Buried Alive! (8 page)

“Nicky, do you think—” Jack began. He cleared his throat. “We should get that duffel bag out of the basket. It has supplies in it.”

“You're right,” Nicky answered slowly. “Only one of us can fit in the hole. I'll do it. Unless—you know—if you want to.”

“You go ahead.”

“No, I'll do it,” Ashley declared. “I'll fit in there better than either of you.”

“All right. You go, girl,” Nicky replied.

The wind kicked up, ruffling tufts of Nicky's hair. A truce had been called. This time it was real, because they'd suddenly realized that survival in Denali wasn't a game. They'd need each other just to stay alive.

The three of them turned toward the basket. Ashley dropped inside the hole, unlashed the duffel bag, and yanked it free. It took a minute to unknot the ropes. Then she looked inside. “There's some stuff, but no food. I'm already hungry.”

“We can go a long time without eating. But we're going to need a shelter.” Jack studied the darkness rolling in from the mountains. They were facing freezing temperatures, no food, and no shelter, and there was not another human for tens of square miles. If the three of them didn't use every bit of ingenuity they had, it would become their grave as well.

N
icky took a turn rummaging through the duffel bag. Throwing out things left and right, he said, “Chaz sure didn't carry that much on his sled. I thought he told your mom he was prepared with food and everything. What a liar. No food, no first-aid supplies—nothing good. We're in trouble, aren't we?”

“Don't get rid of anything,” Jack ordered. “You don't know what we might need. Are you sure there isn't anything to eat in there?”

“Just these, and I'm drawing the line at the fat bars,” Nicky exclaimed, holding up one as though he were posing it for a camera. “Yo, read the label. Even if we were stranded out here for a week, you wouldn't catch me touching them. They're for dogs.”

Silently, Ashley picked up everything Nicky had thrown onto the snow: the fat bars, a tin bucket, a tin cup, candles, dog booties, and a metal box she pried open to reveal matches.

“Wait, here's something,” Nicky yelled, pulling a small camp stove out of the depths of the bag. “We can light the stove to keep warm. I mean, we could if we just had some matches. Oh!” Noticing the open box in Ashley's hand, he added, “All right, Ashley! You've got matches. Now we're cookin'!”

Nicky burrowed into the bag once again. “Great. After all the time we've been digging through the snow with our hands—look what was in the duffel.” He held up a shovel and waved it like a flag.

It was a short-handled shovel with a square blade only six inches wide, but it would have made things a whole lot easier if they'd found it earlier. Jack's fingers were still stiff from digging. No one asked if they should keep on shoveling to find Chaz—or Chaz's body—and Jack didn't bring it up, either. Nicky was right; they had to focus on their own survival. A storm was moving in, which meant the three of them were in more trouble than either Nicky or Ashley realized. But Jack understood. He knew the perils of hypothermia, which could easily overtake them all. Darkness was approaching, a storm loomed, and as of now they were completely unprepared. A different kind of clock was ticking.

“Jack, I'm getting cold. The wind's really kicking up.” Ashley's nylon hood sparkled with frost, and her eyelashes, too, were frosted white. Jack supposed his own eyelashes looked the same, but Nicky's didn't. Even though the temperature had plunged somewhere around zero, the exertion of digging had flushed Nicky's cheeks.

“So how are we supposed to make ourselves a shelter?” he asked. “There's no hammer or nails in that bag. You got a plan?”

“We'll build with the only thing we've got,” Jack told him. “Snow. We'll have to make a snow cave, and we need to get started right away. I don't like the looks of that sky.”

Raising his eyebrows, which had started to grow a thin skim of frost, Nicky said, “Tell me what to do.”

“Yeah,” Ashley echoed. “Tell us.”

“First we have to find the right place. Even with the shovel it will take us a long time to dig. We need to make a chamber big enough to stay in.”

“But what about the rangers?” Ashley objected. “They won't be able to see us in a snow cave, and I know they'll be out looking for us. When we don't come back on time, Mom and Dad'll get the park people to send a plane.”

“Think for a minute, Ashley. We're not where we're supposed to be. Chaz said he was taking us to Wonder Lake, remember? That's where they'll send the planes. Who knows where we are right now?”

“So…you think we'll stay here more than one night?”

Jack dodged the question. How could he know that? “Bottom line is we'll freeze out here without shelter. I mean freeze—to death! Like I said, we're going to have to work together.”

“Go for it, Eagle Scout,” Nicky said. Jack whipped his head around to see if Nicky was being smart-mouthed, but his face looked serious. “You can be the boss man. Tell me what to do.”

