The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Read online

  The Resilience pushes through the bumpy whitecaps, and I’m finally forced into the wheelhouse. I can hardly tell that it’s warmer. Voley is hiding next to Dusty because the motion has made him sick. He’s whining in small, muffled bursts. I get in close to Ernest and Dusty, hoping that it might bring my body back to life. My fingers are frozen but I grab the binoculars anyway and try to hold them steady, looking out to my right. I search for the white again, but I can’t see it. There’s a monster rising on our right. A giant hill. Barren. I see a thousand rivulets running down it, the streams that are its veins, all sending the mudmeat down into the sea. The shore looks like foam death. I don’t know how we’ll ever land the ship. Because without a boat, we have no way of getting ashore. I know this, and so does Dusty. Ernest acts like he doesn’t, like we’re going all the way in. To find Russell no matter what we have to do. And I’m with him. Whatever it takes.

  All at once, the narrowing band of ocean before us widens into a lake of hell. There, directly in front of the ship, maybe a mile away, is a clear spinning arm. It spins all the way up to the hood of the sky. It gyrates at its middle, bending some, then reconstructing itself. I watch in wonderment as it strengthens and dissolves, veering one way and then another, seeking out some kind of target that’s not there. How long will this one last? I ask Ernest. All the waterspouts I’ve known have disappeared in about ten minutes.

  Can’t say, he replies. We’ll stay clear of her. And he keeps his eye on it, maneuvering the ship closer to the lee shore. Dusty sees something and startles. He points it out and then goes for the binoculars. What is it? I ask. He tells me there’s a different colored sky up ahead. Just a sliver. But it’s up there. I look for myself but I don’t find it. I think I’m losing my sharpness. A lack of vitamins. Some sort of degenerative virus maybe. My perception’s shot. But Ernest can’t see it either. And we pass the binoculars around and Dusty informs us where it is. Finally we each see it: a lighter streak, almost white. It looks like the sky version of the white on the mountain. And then Ernest says it, what has been lurking in each of our minds since spotting the snow.

  “I’ll be damned,” he says lowering the binoculars, and then raising them again, sure not to lose his grip on the wheel of the ship. What? I ask, looking for hope to spring from his lips like it always seems to. Something that might mean Russell is alive. Ernest floors us. He says, I don’t think it’s raining under that sky.

  And as quickly as the sliver showed itself to us, it’s gone. None of us can find it anymore. Dusty says we can get to it, that it wasn’t that far. Suddenly I’m not so sure if we should though. Because the only way in is through the waterspout. And it’s split. Spawned three. And they snake and coil around each other and then separate. They bend like rope and then snap back into lines. And they’ve darkened. As if they’ve absorbed some of the brown from the sea itself. No longer clear arms to heaven, but violent defenders of the mountains.

  Ernest starts frantically looking left and right at the shoreline. I think he’s looking for a spit we might be able to land by, but he’s not. He tells us what to look for with him: Look for the boat, he says. And I hadn’t thought to do it, but he’s right. What if Russell wrecked on the sides of this valley—what if that waterspout’s been here all this time, and they tried to land rather than go near it? We scan and scan and see nothing on any shore. But they aren’t shores anyway—the best they can be called are slimy cliffs, spiking in impossible angles from the water. Part of the mountain on our left looks like it has a gentle rise, a curved table rising out of the coughing brown sea, but it’s got a thousand streams, all running down together to make a mud rapid. No way up.

  We need a rocky shore, Ernest says. Keep looking. And he increases the ship’s speed, and with the wind still behind her, she lifts up high over the swells, then drops suddenly each time into the troughs. The rigging of the trimmed sails whines, and I’m glued to the three headed monster directly in front of us. Voley has stopped whining, but he’s licking the floor of the wheelhouse, eyes down, ready to throw up. And then he does. The smell of bile. He can’t help it.

