The Dinosaur Chronicles (23 page)

Sam nodded. “So?”

“Say it took 40 minutes at 30 miles per hour. If we walk two miles per hour it would take 600 minutes, or 10 hours. But we’d probably run into traffic before 8 hours were up. We could
walk
our way out of here!”

Sam’s brows arched at the suggestion, but she didn’t dismiss it out-of-hand. “The day’s half done,” she said. “We’d be walking at night in sub-zero weather.”

“We’d have to wait until tomorrow. But we can do this. I could put together a box of supplies, tie it to the hand-truck in the shed, and we could roll it along, once we got to the road.”

“We could put some hot coffee in a thermos,” she added.

“The thermos is in my pack, in the car, but I can make another with two plastic bottles and some shredded newsprint. Won’t be as good, but it should work for a while.”

Sam put her arms around his neck. “All right, Mr. Self-Reliant,” she said, kissing him. “Rescue me.”

—

They spent the afternoon making sandwiches for the trip, laying out clothes to wear for the trek, and keeping warm. Fisher had the generator on to cook the evening meal and to catch the news on the radio. Except for the threat lurking outside, it was the most pleasant afternoon he’d spent with Sam in years.

They kept the fire going. They sat on the sofa. They spoke of old things and new things, of plans forgotten and reborn. Fisher felt he was falling in love with her all over again.

Dusk fell and Sam said, “This has been wonderful, considering.”

“You’ve always wanted me to take you on an adventure.”

She tipped her head. “The way the wind’s blowing, it sounds like it will be.”

“It’s a dry front. Weatherman said the wind would be up tonight, but it should be fair tomorrow.”

They fell asleep together, on the sofa.

When Fisher awoke, his scrambled senses fought to set the world aright. His face was plastered, face-down, on a hard, rough cloth. His nose hurt. For that matter, his head hurt. He couldn’t think; he only felt a throbbing pain between his eyes.

He blinked and drew breath. And coughed. Breathing hurt, too.

He groped around and found something soft on a platform over his head. An arm. A cheek.

Sam.

Sofa!

He’d fallen off the sofa. Okay, that made sense. But something else was wrong.

It shouldn’t be dark.
He didn’t know why, but the darkness bothered him.

He struggled to move. He crawled to the kitchen, found the junk drawer on the third attempt and pulled. The drawer stuck, and he rattled it up and down as he yanked. It flew out, gouged a new channel in his rib-cage and overturned on the floor.

He sucked air and tried to ignore the pain in his side. He fished around on the floor. His fingers finally fell on a familiar knurled cylinder.

When he turned the flashlight on, his eyes still wouldn’t work. He blinked again and again, rubbed his eyes and shone the flashlight all around.

Shapes of familiar items struggled to define themselves amid a thin sooty haze.

The fire’s died.
The thought seemed profound.

Fine, but why couldn’t he breathe? The pounding in his head wouldn’t let up and nothing much made sense.

Some primal instinct told him he needed air.

He crawled from the kitchen to the bedroom and dug the shotgun out from behind the headboard. He crawled back to the living room and sat upright, against the wall, facing the window. He set the flashlight on its end, where it would throw its feeble light up and around.

He aimed and fired.

Glass tinkled, and Fisher awaited the blast of cold, clear air he knew would follow.

It didn’t.

Fisher swallowed hard. Nothing made sense. He aimed again and fired the other barrel.

Something else fell, but it didn’t tinkle like glass. The cold air he expected arrived, and he took great, gulping breaths as he crawled toward the window. He stopped halfway, as his mind made some complaint about splinters, and then he remembered Sam.

He took two more breaths and staggered to his feet.

He reached over the sofa and shook her. “Sam!” he croaked. “Wake up!”

She didn’t budge.

He turned and tore down the window curtains. He set them, raggedly, across where he thought any glass might have fallen.

He went back to the sofa, grabbed Sam by the arms and dragged her to the shattered window. She was dead weight, but the icy air was reviving Fisher with every breath he took. He sat her up on the curtains and patted her face. “C’mon, Sam. C’mon!”

A minute later he was rewarded with a cough and the flicker of an eyelash. Sam moaned, “God it’s cold ...”

