Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“You’re sure about this?” she asked, pointing to his drawing.

“What?” Paul said. “That? It was on the original map.”

“Okay,” she said. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said.

She knew her son would have taken the task of map-drawing with the utmost seriousness, and now, if he was right, the box on the hand-drawn map might save them. It was far closer than going back to the trailhead — miles closer. It was just around a wide bend in the trail.

“You guys rested?” she asked.

Neither child answered.

“We have to run again,” she said. “We have to run until we get to the lake and the shelter. Do you understand? We’ll go in stages. We’ll run from point to point and we’ll rest when you need to rest. Okay?”

Above, a planet popped like a balloon.

“Can you guys be brave?” Josie asked.

Paul and Ana did not hesitate. They nodded vigorously, wanting to be brave, knowing there was no choice but to be brave, that there was nothing greater than being brave. Josie knew, then, that better than searching for a person of courage — she’d been on this search for years, dear god — better and possibly easier than searching for such people in the extant world was to create them. She didn’t need to find humans of integrity and courage. She needed to make them.

A private smile had overtaken Ana’s face.

“What?” Josie asked.

“I can’t say it,” Ana said.

“Say it. Doesn’t matter.”

“It’s a bad word I think,” Ana said.

“It’s okay.”

“Shitstorm,” Ana said, and Paul laughed, his ice-priest eyes smiling, lit from within.

“It is a shitstorm,” Josie said. “This is a shitstorm. Are you ready to run through this shitstorm?”

They grinned and took off again. They ran through the stand of trees and when the trees ended and the trail was exposed for another hundred yards, they saw another yellow marker and scrambled to it. The rocks on the path were wet now, and Ana slipped on one, and went down, gashing her leg against the scree. Lightning lit the world in slashing blue light but Josie didn’t pause. She picked up Ana in mid-stride and carried her chest to chest until they reached the next small forest.

By the time she was able to put Ana down, Josie’s back had shifted. Something was very wrong. She couldn’t breathe. She set Ana down and lay on her side, trying to find a workable way to bring air into her body. A slipped disc. A punctured lung. Broken rib. Anything was possible.

“What happened?” Paul asked.

Josie couldn’t speak. She raised a finger to ask for time. Now both children were staring at her, Ana with her mother’s wet shirt draped over her like a smock. Josie looked up into the treetops, the black fir silhouettes against the sky, angry and grey like an ocean storm.

Josie slowly regained her breath and when she was able to sit up again, she found that Paul had torn a strip from the bottom of her shirt, the shirt now worn by Ana, and had used the strip to tie Ana’s leg with a makeshift bandage. It looked like something you’d find on a WWI battlefield, but Ana was caressing it, humbled by its grandeur. An oval of blood emerged from within and Ana’s eyes widened.

Josie looked up the trail and thought she could see, just beyond one more stripe of trees and over a low ridge, the clearing where the lake and shelter might be. She stood, very much afraid she might not have the strength, or that the act of standing would make whatever had happened to her far worse. Though she was wrecked, and now noticed that her legs were bleeding in a dozen places, she could breathe and was reasonably sure she could run again.

“She can’t run,” Paul said, indicating Ana.

“Is that true?” Josie asked her. Ana’s eyes welled up and her chin quivered. Josie looked down to see that Ana couldn’t put weight on her right foot. Josie examined the leg up and down and felt no fracture, but when she put the lightest pressure on the bandage Ana wailed. “You twisted it. Nothing broken,” Josie said, and now Ana’s eyes flooded. “Okay. Wrap yourself around me,” Josie told her, “like a monkey.”

Ana threw her arms around her, burying her tiny shoulder in Josie’s neck. When Josie stood again, now carrying forty extra pounds, her back roared in protest.

“Ready, Paul?” she said.

“Just to the next trees?” he asked.

Ahead lay a few hundred yards of dirt and scree cutting across open valley, utterly vulnerable.

“Exactly,” she said. “You run and I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop until you get there.”

“Now?” Paul asked.

“Now,” Josie said.

They ran, and Josie ran with one arm draped around Ana’s bottom, her other arm feeling her way forward, ready to break their fall. She expected to fall. She’d never run carrying Ana like this, on a wet path strewn with loose rocks like this, with pain like this. Every step sent a sharp stab of steely light through Josie’s spine and down her leg. Ana’s weight was exacerbating whatever it was Josie had done to her back, but she couldn’t slow down on the open ground. She had to catch up with Paul, who was suddenly moving with effortless speed and agility. Josie watched him leap and land, thrilling in his agility and courage.

As if to punish her for her moment of pride, the sky ripped open, end to end. Paul fell to the ground, and Josie dropped to her knee. No earthquake, no tornado could be that loud. Josie had lived almost four decades and had never heard a storm like this, had never known a sky this punitive.

They rose and ran again and made it to the next forest. Josie followed Paul to a spot against a dead pine trunk. They sat side by side like soldiers in a foxhole, heaving. Ana was still attached to Josie’s torso, her matted head in Josie’s neck.

“You cold?” Paul asked her, nodding at Josie’s bra, her mottled skin.

“I’m fine,” Josie said. She was soaked with cold rain, and the cold wind was cutting through her as they rested, but she had felt warm while running. The pain, though, overwhelmed her senses.

“We’re beating this,” Josie said. “You see that, right?”

Paul nodded, serious in his acknowledgment, as if his mother was confirming something he’d begun to suspect and had hoped was true. They were moving, fully inhabiting the beautiful machinery of their physical selves, and they were outwitting the unthinking brute power of the storm.

“We just have to get around that bend, I think,” Josie said, pointing ahead. Paul took out his map, and pointed to a wide arc his pen-drawn path made just before it reached the lake.

“I think we’re close,” he said.

A different kind of thunder overtook the air. It was as loud as the sky-cracking they’d heard before but this was coming from up the trail. It was more gradual, a growing roar, sounding like rocks, a thousand rocks moving together.

Josie stood and looked up the bend of the trail. She saw nothing. Then a wave of dust came from behind a bulge in the cliffside. She had never heard or seen an avalanche but she knew this was an avalanche, not a thousand feet ahead. After the strangely orderly roar of it ended, the valley was quiet, as if resting after its exertion. Josie had no idea what to do. To retreat was impossible for all the reasons she’d arrived at earlier — the kids would suffer, it was too cold, they’d be soaked and frozen. But to go toward the avalanche?

“Was it, Mom?” Paul asked.

“What?” Josie asked.

Paul gave Josie a wide-eyed look, indicating that he didn’t want to say the word “avalanche” in front of Ana.

“I think so,” Josie said.

In a rush, the rain seemed to double in volume. Each drop was heavy, distinct. Josie knew they had to move. She made a plan to make their way to the blind bend of the trail and at least peer around the corner, to see what had happened, if there was still a path to follow. Again she picked up Ana, whose grip around her neck was somehow tighter than before, painful but necessary, and she set off. She led this time, with Paul just behind.