The Shattered Gates (9 page)

Bill always cooked them with one hand clamped over his nose.

The weasels were much better, both for their skins and their meat. Plus, John found their behavior fascinating. Sometimes, even after he had trapped enough to feed the three of them, he would remain out in the snow, letting frost color his beard and watching the white creatures come out to play.
The first time he had cut one open, he had noted the fine, red lining of its egg sacks. He hadn’t said anything to either Bill or Laurie. He had wanted to be sure that he was right. But over the next week, he had caught enough female weasels to be sure.

John deliberately waited to approach them with his suspicions, until one afternoon when the air grew warmer and didn’t seem to bother Bill’s lungs so much.

 He ducked through the tiny entrance of their snow-packed shelter, carrying the body of one of the weasels. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim surroundings inside. The shelter would have been even darker, if it hadn’t been for the silver Mylar John had stretched over the frame of black branches before he had insulated the entire structure with thick walls of snow. The Mylar caught any light that seeped in through the entrance and reflected it throughout the low space.

Laurie and Bill sat close together, sharing Bill’s black jacket for extra warmth. Next to them lay John’s silent radio and his nearly empty first-aid kit.

“Hey, Toffee.” Laurie frowned slightly, but her face had already grown so thin that the expression looked ghastly. “You look serious. Is something wrong?”

“These weasels.” John held the soft, dead creature in his hands. “I think they’re monotremes.”

“Which means what?” Bill asked. The silver light inside their shelter exaggerated the permanent blue tinge of Bill’s skin.

When they first arrived, Laurie had also suffered shortness of breath. Like Bill, she had suffered blackouts whenever she moved too much. In the last few weeks she had adapted, but Bill never had. Even now, if he exerted himself, Bill was likely to faint.

 Fortunately for all three of them, the thin atmosphere didn’t trouble John. If it had, they would have frozen to death before they could have even exhausted Bill’s supply of Hershey bars.

“A monotreme,” John explained quietly, “is a very primitive, egg-laying mammal. They’re only found in Australia and New Zealand. As far as I know, the only living examples are the echidna and the platypus.”

“So what are you trying to say here?” Bill raised an eyebrow. “You think we’re in Australia?”

“No.” John frowned. “We’re obviously not in Australia.” He wasn’t sure how to explain without sounding overly dramatic and possibly panicking the two of them. It was a difficult thing to accept.

“So...?” Laurie encouraged him.

“I think we may not even be on Earth.” John just said it.

“Yeah,” Bill agreed. Laurie gave a small sigh.

“You already knew?”

“We did,” Laurie smiled at him, “but we didn’t want to freak you out. You’re not the kind of guy who can just accept something like this on intuition. You have to give yourself time and proof.”

Bill nodded then asked, “So where did you think we were—before you came to this conclusion?”

“I didn’t know.” John shrugged, feeling suddenly stupid. “I just started looking for evidence to tell me.”

“Well, this is a huge thing to have happened,” Laurie said. “I mean, I don’t think the shock has really set in for me. Don’t feel bad.”

“Yeah, man,” Bill said, “if we had been in Australia, you would have been the one to get us out. Me and Laurie would have been trying to mind-meld with kangaroos and saying, ‘Wow, alien life is so weird’ and shit like that.”

John just frowned down at the white weasel. Its toes were delicate, pink, and almost human. He could barely see the fine webbing between them.

“So, do you think you might be ready for something else freaky?” Laurie asked.

John didn’t feel ready for anything, but he didn’t want to say so. He nodded.

“Okay.” Laurie dug into the pocket of Bill’s jacket and pulled out a singed twig. She held it out in front of her and closed her eyes. John stared at the twig and then glanced back to Laurie. Her pale brows knit together in concentration. Her lips pressed into a hard line. Nothing happened.

“Damn it.” Laurie’s eyes popped open. “I almost had it.”

“Just relax,” Bill told her. “Try it like you did last time.”

“Okay.” Laurie closed her eyes again and blew the air out of her lungs. She grimaced absurdly as she concentrated. Bill leaned close to her, attentive as a gymnastics coach of a young Olympian. John watched too, feeling uneasy and unready for anything to happen, but at the same time hoping that something would.

