Darkness(23)
Actually, she knew Arvid and Ray and Mary Dunleavy from UCLA and Jorge Tomasini from Princeton and Andrew Clark from Wash U. They’d attended several conferences together, and she and Arvid and Ray had collaborated on a grant proposal to fund a study of oil-eating microbes that was still pending. The others she’d met when they had arrived on Attu.
“Not all of them.” Tearing handfuls of dry tundra from a patch near her knees, she quickly added that to the growing fire. “But the ones I don’t know, I know of. I know who they are, their résumés.”
“Résumés.”
The skepticism in that made her frown.
He said it as if he thought the résumés might be bogus. As if he thought she and her fellow scientists might be bogus.
As if he suspected them of something.
“Who are you?” she demanded testily. “And who on earth do you think we are?”
He didn’t answer, and as they exchanged measuring looks, dozens of horrifying possibilities for who he was chased one another through her mind. Could he be a drug smuggler? A spy? A terrorist? A fugitive? A—
Stop it, she ordered herself, and shot him a killing look. “Just so we’re clear, whatever it is that’s going on here, whatever’s up with you, I don’t care. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s nothing to do with my colleagues or what we’re doing here. And for the record, I’m damned tired of being menaced by a man whose life I’m doing my best to save.”
“Menaced?” The rasp in his voice made her think of a rusty file scraping across metal. He’d finished with the water. The empty bottle was on the ground beside him, and his hand had disappeared back beneath the Mylar. His eyes narrowed at her. “I haven’t menaced you.”
“Whatever you want to call it. The point is, I want it to stop. Right now. Or you can start saving your own ass.” She gave him a level look and, when he didn’t reply, got on with what needed to be done. Without any more fuel than was available within the small protected area, the fire wouldn’t last long, but she hoped that it would last long enough to at least heat the rocks that she’d been scooping up as they were speaking and that were now piled around the edges of the flames. She followed that by also positioning the collapsible metal pan, in which she eventually meant to place the rocks, near the blaze. A fire in a tent was an invitation to disaster, and she personally, along with an equally abiding fear of flying, had an abiding fear of being trapped in a fire. But heated rocks were a different thing. Used properly, in an enclosed space such as a tent, they equaled a primitive furnace. And while the fire was burning, its heat could do some additional good: it made the bitter cold in its general vicinity a few degrees less bitter.
“Can you get your clothes off?” she asked as she began assembling the tent. He was still in danger from hypothermia despite the space blanket, the hand warmers, the water, and the fire, which hissed and smoked as stray flurries reached it from the eddies of snow and sleet that rose and swirled in miniature whirlwinds around the outcropping. His face was too deep in shadow to read, but his eyes slid her way. He had, she thought, been warily probing the darkness beyond their sanctuary. She didn’t like to think about what—or who—he was looking for.
“As soon as the tent’s up,” she continued when he didn’t reply, snapping another support into place, which suddenly made the crumpled pile of weatherproof gray nylon that was the tent start to take on size and shape, “we’re getting in it, and you can’t go inside it like you are. You’ll get everything wet and we’ll freeze. You need to strip.”
“You want me . . . naked.” Something in his harsh voice brought her gaze whipping up to meet his.
Too dark to read his eyes. Didn’t matter.
Gina rocked back on her heels to point an I-mean-business index finger at him. “Take another step down that path, and I really will take my tent and find somewhere else to ride out the storm.”
It wasn’t her imagination: one corner of his mouth ticked upward in what might have been the slightest of smiles.
He held up a placating hand.
“Just clarifying,” he said innocently.
The look she gave him was ripe with warning. “I have a pair of dry sweatpants in my backpack you can put on.”
“Ah. Got it.”
She watched him narrowly as his hand disappeared beneath the Mylar to start on his shirt buttons, then returned her attention to the tent. Two more fiberglass ribs locked into place, and the thing was done. Long and low, it was a two-man tent with zippered entrances at both ends and a vestibule to keep the weather out as you crawled into it. On her hands and knees, she pushed it as close up against the outcropping as she could in hopes of protecting it from the worst of the weather. As she had suspected, the rocky, frozen ground made staking it impossible. Instead she lugged a quartet of large rocks from their resting places nearby and placed them atop the stake loops. Dragging her backpack behind her, she crawled partway inside, being careful to keep her wet and dirty boots out of the main part of the tent. Quickly she spread out and inflated the vinyl pad that formed a barrier between the sleeping bag and the floor of the tent. With that done, she unrolled and positioned the sleeping bag on top of it.
Finished, she surveyed the space, which was the approximate shape of a hot dog bun, just about tall enough for her to kneel in with an inch or so of clearance above her head, and wide enough for two people to sleep side by side. One of them—that would be him, because he was the one with no clothes and incipient hypothermia—would get the sleeping bag. The other would sleep in her outdoor gear. With the addition of her improvised furnace, the arrangements should be sufficient to get them through the storm alive.