Ashes (Page 11)

Too late. Ellie’s center of gravity, already precarious, shifted.

“No!” Without thinking, Alex straightened—exactly the wrong move. Her water bottle flew from her hand, the water spraying in a wide corona, and then the bottle ricocheted off stone and out of sight. Balanced only on the hump of her shoulder, her unsecured pack caromed down her right arm like a luger on sheer ice and shot off her wrist. No, no! She made a wild snatching grab—another wrong move that pulled her out of the fall line and did no good anyway. Hurtling down the slope, the pack tumbled end over end, following the natural lie of the funnel before sliding into the chute. There it picked up speed, dragging an avalanche of loose stones in its wake before bouncing out of sight.

Gone.

She just had time to think, Oh shit. But that was all because she was off-balance, too, shifting on the mountain, swaying as her boots skidded and slipped on loose rock. With a wild shriek, she threw herself into the slope, her scrabbling fingers sliding over rock. Sharp stone sliced her fingers, cut into her palms. She thumped heavily to her butt, left leg crimped, nearly horizontal, like the blade of a jackknife she couldn’t quite close. Her knee bellowed with sudden pain, but she stopped falling.

A scream. Alex’s eyes jerked up in time to see Ellie’s left boot kick up and away from the mountain, an exaggerated slapstick version of slipping on a banana peel. Still screaming, Ellie tumbled onto her side, sliding directly for the chute.

“Ellie!” Alex shouted. “Roll over, Ellie! Roll onto your stomach, roll over!” She thought the girl tried; saw the girl’s parka bunched in pink pillows as friction drove the material up the girl’s chest. Ellie slowed, but she did not stop.

Move, move, move! Alex’s boots slid over loose rock as she sidestepped to her right. The chute was forty, fifty feet farther on, but there was a scrub pine corkscrewing out of the mountain only twenty feet away; she could grab that. Ellie would have to slide past before she reached the chute, and if Alex got there in time …

A slurry of dirt and scree skittered down the slope, breaking over Alex’s head. She heard the rattle of more rocks as they slalomed into the funnel; saw a spray of them slam and then pinball against bigger rocks and into thin air. Ellie was turtled on her back now, arms nearly vertical as the pack rode up the girl’s shoulders.

Kicking the toes of her boots into the mountain, Alex dug in with her knees, then hooked on to the pine with her left hand. Her hand screamed as the bark’s scales knifed into her already bloodied palm. “Ellie!” she shouted. “Over here! Give me your hand, give me your hand!”

She surged for the girl, and then Ellie’s hand clamped around her wrist. There was a mighty jerk that nearly tore Alex’s shoulder out of its socket, and would’ve pulled her off and sent them both crashing toward the chute if the slope had been any steeper.

Ellie slid, slowed … and stopped falling.

Gulping, Alex closed her eyes. Over the boom of her heart, she heard Ellie crying and shouting: “I told you this was a stupid idea!”

In a little under two minutes, she’d saved a kid who hated her guts and, in the process, lost her pack, her gear, her parka, her food.

And, oh, yes, some maniac was shooting out there.

They were so completely screwed.

11

Four power bars.

Five packets of instant Jell-O: two lime, one orange, one lemon, one cherry.

A space blanket.

A small brown bottle of ancient iodine tablets.

One bottle of water. Her car keys with a working mini-flashlight. A spare magazine of 9mm bullets for the Glock.

An airline travel pack that contained a sliver of soap, a folding toothbrush, and a teeny, tiny tube of toothpaste she must’ve squirreled away after a flight somewhere.

In the Altoids tin she always carried in her fanny pack, she hit real pay dirt: fishing line and weights, a cable saw, waterproof matches, a couple Band-Aids, two small X-Acto blades, a couple safety pins, a tiny baggy of cotton balls, a mini-tube of Vaseline, and four foil packets of alcohol wipes. A miniature compass.

That, along with the Glock and her knife, was the sum total of their gear, everything she had left. Of course, Ellie hadn’t brought a thing down the mountain other than her little Hello Kitty daypack. Except for a collapsible fishing rod, a small box of lures, and an ancient Black & Decker flashlight—working, thank God—the pack was crammed with kid stuff: a handful of toiletries, wads of clothes, a water bottle with three gulps left. A patched, grimy Gund bear that was more thread than anything else.

Okay, so maybe they weren’t completely screwed. The basic four for survival were warmth, shelter, water, and food. Well, Alex could start a fire, which she would need because all she had were the clothes on her back. She could build a debris shelter easily enough. Her filter had been in the frame pack, so that sucked, but she still had the one full bottle, and she knew where to find more water. She had the compass and the sun, and she knew roughly where they had to go, how far away they were, and that she’d have made it on her own without too much trouble.

Food was kind of a problem. There was the Glock, but aside from the spare magazine, the rest of her ammunition—an entire brick—was gone, along with the rest of her gear. Not that she knew the first thing about hunting with a pistol, or was about to waste bullets figuring it out. She might set a snare. Deadfalls were relatively easy, but using any kind of trap meant setting several and staying put, and no way was she interested in that. They could certainly fish; they were heading for the river, and the rangers were only a couple days away, max. She could make it on half a power bar a day, if she had to.

“What’s the Jell-O for?”

She glanced over at Ellie huddling against a fallen, lichen-encrusted tree trunk. The valley floor was dense with a carpet of dead leaves and a logjam of dead and blasted trees, their trunks broken into jagged, splintery toothpicks and coated with cool slicks of moss. Alex spied a few withered, knobby platters of fungus on one tree. Chicken of the woods, if she was right, which was a shame because that was an edible mushroom she actually knew, but it was way too late in the year now: too late, too cold, everything remotely edible—ferns, chokecherries, cattails, duck potatoes—either dead or too hard to get at. She might find nuts: hickory or beechnuts. Acorns were a better bet, but you had to soak them, didn’t you? For days, if she remembered right. Probably a reason the Ojibwe thought of them as famine food, something you ate as a last resort. Well, they weren’t there, yet.