The Dinosaur Chronicles (21 page)

Had it been a rout and an embarrassment, the South might have been able to sue for peace and have seceded as a new nation.

In no conceivable fashion could the South have actually won
and
taken over the entire country. As a noted historian of this era has noted, the North was actually fighting the war half-heartedly, with one hand tied behind its back. The North’s population and industrial base was simply too much for the South to overcome.

One issue, as writer, that I’d like to point out about “Edges of Memory”: This was my first serious attempt at putting on bra and panties—namely, writing a tale from the point-of-view of a female protagonist. Many writers find writing “outside of their gender” difficult. If you’re an honest writer, you’ll admit that it
is
difficult. With practice, you get better. Analytically, Gladys Brill is more of a generic “good guy” who happens to be female, than a female
in essence
. Samantha Fisher, in the upcoming “Crawl Ice” story, though not the main protagonist, seems much more real to me.
 

Evan Fisher lugged the suitcase down the walk, across a spray of ice and snow, and heaved it onto the opened tailgate of his neighbor’s pickup truck.

“That’s the last of it,” Fisher said, stuffing his gloved hands into his jacket pockets.

“Thanks, Evan,” Hank Stricker said, shoving the suitcase crosswise. He latched up the tailgate and added, “I just wish you’d get out of here along with the rest of us.”

Fisher looked back and watched as Hank’s wife locked the front door of their house. “Don’t see a need, Hank. I’ve got wood for the fireplace and enough gasoline to run the generator—when I need it—for two weeks. Power should be back by then.”

“There could be aftershocks,” Hank said. “Slides. If Mountain Electric can’t get their trucks to the lines—”

Fisher put his hand on his neighbor’s shoulder. “Hank, you worry too much.”

Snow crunched as Hank’s wife came alongside.

“Hank’s a worrier, all right,” she said, winking at her husband. “It keeps him out of trouble.”

Hank blushed but added, “So how’s Samantha feel about this?”

Fisher hesitated. “She’s not crazy about staying.” Then he grinned. “But I told her it would be romantic—just the two of us, all alone in town. Almost like pioneers.”

Hank’s wife laughed. “Evan, a weekend in a nice motel is romantic. Two weeks in a cold, dark valley in Colorado is a
nightmare
.”

—

Fisher watched Hank’s truck crawl up the winding north road. From time to time, the early-afternoon sun flashed across the tailgate, giving it one last lick before the truck finally disappeared into a cleft.

Fisher turned and trudged slowly up the block, to the rancher he shared with his wife. He wondered if the coming isolation would be a good thing or a bad thing for his marriage. Samantha had complained about being ignored, being neglected. For at least the next week, he figured, there would be no one else
to
“nore” or “glect.”

She should appreciate that.

As Fisher turned from the street into his walkway, he staggered as a sudden loss of traction threw him aside.

He righted himself and looked down.

A six-foot area of his front walk had iced over.

Ice in the middle of a Colorado November was no surprise. But he’d cleared the walk just that morning, and it had not gotten warm enough for any melt.

For a moment he contemplated the idea that Sam had poured water on the walk to spite him or—and his gut twinged at the thought—to deliberately injure him.

Sam might’ve changed her mind about staying
, Fisher thought,
but she’s not crazy
.

Fisher walked to his door and let himself in.

The front door opened into the living room.

Sam’s voice carried out from the kitchen. “Evan?”

“Yes.”

“You sonofabitch!”

Fisher rushed into the kitchen. His wife sat in jacket and panties, her bare right leg elevated on the kitchen table. A bloody bandage and a bag of ice lay across her knee.

Sam spat out the words: “You said you cleared the walk!”

“I did!”

“My ass! There’s a patch of ice—”

“I know! I nearly fell on it myself!”

Sam’s voice dropped to a menace, and she bared her teeth.

“Do you really mean to get rid of me?”

“Dammit, Sam, it’s winter out there! You’ve got to watch for the hazards, always!”

“You said you cleared the walk!”