He wished he were as sure about all this as he was pretending to be. “First we have to pick a place where the snow's not so hard to dig,” he answered. “Avalanche snow hardens to cement. If we get to the lee side of the creek, we ought to be OK.” Oh Lord, I hope that's right, he thought. When he'd gone winter camping with his troop, they'd hiked into a perfectly safe snow basin with no avalanche danger at all. “We need a slope with snow at least six feet deep. Let's go.” After they hiked to a slope that looked perfect, Jack began to thrust at the snowbank with the shovel.

“Want me to dig?” Nicky asked.

“No, I want you to remove the snow that I shovel out. First I have to tunnel in about two feet straight back, then angle up for another foot. That's just to make the entrance. I'll dig first while you move the snow away.”

“What about me?” Ashley asked.

“You move snow. Shove it away from the entrance.”

As Jack dug, Nicky started pulling away the snow so energetically that Jack had to warn him, “Take it easy. You don't want to sweat. If you sweat too much your clothes will get damp, then freeze later. You could get hypothermia, and I don't even want to think about that.”

“What's hypothermia?”

“It's when your body temperature gets real low. Too low! It can kill.”

“Yeah? Well, so can that storm. We'd better get moving, Jack. Flakes are already coming down.”

With the three of them working, it went faster than Jack had hoped, although Ashley was hampered by the loss of one glove. She scraped snow awkwardly with her left hand, keeping her bare right hand pulled up inside her sleeve.

After Jack had dug two feet straight back, he began to tunnel upward.

“Let me do some digging,” Nicky urged.

“OK. Let me get out first,” Jack answered, backing out, then letting Nicky crawl into the hole. “See how it's angling up?” he asked, feeling kind of foolish as he talked to Nicky's backside. “After we make the main room of the cave and light the camp stove and candles, the warm air will stay trapped in there and not escape through the entrance. It's like a—like a split-level house where you go up half a flight of stairs to the main floor.”

“Real cool,” Nicky grunted, his words swallowed by the tunnel of snow he'd crawled into. One after another, he dropped shovelfuls of snow into the entry hole for Jack and Ashley to scoop out. This snow didn't have anywhere near the mortar-like texture of the avalanche, although it wasn't the powdery kind that skiers like, either. It was somewhere in the middle.

Nicky dug like a Roto-Rooter as more flakes fell from the sky, whipping Jack's cheeks with tiny razor-sharp crystals. “Hold it,” Jack called to him. “Let me get in there and take a look.”

Nicky backed out. The entrance was so narrow that only one of them at a time could fit inside. When Jack crawled in to check their progress, he had to admit he was impressed. In another hour they should be able to finish carving a room about the area of a pup tent, not big enough for them to stand in, but high enough that they could sit comfortably and maybe curl up together to catch a little sleep. Most important, they could stay warm in there. They could survive.

Jack had estimated the time pretty closely. In an hour and 12 minutes, they completed the snow cave, just after the sun had dipped all the way behind the highest mountain peak. The long-lasting twilight had already tinted the snow to pale amber. Snow pelted them now, and Ashley hugged herself, shivering like a rabbit.

“Ashley, you go first,” Nicky told her.

“Th-th-thanks,” she replied. One by one, the three of them crawled into the cave. The area turned out to be smaller than Jack had hoped. Roughly four feet square and only three and a half feet high, it gave them barely enough room to sit upright, and not quite enough for them to stretch their legs straight out in front of them.

“It's what I call cozy,” Nicky commented. “Very cozy. And dark. Where are the candles, Ashley?”

“Right here.” She pulled out the items from the duffel bag one by one: the tin cup, the bucket, the camp stove, the fat bars. Then she reached for Nicky's hand in the darkness to give him the candles and matches.

After Nicky lit a candle and stuck it into the snow floor, he picked up the camp stove to examine it. It looked something like a lamp, with a circular plastic base where a metal cylinder of propane fit snugly. At the top sat a burner similar to one on a gas range, with three metal prongs that would hold a pot or pan. “Let's light this sucker,” Nicky said.

“Not yet. First I have to poke a ventilation hole through our roof to the outside. Whenever you burn something in a tight space, you need ventilation or you could die from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Yo, can everything in Alaska kill ya?” Nicky asked.

“Just about.” Jack took the tin cup and pushed it against the snow overhead, rotating it to make a circular hole. When he pulled out the cup, snow came with it—he dumped the snow into the bucket, repeating the process until the bucket was nearly full. “Well, it's going to take me a while to break through,” he said, “but maybe you can light the camp stove now, Nicky, if you keep the flame real low. Ashley, set the bucket over the flame so the snow will melt, because we need to get water for drinking.”