He stayed with her until she could sit on her own. “Keep breathing,” he said. “I want to check something.”

He got the flashlight and shone it on the fireplace. Dark, wet splotches tattooed the brick apron. He stuck his head into the hearth and pointed the light up the chimney.

“Sonofabitch!”

Sam said, “What do you see?”

“The
thing
’s covered up the chimney!” Fisher shuddered with the next icy blast of air and turned to the window. The reason his first barrel hadn’t gotten him air was now apparent. A sheet of ice, flat with the outside wall but six inches away from the window itself, covered that side of the house. The second barrel had blown a hole in that, and he had heard the pieces of ice skittering over the snow.

He ran to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the bedroom. Every window was shrouded by a milky curtain. From outside, the house must look like a confectioner’s nightmare.

The
thing
had been busy. If it hadn’t been for the damned wind, they might have heard it at work. Not that they could’ve done much about it, but they could have stood shifts and not been taken by surprise.

A loud
pop
echoed from the living room and Sam screamed.

Fisher ran into the room.

Sam said, “It’s at the door!”

Fisher licked his lips. The front door looked okay, and it was still too warm inside for the thing to enter, though with the fire out and the hole in the window, that wouldn’t last long. He decided he’d better check things out.

He opened the front door, quietly. He could see where ice, driven by the
thing
, had leached in around the frame of the old storm door and pooled in the cavity between the doors. Now the buildup had actually popped the storm door off its brackets. Fisher shut the door again.

He took Sam by the arm. “Into the kitchen. I’ll turn on the generator and we can boil water for heat.”

“And coffee.”

“No argument there.”

They walked to the kitchen and Fisher started the generator.

“Air’s still bad in here,” Sam said. “We need a draft, if only for a minute.”

Fisher nodded. “I’ll get the shotgun and blow a hole in the kitchen window. But this time I’ll raise the sash first.”

Fisher returned with the gun and several shells. He upped the sash and fired one barrel. Slabs of white fell away, and somewhere the scream of crawl ice echoed in the dark.

“It’s close,” Fisher said.

Sam shivered. “Does it always scream like that?”

“Only when it makes ice. It’s the moving ice, I think, that actually makes the sound.”

A couple of minutes later, Sam said, “It’s better in here now, but I never felt a draft.”

Fisher looked at Sam. “Damn I’m stupid!” He walked into the living room and switched on the light. Sam followed at his heels.

The hole in the living room’s window ice had been sealed.

“That was quick,” said Fisher. “Real quick. It didn’t scream but for a couple of seconds, and that was a two-foot gap!”

“Forget the hand-truck tomorrow,” Sam said. “We can make a run for it with grocery bags.”

“
If
we can get out.”

The crawl ice screamed again.

They returned to the kitchen, knowing what they’d find. The hole in the kitchen window ice had been sealed, too.

They stood in silence, stunned at the speed with which the thing had done its work. Only the hiss of the water simmering on the range broke the stillness.

“When it builds ice, it moves at about a foot per second now,” Fisher said. “Who knows how fast it moves through ice already laid?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that
if
we can break out, we might not be fast enough to get to the road before it catches up to us. And if one of us takes a spill—likely with all the ice now around—and has several appendages in contact with the ice at one time, the odds of getting caught go up even more.”

Sam gripped Fisher’s arm with both hands.

“We could try a diversion,” he went on. “Blast another hole with the shotgun, and as soon as we hear it fixing the hole, make a run for it.”

“Wouldn’t it first fix the hole we made to run out of?”

Fisher shook his head and took a deep breath. “I’m still not thinking straight. Yes. So we blast a hole in the living room window ice, and when we hear it fixing that again, we blast a hole in the kitchen window ice and drop out through the kitchen window.”

“It must be twenty below out there. Can’t we wait until dawn?”

“We better not. Let’s put on the layers of clothes we set out for tomorrow. Triple socks, triple hose. Ski masks. Two jackets. The works.”

As they put on the clothes, they heard the ice scream again and again, though the sound was muffled by the walls and the ice already glazing the house.