“And I did—this morning. I don’t know how the ice happened. It
couldn’t
have happened. It never got above freezing today!” Fisher took off his gloves and reached for her knee. “Does it hurt? A lot?”

Sam sliced her fingernails across the back of his hand. “Do. Not. Touch. Me!”

Fisher pulled back, gasping at the sting of the welts. “Look,” he said, “there are hot springs in the area. Maybe the earthquake opened up other channels, and one opened under our lot. That could explain the ice.
It’s not my fault!
”

Sam narrowed her eyes to sharp, cutting slits. “Evan Fisher, as soon as the painkillers I took kick in, I’m taking the car and driving to Pineway. I’ll spend the week in a motel there, and you can spend the week here
and rot
. And you damn well better hope by the end of that week it’s me who comes back and not a notice from some lawyer!”

Fifteen minutes later, Sam hobbled from the kitchen into the bedroom, threw an overnight case onto the bed and began stuffing it with clothes and assorted
objets de femme
. “While I’m doing this,” she snapped, “you could salt the walk and throw out some kitty litter!”

It was too cold for calcium chloride to do any good, but Fisher knew it was pointless to argue. He trudged out the back of the house to the storage shed and grabbed one bag of melt and another of litter. He walked around the house, avoiding another confrontation with his wife. He put extra melt on the steps and the front porch. He wanted to be sure Sam saw it. Then he worked his way toward the street, pouring out the contents of the bags.

By the time he was done, Sam was standing at the front door with the suitcase at her side. For a moment, neither spoke. Then Sam said, “I’m not going to carry this thing myself!”

So Fisher carried her suitcase with his right hand as he held her upright—with her grudging acceptance—with his left. If she noticed the ice melt, she didn’t show it.

Sam dropped into the driver’s seat and Fisher stuffed the suitcase into the back. As she fished the keys from her purse, Fisher said, “Drive carefully, okay?”

Sam looked back, and for a moment her dark eyes softened. But she put the key into the ignition, cranked the car and pulled away without a word.

—

Following the quake and the loss of power, the hundred-odd families of the town had borne the cold and dark for several days before taking to their cars and leaving. The Strickers had been the last to go. Fisher had coaxed Sam into staying by promising her a clutch in the town square—an encounter under the ridiculously grim, reserved statue of the founder—at high noon, in
flagrante delicto
.

The coquette in Sam had laughed at the idea, and the rebel in her had embraced it.

The ice on the walk had shattered it.

The goddamned ice.

Fisher clenched his fists. Anger and disappointment ran through him, and without thinking he found himself back at his shed. He picked up the snow-shovel and the axe. He wouldn’t be chopping any wood, but if he held the axe vertically, with the head down, and worked it as a pile-driver, he could crack ice on the walkway.

He’d use the shovel to clear away the pieces.

And for the next hour, Evan Fisher did just that. The six-foot slab of ice yielded to his anger, and the chips glistened in the sun as the snow-shovel tossed them into the bank.

Only when he was done, standing and admiring the results of his work, did Fisher hear the ice behind him.

Ice doesn’t sound. Ice is silent. But Fisher turned and saw a new sheet of ice inching its way across the walk, and as it moved, crystals of frozen water, forced into a motion they resented, screeched in protest.

“Damn!” Fisher cursed, and for the second time that afternoon he moved without thinking. He took the axe and pounded the moving ice. Pieces scuttled by his boots, and the screaming of the ice grew until his ears heard nothing else.

Fisher pounded and pounded, and chips flew left and right.

He didn’t notice the chips accumulating around his boots until it was too late.

Fisher tried to move. He couldn’t.

The ice sheet had begun as a half-inch slab creeping across his walk. Now it was two inches deep and encasing his boots in a solid glassy block.

Fisher stopped pounding the walk and began pounding on his boots. The screaming of the ice grew again, and as quickly as he cracked the ice it would seal itself.

And each time the ice resealed, it grew just a bit taller.

Fisher turned the axe around and swung it edge-to-boot.