There was nothing. Then John caught the faintest scent of burning. A wisp of smoke drifted up from the surface of the twig as a tiny red ember began to glow through the wood. The ember spread like the cherry of a cigarette and then flickered into a small flame.

Laurie pulled her eyes open and gasped for air, as if she had just broken the surface of a lake after a deep dive. She slouched against Bill, still breathing heavily.

John blew out the flame before it filled the confines of their snow-packed shelter with smoke.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Laurie smiled.

“Very cool,” Bill told her.

“Could you always do that?” John inspected the end of the burnt twig.

“Maybe.” Laurie leaned in against Bill, and he pulled his arms around her. Bill’s blue-white hands looked like cut ice against the black jacket.

 “I never tried as hard as I did here,” Laurie said. “You know, that first night when the matches were all wet and the wood was wet, and you just kept trying to get a fire going?”

John couldn’t forget it. He still had nightmares of looking up and seeing Laurie’s entire body, pale as wax, shaking uncontrollably. He remembered Bill lying on his side, huge white flakes of snow accumulating in his black hair as he struggled to draw in a breath. He had seen them dying as the sky grew darker and colder. Snow had fallen, thicker and faster. He had wanted to cry, but instead he had kept on striking the wet matches. He’d never felt so helpless or so worthless in his life.

“That night,” Laurie went on, “I kept staring at the wood and wanting it to burn so badly. I could almost see the spark. But it wouldn’t happen. I’d see it every time you struck a match. I was almost holding my breath—”

“You were holding your breath,” Bill said.

“Yeah, I must have been. We figured out that holding my breath makes a big difference. I don’t know why, but there’s something about that moment when I feel like I’m going to suffocate—if I can just keep focused, then I reach this intense force. It’s really kind of scary. It feels like I’m dying. Like it’s killing me. But you know, that night I was already dying, so I guess it didn’t make such a big difference. All of the sudden, I felt this power burn through me. It felt like it was searing up from my bones—coming up from really deep. And then I lit the fire.”

“She’s been practicing since then,” Bill said.

“I’m still pretty shaky with it,” Laurie added.

John didn’t know what to say. It all seemed so unreal.

“Maybe this is why we were brought here,” Laurie said. “Maybe Kyle was some kind of messenger who meant you to get that key and bring us here.”

“Maybe,” John replied. He couldn’t imagine what possible use he, Bill, and Laurie could be out in this frigid wasteland. But just at the moment, he had no faith in his ability to judge reality. He didn’t know if he could rule anything out.

In the weeks that followed, Laurie grew more adept at lighting their fires. Bill cobbled together decent meals from the small animals and bitter, blue-gray berries that John foraged. Little else changed. Snowstorms came and passed. If there was a purpose to their presence in this frigid world, none of them recognized it.

John often returned to the area where they had first arrived. He always looked for the glint of a dull gold key in the masses of snow. He didn’t know what he would do with it if he found it, but he kept searching anyway. He couldn’t give up on finding a way home.

Today, he didn’t discover the key. He found something else.

He knelt down next to streaks of vivid red blood, spilled across the snow. He studied the outline of a tall, prone body that had crashed deep into the white drift. A set of tracks led away from the impression. They marched north towards the mountains. But, curiously, no tracks led up to the imprint. It was as if a body had just dropped from the sky, struggled up, and staggered away.

John guessed from the size of the impression and footprints, that it had been a man, maybe as tall as he was, and probably injured.

At the horizon, storm clouds were gathering, and late-afternoon shadows lengthened. If he followed the tracks, he could be caught in a storm and lose his way home when darkness fell. But if he waited until tomorrow, the tracks would surely be lost under fresh snowfall.

John raced northward. The strange figure’s strides were long—almost as long as his own. They led straight north, through thick stands of trees and across a frozen stream.

John noticed the way the sky was changing from its usual pale blue to a sooty color. The wind grew colder and whipped up powdery snow. He bowed his head, protecting his eyes from the wind, focusing on the few feet of ground directly ahead of him.

He had already gone too far to get back before night.

