Authors: Michael Northrop
It was probably a little after three o’clock. The school was well behind me now, and I was pretty sure I’d made a mistake. There probably weren’t even two more hours of daylight left. I wasn’t sure I could make it to the substation by then, and I wasn’t sure it would matter if I did. What if they weren’t there, what if power wasn’t a priority yet?
I started looking for other options. There weren’t many houses this far from the center of town. To be honest, there weren’t even that many in the center of town. There were some out here, though. I’d already passed a handful of them, but I hadn’t seen any lights or any signs of movement. The first few had just been roofs, the sides barely poking out and the tops wearing heavy peaks of snow like hats. I didn’t see how being in there would be any better than being back in the high school. And I really, really did not want to stumble across any more claw hands and blue faces.
I kept going. Had everyone gone into town? Maybe to the town hall, where the fallout shelter was? I used the tops of telephone poles as guides and stayed over the road. The houses would be along the side of it, and this was the route the National Guard would take.
There was a little fork in the road a quarter mile ahead, where
Route 7 met River Road. I looked up and there was something moving. It was a little figure, a man, scissoring his legs back and forth. He was skiing. I blinked into the wind and wiped the snow from my lashes. I saw the thin, red cross-country skis gliding underneath him and his black ski poles stabbing the snow. He was following the turn of River Road, heading toward Route 7.
I called out, but he was upwind and too far away. I kept my eyes trained on him. He turned his head my way at the intersection. It was habit I guess, checking to see if anything was coming. It seemed kind of funny under the circumstances. I felt like saying, “There’s nothing coming, dude. You’re clear for about three states.”
I think he must’ve seen me when he looked back. There wasn’t much else out here, and I wasn’t exactly going to sneak up on anyone. I was moving in big exaggerated steps, with my arms out for balance and my blanket flapping around behind me. But if he saw me, he didn’t let on. He paused for a second or two at the intersection and then moved on.
I set a slow course to intercept him, or his tracks, anyway. We were headed in the same direction now, but he was moving much faster than me. That wasn’t saying much, of course. He was moving across the snow in smooth, even strides, while I was stomping across it like I was mashing potatoes with my feet.
And the potatoes were winning. I was seriously broken down at this point. I was operating in a zone past fatigue. I was just a
numb engine chugging slowly along, trying not to think about what I’d seen. My brain sent signals to my legs and, for now, my legs responded. The less I thought about it, the better. If I really thought about it, about how tired I was and how much energy it took to keep going, I was pretty sure I’d stop. I had no feeling at all in my hands or my face.
The skier’s movements were so sleek and effortless that it was like he was mocking me. I must’ve looked like Frankenstein’s monster out here.
At first, I’d been happy to see someone else, another human being. But when he didn’t stop for me, I started to get angry. Now I was getting angrier with every step. I was mad at him for moving better than me, for being farther ahead, for having enough feeling in his hands to use his ski poles.
It wasn’t his fault, of course. I hadn’t made skis because they didn’t seem like a good bet in the really driving, heavy snow. It seemed like they’d bog down, get stuck. So instead I made snowshoes that bogged down and got stuck even in light snow. I couldn’t exactly blame him for that.
This guy had just waited for the heaviest snow to stop and then taken out his skis. How many others had done the same thing? Now he was moving easily over the snow, putting another forty yards between us since the last time I looked.
“Where’s the fire, jerk,” I said under my breath. But I knew, just like he did. At any moment, the really heavy snow could start falling again. The storm had done that before. It had taken a break only to come back as strong as ever. We could be in a
whiteout, or it could be hail, or freezing rain, or the wind could kick up a few more notches. I took some weird satisfaction in the thought that, if any of those things happened, we’d both be dead.
I remember thinking this: With my last breath I’d take his fancy skis and make a cross over his body. Here lies a man who thought he was hot stuff. I’m not proud of that, but you get mean pushing yourself past exhaustion in the freezing cold on the day your friend died.
I’m not sure why I kept following him, even when he was barely a dot in the distance, even when it was clear that he wasn’t peeling off to go to the substation, that he was going on into town. Even when it was getting dark, and my body could only give me one or two steps a minute.
Part of it was that I figured he knew where he was going. A man doesn’t go that fast without a pretty good idea of his destination. And part of it was that I did not want to be beaten by a guy in a bright blue ski suit. The rest of it, I don’t know. I think maybe I wanted to go all the way into town because that’s where Pete had been headed, and Pete wouldn’t ever get there.
I kept going. Even when I couldn’t see the skier ahead of me on the road anymore, I kept going, taking a step when I could. I was down to maybe a step a minute.
Finally, when I couldn’t even see his tracks in the darkness, I stopped. Standing there, ready to topple over, I caught a whiff of wood smoke. Somewhere nearby there was a house with a
fireplace and people. I needed to get there, but it was too late. My legs had stopped, and they were not going to start again.
