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Past midnight, Winter Solstice
“YOU ALL RIGHT IN THERE? Hey, you all right?”
Cold. Kennedy had never been so cold in her life.
“You ok?” There was a pounding on the car window, a flashlight beam blinding her eyes.
She reached her hand to the side and croaked weakly, “Willow?”
“I’m here.”
A small breath of warmth when her fingertips brushed her roommate’s shoulder.
“We’re ok?” Kennedy asked.
“Yeah, we’re ok. We hit a moose.”
“I know. I saw it.”
“Me, too. Just too late.”
More tapping on the window. “Can you hear me? Do you need help?”
“Someone’s here,” Kennedy announced. Feeling was returning to her limbs. Limbs that ached as if frost had seeped into each individual nerve bundle. How long had she and Willow been lying here? She tried her door and did her best to rouse up her energy. There was a fierce pain in her neck and shoulder, but she didn’t think anything was broken. Her leg was pinned beneath the crumpled dashboard, but it didn’t hurt. Just felt cold.
Terribly cold.
“Unlock the door!” The shout was muffled. He had to repeat himself several times before Kennedy fully understood.
She undid the locks, and the man opened the driver’s side. The cold burst in through the open door and settled in her bone marrow.
“You hurt?” He shined his flashlight into the car, studying both girls’ faces, then checked the backseat. “Just the two of you? Are you all right?”
“My leg’s stuck,” Kennedy told him.
“What about you?” He turned to Willow.
“Yeah. I’m ok. Just a little ...” She shook her head slightly. “Dude.”
“You black out?” he asked. “How long you been here?”
Willow looked at Kennedy, who had no answer to give.
“It’s ok,” the man said. “Listen, there’s no reception here, but I live about six miles out. I can give you a ride to my place and we can get you warmed up. Don’t want to take the time to call for help and wait for the ambulance to come if we don’t got to. It’s minus twenty-eight last I checked. Nothing broken that you can tell?”
Willow had already adjusted herself loose while he was talking. Kennedy tried to do the same, but her boot was still pinned.
“Here.” The man handed her the flashlight, reached across Willow, and tried to set her free. After a minute of struggling, Kennedy finally had to slip her foot out of its boot and edge her leg loose that way. “You’ll be cold, but at least my truck’s heated. It’s the best we can do. Want me to carry you, or do you think you can hop?”
Kennedy tried to wiggle her toes. How long did she have before she had to worry about frostbite? She didn’t even know how much time had passed since the crash. Two minutes? Twenty?
When she was outside the car, she could see the damage. The entire hood was collapsed in on itself.
“I think you’re far enough to the side of the road that we don’t have to worry, but I’ve got a few flares I’ll set out just in case. I’m Roger, by the way.”
With Willow supporting her on one side, Kennedy hopped toward his truck. She turned around to get one last glimpse at the damage, but Willow grabbed her more tightly. “Don’t look back there. It’s not pretty.”
Kennedy, still somewhat dazed, soon realized that Willow had been talking about the moose and not the car.
“Told you not to look,” Willow said.
Kennedy shivered.
Roger’s truck was just a small two-seater, so the two girls squished together, trying to conserve heat. “Here, bend your leg so I can sit on your foot.” Willow’s suggestion sounded odd, but soon Kennedy could feel the painful throbbing of her pulse in her toes. At least her blood was flowing again.
Willow wrapped both arms around Kennedy. “You ok? You’re shaking.”
Kennedy nodded, but her teeth were chattering so hard it was difficult to speak.
“All right.” Roger hopped into the driver’s side with an authoritative air. “My cabin’s up this way. Hold on tight. It’s a bumpy road.”
Calling the path through the woods a road was quite an embellishment, as Kennedy was reminded each time they bounced over whatever boulders or tree roots or potholes lay underneath the snow. She was grateful for Willow’s warmth next to her, thankful that the only pain she felt was in her joints, her neck, and her throbbing foot. Relief coursed through her, but she still couldn’t stop shivering.
“It’s all right,” Willow whispered in her ear. “We’ll be there soon.”
“Yup,” Roger confirmed. “Cabin’s just up this way.”
Declaring Roger’s shelter a cabin, at least in Kennedy’s opinion, was even more euphemistic. Willow, who apparently had seen plenty of hand-built lodgings that were hardly bigger than a bathroom stall, seemed quite at home.
“Sorry, ladies. I’m off the grid here,” Roger explained as he shined the flashlight into the dark room. “Give me a few minutes to get the generator running.”
“Right on.” Willow nodded as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about a bearded man who lived miles off the highway without electricity or running water or even an indoor bathroom.
While Roger stepped out, Willow seated Kennedy on a wide stump in the middle of the room and knelt in front of her. She rubbed her socked foot until the friction made it burn and asked, “You doing all right?”
