Darkness(27)

“Getting us some heat,” she told him over her shoulder as she entered the tent.

She’d left the sleeping bag unzipped for easier access. Running the pan of rocks along the inside of it as a kind of makeshift bed warmer, she then set the pan down in the back corner, where it would heat the small tent while still being safely out of the way. Even if the rocks were to somehow spill, though, the worst that would happen is that they would melt a hole through whatever they landed on. There was no possibility of anything catching on fire.

As an afterthought, she tucked the hand warmers down inside the sleeping bag to serve as an extra source of heat.

The only thing left to do was get him inside.

When she crawled back out, he was already on his hands and knees and almost at the door of the tent. Without the fire, the darkness was interrupted only by the narrow, focused beam of the flashlight in her hand. As it hit him, she could see that his face was drawn with effort and his mouth was tense. The air near the tent already felt ten degrees colder. The shriek of the wind howling past and the drumming of the sleet on the rocks underlined the extremity of their situation. Without the shelter the tent provided, they almost certainly wouldn’t live through the night.

“I was coming to help you,” she said in a scolding tone, to which he responded with a grunt. On all fours, he was a large, dark shadow the approximate size and shape of a grizzly. A grizzly with a rattling Mylar superman cape and her turtleneck tied around his waist, which made for an irresistible mental image that would have made her smile under better circumstances. If there were such a thing as limp-crawling, he was doing it. If she’d had to help him—well, there really was no way to support someone who was crawling. And dragging him inside the tent would have been impossible.

Turning to set the flashlight down inside so that he wouldn’t have to find his way to the sleeping bag and avoid the makeshift furnace in complete darkness, she scooted out of the way as he reached the tent and pulled the flap aside for him.

“The sleeping bag’s unzipped. Get in it. Be careful of the pan of rocks at the far end.”

He didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure he had the energy to speak. He was breathing hard enough so that she could hear it even over the noise of the storm. As he crawled past her, she saw that he was carrying his discarded clothes with him.

“Wait! Stop! You can’t take those in there.” She caught a trailing pant leg, tugged. “They’ll get everything wet.”

He stopped, looking over his shoulder at her. “I’ll need them. Tomorrow.”

His tone told her that he was determined.

“They won’t dry,” she said.

“They’ll dry some.”

Stalemate, and it was too cold and she was too tired to argue. “Fine. Leave them right where you are and I’ll hang them up in the vestibule.”

He made a sound that she thought signified agreement, dropped the bundle of clothes, and proceeded on his way. The door of the tent was small, and he had to maneuver his way through carefully. He made it inside, and she heard the crackling of the space blanket, then a soft sound as, presumably, he collapsed onto the sleeping bag. Following him in, she closed up the outer flap, hung up his wet clothes as best she could in the vestibule, then took off her boots and left them in there, too.

Crawling into the main part of the tent, she sealed the doorway up behind her, first with a zipper and then with a Velcro flap. The sounds of the storm were suddenly muffled, like the rush of traffic on a distant freeway. Except for the flashlight’s narrow column of light, the tent was dark. The corners, the ceiling, the sides of the tube encircling her were thick with shadows. She heard his breathing, harsh in that enclosed space, smelled the salty-sea scent of him, and felt her shoulders tighten. She’d never been one to suffer from claustrophobia, but for a moment the flimsy nylon of the walls and ceiling seemed to shrink around her. If she and the big, scary guy with the bullet wound had been in a space capsule on their way to Mars, their isolation couldn’t have been more complete.

Stay calm.

On her knees, she turned, picked up the flashlight, and played it over the cramped, tunnel-like interior, over her backpack, over the smoking rocks in the makeshift furnace a few feet away, over the arched ceiling and the sealed flap at the far end of the tent. The Mylar blanket lay crumpled in the maybe eighteen inches of space between the edge of the sleeping bag and the curving wall. It glittered as the flashlight beam caught it.

“Glad you came prepared,” he said. He lay on his uninjured side in the sleeping bag with his head cradled on his bent arm, still breathing heavily from his recent exertion. The bag was the same dark gray as the tent and the pad beneath it. It had a side zip and the top could be adjusted so that it closed around the head like a hood. At the moment that top part lay flat beneath his head and arm.

“What can I say? I was a Girl Scout.” Maybe her tone was a little tart under the circumstances. Surprise: being sealed up in a virtual wind sock with him was making her nervous. The flashlight beam caught him in the process of stretching his long legs down inside the sleeping bag while pulling the loose corners of it close around his bare shoulders. At his height, she saw that he was barely going to fit. He was shivering again, which she took as a good sign. It had been a while since she’d seen him shiver. Hypothermia in reverse? She didn’t know if that happened. But he was shivering.

His head lay right beside her thigh. As the light caught him he looked up at her, squinting against the brightness of the beam. “I thought ‘Be Prepared’ was the Boy Scout motto.”