Chapter 9: Higher Ground

“But we’re up in the mountains,” Rusty argued. “How big could it be?”

“I dunno,” Envy said. “Big.” And it was coming. Soon. Every moment that passed was making her more twitchy, her chest constricting even further with worry.

Rusty pulled out another of his trusty gadgets from his profusion of military pouches strapped to his person. “Says here we’re at eight hundred ninety feet,” he said, reading something that looked like an oversized watch.

“What is that?” Envy asked.

“Altimeter,” he said, holding it out to her. “You adjust for barometric pressure, then it’ll tell you how high you are from sea level.”

Envy, who even after trekking through the Alaskan wilds six different summers in a row hadn’t heard of such a thing, looked it over then handed it back. “And you thought that would be useful survival gear why?” Envy demanded.

“Never know when you’ll have to hole up on Denali,” Rusty said, shrugging. “And if you get too far up, you can pass out from lack of oxygen.” He tapped the altimeter proudly. “This’ll keep me from passing out when I go too high.”

Envy squinted at the hillbilly. “You mean oxygen will keep you from passing out.”

Rusty cheerfully opened his mouth to contradict her, then frowned and glanced down at the device as if the thought of bottled oxygen hadn’t occurred to him.

“Jesus,” Envy said, shaking her head. “Just help me find the rest of our stuff before we get hit again.” As Rusty wandered off, frowning down at his altimeter, Envy glanced over at Douglass, who was seated stiffly on a mound of berry bushes. “How you doin’?”

“Aside from the fact my world is a white haze of static punctuated by the occasional blast of random color, fine.” Douglass made a face, then wiped his nose with a hand. Then, “How long ago was that earthquake?”

Envy wasn’t sure. “I dunno…an hour?”

“And you really think it was a 12.0?” he insisted.

“Dude, if you could see the mountains right now, you wouldn’t be asking that question.” Indeed, it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off. Where the mountains had been patchy white before, streaks of brown from rocks and landslides now dominated the slopes. Several of the mountains had lost their peaks, the dislodged boulders now in broken piles at the base.

“And we’re only eight hundred feet up?” Douglass insisted.

“Well, I don’t know how accurate that is, considering the source,” Envy said. He had pronounced ‘barometric pressure’ as ‘bar-oh-meet-trick’.

“Then we should probably get higher up the mountain,” Douglass said.

That made Envy blink. “Up the mountain?”

A few hundred feet away, Rusty crowed, “I found my Dixie Zippo!” He held up a little silver object and kissed it a few times.

“I was bored a lot in college, before I got accepted to med school,” Douglass said. “Spent a lot of time researching Google Earth and topography. Almost went into archaeology.”

Wouldn’t that have been a disaster, Envy thought, thinking of the Kerosene Incident. “What’s your point?”

“Point is, geologists have documented tsunamis over a thousand feet high,” Douglass said. “You can see their dunes on Google Earth.”

“Dunes?”

“Yeah, you know on the bottom of a river, how it makes ripples in the sand? Think like that, but on a gigantic scale. We’re talking mounds of debris a hundred feet high left behind as the water rushed back to the ocean. Destroyed whole civilizations—they found pottery buried under the bottom of these things. There’s a theory that’s where the story of Noah’s Ark comes from. Someone watched one of these things take out his city, then told people about it afterward.”

Envy glanced nervously at the huge alien structure dominating the landscape below. “Did you say a thousand feet high?”

“At least.”

She cursed. “All right. We need to get higher. Rusty and I will help you, okay?” She glanced up the hill. “Rusty! Come help me get the doc up the mountain—we’re moving to higher ground!”

“You got it, Captain.” The big man came jogging down the hill without so much as a ‘why’ and grabbed Douglass firmly under the shoulder. “Follow me, doc.” Ever since Douglass had re-located his shoulder, he’d been a lot more respectful of the slender man in the mud-caked woolen overcoat and the stained loafers.

“We’re gonna get you some better gear, first chance we get,” Envy said.

“After a thousand foot tsunami?” Douglass snorted. “Not likely.”

“We’ll find you some gear, little man,” Rusty said gruffly. “I got another stash up in Archangel Valley.”

“Doubt there’s much left in Archangel Valley,” Envy said, remembering the titanic bowl of granite, its sides almost vertical. “What’s your closest after that?”

“Other side of Hatcher’s Pass,” Rusty said. “Maybe thirty miles from here?”

Well, that was better than nothing. The question was whether or not they’d be able to stay warm and alive without gear or a tent—or any significant amount of fuel, since the higher elevations of the Pass had very little in the way of burnable vegetation, mainly just knee-high green shrubs and lichen. When she mentioned her fears, Rusty said, “Well, there’s those old miner cabins along the way.”

Envy shook her head. “Any cabins would’ve come down in that quake.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Better kindling that way.”

She opened her mouth, then frowned. “Guess so.”

The higher they hiked, the colder and windier it got, until they were shivering even with their coats. Douglass, holding onto Envy’s shoulders as she and Rusty made a path for him through the upper snowdrifts, was surprisingly no longer complaining about stains on his loafers.

“His feet are gonna fall off if we don’t stop and warm up,” Rusty said, giving the doctor a nervous look. “This place looks pretty good.” He gestured around them at the divot that protected them from the wind.

Hugging her arms tightly around herself, Envy glanced down the valley. The feeling of doom had receded to a dull throb, but it still made her uncomfortable to look at the towering silver megastructure. “How high are we now?” she asked.

Rusty got out his trusty altimeter and squinted at it, then squinted at the sky, then made an adjustment to the dial. “Looks like…twelve hundred and fifteen feet, give or take thirty.”

Instinctively, Envy wanted to go further, but she could see the snow stuffed into Douglass’s loafers and knew he wasn’t going to last much longer.

