21

I blinked, found myself slumped across the seat, my hands tied behind my back and my cheek sticky with blood. The window above me showed a dark wedge of sky smeared red and brown. As I pushed myself up, the passenger door opened in an icy rush and Einar dragged me into the snow, stopping when we were twenty feet away from the car before he let go.

“You can stand. Good.” He was holding the shovel. “Now walk.”

I kicked out, lost my balance, but couldn’t catch myself: He’d bound my hands with a jumper cable. He grabbed my upper arm and pushed me in front of him. “Just walk.”

I staggered a few steps while he remained where he was. When I paused to look back, he shook his head, grasping the shovel in both hands like a broadsword. “Keep going,” he shouted.

I walked backward, slowly, so I could watch him, but he didn’t move, just stood with the shovel in his hands and his loden-green overcoat flapping in the frigid wind. With every step, my boots punched through brittle snow, and something knocked against the back of my knees—the cable’s metal grips. After I’d gone another thirty paces, Einar turned and walked to the Range Rover. Before he got inside he looked back at me.

“He’s my brother.”

His voice echoed across the plain as the Range Rover did a 180 and roared out of sight.

I looked for something to shelter behind but saw nothing save a small outcropping of barren rock. I lurched toward it, crouched in the leeward side, and tried to catch my breath. Cold won out over panic, just barely. I had to get my hands free, but my fingers were numb and wet, and the cable slipped through them whenever I tried to grab it. Pellets of sleet stung my face as the wind gusted, hard enough to knock me down. I jammed myself against the rock, my face inches from my knees, and fumbled with the cable until I finally managed to clamp one of the grips onto a finger.

I hardly felt it—not a good sign—but it made it possible to tug the cable through one knot and then another. Einar wasn’t much of a Boy Scout. It seemed to take forever, but at last I shook the cable from my wrists. I unzipped my leather jacket and thrust my hands under my sweater, groaning: It felt like hot nails jabbing my skin.

Now I started to panic.

I wiped sleet from my eyes and stared at the snow-covered wilderness that stretched between two glaciers, the one to my left a whale breaching above an icy sea. The moon hung a hand’s span above it—a setting moon, so that would be west. Straight ahead of me, through the lunar glitter of sleet and wind-driven snow, white smoke billowed steadily.

It was miles away, and seemed like far too much smoke for a wood fire, and where would you find wood to burn? And I couldn’t imagine a power plant in this wilderness.

But then, until I came to Iceland, I would never have been able to imagine a place like this at all. I knew I had to keep moving. My wrist ached from the spiked bracelet Brynja had given me: The cold metal burned my skin. I struggled with numb fingers to unclasp it and stuffed it in my pocket, then pulled the collar of my sweater around my head to form a makeshift hood. I stretched the bottom of the sweater until it covered the top of my thighs, straightened, and stamped my feet.

My toes ached. At least I could still feel them. My face and hands were wet, my ass and legs freezing—one reason you don’t see a lot of people attempting K-2 in skinny black jeans. Otherwise the layers of wool and leather had kept me dry, even if I was starting to shake with cold. I couldn’t remember if shivering was supposed to be good or bad. All I knew about hypothermia was that you begin to feel warm and drowsy, then you lie down to sleep, and then you freeze to death. The rock wasn’t enough to shelter me. There was snow everywhere, but it was too hard-packed to burrow into, and that would just be resigning myself to an ice coffin.

The only aspect of this disaster scenario I might have been able to rise above was the not-falling-asleep part. I huddled back against the rock and dug in my pocket for the crank, shoved my finger into the envelope, then jabbed as much as I could into one nostril after the other. It burned like acid, searing the back of my throat. I swallowed a mouthful of snow, something else I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do. I wolfed down the chocolate bars I’d taken from Einar’s car, tied the jumper cable around my waist, pulled my hands up into my sleeves, and staggered to my feet.

I started walking.

