Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Drinkwater’s tracks became two solid rails in the snow. The cold had locked itself so deeply around my brain that it took a while to realize what Drinkwater must’ve done.

“He started crawling , Dunk.”

We got down on all fours, too. Rocks dug into my kneecaps and the butt of the shotgun banged my tailbone. The sky was only slightly lighter than the rocky scrim. Halfway down yet? No, but still far enough to seal the decision. Here and there shrubs protruded from the snow, their branches clad with frozen berries as pretty as Christmas tree ornaments.

We found a rock carved into a recessed pocket with an overhang to keep out the snow. We stopped and huddled inside, bodies pressed tight, legs drawn into our stomachs. Duncan heaved like a sheepdog with a busted septum and we both shivered uncontrollably: the cold had sunk so deep into our chests that we couldn’t stop our teeth from rattling.

My fingers were waxy looking, the swollen skin stretched tight. Cold ulcers. Next came frostbite. The sunny Swede … what had he said happened when a body froze? On TV or in the movies, a body found in a meat locker was usually pasty-white, little icicles dangling from its chin. But in real life the skin would be black, wouldn’t it? Frostbite bursts the surface blood vessels. Your blood freezes black.

“Are you g-good to g-go?” I asked.

Duncan wiped the blood off his lips and nodded.

We set off at a tormented crawl. Full darkness had fallen, which was a relief in its way: as we could no longer see the basin, we weren’t dispirited by how far away it remained. A blade-edged wind tore down the rock face; I curled my hands into fists, plodding like a mule. My equilibrium was shot; half the time it felt like I must be climbing uphill. I stared skywards at a freak meteor shower: thousands of streaks through the air. I blinked. The meteors vanished.

The next time I put a hand down, the earth wasn’t there. The path had hit an unseen edge. I lurched forward with a squawk, outflung arms grabbing for something, anything , closing around a sapling growing at the lip; the sapling stripped through my hand like burning rope, flaying skin. Something clutched at my hips — Duncan’s hand clawing for my belt — but his fingers tore free and I was falling, too startled to scream, shocked that it could happen like this, no chance to say goodbye.

I came to in a deep drift, snow swirling above me like lunar moths in a dark vault. I patted my body down to check if anything was obviously broken or leaking. My fingers were so numb it was hard to tell what, if anything, was wrong. Running my hands over my own body felt no different than running them over the hood of a car.

Duncan elbowed through straggly pines, his face plastered with blood.

“Stay st-still,” he said. “Can you f-feel your feet? W-wiggle your t-toes.”

I almost laughed. For all I knew my feet had snapped off at the heels. Duncan offered his hand. The fact I could stand stunned me. Something may have been ruptured inside but the cold acted as a natural novocaine.

The snow blew nearly sideways, pinging off my skin as if off glass. The eyelashes of Duncan’s left eye were frozen. He wet his fingers with the blood pooling in his mouth and massaged his lashes until they unstuck. Then he pulled the final flare from the satchel, popped it alight.

Had anything been watching from a godlike vantage, hovering miles above, it would’ve seen a wavering ball of red light moving with agonizing slowness through the night. That ball was surely the only light to be seen for many miles.

Trees filled in around us; soon we were sidestepping them, stumbling over buried sticks and branches: should we collect them, build a fire and hunker down? The very idea of shelter was silly — what would we build, an igloo? You couldn’t hide from this cold.

My worldview winnowed to a pinprick of intent: keep … moving … forward . My breath came in shallow gulps but miraculously I’d stopped shivering; a calm had settled into my bones. I felt like sitting down. A cheery, sensibly gruff voice in my head told me to do whatever I felt like.

Take a load off, son . … sit your ragged ass down .

We struck it in unison: a ringing metallic wall. Duncan tripped back as the hollow reverberation trailed into silence, and squinted at the boxy obstacle in our path. Was this it — had we reached the edge of the universe?

My mind was so numb that I couldn’t puzzle out how to get around it, whatever it was. Maybe we would have kept bashing into it like flies into a window had Dunk not given it a half-hearted kick. A sheet of snow dislodged from the underlying metal.

A van. A very old van.

A very old brown van.

Bruiser Mahoney’s old brown van.

We burned the seats first.

The upholstery had been picked at by animals, the stuffing stolen by birds. We tore out what was left in spongy handfuls, hacked the leatherette upholstery with hands now trembling not from the cold but in anticipation. We piled it outside the van’s rear doors, doused it in gasoline and lit it with the flare.

It ignited with a hugely satisfying whoomph . Duncan’s hands were nearly in the fire: neither of us could properly feel the heat. I wanted to cup the fire like water, splash it on my face and up my arms.

By the time my fingertips were prickling with sensation the flames had burned dangerously low. It took the greatest effort to haul ourselves away and scavenge in the van for anything else that would burn.

We hacked ragged Xs into the passenger seat and harvested every scrap of foam. We tossed water-fattened bodybuilding magazines on the guttering fire, laughing like children as the flames devoured the veiny beefcakes.

Duncan tore hunks of radial tire off rusted rims: they peeled in long curls like monstrous black fingernails. They hit the flames and smouldered, sending up a noxious stink. I found the emergency spare under the bench seat and heaved that on, too.

The temperature inched upwards. Our faces were swollen and windburnt. Cold blisters burst on my fingers and oozed down my palms. My mind started to tick again, but the flames were already dipping. I crawled to the front of the van and tore the stuffing out of the driver’s seat. A small wooden box hidden within the seat coils fell to the floor. Curious, I dumped the box’s contents — ancient vials filled with piss-yellow liquid and a reusable syringe — then returned to the fire. The box was made of cheap presswood; the flames devoured it greedily.

I crawled under the van and found a log big enough to burn through the night. Once its icy encasement melted, the fire crept along the wood with grasping orange fingers.

Duncan lay with his legs dangling over the bumper. His hitching, shallow breaths sounded a lot like hiccups. He looked helpless, a fish asphyxiating to death on the beach.

“It’s your lungs,” I said. “Blood in them. Can I take a look?”

Dunk gave a vague shrug. I unzipped his parka, rucked his sweater up. His chest was nearly black from nipple to nipple, the skin tight-swollen. There was a horrible dent on the heart side of his chest near his abdominals.

“Broken rib … punched into your lung? Jesus, Dunk. How did you make it this far?”

Duncan closed his eyes. Blood dripped out the side of his mouth. If we couldn’t get the blood out of his lungs, he’d choke to death on it.

I crawled to the front of the van, searching for the contents of that wooden box. I found the vials first. Their labels were faded, but one I could make out: Testosterone ethanate . The other read: Equipoise . Bruiser’s travelling ’roids case? I rooted under the seat until my hand closed on the syringe. Old, Victorian-looking; I envisioned genteel addicts in deerstalker hats funnelling opium into their veins with the thing.