Mud Vein

“Isaac?” I grab onto his arm. His breath puffs out of his mouth. I can see him shivering. I am shivering. God. We haven’t even been outside for five minutes.

“There’s nothing, Isaac. Where are we?”

I spin in a circle, my knees brushing a pathway through the snow. There is only white. In every direction. Even the trees seem to be far off. When I squint I can see the glint of something in the distance, just before the tree line.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing. Isaac looks with me. At first it just looks like a piece of something, then my eyes follow it. I follow it until I spin and come back, full circle. I make a sound. It starts in my throat, a noise you’d make when surprised, and then it changes into something mournful.

“It’s just a fence,” Isaac says.

“We can climb it,” I add. “It doesn’t look that high. Twelve feet maybe…”

“It’s electric,” Isaac says.

I spin to look at him. “How do you know?”

“Listen.”

I swallow and listen. A hum. Oh God. We couldn’t hear that from behind the three inch plated windows. We are caged in like animals. There has to be a way around. An electrical wire we can cut… something. I look at the snow. It covers the trees beyond the fence and falls in a graceful white skirt down a steep ravine that drops off to the left of the house. There are no roads, no houses and no breaks in the cover of white. It never ends. Isaac starts walking back toward the house.

“Where are you going?”

He ignores me, his head down. The effort it takes to walk through the snow makes it look like he’s climbing stairs. I watch as he circles around the back of the house, not knowing what to do. I linger for a few more minutes before following him, grateful for the path his struggle has cut for me. I find him facing what looks like a shed. Since there are no windows facing this way, it’s the first time I am seeing what’s back there.

There is a smaller structure to the right of it. The generator, I realize. When I look at Isaac’s face I see that it’s neither the shed nor the generator he’s looking at. I follow his eyes past the structures and feel my breath seize. I stop shivering, I stop everything. I reach for his hand and we plow together through the snow, our breath returns, laboring from the effort. We stop when we reach the edge of the cliff. Laid out in front of us is a view so sharp and dangerously beautiful I am afraid to blink. The house backs right up to a cliff. One that our captor—our zookeeper—didn’t give us windows to see. It seems like he’s trying to tell us something. Something I don’t want to hear. You are trapped, maybe. Or, You’re not seeing everything. I’m in control.

“Let’s go back inside,” Isaac says. His voice is wiped clean of emotion. It’s his doctor’s voice; factual. His hope just fell down that cliff, I think. He heads back without me. I stay to look—look at the spread of mountains. Look at the dangerous drop-off that could turn a falling body into a sack of skin and liquid organs.

When I turn around, Isaac is carrying armfuls of wood from the shack and into the house. It’s not a house, I tell myself. It’s a cabin in the middle of nowhere. What happens when we run out of food? Fuel for the generator? I walk back toward the shed and peer inside. There are piles and piles of chopped wood. An axe rests against the wall closest to where I stand to the back of the shed are several large metal containers. I am about to go investigate them when Isaac comes back for more wood.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Diesel,” he says, without looking up.

“For the generator?”

“Yes, Senna. For the generator.”

I don’t understand the edge in his voice. Why he’s speaking to me like he is. I crouch down beside him and reach for the logs, loading my arms. We walk back together and stock the wood closet in the cabin. I am about to follow him outside for more when he stops me.

“Stay here,” he says, touching my arm. “I’ll do the rest.”

If he hadn’t touched my arm, I would have insisted on helping. But there is something to his touch. Something he is telling me. I crouch in front of the fire he’s built until my shivering stops. Isaac makes a dozen more trips before our wood closet is full, then he starts piling logs in the corners of the room. In case we get locked in again, I think.

“Could we leave the door open? Wedge something in between the door jamb so it can’t close?”

Isaac runs a hand along the back of his neck. His clothes are filthy and covered in a thousand flecks of wood.

“Would we be guarding it, too? In case someone closes it in the middle of the night?”

I shake my head. “There is no one here, Isaac. They dropped us off and left us here.”

He seems to be torn about telling me something. This pisses me off. He’s always had the tendency to treat me like I’m fragile.

“What, Isaac?” I snap. “Just say it.”

“The generator,” he says. “I’ve seen them before. They have underground tanks with a hose system attached.”

I don’t get it at first. A generator … no windows on the back of the house … a hose system to refill the diesel.

“Oh my God.” I collapse on the couch and stick my head between my knees. I can feel myself gasping for air. I hear Isaac’s footsteps on the wood floor. He grabs me by the shoulders and drags me to my feet.

“Look at me, Senna.”

I do. “Calm down. Breathe. I can’t afford to have anything happen to you, okay?”

I nod. He shakes me until my head snaps back.

“Okay?” he says again.

“Okay,” I mimic. He lets me go, but doesn’t step away. He pulls me into a hug and my face buries itself in the crook of his neck.

“He’s been filling that tank hasn’t he? That’s why there are no windows on the back of the house.”

Isaac’s silence is confirmation enough.

“Will he come back? Now that we have the door open and can fill it ourselves?” It seems unlikely. Is it our punishment now that we figured out the code? A reward and a punishment: you can go outside, but now it’s only a matter of time before you run out of fuel and freeze to death. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

He squeezes me tighter. I can feel how tense his muscles are underneath my palms.

“If he comes back,” I say. “I’m going to kill him.”