Jacqueline Druga - Under the Gray Skies

“Or cooked,” Del added.

“We could have been shot, or stabbed,” I said. “That’s a horrible way to die. I always feared choking.”

“Thinking about it,” Madison said. “There could be worse ways to go other than freezing to death with people you care about.”

We lit candles to add not only light but warmth and sipped on the remaining airline size bottles of alcohol while talking. I took some time to write one final entry in my notebook. Not that Davis would see it, he wouldn’t. Neither would the kids. However I needed to do it. I needed to say my goodbyes.

We were going to make the best of it. What else could we do? Walking was out of the question, and soon enough, we’d freeze to death whether we stayed or walked.

We weren’t there long, maybe two hours. Longer than I thought we’d last. We shivered out of control. My face went numb, and I had to keep cupping my hands around my mouth, breathing into them to stop my lips from freezing together.

I watched as Del’s head started to tip forward. He’d catch himself, but was fighting the drowsiness. I felt it too.

It was when I stopped shivering that I knew the end wasn’t far off.

Just as I resolved myself to that, there was a triple bang on the window, followed by a beam of a flashlight.

Instantly, I felt rejuvenated. I sprang forward. Del snapped awake.

“Oh my God,” Del said. “Is someone out there?”

“Hey!” the male voice yelled. “Anyone alive in there?”

We couldn’t make out the face. The light caused him to be a shadow, but I was certain there was more than one person out there.

“Yes!” I screamed.

All three of us enthusiastically cried out, our voices meshed together. “We’re here. Yes. We’re in here!”

They tried to open the door, it rattled.

“It’s frozen!” he shouted. “Can one of you kick it?”

He was pulling on the passenger door and Madison turned her body and just started slamming her foot into the door. She was relentless. Slam. Slam. Over and over until finally, with a huge crack, the door flung open.

Two men bundled in winter gear shone the light inside.

“Everyone all right?” the one asked.

“We are now,” Madison said.

“Let’s get you on the bus. Hurry. Get what you can,” he instructed.

Without hesitation we obliged.

I could tell by their gear they were military and when I saw the bus, I knew. A convoy had found us.

We didn’t grab much, we didn’t need much, just our personal belongings. I grabbed my backpack and took a moment to some transfer things from my suitcase and I left that behind.

Then we boarded the bus. There were about twenty people on it, and I scanned each face, hoping, thinking maybe by chance my family was on there.

They weren’t. The bus was warm. My legs and body were weak. I didn’t realize how much the cold had battered me until I stepped on that bus. One of the soldiers handed me a blanket. I was so excited, so happy, I couldn’t even speak. Moments earlier I was resigned to dying.

Now, all that had changed.

Immediately, I pulled out my notebook.

“What are you doing?” Madison asked through shivering breaths. “You just wrote in that.”

“I know. I know. I just have to add something.” I grabbed my pen.

I had written my farewell, I just wanted to add to the bottom, that it was premature. All was well. We had been rescued. I wasn’t dying after all.

I’ll take it from here.

Before she did anything else on that bus, Lacey wrote in that notebook. They offered her coffee from a thermos. She refused. She had to write something in that notebook. Her hands were still trembling from the cold.

“Really?” I said to her. “You can’t wait until you warm up?”

“No, no I can’t.” She smiled at me. It was weird, because Lacey didn’t really smile much. Always so serious looking, even when she wasn’t being serious.

Del sat in the seat directly behind her. “Leave her alone,” he said. “When she realizes how bad her hand writing is right now she’ll stop.”

“It is pretty bad, huh?” She adjusted herself in the small seat to turn her back more against the windows, catching some of the light that came from the spotlights on top of the bus.

“Here.” I grabbed the flashlight out of my pack and just to get her to stop moving, I aimed the beam on the page for her.

It didn’t take her long, and she closed the notebook, resting it on her lap. She had a picture of her family clipped to the front of that beaten journal. The notebook had seen better days.

I hadn’t a clue how she could concentrate to write even a sentence. After I warmed up and my senses returned, I was a nervous wreck. We were driving a school style bus, top heavy, on icy windy roads in the middle of a pitch black night.

She was fine with it, Del was fine with it. They didn’t seem to notice. It was like, since the soldiers were driving we must be fine.

There was no expertise when it came to the road conditions.

One soldier overheard me expressing my concern.

“We can’t stop,” he said. “Not for any extended amount of time. After fifteen minutes the fuel line will start to freeze up, especially if we’re low on gas. No worries, this is the third trip this week.”

“Yeah, but isn’t it getting worse?” I asked.

“Um… yes,” he replied. “But as soon as we get into Virginia the weather stabilizes some.”

That was good to hear but it didn’t lessen my nerves. I wished we hadn’t consumed those remaining little bottles.

I told Lacey that, too. Not that I was a drinker, but I needed one. It would help with how nervous I was. Every bump set my heart racing.

“Do you really need a drink?” she asked.

“Is that a rhetorical question, like questioning the reasoning?”

“No. Do you?’

“Yeah, but we drank it all.”

“The little bottles,” she reached down to her backpack, the one she brought from her house, unzipped it and pulled out an oval bottle that was pretty much full. “It’s a little frozen.”

From behind us, Del whistled. “Holy shit it has to be in the negatives if it’s frozen.”

“Shake it, you should get some.”

I looked at the bottle with a picture of John Wayne on the label. “Duke Bourbon, Wow.”

“That is Davis’ special stash. I can’t believe he left it behind. Go on.”

I uncorked it and drank straight from the bottle. It had a rich, almost pure vanilla flavor.

“Need a straw?” Lacey joked pulling out a kid’s green fun straw.

I laughed, “No, I’m good. Why did you take that?”

“It was Jana’s when she was four. Wouldn’t drink anything without it.” She put it back in the pack. “Memories.”

The Duke Bourbon did the trick. It not only calmed my nerves, after several gulps it also warmed my chest, I believed it made me slightly intoxicated.

I returned it and Lacey shoved it into the bag.

We talked for a while, keeping my mind off of the roads. We talked about our first meeting with Callie, how wrong we were about her. We laughed about how silly we seemed thinking we were going to die.

It wasn’t long before it started getting light and I breathed out in relief.

I could tell we had made it farther south. While it was frozen outside, it just didn’t look as icy.

I asked the one soldier, “How much longer?”

“About three more hours.”

To me that was a long time and I was getting tired. Once I relaxed, exhaustion hit me.

Noticing the empty row of seats across the aisle, I grabbed my blanket and pack and moved over. I lost my balance and felt the rush of the booze.

“You okay?” Lacey asked.