In toxic amounts, crank induces hyperthermia. I knew a guy who swallowed his stash to avoid being arrested, and when they got him into the ER, his core body temperature was 114 degrees Fahrenheit before it was lowered by ice blankets. I’d spent so much of my life wasted that I always assumed when it was time to check out, I’d be too fucked up to notice.

Now, the irony wasn’t lost on me that I would be wide awake as I froze to death.

The wind was so powerful it was like forcing myself through an invisible wall. I was dimly aware of my head pounding where Einar had smashed it against the windshield, dimly aware of the blood frozen to a grainy crust on my cheek, and my wrists throbbing where they’d been chafed by the jumper cable.

But that was all background static to the wind. During World War II, the Nazis gave meth to soldiers, who’d fight until their legs were blown out from under them. Sometimes they wouldn’t give up even then, dragging themselves along the ground with exposed bone and scorched flesh until their hearts gave out. I thought about that zombie army as I broke into a shambling run, head down, staring at the white ground in front of me and counting mindlessly to a thousand, losing track again and again. Fine snow and windblown sand streamed through the air like fog, but fog that bit my face like countless stinging insects. Every few steps I stumbled. Sometimes I fell. The moon had dipped below Langjökull, though the sky was still eerily bright. Reflected moonlight bounced from the snow-covered plain and made strange patterns in the air, like swooping birds. The screaming gale became indistinguishable from the sound of blood pulsing in my ears. I heard high-pitched cries—more birds, I thought; but of course there were no birds here.

Yet something hovered in the air a few yards in front of me, wings beating as it flung itself against the wind—the moon’s black shadow, a raven.

I was starting to hallucinate. I rubbed icy grit from my eyes, not daring to halt. The bird was still there. I knew that seagulls would follow boats, hoping to score chum or other trash thrown overboard. Maybe this was an Icelandic vulture, waiting for me to die. I veered and stumbled over a lava mound. The raven followed, diving toward my face. I batted it away and it struck again, its talon piercing my cheek. I stopped, panting, turned and stumbled back the way I’d come as the bird continued to attack me. I covered my head with my hands and ran, dodging lava hummocks. The ground cracked beneath my boot, the skin of ice on a shallow stream, but I kept going until I finally collapsed, retching with fatigue.

When I looked up the bird was gone, and the moon. A few pale stars pricked a charcoal sky. The wind had died, and with it the snow. I couldn’t feel my feet. I stamped them against the frozen ground until a prickle of sensation returned to my toes. I withdrew my hands from beneath my sweater, tried to straighten my clenched fingers, and kept walking.

In the distance smoke billowed, nearer than before, great clouds rolling across the horizon to fade into distant hills. A star shone through the smoke, brighter than the faint stars overhead. I wiped my eyes and saw that it was far too low upon the horizon to be a star. The highlands rose behind it, darker than the sky. To my left, the stream I’d forded widened into an ice-locked river, a serpentine channel that led toward the smoke. I followed this, the rocky ground giving way to knobs of lava encrusted with moss that glowed an improbable beryl green in the darkness. There were two long channels in the frozen turf—dry streambeds, I thought at first, but soon realized they were ruts left by vehicles.

I tried to run, but by now I could barely walk. My legs felt as though they’d been impaled upon steel spikes. A crust of rime formed across my sweater where my breath had frozen. My lungs and heart had fused into a solid burning mass lodged inside my chest. Spidery forms wriggled across my vision. I tripped and fell onto something smooth and circular—a tire. If it had been upright, it would have been nearly as tall as I was.

I looked up and saw an old Econoline van that had been converted to a 4 × 4, mounted on even bigger tires to loom above me like an antiquated space capsule. Beside it were several tarp-covered objects lashed with bungee cords, and what looked like the other part of the lunar landing pod—a snow-covered Quonset hut, its door surmounted by a sign covered with runic letters.

A column of light spilled from a window. I staggered toward the door and pounded as hard as I could until it swung open, and I fell to my knees in the snow.