This time the crack in the ice lasted long enough for him to yank his boot up a whole inch before the ice grabbed it back. He repeated the operation on his other boot, but by then the ice had regained its loss from the first boot. Cold sweat dripped from Fisher’s brow as he switched tactics again.

He turned the axe sideways and swung to cut the metal clasps that sealed his boots. He swung too deeply and yelped with pain. But there wasn’t time to cry or whine—he swung again.

He strained, and his right foot, bare and bleeding, emerged from one boot.

Like a crazy man, he danced on his bare foot to keep the ice from grabbing it, while at the same time trying to cut open his left boot. He swung and missed, putting a six-inch gash into his dancing foot. He swung again, catching several clasps, and yanked his other foot free.

But to do so he had to keep his right foot on the ice, for leverage, and now it was frozen in the screaming white.

Fisher made one mad pound of the axe on his gashed foot.

Desperation and adrenalin, and the loss of several inches of skin, made his escape.

—

Fisher sat on his sofa and stared through the window. On the walkway, his boots, his snow-shovel and his axe lay covered in a taffy-pull of tormented ice. Nothing moved, and in the last rays of the setting sun only the stray snow-crystal twinkled to give the bleached tableau any life.

After making it through his front door, Fisher had washed and cleansed his right foot, using nearly all the peroxide in the medicine kit. He’d screamed when the astringent hit the inches of missing skin—it was like pouring fire on a broken blister. No one heard him, however, and his male ego did not suffer.

What did suffer was his ability to think. After bandaging his foot, he should have called for help, for while the electric was out, telephone service had survived. But he thought,
What am I going to tell anyone? That
ice
tried to kill me?
 

They’ll put me away.

He should simply have lied. He’d had an accident with his axe. His foot was infected. Come and get him. But the benefits of constructive prevarication had not occurred to him.

Now, as he sat watching the shadows swallow the valley, he wondered if his old pair of boots still lay in the attic, and if the right of that pair would fit his bandaged and swollen foot.

That could wait until morning. For tonight he had enough wood for the fireplace and enough gas in the generator. He got up from the sofa and hobbled to the back door. He unlatched the wall panel housing the generator control and held down the start button until the yellow “Running” lamp stayed lit.

Fisher switched on the kitchen light. It flickered a little but threw off the encroaching shadows. He found his laptop and plugged it into a free socket. Generator power—at least at the level of his generator—was lousy for computing equipment, but this was a matter of urgency. The cell towers were out, but his Internet provider still offered land-line service. He plugged the PC’s modem connection into the phone jack and logged on.

For hours, Fisher searched the Internet for information about ice and ice phenomena. He learned much about many things but nothing about the
one
thing. Finally, around two in the morning, to the crackle of the fireplace in the living room and the hum of the generator in the back yard, he happened upon an obsolete, no-longer-supported web crawler and the query combination “earthquakes & ice.”

The query brought up just one link. And the article had been pulled or deleted. Still, Fisher felt certain now he was not the only one ever to have experienced the phenomenon, and his evidence was a broken link, a brief description and an orphan title: Crawl Ice.

—

Fisher awoke as the last log in the fireplace was turning black and the first rays of the sun scratched their way across the wallpaper.

He’d slept, fully-clothed, on the sofa in the living room, his bad foot elevated to control swelling. He hobbled to the fireplace, stoked the embers, and put on a new log. He’d pulled the breaker on the baseboard heat the day the electric went out and had become dependent on the fireplace. The generator couldn’t handle the draw of the electric heaters anyway.

After changing his bandage, he climbed into the attic and retrieved his old boots. These zippered up the sides, but one zipper was rusted, and he couldn’t zip the one on his right boot because of his foot. But he stuffed his feet into them anyway and tied lengths of rope around the ankle-points to keep the boots from slipping as he walked.

Two bowls of cold cereal in rancid icy milk made him feel just a bit better, and he wondered if what had happened to him yesterday had all been a dream.

He rose from the kitchen table, grabbed the broom from its nook behind the refrigerator, and returned to the living room.

Cautiously he opened the front door and looked out.

The snow-shovel, the axe and his new boots were still there, encased in white.