In an odd synchronicity, John noticed a growing distance between the footprints as the man stopped walking and began to run. Whoever it was, he seemed to know where he was going and wanted to get there quickly. John wondered how far he was behind the other man. Although the blood appeared bright and vivid, that could be deceptive. When the air was this cold, blood would remain fresh for nearly a full day.

Suddenly, the tracks turned to the west. John glanced up and, despite the dim light, saw why immediately. The land fell off sharply to a wide, ice-encrusted river. He thought he could see moving water at the very middle, but he wasn’t sure. It certainly didn’t look safe to cross.

John followed the tracks farther west than he had ever gone before. Stands of bare, black trees became more common. And a new smell suffused the air. John had been running so hard that he hadn’t been thinking about it, but now it had grown strong enough that he couldn’t miss it. It was the smell of fire and roasting meat. The smell of habitation. Just that scent gave him a surge of strength. He ran faster.

 He could see warm, yellow firelight glowing between the bare branches of the trees. A feeling a joy and hope flooded him. He found himself thinking of things that he hadn’t dared to let himself miss. A room of his own. A warm bed. A bath.

John broke out from a cluster of trees and stopped. Instantly, he pulled himself back into the cover of the woods. He dropped low and peered out, horrified by what he had seen. He had reached a cobblestone road. At uneven distances along the edge of the road stood huge metal poles with the bodies of men hanging from them on chains. Some of the bodies were only charred remnants; others were still writhing, gagged and burning alive.

Chapter Eight

The cold invaded. It devoured every other sensation until his body felt like a frigid expanse surrounded by darkness. Incrementally, the thought struck him that it shouldn’t be dark and he shouldn’t be lying still. People died this way—sleeping in soft drifts of snow, blanketed beneath layer after layer.

He had to open his eyes. The cold would kill him if he didn’t open his damn eyes. He couldn’t let himself fall asleep. John jerked himself upright and stared numbly around.

 Instead of an open expanse of snow, he found himself gazing at the silver Mylar interior of the shelter. Afternoon light poured in from the small entrance and reflected across the metallized plastic, lending the cramped, low space a golden luminosity.

Laurie and Bill both looked up from tinkering with the handheld radio. In the soft light and deep shadows, they both appeared hollowed and far too thin. Laurie’s hair hung in dirty, blonde strings. Patchy, black tufts of beard darkened Bill’s chin. They were dressed in a bunchy mix of their old, stained clothes and strips of dried weasel hide. They looked like famished poster children for some Siberian relief campaign.

How could he have failed to notice how fragile and ravaged they had become in the last months? He’d just gotten used to it. He supposed he looked just as bad.

“I don’t think it’ll be too hot now.” Bill picked up a silver thermos and handed it to Laurie.

Laurie smiled at Bill, very sweetly, as if he had said something touching. She took the thermos and turned to John.

“Hey, Mr. Frostbite.” Laurie crawled over to him. She unscrewed the thermos and handed it to him. His fingers were still too clumsy to grip the steel surface. He held the thermos between the flats of his palms, like a child who had not yet mastered the dexterity or proportions of the adult world.

The warm broth scalded his chilled lips as he drank. It tasted like weasel meat. The heat of the liquid burned down into his body. It was good. He hadn’t realized how starved he was until now.

“How are you feeling?” Laurie placed her hand against his forehead. He had to suppress the urge to jerk back from her touch. Her thin fingers felt like brands searing into his skin. The pain faded, as his skin warmed beneath the heat of her hand.

“Better.” The word came out in a dry whisper.

“You look better,” she said.

John closed his eyes. He was so tired. He felt the thermos slip from his hands and then the brush of Laurie’s bony fingers as she caught it.

“Don’t go back to sleep, Toffee. Stay awake for a little while, okay?” Laurie shook him gently.

John forced his eyes open again.

“How did I get back here?” John asked.

“You ask that every time you wake up,” Laurie said.

“You just staggered out of the middle of that fucking blizzard, like a big, old abominable snowman,” Bill said. “That was three days ago. Maybe four. I lost track of time when it was really blowing out there. It could have been day or night.”