Nowhere on Earth Page 10

  She turned to Aidan just in time to see him teeter, a surprised look on his face, then fall.

  Flat on his back.

  Oh, no.

  She ran to him and crouched beside him. He was lying on the snowy ground, his skin not just pale in the moonlight, she realized, but white, drained of color.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “I don’t know. My body is shaking. I can’t make it stop.” She saw he was right: he was trembling all over. “There is a pain in my extremities,” he said. “My appendages. My ap-pend—” It was as if he were a robot, winding down, battery running out.

  “You’re cold,” she said, and understood at the same time. “Don’t you have cold where you come from?”

  “No,” he said. “But I know it from touching you. I…I r-r-remember when you fell through lake ice, and your mom p-p-pulled you out and r-r-rubbed you all over and p-p-put you by the fire.”

  She hadn’t remembered that, but now she did. The fear in her mom’s eyes. The love. It was almost painful to think of.

  She touched his warm, fur-lined jacket. “It’s obviously not enough,” she said. “We’ll get you inside, and I’ll find you a hat for next time we go out, a scarf, maybe—”

  “Oh, it’s not real,” said Aidan.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The jacket. Not really wearing one—I took it from your mind.”

  That was Aidan: he would quote Archimedes at you but go outside into the Alaskan night, in the snow, without clothes. He was basically naked, out there in freezing cold, where hot coffee would turn to icy mist if you threw it into the air.

  After that—immediately after that—she carried him back to the house and snuck him inside and ran him a warm bath, and she wrapped him in every towel she could find, and then she dressed him in her old jeans from the attic, a T-shirt, a thick Bears hoodie.

  When they went downstairs, Emily’s dad was in the kitchen, drinking a beer. He pulled a confused, amused face.

  “Why are you wearing your big sister’s clothes, kiddo?” he said.

  Emily saw his eyes narrowing.

  Saw him shake his head slightly, as if different ideas were fighting in there, banging against his skull.

  Shit.

  Emily turned to Aidan.

  She thought quickly.

  “He’s…getting tall,” she said. “Growing out of all his stuff.”

  Her father’s facial muscles relaxed. “Right,” he said, nodding. “Yeah.”

  “Shooting up,” said Aidan.

  “You’re shooting up,” said her dad, an echo. Then he stepped over to Aidan, pulled him into a big bear hug, slapping his back in that way men do. “My big boy,” he said.

  Emily stared at them, at her dad, who had never hugged her, not once since her tenth birthday; and here he was, hugging a ghost, hugging an idea. She couldn’t believe it.

  Still: Aidan needed clothes to keep him warm, and she didn’t have a jacket his size. So not long after that, she broke into her money from babysitting back in Minnesota and went to the general store and bought him the puffy coat he was wearing right now.

  Without her, he would have died in that cold.

  Without her now, he might still die.

  Bob too: his breath as he slept had liquid in it, as if the lake were reaching out and down his nose, into his lungs.

  She looked up at the sparks and the stars, dancing around each other, and she didn’t sleep again for even one minute.

  CHAPTER 28

  SHE WAITED TILL sunlight filtered through the clouds before she woke Bob. The fire had died down, and Emily was afraid that if they didn’t get moving soon, they might never get moving. But there was the GPS to deal with.

  Bob was sleeping fitfully—she watched him twitching by the embers, and when she touched his side to rouse him, she could feel the heat radiating off him. Not good. She shook him gently. He wasn’t easy to rouse—and there were more bright red lines on his wrist and hand: infection tracing his lymphatic system.

  “What is it?” he said. He sounded beat. Beaten.

  The lake whispered beside them, a constant susurrus, talking in low tones about the clarity of water and the hardness of stones. Or something. Emily may have been a little delirious.

  “The SPOT tracker,” she said. “You still have it?”

  He sat up with a pained grunt. He took the small object out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Why?”

  “The men,” she said. “They’ll be following it.” It sent a distress signal when you pressed a button, but if you knew its details, you could track it without that. Passive GPS.

  “Oh, no,” said Aidan. “Sorry. I should have thought of it.”

  She shook her head. “Not your fault.”

  Aidan turned, watching the mountains. Looking for the men in black, she knew. Damn, damn, damn.

  “Get rid of it,” said Bob.

  She nodded. They were tracking it, right now, she was almost certain. They’d have known whose plane she was on—there was only one regular plane into the town—and they’d have the means to check the ID number of Bob’s tracker, which was a transmitter as well as a receiver.

  For all she knew, that was why they hadn’t yet made a move, why she hadn’t seen them, since the avalanche and the bear took out the last two. They were just biding their time, watching her on a screen somewhere, a green dot bleeping against a black background.

  She took the SPOT a little distance away from the fire. The cold shocked her: the almost weight of it, a charge in the air. She could smell the lake. Ice, and something that spoke of fish, of deep fronded places. She placed the tracker on the largest stone she could find, then picked up another stone and smashed it, again and again, until its circuitry innards spilled onto the beach.