“Why does the woman always have to do the cooking?” Ashley complained, but she was smiling.

The whole process seemed to take forever: Use the tin cup to scrape a hollow in their ceiling, dump the snow into the bucket, heat the bucket on the stove, get about half a cup of water, take turns drinking it, and keep doing the whole thing over and over again. The cave didn't exactly grow warm, but between the small flame of the stove and the body warmth of the three of them huddling together, the temperature rose enough for Jack to unzip his parka and pull off his gloves.

“Finally!” he yelled, as he pushed his fist through the snow roof to touch outside air. Wiggling his fingers at the dark night, he told them, “We have ventilation! And it isn't snowing too hard right now.”

“Do I have to keep drinking this melted snow? I don't want to drink any more—I'm sick of it!” Ashley complained.

“Drink! Your brother commands you,” Jack told her.

“Then I'll just have to go to the bathroom.”

“Stop drinking! Your brother commands you.”

“Ha, ha. Are you sure there wasn't any food in the duffel bag?”

Jack shook his head and tried to close his mind off against his own hunger. “Just the disgusting fat bars. Nicky was right. Listen to the first two ingredients: poultry fat and fish meal. No way I'll ever be that hungry.”

“Throw them outside,” Ashley ordered. “They stink.”

“Sure. I'm not gonna eat them.” Jack slid across the narrow floor of snow, which by now was getting pretty compacted. Outside, wind moaned through the trees with deep sighs. Although the snowfall had lightened, the wind had picked up. That meant the tracks from Chaz's dogsled would be totally obliterated by morning, and without those tracks to guide them…well, Jack would face that problem in the morning. With his feet, he kicked the fat bars outside, then shoved the duffel bag against the entrance opening, blocking it most of the way. Scooting backward on his behind, he squeezed himself between Ashley and Nicky, trying not to be too obvious, but not wanting Nicky Milano pressed close against his sister.

For several minutes they sat in silence while Ashley made shadows on the snowy wall of their cave, her fingers moving as delicately as if she were playing piano keys. First a dog shadow, then a bunny, and after that a few more shadows that didn't look like any recognizable creatures. Finally she asked, “Nicky, do you believe in ghosts?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard. “I don't know,” he said, staring intently at his chapped knuckles. “Yes. No. Maybe.” He shook his head. “Why?”

“I know Jack doesn't, but before we got in the snow cave, I was looking up, and I saw this shadow in the very tip of a fir tree. It was at least six feet long, and it wound around the treetop like a black cloth.”

“That was an owl,” Jack snorted.

Ashley rapped him sharply with her knuckles. “I know what an owl looks like, and it wasn't an owl. Do you—” She licked her lips, then said, “Nicky, do you think Chaz is dead?”

“I know he is. Ashley, I checked, and there were no footprints anywhere. He didn't come out of that slide.”

“Do you think his spirit's spying on us?”

“Nah, I bet he's down there where bad guys go, roasting away.”

“But I think I saw him. You and Jack were busy with the tunnel—”

Jack couldn't stand it. It wasn't that he didn't believe in the afterlife, but there was no way a ghost would waste its time zooming around treetops. Spirits must have better things to do. “Come on, Chaz is buried under ten feet of snow. He's dead,” Jack protested, hoping he was right.

Nicky leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. His hair gleamed copper in the soft light. “When I was six, I thought I saw my mom a few times. My dad would take me to the park, and I swear I saw her, swinging high on the swings, the way we used to.”

“Really?” Ashley breathed. “What happened to her?”

“I—I don't want to talk about any of my family. I…can't.”

Jack saw his sister swallow her disappointment as Nicky balanced his elbows on his knees, his head bowed so that he closed in on himself, almost like a box that folded flat. The silence was uncomfortable, but Jack didn't know what to say. Drawing people out was Ashley's job.

Suddenly, Ashley brightened. “Hey, I know a wolverine legend that I read in a ranger's book. If we get back home—” She swallowed, and Jack guessed she was asking herself if they would ever really escape, alive, from Denali's bitter cold. After a small, wavering breath, she smiled again. “When we get back, Mom'll be so happy that we know the answer to her mystery. We can tell her that Chaz killed the wolverines.” Her dark eyes widened as she made a connection. “Oh my gosh, remember what happened to his friend, the one who shot the wolverine? That guy died. Then Chaz killed five wolverines, and now he's dead, too. Maybe that's why the avalanche got him and not us. Maybe the ancient spirits got him.”