Neal Shusterman: Resurrection Bay

“Please… ” I begged.

And then I heard something— felt something resonating in my bones. An icy breeze flowed over me, smelling fresh and crisp… and the glacier began to move.

I felt the calving of ice, and instinctively I jumped back. The glacier surged—a sudden lurch—and rolled forward just a few feet. Ice plunged and frost filled the air, settling on my hair like snow. Once it was done and the wall of ice had fallen silent again, Sammy was gone. He had been taken under the ice.

The glacier then breathed one last time—a slow wheeze of icy air that faded into nothing. I knew it was truly dead now. Whatever life force had been inside, it was gone.

Now Exit Glacier, like so many glaciers, would wither, melting back year after year, until it was gone completely. The glacier was dead. It had spilled out the last of its spirit.

And Sammy was beneath the ice.

I don’t remember walking home that night, but when I got there, Dad was furious. “Where were you? Do you know how worried I was? Where’s Sammy?”

“I was with Rav,” I told him. “And Sammy… Sammy’s with a friend.”

And since it wasn’t really a lie, he couldn’t read any deception on my face. He told me we’d talk about my punishment in the morning. Then he told me to lock up.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I unlocked every door, every window in the house; and even though I went into my bedroom, I didn’t go to sleep. I just sat on my bed forcing my eyes to stay open, holding a vigil.

At three in the morning, I heard the faint creak of door hinges, and I bolted upright in bed. Had I really heard it, or was it just my imagination? Slowly, I went out of my room, down the hallway, and into the living room. The front door was open just a crack. There was a chill in the house now, and it wasn’t hard to find the source. Frost spilled out like smoke from Sammy’s open bedroom door.

Fighting the shivers that threatened to overtake me, I crept toward Sammy’s room and peered in. Sammy was sitting on his bed, looking out of the window at the setting moon.

“Sammy?”

He slowly turned to me. His skin was pale and blue, and his eyes were as dark as a glacier crevasse.

“Can’t sleep,” he said in a voice both gruff yet gentle, childlike yet ancient. “Why can’t I sleep?”

“It’s all right, Sammy. Don’t worry about that.”

Then I went to the front closet to get my heaviest winter parka and my best fur-lined gloves, and put them on. Back in Sammy’s room, I sat down next to him and reached out to touch his frozen face with my gloved hand.

“I’m scared,” he said, with ice-crystal tears falling from his eyes.

“Don’t be,” I told him. “You’re home now.” Then I took him into my thickly padded arms to comfort him. And I comfort him still.

Dad will have to face this. He will somehow have to come to terms with it, making peace with this new reality. And once he does, the three of us will leave Resurrection Bay, because although winter is long here, it’s not long enough. We’ll have to go someplace that’s always cold. I’ll bet they could use a good helicopter pilot way up north, in Prudhoe Bay.

But for now, I hold Sammy, gently rocking him back and forth, feeling his breath numbing my neck. Warm air flowing in, cold air flowing out.

“I know you…,” Sammy says.

It only makes me hold him tighter, closer. “Yes you do, Sammy,” I whisper, ignoring the chill that pierces all my layers of protection. “And I know you.”

NEAL SHUSTERMANis the award-winning author of more than thirty books for teens that span many genres. He has also written screenplays for motion pictures and television shows such as Animorphs and Goosebumps . He won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for THE SCHWA WAS HERE and has had numerous books on American Library Association and International Reading Association award lists, including UNWIND and EVERLOST. Neal lives in Southern California with his four children. You can visit him online at www.storyman.com.

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RESURRECTION BAY. Copyright © 2011–13 by Neal Shusterman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © August 2013

ISBN 9780062295163

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

Previously published in a somewhat different form on www.storyman.comin 2011-12.

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