Kennedy nodded, convinced that normal people didn’t live out here in the middle of the wilderness with nothing but a few stacked logs and a wood stove protecting them from the negative thirty- or forty-degree temperatures that were common to Alaskan winters.
“We’re going to be all right,” Willow told her. “The most important thing is to get you warmed up.”
No, the most important thing was to call someone they knew and tell them where they were. She looked around the small room. “Think he’s got a phone?”
“There’s no reception out here.” Willow was still rubbing her foot vigorously.
“I know, but we need to let someone know where we are. We can’t spend the night here without cell coverage or electricity or anything.”
If the thought that they were trapped in a cabin with a complete stranger bothered Willow, she didn’t show it. “He’s got a generator.”
Willow could have said he had a thermonuclear reactor for all the difference it made. What did Kennedy know about generators? What did she know about surviving with nothing but a wood stove in the middle of the Arctic? She glanced at a pile of blankets on the floor. That couldn’t be his bed, could it? He’d freeze right to the ground. There was a shelf in the corner with some canned goods, mostly spam and corn and hash. Not even enough to last a week. Who was Roger and what was he doing living way out here in the middle of nowhere? Off the grid? What did that even mean? Was he hiding from the government? Maybe he was a fugitive. They should have never gotten in the truck with him, especially in a no-coverage zone.
Roger stepped back into the cabin, and Kennedy studied him as earnestly as she’d prepared for the MCATs. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for exactly, bloodstains on his flannel shirt, fangs instead of yellow teeth, something sinister behind the bushy, tangled beard that would make Nick’s dreadlocks look well-groomed in comparison.
“Got the power up and running,” he announced.
At this proclamation, Kennedy expected Roger to flip on a light switch, but after checking each wall, she realized there were none. She glanced over at Willow, hoping to steal a pinch of her roommate’s calm.
Roger adjusted some dials on a small box tucked away in the corner. Kennedy tried to guess his age. Thirty-five? Sixty? There was no way to know with his entire face covered by that ridiculous beard. It was so ratted she couldn’t tell if it was more gray or brown. He wasn’t young or old, skinny or overweight, the kind of person she might have walked past in the airport or movie theater and never noticed. There was nothing to learn about him from his clothing either. Flannel and jeans in Alaska were about as common as premed students in the Harvard library.
Roger pushed a button, and Kennedy flinched at the sound. She hoped he hadn’t noticed, but he straightened up and stared hard at her. “Space heater,” he explained. “Nothing to worry about.”
Great. Nothing to worry about. Isn’t that about like a sleazy salesman crooning you can trust me?
Kennedy tried to dissolve her fears in the warmth from Roger’s small heating unit. At least her foot felt better now, thanks to Willow’s vigorous massage.
“Where you girls from?”
“We came in from Anchorage,” Willow answered while Kennedy tried sending out telepathic messages to her roommate to keep her mouth shut. Maybe it was her dad and all his paranoia, or maybe she just couldn’t trust a man who actually chose to live out here in the middle of winter in nothing but a hundred-square-foot shack, but she certainly didn’t want to give Roger any more information than was absolutely vital. “My parents live out in Copper Lake,” Willow added, “just past Glennallen.”
So much for discretion.
Roger nodded. “Pretty place.”
“Oh, I know. It’s gorgeous. I’m getting married there the day after tomorrow.” She sighed. “Actually, technically it’s tomorrow already. Nick’s going to be really worried about us. Frankenstein. I wish I could get a hold of him.”
If Roger was surprised by her odd choice in exclamations, he didn’t show it. “I took a look at that car of yours. Totally busted.”
Kennedy waited for the part when he offered to drive them out toward Glennallen, but all he did was stare.
“You got any way to get in touch with my family?” Willow wound a strand of hair around her finger. “They’re going to be wicked worried. You heard what happened earlier, didn’t you?”
Roger nodded, then walked over by his small stash of food and slowly opened up a can of spam. Ignoring Willow’s question, he held out the container. “I could heat it up for you, but it takes a while on the stovetop. You girls think you can handle it straight up?”
For the first time, Willow looked as terrified as Kennedy felt. “No thanks. I’m vegan.”
“You’re what?” Roger narrowed his eyebrows.
“Vegan,” Willow repeated. “Kind of like vegetarian. I don’t eat meat.”
He frowned at her with suspicion then looked at Kennedy. “Do you?”
She nodded, and before she could tell him she wasn’t all that hungry, he’d dumped the slab of spam into the palm of her hand. She’d never eaten it before and wasn’t even sure what to do with it. She glanced at Willow, who scrunched up her face.
Roger was staring at her, so she forced herself to take the daintiest of bites. With all the salt and grease, she couldn’t taste the meat itself, if it actually was meat. Kennedy wasn’t sure, and Roger was still holding the can, so she couldn’t read the label.
