“Everyone alright down here?” someone shouted, and I managed to raise my head and squint through my fingers to see a man in a snowsuit with a harness around his waist.
“Yeah!” I called back. It was strange to see someone bursting through a small hole in our ceiling. A ceiling I hadn’t even been able to see well until now, given how far it was from our fireplace. Like the sky had fallen in. I had that weird feeling of being in a movie, one where the protagonist didn’t even know his whole life was just a construct.
One that he could break out of.
“Let’s get you boys out of here,” our rescuer shouted, dropping closer to the floor with an extra harness on a rope in his hands. I recognized his voice this time. He was the man from the radio.
This was it.
We were leaving.
And I hadn’t had the chance to say what I knew I needed to say.
Cade
The cold hit me hard. I was shivering by the time I reached the tunnel they had dug towards us through the snow, a tunnel reinforced by special equipment that kept us from getting snowed in again by some kind of collapse.
All I could do was stare upwards. The man who had broken through to rescue us was waiting down there inside the cabin with Aiden. I was being winched up alone through a thin channel in the ice that wasn’t big enough for two people anyway, and it was the first time in this whole ordeal that I really did feel alone.
I didn’t look down. I couldn’t. If I could have seen Aiden’s face, I might have begged them to cut the ropes and let me stay down there.
The cold took over, the snow and the ice, and for a long horrible moment, I thought about what it would have been like to truly have been buried in this stuff. To have been outside when the avalanche came down, with no way to escape.
To have had it burst through the windows or take off the roof of the cabin with its force, drowning us in the cold until we ran out of oxygen.
I shuddered and held tight to the ropes of the harness, and when I breached the top and I saw that I was out in the world again my heart leaped and hammered uncontrollably in my chest.
I glanced around, half-blind from the sun glaring off the ice. I couldn’t see much. I was immediately surrounded by people, rescue workers who liberated me from the harness and pulled me away to take shaky steps across the surface of the snow. I felt like I hardly touched the ground before I was whisked inside a waiting helicopter, an EMT fussing over me and asking me questions I could barely answer quick enough.
It was overwhelming. I was outside. I could breathe fresh air – fresh air that tasted sweeter and smelled cleaner than any I had ever breathed before. The brightness of the day was all around me, amplified by the snow. I could hear so many loud voices, so many people between me and where I had been, but I didn’t know or recognize anyone and couldn’t even figure out how many people were there helping us.
Before I had managed to get a grip on what was happening, Aiden was being helped into the seat next to me. In the bright light, he looked different. There were heavy dark circles under his eyes, dark stubble on his chin, and his face was smeared with touches of grime here and there that he hadn’t quite managed to sweep away. He looked thinner than I remembered him being when we’d first met, but maybe that was just the light.
I looked away from his searching eyes and down at my own body. My clothes were dusty. There was a smudge of dirt on my left thumb.
A loud whirring was replaced by a headset that settled over my head. I couldn’t keep a grip on what was happening. We were lifting into the air, weightless but not, and I gripped onto the seat hard in a sudden spasm of fear. I had never been in a helicopter before. I’d barely been on a plane, only a couple of times. It felt so fragile – like we might tip out onto the ground or just fall from the sky.
I wanted to hold Aiden’s hand, but people were talking constantly in my ear and someone kept trying to get my attention and I couldn’t focus on a single thing or figure out where his hand was.
“There,” someone said, and I managed to understand it. “That’s where we’re headed. We have your friends and family waiting for you down there.”
Everyone was down there?
Caleb?
My heart jumped in my chest at the thought that I was about to see my brother – to confirm for myself that he was alive and well. I clung tightly to the edges of my seat as the helicopter descended, bringing us closer and closer to what just looked like a white square at first but turned out to be a marquee, a huge tent that got bigger the closer we dropped. We landed on flat and unmarked snow and then everything was noise and movement again: someone taking the headset off me, the noise of the rotor above our heads, the straps being removed from my chest, someone’s hand leading me out onto the solid ground. My legs were shaking so much that I almost fell. A crinkling foil blanket landed around my shoulders. I had no idea where I was going or what was happening.
“Cadey!”
Caleb’s booming voice cut through the noise. I was aware of being led inside the tent – open on one side but much warmer than I expected, with heaters lining the walls – and then he was on me. Caleb enveloped me in a huge bear hug, the foil crinkling loudly in my ears as he lifted me off my feet. At any other time, it might have been humiliating for everyone to see how easily my big brother could lift me like I was a twig compared to him. But all I knew was how grateful I was that he was alive, and I was alive, and then a solid force crashed into us both from the side and I heard my Mom’s voice and all I could do was cling onto them both.
When I finally came back to myself enough to know what was going on, and when Caleb and Mom let me go for long enough that I could actually look around, I saw him. Aiden. He was standing there with an older couple who had to be his parents – they had the right look about them. His Dad still had an arm thrown over his son’s shoulders. Aiden was smiling, nodding, probably reassuring them that everything was fine in his cool and confident way.
And here I was, crying like a baby in my Momma’s arms.
“I can’t believe how long you were down there,” Caleb was saying, shaking his head. “It was bad enough for me and Aubrey. You must have been losing your mind.”
“We found a way to make it through,” I told him with a tight smile, then cursed myself silently. I’d said ‘we’. I needed to remember to distance us. There was no ‘we’ anymore. Aiden wouldn’t want me to give the game away. Not to anyone.