  It’s a split decision—we’ll go around the waterspout, Ernest says. At this point, I can’t think of any other option except to turn around. But I can’t muster the courage to say that. And I’m glad I don’t because of what’s on the line. The Resilience summons what’s left of her strength, and we charge right at the spirals. They switch and play like dancers, half-dissolving, spraying up fountains of mist where they suck up water from the writhing sea. For a brief moment, they break apart, and two of the tendrils disappear altogether, but they snap back from thin air, forming from nothing again, like some invisible place holder is holding a spot for them so that we can’t get by. The sea doesn’t want to let us in.

  The waterspout arm closest to us has widened to the size of our ship. It’s right there, to our right, a funnel of death. Ernest keeps twitching, checking it as we pass, watching ahead, then the shore we’re nearly running into, and the monster that might swing over at any second. I know how fast the waterspouts move—they disappear and reappear in an instant, shifting a hundred feet. The waves are impossibly high, and I think that’s what will kill us now, not the waterspouts. The ship rises so high over the next swell that I join Voley on the floor. Hold fast, says Ernest. He says it again, but all I can do is throw up on the floor. It’s disgusting fish mucus and it mixes with Voley’s bile. Dusty has remained up somehow, and he asks if I’m okay. I just nod because I’m finding it easier to shut everything out down on the floor. There is only the feeling of sickness down here, the close smell of the vomit, the dry nose of Voley, who gives me kisses on my mouth despite the awful taste. I hug him and drive my head into his stomach.

  Up above, I have no idea what’s happening. But I feel the ship rising. We’re going up, and without vision of the sea I feel like it’s way higher than it should be. Like we’re rising into the sky. And then I’m sure of it—we’ve been pulled into the vortex, and the thing is sucking us right up into gray roof of the world. Up and up and up until I scream Dusty! He doesn’t comfort me or reply at all, and I think he’s already dead, so I turn up finally from the floor. How can we still be rising?

  The moment I see Ernest, he’s bent over the wheel, sticking his head way out, almost to the glass of the wheelhouse. Dusty is there too, holding onto the wheel with him. Hold her, Ernest says. And that’s all I see or hear before the drop and the loud pop of shattering glass. The shards and the water come down together on top of me and Dusty, and I know we’re going down. The water rushes in and I slide across the floor with Voley, right out onto the deck of the ship. I bang along the rail. I see Ernest as I go, still holding the wheel somehow. And then the water is gone again, that fast, sliding away to the other side of the ship and over the edge. And all over again we start to rise. Up and up.

  I run uphill to get back into the wheelhouse, tugging Voley against his will. If I leave him out on the deck, he’ll be swept overboard as soon as the we drop out from this wave. Somehow we get all the way into the wheelhouse before we fall again, and I shut the door this time. Then we crash down. I stumble and break my fall on broken glass. The water comes in again, but with the door closed it sloshes around on the floor, bathing me in the shock of a thousand icy needles.

  Like the chaos is all somehow part of normal experience, Ernest proclaims that we’re almost past them. And I can’t imagine that but I cling tightly to a knob at the base of the wheelhouse and try to bring myself back up to my feet. Dusty lifts my arm, and I’m out of the water. I check behind to make sure Voley isn’t going to fly out through the wheelhouse door. He’s still hanging on, focused on every one of his paws at once, trying to keep his balance. Dusty holds me up. I look for the first time at where we are in the lake. The ship is fighting to get back into the center, and the waterspouts are nowhere in sight. I spin my neck and see them—they’re behind us. The vision only lasts a second as we drop again, but this time I hold onto Dust
y’s arm and I stay up. Ernest roars like some kind of crazed animal. Like he’s challenging the sea. Come on, come on, he says. And I know he’s not challenging the sea, but cheering on the Resilience. Like she needs encouragement to get through this last wave. But it’s not the last wave. We rise and crash again and again, a wall of water spilling in through the wheelhouse window each time. Dusty tells me to hold Voley so he can open the door and let the water slide out to the deck. I don’t know how I summon the strength, but I do, and I lift Voley up all the way off the ground while Dusty opens the door. The water escapes in a flash as the ship drives up another crest. Dusty shuts the door just in time, and I fall to the floor together with Voley as we slam into the bottom of the trough. The ship jerks her nose back up immediately, rising again. There’d be no turning back if they hit this, Ernest says. At first I think he’s talking nonsense to himself, or cheering on the ship again. But then I figure out he’s talking about Russell and Clemmy. If they’d gone through this same weather, and these waterspouts don’t go away like normal ones, then they’d be forced to find another way out to the open sea where we had waited. And I fear for a moment that we will make it to land, even to Leadville, only to find Russell and Clemmy are nowhere—that they’ve gone around, following a new route, just to get back to the Resilience. But she won’t be there anymore, because we’ll have gone in after them. And that will be the end of it. They’ll have no more time to circle in again. And I curse myself for forcing us into this all, because it means their lives. Russell’s life. If only we’d waited another day for them to come around. I see them in my mind—frozen but filled with hope, skirting some far bank of the mountains, curving back to find where the Resilience was only an hour ago. I see the hope disappear as they see open brown nothing.