“All right,” she said, “try to build a fire. I’ll get some sort of shelter started. Doug, take a seat and start getting the snow out of your shoes, okay?”

Douglass slumped to the ground and started pulling his loafers off while Envy and Rusty started looking for ways to make their lives more comfortable. There was a boulder about fifty feet from them that would have made a nice windbreak, but after the last earthquake, they were avoiding boulders like the Plague, going out of their way to walk around them and not to get directly downhill of them.

Because she didn’t have any other tools, Envy started using her hands and feet to clear out a space down to the ground, mounding up snow to six feet on all sides to keep out the wind. After enduring the quakes, she figured attempting to build an igloo was foolhardy at best. Besides, the jostling had broken up the snow, leaving it more of a crumbled mess than was necessary for the igloo-building blocks.

Rusty came back a few minutes later with a few armfuls of meager twigs, which he deposited inside her ‘structure’. Getting it to light was an hour-long affair, and as they huddled and cursed over it, Douglass started to shiver and clutch his woolen overcoat tighter to his body, but still he didn’t complain.

It was Rusty who finally got the fire going—Rusty and a streak of colorful curses to make a Marine’s face heat up. “Ha! Ha! You take that, fucker,” he shouted, adding more tiny twigs, “You take that, you mama-sucking limpdick panty-poker! Yeah!”

“Mother Nature doesn’t like it when you get uppity,” Douglass noted solemnly. “She tends to blind and humiliate you. Rip you down. Take away your dignity. Make you bleed.” He plucked at his thin, black, professional socks. “Shove you to the ground and fuck you in the ass without lube.”

Rusty, who was in the middle of a full-throated laugh, choked it off suddenly with a nervous sideways glance at the doctor. Douglass continued casually tossing tiny twigs he broke from the shrubbery beneath him onto the fire as if he’d said nothing out of the ordinary. Face reddening, Rusty said, “I’m gonna go get some more wood.”

“Good plan,” Douglass said, flicking another thumb-length twig at the fire.

Rusty hurried off in a superstitious hustle.

“Come on,” Envy said, pulling the blanket from the duffel bag and hanging it over Douglass’s shoulders. “You look cold. We can share.” She sat down beside him and pulled the blanket over her, too, being sure to leave some for Rusty.”

“I can’t feel my feet,” Douglass whispered.

Envy froze in arranging the blanket. “What?”

“Can’t feel them. Haven’t felt them for a couple hours.”

Envy frowned down at his socks. “You’re kidding me.” She yanked a sock from his foot, then gasped at how white it was. His feet were freezing and Douglass hadn’t ushered a word of complaint. “Fuck, Douglass, why didn’t you say something?!”

“Rusty said he’d kill me,” Douglass said, shrugging. He tossed another tiny twig and it landed in the snow, three feet from the fire.

“When?” she demanded, yanking off the other sock. She’d seen frostbite before, and this was bordering on permanent damage.

“In the tent,” Douglass said. “After I wasted all the firewood.”

At least his toes were still pliable, not yet frozen. There was a chance he wouldn’t lose any of them, but only if they could get the blood circulating again, fast. She immediately started warming them with her palms, holding his feet up to the fire.

“I’m gonna have a chat with Rusty,” she growled as she worked.

“Don’t bother,” Douglass said. “Made sense. I wasn’t pulling my weight.”

Hearing her own words used against her, Envy immediately felt bad. “Look, when I said that back there—”

“You were scared, I was a fuckup, and aliens were pounding their load into Mother Earth. I know.” He didn’t sound upset with her at all. If anything, he sounded tired. “Look, I’m probably gonna die up here.”

“We’re all probably gonna die up here,” Envy said, propping his second foot up to start restoring circulation. “What makes you so special?”

“My vision hasn’t gotten any better. It’s probably blood on the brain. Hallucinations. Bad concussion, something. I don’t see myself living very long, even if we do survive the night.”

Hearing the raw morbidity in his apathetic voice, Envy decided to give him something else to focus on. “Are you kidding?” she demanded. “You’re our earthquake gauge. You’re gonna let us know next time the earth tries to kill us.”

Douglass squinted sightlessly ahead of him, frowning. He turned, though his eyes didn’t find hers. “You really believe that?”

“Dude, it’s what I saw,” Envy said. She glanced at the devastation around her, the river valley now filled with loose boulders and debris. “And if you could see what I see, you’d feel the same way.”

Shivering, Douglass made a grimace of skepticism, but didn’t argue. He went back to shaking and staring at the fire as she rubbed his feet. “You know, I honestly don’t think I’m gonna mind sharing body heat with a three hundred pound hillbilly tonight,” Douglass said. Then he chuckled unhappily. “We’re so fucked.”

“It’s just for a night,” Envy said. “Further up the pass, there are some structures…”

“Don’t forget the mines!” Rusty called, as he jogged back with a little armful of tiny branches. “Might be a couple mines up there that didn’t collapse. Warmer underground.” The big man paused when he saw Envy rubbing Douglass’s feet, and his eyes immediately narrowed with suspicion as his eyes slid up the doctor’s legs to his unseeing face with unmistakable jealousy.

“For the love of—he’s got frostbite,” Envy snapped. “Take a foot.”

“Frostbite?” Rusty’s eyes widened and he dropped his stack of branches haphazardly beside them and knelt. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna be okay, doc.” Then he grabbed the doctor’s other foot and started rubbing it like his life depended on it.

Who knows, maybe it did.

They were still trying to restore circulation to Douglass’s toes when Rusty, who was looking over Douglass’s shoulder at the valley below, stopped rubbing the doctor’s feet. His eyes, fixed on something out in the Mat-Su, went wide and he slowly started to stand. “Mother of Dixie,” he whispered. “We’re not high enough.”