelter from the wind for both Angie and the fire—which was now roaring. It wouldn’t do for the night. But for now, it was enough.

I moved as close to the fire as I dared, mindful of the fact that I also had wet clothes that needed changing, and started rubbing at Angie again. The color was starting to come back into her skin, but I could see that she was still shaking, and I was starting to get very worried.

Our list of options was getting shorter with every minute we spent out here. A glance at my watch told me that it was past midday already. Before long we would have to start worrying about losing the sun entirely.

If the cold and damp hadn’t killed her, the dark almost certainly would.

I looked up and saw the same thoughts flying across Marlon’s face, and a shift of my gaze showed me that Angie was thinking the exact same thing. We all knew that we couldn’t stay here.

I just didn’t know what else we were going to do.

“Well one of us might as well say it,” Angie finally said. “We can’t stay here. Can’t stay out in the snow and weather now that I’m so close to hypothermia. We have to move.”

She’d barely finished speaking when a howl tore through the air around us, and we all froze. Seconds later, another answered it. And then another.

“Wolves,” I whispered. God, could it get any worse?

“And they’re close,” Marlon answered, his voice just as quiet.

Shit. Wolves. The only thing that would work against them—

“Oh God, the guns,” Angie murmured, her mind moving along the same lines as mine.

I looked up and met her eyes, and I knew mine were dark with the realization that she was right. Our best hope at fending off these wolves was guns. And ours had been strapped to her pack, where we thought they’d be safe.

Which meant they were now at the bottom of the river.

We sat completely still, the fire flickering over our features, and listened for the wolves to call out to each other again. When they did, I cringed. I wasn’t an outdoorsman. I’d started hunting only when Angie began to teach me what it was all about. I’d never been one to really, truly enjoy time in nature—with all the dangers. All the things that could go wrong out here. So it wasn’t like I’d heard wolves howling in real life before.

But my instincts knew exactly what it was. And my body knew to be terrified.

Chills ran across my skin, leading to an outright shiver—which was echoed by the woman sitting next to me.

“At least ten of them, maybe more,” she whispered. “And they’re on the move. They’re on the hunt.”

“Are they coming after us?” I asked, trying to figure out how that would even happen. Did wolves usually hunt humans? Didn’t they generally try to stay away from… you know, things that might shoot them? And why would they be after us? We weren’t wounded. Much. We certainly weren’t bleeding all over the ground.

“Probably not,” Marlon said. “They’re probably after smaller game. Rabbits. Maybe a deer or two. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be dangerous to us if they find us. Wolves might be where dogs started—”