  All my thoughts and fears slip away because of the rocking. It doesn’t change, and I keep waiting for the cries from Ernest, the last goodbyes, the sign that the Sea Queen Marie’s fate has come upon this ship too. With each rock I brace for the noise—the bow snap. And the water to rise up and swallow us in icy tombs. There’ll be no second miracle escape like there was in Chicago. This time, there are no life rafts. There is no Russell to drag me to safety. Just plain death. And the part of me that has always retained the undying optimism that Russell first gave me, the optimism that has sustained me even when Russell’s own version of it calloused and hardened over, realizes it too must die with me: the hope, the buried dream of no longer moving after ghosts and legends of cities without rain—no longer running after a happy life. It’s all invisible stuff, and it matters nothing to the sea and the sky and the rain. It’s only here in my head, and when I go, down into the sea, there’ll be no signs of it anymore. No record that it ever existed, that I ever fought for the veneer with Russell. That we came so far, overcame so much.

  For all the thinking I’m doing about death, I barely notice that the ship’s intermittent rise isn’t so steep, and that the drop and jerk isn’t so hard. And then a smell lets me know at last that we will live. Even if it’s just for another hour. Or another day. We will live.

  It’s the smell of smoke, the tobacco that is burning in Ernest’s pipe. And the ship is sailing manageably again, and Ernest is smoking, and we’re well past the waterspouts. No one speaks. It’s like nothing happened. Like the window of the wheelhouse never blew out, like we never almost capsized. Dusty’s back on his map, and Ernest is just smoking, and looking full, like he’s had a big meal. I don’t understand it and I don’t care because it all makes me happy in one uncontrollable rush of realization—we made it. And the joy is made into ecstasy by the sky. It’s there, all white and beautiful, like we’d seen before, but come now to us and spread out like a broad curtain of pearl. It’s welcoming us into the Rockies. And though the sloping mud castles still surround both sides of the ship, and the waves still rock me to the core, all of us know what the white sky has in store for us. If we can only stay afloat to turn the next corner. There will be snow.

  Chapter 3

  We sail on and fight through swells to reach a low crust of mountain where the great river turns. Ernest tells us he’s going to put in the sea anchor so that we can eat something, and he disappears toward the stern. The wind blows through the open wheelhouse window and stings my face, and I look at Dusty and Voley. Voley has started to shake a little bit from the cold, and Dusty says we better get below deck to warm up. All I can think is that if the water somehow got below deck and put out the stove, we’re going to freeze to death. I think about the tiny stove Russell had on the motorboat, and I wonder if that would be enough to keep him alive if he got stuck somewhere on these mountains. And then I wonder—what if he reached the snow, and kept going? Didn’t turn around and circle back to find us waiting for him. I can’t decide which choice would give him a better chance. But having come through the attack of the sea alive, I feel like there is some hope. Maybe we will find him.