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Bob struggled to his feet—or rather, he struggled to one foot and then collapsed as soon as he put weight on the other.

  He cursed, and she helped him up, then got his arm over her shoulders, so that he could limp along, with her bearing the weight instead of his hurt ankle.

  “Not far,” said Aidan.

  It was both true and not true. Under the pale low sun, the center of the lake almost glowed blue. Moonlight, if moonlight were a solid thing.

  Emily was trembling with weakness when they finally reached the short path from the lake to the cabin. A large canoe was pulled up on shore, tied to a stump. Bob leaned against a tree, and she approached the cabin door, praying that it didn’t have a lock. She didn’t do much praying ordinarily—that was her mom’s thing—and she knew this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. It was supposed to be for kids who really deserved it, but she was too cold and tired to stop herself.

  The cabin was low and compact, made from interlocking logs. The roof was covered in turf, and there was a chimney built out of what looked like the same gray stones as the beach. At the back was a small shed structure: a storage unit of some kind, Emily supposed.

  The door had a steel catch. Bob propped himself against the wall of the cabin as Emily lifted it…and the door swung inward. It wasn’t even locked. Well: who would break in? She entered the cabin. There was a stale but not unpleasant smell. No one had been here in a long time. She smiled to herself.

  She looked around in the gloomy light. Most everything was made out of wood, much of it hand-carved and turned and slotted. There was a table; a single bed, raised off the floor, covered in blankets. A couple of chairs. Shelves containing oil lamps, feathers, pebbles, the skull of some kind of bird—things a hunter might collect during a season. The windows were thin plastic sheeting: again, made by hand, Emily could see. Well: how else would they be made? There was no way to drive building supplies or builders, for that matter, up here.

  Most important, there was: a
stove, with a kettle and pan set on top.

  A card sign propped next to the pan said: PLEASE LEAVE THIS PLACE AS YOU FOUND IT. MAY PEACE ALWAYS SURROUND IT.

  Amen to that, thought Emily, the echo of her earlier prayer still in her mind.

  Bob had come in now too, and Aidan. Emily tried to think. They were in a cabin. They had shelter, which was something. Not enough, though: Aidan’s lips were blue, even now that they were inside.

  Too cold for him. For his little not-real body.

  Shit.

  What to do? She and Aidan could continue without Bob. But then they’d be leaving Bob on his own. To die, slowly, of septicemia. There was no way to call for help from here.

  But to stay might mean being a sitting target for the men who were after them.

  Well. She would have to worry about the men later. She couldn’t make any decisions on an empty stomach—and Aidan needed to eat, or seemed to anyway. She didn’t know anything about his biology, and didn’t want to. She didn’t need to take him apart to know he was alive, that he understood the important things.

  Fear. Love.

  The main thing they needed to do, of course, was light the fire. She eyed it. But if they lit it, then the people following them would see the smoke from the chimney, and know exactly where they were. That had been true on the beach too, she realized, but somehow that had seemed…better. They’d been outside, free to move.

  Here, in the cabin, they were sitting ducks. Trapped.

  Bob saw where she was looking, and not for the first time read her mind. “I figure, if they’re still out there, they know where we are anyway,” he said. “You may as well light it, warm the kid up.”

  She glanced at Aidan. He was swaying on his feet, and she caught his hands, helped him to sit on the bed.

  “I guess…,” she said, to Bob.

  “You want to send him home, right?”

  She nodded. She didn’t. But she did too. “Uh-huh.”

  “He dies of exposure, you’ll be shipping a corpse up to the stars, instead of…well…whatever he is.”

  “I am still here, you know,” said Aidan.

  “Besides,” said Bob. “None of us can think clearly like this.”

  Emily smiled, sighed. He was right. She looked out of the wobbly, grimy plastic window. Everything out there looked still.

  So.

  Fire.

  Maybe try to find some food. There had to be some kind of stash in here, right?

  And then: then they would plan what to do next. And who would do it. She was aware, in the back of her mind, like some dreadful remainder in a division problem, of Bob’s shoulder, his arm, his ankle. Warm or not, he wasn’t going to be able to move quickly.

  Another problem for later.

  She concentrated on the stove first. There was a box of matches set into a crack in the log wall, and a pail full of wood and kindling. She took the kettle and pan and the quirky sign down from the flat iron top and put them all to one side. Then she got a fire going, quickly, and shut the door of the stove, adjusting the air intake as soon as it was burning nicely.

  The heat was miraculous, immediate, embracing. Bob sat on one of the chairs, his leg stretched out, and Emily resisted the urge to get right up close to the stove and stay there. You wanted to warm up gradually. She went around the single room, checking the oil levels in the lamps, lighting them.

  An orange glow filled the cabin—the square panes of plastic in the windows growing darker all the time. Slowly, Aidan seemed to unstiffen, to ease into himself again, from the sharp and folded thing that had been sitting on the bed. He cricked his neck, and smiled at Emily.

  He got up and went over to Bob, then bent down by the pilot’s leg and put a hand on it. He closed his eyes. A long moment passed.

