Mud Vein

Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We eat the last potato sometime in late November. Isaac’s face is so drawn I would syphon out my own body fat to give him if I had any.

“Something is always trying to kill me,” I say one day as we sit watching the fire. The floor is our perpetual hangout, in the attic room—as close to the fire as we can get. Light and heat. Light and heat. The barrels of diesel in the shack are empty, the cans of ravioli in the pantry are empty, the generator is empty. We’ve chopped down the trees on our side of the fence. There are no more trees. I watched Isaac hack at them from the attic window whispering “Hurry, hurry…” until he cut them down and hauled the logs inside to burn. But there is snow, plenty of snow. We can eat the snow, bathe in the snow, drink the snow.

“It seems that way, yes. But so far nothing has been able to.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” he says.

Oh yeah. How easily the brain flits about when there is no food to hold it in place.

Lucky me.

“We are running out of food, Senna.” He looks at me like he really needs me to understand. Like I haven’t seen the goddamn pantry and fridge. We’ve both lost so much weight I don’t know how I could ignore it. I know what we’re running out of: food … wood … hope…

Isaac set the traps we found in the shed, but with an electric fence we’re not sure how many animals can get to our side without frying themselves first. Our power is out, but the fence remains on. The hum of the electricity feels like a slap in the face.

“If our generator ran out of power, there must be another power source on the property.”

Isaac puts another log on the fire. It bites gingerly at the wood, and I close my eyes and say, hotter, hotter, hotter…

“It’s all been planned out, Senna,” he says. “The zookeeper meant for us to run out of generator fuel the same week that we were plunged into permanent darkness. Everything that is happening has been planned.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.

“We have enough for another week, maybe, if we’re careful,” he tells me.

The same question as always ricochets through my brain. Why would someone go through all the trouble to get us here, only to let us starve and freeze? I ask my question out loud.

Isaac answers with less enthusiasm than I asked. “Whoever did this is crazy. Trying to make sense of crazy makes you just as crazy.”

I suppose he’s right. But I’m already crazy.

Three days later we run out of food. Our last meal is a handful of rice cooked over the fire in a pot that Isaac rigs with metal poles he found in the shed. It is barely soft enough to chew. Isaac gives me the larger portion, but I leave most of it on my plate. I don’t care if I die hungry. The only truth is that I’m going to die. When they finally find my body I don’t want them cutting me open and seeing half digested rice in my stomach. It feels insulting. Prisoners always get their choice of a last meal. Where is mine? I think of the potato skins I ate over the sink. It feels good now, to know that I didn’t waste them. We ate coffee grounds last week for breakfast. It was almost funny at first, like something out of a horror, survival story, but when they clogged up my throat with their bitterness I wanted to cry.

I roll myself tighter into my blanket. It’s so cold, but we only burn two logs a day. If we can just get past that fence we can hack at the trees to our hearts’ content. Sometimes I see Isaac outside staring at it, his hands in his pockets and his head dipped back. He walks up and down with a screwdriver he found in the shed, holding it against the posts to see how far the spark jumps. I think he’s hoping for a day the zookeeper forgets. We’ve already chopped down anything that can burn, including the shed itself. The doors in the house are made of fiberglass or we would have used those too. We’ve burned furniture. Isaac sawed and hacked at the beds until only the metal frames were left. We’ve burned books. God—books! We burned the puzzles, we even pulled down the Oleg Shuplya prints, first for their wooden frames, and eventually we’d tossed in the paper as well. I could call this situation my own personal Hell, but Hell is warm. I’d love to be in Hell right now.

Isaac comes into my room. I hear him near the fireplace. He’s lighting my log. My one, precious log. We were saving it. I guess the time for saving has come to an end. Usually he leaves when he’s done, goes to his own room, but the attic room is the warmest in the house and the only one left with a burning log. I feel the mattress shift under his weight as he sits next to my cocoon.

“Do you have any of that chapstick left?”

“Yes,” I say softly. “In the closet.”

I hear him walk to the wooden armoire and move things around. We have one pink Zippo left. It’s on its last few drops of lighter fluid. We’ve been so careful, but no matter how careful you are, things eventually run out.

“Chapstick will keep the fire burning longer,” he says. “It’ll make it hotter, too.”

Some part of my brain wants to know how he knows this; I have a snarky question on the tip of my tongue: Did you learn that in medical survival school? But I can’t formulate the words to ask him.

“I’m going to sleep in here with you,” he says, sitting on the bed. I open my eyes and stare into the whiteness of the comforter. The color white is so prevalent here. I was growing sick of it when everything went dark. Now I long for it. His weight lifts from the bed as he unrolls me. The minute the last of the blanket falls away, I begin shivering uncontrollably. I stare up at him from my back. He looks ragged. He’s lost so much weight it scares me. Wait. Did I already have that thought? I haven’t looked at myself in weeks. But my clothes—the ones the zookeeper left me—they hang and wilt over me like I’m a child wearing my mother’s things. Isaac leans down and scoops me up. I don’t know where he’s getting his strength. I can barely hold my head up anymore. The blanket is still underneath me. He lays me on the ground in front of the fire and spreads the blanket out around me. I don’t understand what he’s doing. Then my heart starts to pound. Isaac stands over me. I’m between his legs. Our eyes lock as he lowers himself over me; first to his knees, then his elbows. I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I close my eyes and feel his weight, a little at first, then all at once. His body is warm. I moan from the shock of it. I want to wrap myself around him, absorb his heat, but I hold still. He pulls me up just enough to wrap his arms around my back. My eyes are still closed, but I can feel his breath on my face.