Freeze

4

He grabbed her a fresh towel (one of the least grungy-looking rags from the drawer beside the sink) and stoked the fire. When he was sure she was comfortable—at least for the moment and as much as you could expect given the circumstances—Warren left Tess in her chair and hunted down his keys.

After the power went out, they’d talked about driving out of the mountains and into town, but in the end they’d decided against it. They didn’t have money for a hotel, and they didn’t know any of the townies well enough to ask for a spare room. They’d have ended up sleeping in their car or some kind of homeless shelter, which wasn’t any better than making due in their own home, power or not. They had enough food to last them several weeks and wood to keep themselves warm, so they’d agreed to hunker down and wait out the storm. After all, it couldn’t snow forever, right?

Warren found the keys on the dresser in their bedroom and stuffed them into one of his snowsuit’s side pockets. He found a snow shovel and an ice-scraper in the hall closet and brought them into the living room. There was probably already a scraper in the truck, but he couldn’t remember for sure and didn’t want to trudge all the way out there only to come up empty. And he’d need the shovel for sure. The truck was half buried in the snow. He’d have to do plenty of digging before he’d have any kind of chance of driving it farther than a couple of inches.

You really think you can get it down the mountain anyway? Seriously?

He wasn’t sure. Although Tess seemed to be okay, there was a chance she wasn’t. Scary, unfair, but true. He couldn’t just sit here and hope there weren’t shards of broken glass shredding her innards to pieces.

That’s probably an exaggeration and definitely a little morbid.

Maybe, but sometimes life is a little morbid. Like it or not.

He retrieved his scarf from the kitchen floor and wrapped it back around his face. When he told Tess to sit tight and moved to the front door, Bub started to get up off his doggy bed.

“No,” Warren said. “You stay here.” He said it in his most masterly voice, and Bub dropped back onto his belly with a huff that was eerily human.

Warren stuck the scraper in his pocket, took a long breath of semi-warm air, opened the door, and stepped back out into the storm.

The wind and snow surged when he moved through the doorway, as if it had been waiting for him. For a second, he couldn’t breathe—the wind had jerked the breath right out of him. He lowered his head and gasped.

They hadn’t used the front door in a couple of days. If it had opened outward, or if there had been a storm door or a screen door that did, he might not have been able to get out that way. The snow hadn’t drifted against this side of the house as badly as it had in the back, but it was still at least a foot and a half deep. Snow spilled in through the entryway and onto the hardwood. He used the shovel like a walking stick to help himself climb out onto the snow and pulled the door closed.

The truck sat in the driveway beside the house. Not that you could see the driveway. Or much of the truck, for that matter. The snow had drifted against the cab and the tailgate and left only a few bare patches of paint and glass. Warren hefted the shovel, ducked his head, and shuffled toward the vehicle.

They had a garage—a detached structure someone had added on after the home’s original construction—but although Warren had promised himself he’d get the storage boxes and junk organized before winter came that year, he hadn’t gotten around to it, and there was barely room to park a bike inside the space, let alone a honking GMC. He wasn’t sure if he’d call his failure to clean up lazy or absentminded (he didn’t like to think of himself as either), but he guessed it didn’t matter; if the truck had been tucked into the nice, dry garage at that very moment, he’d probably still have had to dig a ramp in the snow to get it anywhere.

One more time: you really think you’ll be able to get it anywhere anyway? In this mess? You’re kidding yourself. You’d need a monster truck with ten foot wheels and a snowplow mounted on front.

Pushing his way through the blizzard, it was hard to argue with that thought, but he still had to give it his best shot.

Warren wasn’t sure how long it took him to get to the truck—several minutes at least, although it felt like much longer. The storm had taken a turn for the nasty, and the snow smacking him in the face wasn’t the least bit soft or fluffy. Bits of ice rained down on him and into him, seeming to come from every direction at once. He used the shovel to brace himself when the wind gusted or he came across an extra slippery patch of ground, and although he nearly fell once or twice, he managed to avoid it. Barely.

He circled the GMC to let himself in through the passenger-side door. The snow hadn’t piled up as badly on that side, had come up only to the wheel wells, in fact. Once Warren used the ice-scraper to chip away most of the ice holding the door shut, it opened with relatively little fight. He leaned the shovel against the truck and crawled into the cab.

Out of the wind, the storm didn’t seem quite so bad. Cold, sure—disgustingly cold—but no colder than it had been a million times before. He sat there for a moment, unable to see out through the snow-covered windows, wisps of smokey breath drifting out of his mouth, feeling claustrophobic but happy to have escaped the swirling snow and biting ice. At least for a minute.

But he couldn’t stay still for long. As his body relaxed, the warmth seeped out and the cold snuck in. He felt it around his neck and in the cuffs between his gloves and sleeves, felt it wrapping itself around him, squeezing, like a snake.