I was standing, and then I wasn’t. My eyes were open, and then they weren’t. I was conscious, and then I wasn’t. I was out cold.
I heard something. Lying there in the snow in something deeper than sleep, there was a sound loud enough to bring me back to the surface. Lying there with eyes that barely worked, there was a light bright enough for me to see it. I knew what it was: It was an angel, come for me at the end. I was ready, and it was my time.
As the angel descended to collect me, to welcome me or dismiss me, to do whatever it is they do with the dead, I could hear his wings. The air beat the snow beneath me. It sounded familiar. I tried to remember. My brain wanted to run back over my whole life, to show me everything, but I made it stop and pause on one thing.
The air beat the snow beneath me. The sound was strangely familiar.
The angel lifted me up and carried me away. And there was more than one angel now. My eyes were not working well in the dimness, but I could hear them. I listened to them talk. There were two voices, then three, and I wondered which one was Gabriel.
“Weak but stable, hypothermic,” one of them was saying.
I was hearing OK but having trouble processing the words. Then I felt something: a rough tug on my arm and then a quick flash of pain. A warm sensation began to wash through me.
After that, things started to come back into focus and the words started to make more sense. I raised my head, just a little, and turned it to the side. I was inside a little cabin. There were three people with me, two men and a woman, all wearing helmets and uniforms. There was a constant rhythmic beating in the air all around me:
FWOOP FWOOP FWOOP.
I was in a helicopter.
I turned my head one more tick to the side and realized the closest man was looking right at me. “Hey,” one of us said. I was pretty woozy, but I think it was him.
“Hey,” he said, or I repeated.
“How you feeling?” And that was definitely him.
“OK,” I said. “Better. Alive.”
“Yeah, you’re talking,” he said. “That’s a good sign, lifewise.”
I looked around again. The other two people seemed to be very busy. I couldn’t make out what they were doing, but their uniforms were green.
“Are you the Army? “ I said.
“National Guard,” the man said.
“Massachusetts?” I said. “Connecticut?”
“Tennessee,” he said.
“Huh.”
“The Volunteer State,” he said, and now I noticed a slight accent.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just told him the truth: “I thought you were an angel.”
“Heck, kid,” he said, smiling. “I’m not even an officer.”
“Sergeant Marten,” he continued, “and who might you be?”
“Scotty,” I said. “Scotty Weems. I don’t have a rank.”
He thought that last part was funny, but I didn’t mean it as a joke. Things were still kind of foggy for me. I tried to sit up, but that wasn’t happening. I felt a tug on my arm, and I looked over and saw that there was an IV hooked up to it. That made sense. I looked at the spot where the needle disappeared under a wad of gauze and tape.
“So where you coming from?” the sergeant asked.
And then it all came rushing back, and I started talking, too fast and all at once.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said. “Come again?”
“The high school,” I said. “Tattawa. It’s just … close. It’s close to here.”
I realized I didn’t know how long we’d been flying or in what direction. Sergeant Marten reached up to his face. He had a small mouthpiece coming from his helmet. He covered it with one hand and said a few words, but between his hand and the rotors, I couldn’t make them out.
“Roger,” someone called back from farther up. “I got it.”
I tilted my chin forward and my head followed. I saw another person, all the way at the front. It was the pilot, outlined against a bank of glowing instrument panels.
“There anyone there with you?” said Sergeant Marten. “A teacher or someone?”
“No teachers, but there were seven of us there,” I said. It didn’t seem like I had time to tell him about Gossell right now. I’d do that next.
“So there are, uh, six students still there?”
“Five,” I said.
“I thought you just said …” he began, and then he got it. “Oh. OK. Roger.”
He put his hand to his mouth again and began speaking, faster this time. I still couldn’t hear him when he talked like that, and it was frustrating.
“They need help,” I said. “It’s bad.”
“Yeah,” he said. “High school sucks.”
I heard one of the others laugh behind him, just one loud “Heh!”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“I know it,” he said, and I felt the floor shift beneath me, the helicopter banking hard left, heading back the way we’d come. It was like the world had tilted sideways on its axis. It had been doing that a lot lately.
Michael Northrop has written short fiction for
Weird Tales,
the
Notre Dame Review,
and
McSweeney’s.
His first novel,
Gentlemen,
was published to starred reviews and named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It also earned him a
Publishers Weekly
Flying Start citation for a notable debut. An editor at
Sports Illustrated KIDS
for many years, Michael now writes full-time from his home in New York City.
Visit him online at www.michaelnorthrop.net.
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Northrop
Cover art & design © 2011 by Phil Falco
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,
Publishers since 1920.
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First edition, February 2011
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