  “Not broken,” he said. “But you need antibiotics. The wound in your arm is infected.”

  “I know,” said Bob.

  “We’ll stay here until you recover,” said Emily. She hadn’t known that until she said it, but it seemed to be true. They were a team.

  “And then?” said Bob.

  “Then we need to keep going.”

  “To send your message.”

  “Right.”

  “From where?”

  “The HAARP facility. Or what used to be. It was government property; now it’s part of some university.”

  Bob nodded. “I know it. It was on The X-Files or something like that. They send radio beams deep into space.”

  “Yes,” said Aidan.

  “But it’s…I don’t know exactly…a hundred miles away,” said Bob. “No way you can make it—especially not with me.”

  “We may not make it without you,” said Emily. “Strength in numbers, et cetera. Anyway, let’s get some rest and then we can plan.”

  Bob didn’t say anything to that.

  The word radio pinged in Emily’s mind, lodged there from when Bob had said it. Could they send a signal to…truckers or something? CB radio? Get some civilian help? She looked around for one. Nothing. Then she searched the small handcrafted cupboards along the wall. She found:

  A bag of flour.

  Some dry yeast.

  A wash of relief ran through her, liquid and cool, frothy with lightness and air. Food. It seemed almost religious, finding it here. Like a miracle. Though, of course, it was just a hunter’s cabin; there was nothing supernatural about it.

  But it meant survival. It meant living another day—two—three. And every day that they lived was another day to get to the facility, to keep moving.

  She kept looking. There were also:

  Some pots.

  Various woodworking tools.

  Binoculars.

  A Swiss Army knife with a compass. (Jackpot, she thought, slipping it into her pocket.)

  A medical kit, containing bandages, alcohol, Band-Aids, scissors, gauze compresses.

  She did not find:

  Antibiotics.

  Then again, she hadn’t really expected to. But Bob needed them. She didn’t like the way he was looking. He was less pale now that they were inside and the warmth from the stove was spreading, but his breathing was still shallow and labored, and he was grimacing when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  She leaned the rifle they’d taken from the dead man against the wall by the door, ready in case she needed it. She realized she should have searched the dead guy, seen if he had any more spare ammo, a sidearm, anything else useful she could have taken. But she couldn’t have—she just couldn’t have. Even so, she was annoyed with herself. Her dad would have done it.

  To take her mind off it, she made bread. In the absence of drugs, at least she could get some calories into the pilot. Bread was pretty much the only thing she knew how to make—her dad had this thing about not buying bread, when it was so simple to bake yourself, so he’d taught her when she was young. She sent Aidan out with the kettle to fill it with snow, and set to melting it. Then she got him to fetch some pebbles from the beach while she mixed flour and yeast into the snow water.

  She set some of the mixture aside in a ceramic cup and put it on the windowsill: it would draw in more natural yeast from the air, make a starter culture, or the beginnings of one anyway. If they stayed a day or two, she could make a sort of sourdough.

  While she waited for the dough to rise, she made an inventory of all the things they had: a kind of balance sheet of survival. Lighter, mostly dry clothes, basic first-aid equipment.

  Then she built a simple Dutch oven: the way her mom had shown her one time while camping as her dad had skinned and gutted a moose.

  There were two pots, one smaller than the other and with a detachable handle, which suited her just fine.

  First, she dropped the pebbles into the larger pot, to make an insulating layer of stone and air. T
hen she put the smaller pot inside it.

  Emily floured the inner pot, so the dough wouldn’t stick, and tipped the mix into it. Then she put both lids on and placed the improvised oven on top of the stove. Forty-five minutes would do it, she thought.

  “Jeez,” said Bob, from his chair. She startled: she’d thought he was dozing. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “What I’m told. Schoolwork. Chores.”

  “Ha,” said Bob. “Well, none of those things will save our lives. But you just might.”

  Later, they ate warm bread, a little too moist, the crust a little hard, but simply incredible after nearly forty-eight hours of no food. Her stomach was full for the first time in, what, three days? And it felt like heaven, it felt like being complete, like being full in more ways than one.

  Then they wrapped themselves in the blankets, and she and Aidan took the floor, spooning, while Bob slept in the bed.

  Always, they kept looking out of the windows. Expecting to see movement out there. The cabin being encircled. The men closing in on them.

  But it was only stillness, and darkness, and the sound of an owl hooting, somewhere very far away and at the same time, weirdly, close.

  CHAPTER 29

  WHEN SHE WOKE the next morning, no one was holding a gun to her head, and she took that as a positive.

  Her stomach wasn’t tingling, either, which was also good. Though she was hungry.

  She rolled over.

  Slowly she got up off the hard floor, every muscle in her body aching. Actually, she didn’t know that. There were hundreds of muscles in the body, right? Like, in the tongue and stuff. And none of those were aching.

  But a lot of them were aching.

  She went over and took her starter culture from the windowsill, figured she would make more bread.

  “I was thinking…maybe…pancakes,” said Aidan.