  We descend into a wall of warm air that envelops us. My stomach is still torn up, and I don’t think I’ll be able to eat. But the rocking isn’t nearly as bad down here, and I go lie on the floor right in front of the stove. Dusty and Voley join me and we don’t say anything. We’re crawling back to life, all of us together, feeling the pain start up in our hands. My feet still have no feeling. Dusty tells me to take off my shoes and clothes and let them dry. I strip everything off. When Ernest comes down, he doesn’t bat an eye that we’re in our underwear. He tells us there are more clothes. He goes to the corner of the room and drags out an old duffel bag. He starts to go through it and finds a change of clothes for each of us. I put on dry boxer shorts and socks and then over that slip into thermals. Dusty does the same. And then at last Ernest undresses right in front of us, pipe dangling out of his mouth. I can’t help but watch his bear of a body, with enough fur on it that I think he’s got a great advantage over anyone else for the warmth it must provide. He turns his back to us and changes out his wet clothes, and together Dusty and I see the scars on his back. There are three long lines that cut and twist in putty lines. They go all the way down from his shoulder to his butt. I almost turn away, but I can’t. I want to ask him what happened. He senses this anyway and when he turns back to us he says, We all have our scars, don’t we?

  He heads off to some other part of the ship and brings back a block of frozen fish. On the table he starts to hack it apart. Then he holds something else up, high as if he’s trying to catch some light from above. What’s that? asks Dusty. Thermometer, says Ernest. Thirty-two degrees. Coldest I’ve seen since the rain started. He goes on about the poles, and how he thinks they’re all mixed up. In new spots. He’s into his theory on the rain and how it started. And how the Arctic and Antarctic are probably jungles now, hot and balmy, and that’s really where we should have headed. But they’re thousands of miles away. We’d never reach them. He says we’re at the new North Pole.

  I can’t eat the fish but Ernest tells me I have no choice. He doesn’t know when we’ll have our next shot to eat. And it’s important to eat everything we have now because there might not be anymore fishing after this. And the fish will spoil. Or maybe they won’t, he says, with the cold. But either way, we need their strength. He says it as if the spirit of the fish themselves are going to help us now. For him I choke some of the icy slime down. It feels awful and I nearly throw up again. But then my stomach calms down, and everything slows, and Ernest tells us we’re warming up now. Going to be ready to turn the corner, he goes on. I think about what’s ahead. I ask him about the sky. Why it’s so white. The sky of my Clint nightmare.

  It’s a snow sky. I don’t know how much longer until we hit it, Ernest says. It still hasn’t sunk in—the possibility that we’ll live long enough to see the snow. And the end of the rain. But Ernest seems pretty sure of it. He seems pretty sure about our whole expedition again. Like the test we’ve just come through has proven the Resilience is worthy of its name. But there’s still going to be the problem of the landing, he says.

/>   “Landing?” Dusty asks, shocked. He can’t imagine that we’d leave the ship now, the way the weather is. And I haven’t thought that far ahead either. But it seems like it might be the only thing to do, one way or the other. We’ve got to get to Leadville, says Ernest. And if we’re going to find Clemmy and Russell, we have to land.

  We don’t know if they’re even on land, Dusty argues. No we don’t, says Ernest. But I have a feeling they are. How can we do it? I ask. We’ll have to bring her in as close as possible. Then he stops his explanation. How close can we get? asks Dusty. Depends, Ernest says. We don’t know where the land curves back up underneath us. The closer we go, the greater the risk we crack the hull. But the farther out we anchor, the longer we have to be in it. In it? I say, unable to imagine that he must mean the freezing foam that’s rocking us still. Swim, Ernest clarifies. And only Dusty knows what it feels like. I see him sinking into his memory, reliving when he decided to try to swim back to Blue City. We won’t make it, Dusty says. We will, I’ll get her close enough. Look, Ernest says. And he brings out the map of the Rockies with Leadville marked on it.

  It’s only another few miles inland, and then we should see the city. There’ll be shelter there. There better be. We’ve committed, so we’ve got to try, he goes on. Neither of us reply. We’re stuck in thoughts of the water, despite the relative warmth and safety we feel again. The idea that we could swim and get ashore and not freeze to death seems impossible. But I can’t wrestle the choice anymore. I’ve decided, and Ernest is right. We’ve committed. I’ll die if that’s what it’s going to take. To take the best shot at finding him. He’d do it for me. I convince myself of this as Ernest smokes and then decides we’d better keep sailing while there’s light. Lie down for an hour, if it’ll help. I’ll guide her in. And he puts his rain suit back on over his new clothes and heads back into the cold above.