“How is it?” Willow was trying to hide a bemused smirk.
“It’s ok.” Kennedy forced herself to take one more taste and then looked for a place to put the rest down. Finally, Roger held out his palm. Kennedy handed him the cube of meat product, and he took a huge, noisy bite.
He pointed to the pile of blankets on the floor. “You two can curl up by the heater down there and get warm.”
He didn’t have any indoor plumbing or running water, and he didn’t seem like the type to worry about carrying his dirty linen out to the lake every week. Besides, it would be frozen five or six months out of the year, and the closest laundromat was probably a hundred miles away. Just how dirty were those blankets? And was any amount of warmth worth risking fleas or ticks or heaven knew what else might be down here?
“Come on.” Willow plopped down onto the pile and beckoned for Kennedy. “We may as well get comfortable while we wait for ...” She stopped and looked at Roger. “What exactly are we waiting for? What’s the plan?”
“My buddy Buster,” he answered with his mouth full of spam.
Kennedy hadn’t realized there really were people named Buster in the world. She’d previously thought it was just a name you called someone you didn’t like if you were a character in an old-fashioned cartoon episode.
Roger was still chewing on his canned meat. “Lives about fifteen miles down the road. Has a landline.”
“Right on.” Willow snuggled down in the corner of the cabin, completely unfazed.
Kennedy didn’t bother to point out that even if this Buster guy had a landline phone, it did them precious little good if he was fifteen miles down the road, especially if Roger was referring to the little mountain trail they’d driven on to get here. Things didn’t make much more sense when he took a large electronic box off the shelf.
“Buster?” He held it close to his mouth. “You hear me? Wake up, cranky.”
The radio crackled, and an angry voice responded, “What you want?”
“Got me two girls here.” Roger looked them both over. “Ran into some car trouble on the Glenn, and they have to get a message home.”
More static, followed by, “Oh, yeah? They all right?”
Kennedy couldn’t figure out why Roger was staring at her so intensely. “Yeah. Both fine. But there’s a family around Glennallen they’re trying to get a hold of. If I give you a phone number, could you call them for us?” He stared at Willow. “Ready?”
He brought the radio toward her, and Willow gave Buster her parents’ phone number and a message that she and Kennedy were safe but the car was totaled.
“What about someone coming to pick us up?” Kennedy asked, still unwilling to sit down next to Willow on that dirty pile of tattered blankets. She tried to figure out how far away they were from Copper Lake, how long they’d have to stay here until they were rescued. At least she wasn’t as cold anymore. The space heater and stove were far more efficient than she’d initially expected.
Roger overheard Kennedy’s question and grabbed the radio back. “Buster, tell her folks to come get them tomorrow morning. I’ll drop them off at Eureka Lodge.”
A lodge? Kennedy’s brain sprang to attention at the word. A lodge within driving distance? A lodge meant real walls, not logs piled up onto each other by hand. Heat that came out of floorboards, not a stove or space heater. Real beds, real sheets, and blankets that were at least occasionally washed by machine. Why weren’t they already on their way?
“We could leave now,” she suggested, but Roger was listening to his friend on the radio.
“You sure they’re all right?” Buster had a wheeze in his voice. “Sound pretty young.”
Roger glanced at them again. “Yeah, they’re fine. Just make sure you pass their message on, got it?”
“Roger that, Roger.”
“Hilarious,” he grumbled. “All right, so we’ll see you there.”
Roger ended the call, and Kennedy wondered about his last words. We’ll see you there. What did that mean? Did Buster live at this lodge? He had a landline, so he had to be a little closer to civilization. She still couldn’t believe people voluntarily lived out here like this. Were there other mountain men, dozens of hermits like Roger, scattered through these woods?
Roger set the radio back on the top shelf and looked at Kennedy. “May as well get some rest,” he told her. “I’ll drive you up to Eureka in the morning.”
Kennedy realized they hadn’t set a time to tell Willow’s parents to meet them at the lodge. What if Roger’s idea of morning was 11:30, and the Winters showed up at six, frantic and worried? What if there was more than one lodge in Eureka, wherever that was? How would they find each other?
Willow motioned for Kennedy to sit down by her. “Come on,” she coaxed, “you need some rest.”
Kennedy couldn’t argue with her. At least maybe the cold was enough to kill off bed bugs and ticks that might be living in the rags.
She hoped so as she sat down next to her roommate.
Willow started rubbing her back. “It’s going to be fine,” she whispered.
Kennedy scooted closer. “You think we can trust him?”
Willow smiled. “Yeah. Never mind what his home looks like. There are people like this all over the state. They’re totally harmless. Don’t worry about a thing.”