He shivered, rubbed his arms, and reached for the keys.

He couldn’t find them at first; for one frightening moment, he thought he must have dropped them somewhere between the house and the truck. If that had happened, he might never have seen the things again. But the keys were there, tucked so deep in the pocket of his snowsuit that he couldn’t get to them without taking off his glove and going in barehanded. He pulled the ring out, poked the GMC’s key into the ignition, and twisted.

Nothing.

He frowned and tried again.

Twist.

Nothing.

Turn.

Bupkis.

He put his glove back on and stared at the dashboard. As if a warning light might come on and tell him what had gone wrong.

Could cold weather keep the truck from starting? He wasn’t sure. He’d never pretended to be a mechanic. He knew how to fill the vehicle with gas and which of the pedals was the brake, but he was pretty clueless otherwise. He could admit it and wasn’t ashamed. Not everybody could know everything about everything. Engines had never been one of his specialties.

Still, expert or not, he knew he’d started the truck when it had been this cold before. Colder even. He tried the key one more time and shook his head when nothing happened.

He wondered if maybe he ought to look under the hood.

What good would that do?

At least he could see if there was something obviously wrong. A broken hose or a corroded battery.

Do you remember the snow? There’s at least a foot of it out there on that hood. You’re going to shovel it all off for what’s bound to be a useless look at the engine?

Yes, he was. Tess had been in an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He wasn’t going to risk complications to her condition to avoid some manual labor. What kind of sorry excuse for a husband would?

He left the keys in the ignition and let himself out of the truck. The storm hit him harder than ever. The wind had stopped gusting and seemed to be blowing with a constant intensity Warren had never experienced, the kind of thing you might see in news footage of a hurricane. He ducked his head, grabbed the shovel, and went to work.

It was hard to judge how long it took to clean off the hood. Partly because his watch was on the nightstand in their bedroom, but mostly because he had to pause so often to huddle against the blizzard. By the time he’d finished, cleared off all but the last few patches of ice (and the new snow already covering up what he’d just cleared off), he felt cold, sore, and beaten. Like he’d been raped by a yeti.

He ducked back into the GMC’s cab, popped the hood, and then worked on prying the thing up. Thanks to his clumsy, gloved fingers, it took much longer than it probably should have, but he didn’t dare take the gloves off, even for a second. In this weather, that would have been an open invitation to a nasty case of frostbite.

When he wedged the ice-scraper beneath one side of the hood and finally levered it up, it popped and crunched and cracked. But it opened. Sure enough.

He lifted the hood and ducked his head beneath.

No. That’s not possible.

The engine was a ruined mess. Chunks of ice hung from tattered rubber hoses and poked out of cracked fluid reservoirs. Warren wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking at, which was the oil tank and which the wiper fluid reservoir, whether that hunk of metal in the middle was the starter or the alternator. Cracked metal casings bulged in places they shouldn’t have.

Could ice have gotten into the engine? So much ice that it distorted steel? Was that even physically possible?

He recognized the battery (although the thing was encased in a block of thick ice and distinguishable only because of the red and black cables jutting from the top), a thing he’d managed to jump once or twice over the years, and he knew the coiled apparatus in front was the radiator, but it also had jags of ice that shouldn’t have been there—that couldn’t have been there—and cracked bulges with veins of frost running into (or maybe out of?) them.

He shook his head.

This didn’t seem possible, but what was he going to believe, common sense or his own damn eyes? He knew only that the engine was useless like this, completely worthless. Whether they wanted to or not, whether there’d ever been any kind of chance of driving out of the mountains anyway, he and Tess weren’t going anywhere now.

He shut the hood and climbed back into the cab for the keys, but what good were the keys? The truck wouldn’t be moving from that spot until long after the storm ended, until they could get a tow truck up here to drag it back to town. Might as well leave the keys there; one less thing to keep track of, one less thing to lose in the storm.

So he turned back to the house instead and trudged through the snow.

What if Tess takes a turn for the worse? What exactly are you going to do then?

What could he do except hope it didn’t happen? If they’d had a phone, maybe he could have called for help—although the chances of an emergency vehicle making it up the mountain were even worse than their chances had been of making it down, and no helicopter would have dared this weather, not even for the worst kind of emergency, let alone a broken window and a few cuts—but they had no phone; there were no cell towers this far up the mountains, and although their landlines were partially buried, there were still stretches of above-ground lines, and they never lasted long in a bad storm. Warren had tried the phone on the first day of the blizzard and got nothing but silence.

He stepped through a drift with his shoulders hunched. Around him, the blizzard blew its freezing breath, wheezing at him.

Laughing at him.