“Wonder why it’s building ice now?” Fisher muttered at one point. “Maybe it trapped some animals.”

Fifteen minutes after they started, they were ready. Sam had stuffed cookies and sandwiches into available pockets. Fisher had turned off the range and the generator and was holding the flashlight and shotgun. Sam wore her gloves, but Fisher kept his tied to his belt so he could work the gun triggers.

He gave Sam the flashlight to hold and said, “Ready?”

She peered back through ski goggles and mask. “Do it!”

Fisher aimed the weapon at the living room window ice and fired.

The blast rang loud, even through their ski masks, but no change appeared in the ice at the window.

Fisher thought he must’ve had a weak shell, so he fired the other barrel.

Again, the ice held.

“Yeah,” Sam said bitterly. “It trapped a couple of animals.”

—

Fisher paced up and down the living room exactly twice before tearing off his ski mask, storming back into the kitchen and hitting the generator button. He had a bad moment when the battery-powered starter took longer than usual to catch, but the “Running” light eventually came on.

His head was still pounding from the bad air and the chimney smoke, and he had a hard time focusing his thoughts.

Sam said, “It thickened the ice. It’s intelligent!”

“It has some smarts,” Fisher agreed, “but for a thing that’s lived its life underground for God-knows-how-long, I can’t give it intelligence. Maybe it figured the ice was weak—it had to repair it twice, you know, and maybe it figured to shore it up. The house is a heat source, it wants heat, and we just happen to be the cherries in the chocolate.”

Sam took out two cups and spooned instant coffee into them. The spoon shook as she held it. “With all the ice around,” she said, “it found those breaks mighty quickly.”

Fisher poured some of the simmering water into each cup. “It must’ve become sound-sensitive. Chasing noise. I made plenty of that when I was giving it the axe on the front walk.”

The same thought occurred to both of them at the same time, and they turned to look at the “Running” lamp. “It’ll eventually attack the generator,” Fisher said. “Not that there’s much gas left in it anyway.”

“Maybe it’s afraid of the electricity,” Sam offered.

Fisher tried to take one sip of coffee and spilled most of it on his jacket. He fought to clear his thoughts. Ice. Electricity. “No. Ice is a lousy conductor of electricity. I measured its resistance once in high school. Took a cube of ice, put the ohmmeter on it—the resistance is in the megohm range. If we had high-tension lines out there, then maybe we could do something. But not with a lousy, ragged 120 volts.”

Sam pulled up her goggles and wiped away tears. “It was just a thought.”

“We have
got
to get out of here!” Fisher slammed his fist on the counter, and Sam jumped. Fisher grabbed the doorknob and tried to open the back door. When that didn’t work, he put one foot against the wall and pulled again. The door was frozen shut.

The back door had only a screen door as partner. The front door had a storm door. Maybe the front door still opened.

He walked back into the living room, turned on the light and fought with that door until it finally yielded.

The storm door was now solidly encased in ice. Still standing, but floating in milky white.

Fisher kicked the ice. Uselessly. He pounded on it with his fists until he gasped for breath.

He took a running start and threw himself at the ice. He ended up on the carpet with a mouthful of fibers and a sore shoulder.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Think!

He couldn’t think. The pounding in his head wouldn’t go away. He picked himself up and collapsed on the sofa.

Sam materialized and put her hand on his face. “I love you, Evan Fisher. If this means we cash in our chips, I still love you.”

The lights in the living room flickered and kept flickering.

“Ohmigod!” Fisher yelled. “It’s at the generator!”

He scrambled up from the sofa but stood, like an idiot, thinking of what to do next. “We’ve got to draw it off—get its attention!”

Sam said, “But how?”

“We’ll use the sofa as a ram! Grab a leg so your grip won’t slip! C’mon!”

The lights were more off than on when they threw the sofa at the front door ice the first time. They heard the storm door crack, but the ice held.

“Again!” Fisher yelled. “Running start!”

They picked up the sofa and backed up to the hall.

“Now!”

Like maniacs, they rushed the doorway. The sofa ploughed through the storm door, through the ice, and came to rest halfway in and out of the doorway. It lay atop a pile of ice and glass, blocking their escape.