Exile to the Stars (The Alarai Chronicles) by Dale B. Mattheis Page B

he had thought
of.
    Jeff
pulled the pack out of the burrow to inventory what food remained. The small
pile that resulted frightened him. He was going to need five thousand calories
a day just to stay on his feet, and the remaining food was worth no more than
four or five hikes.
    “Shit!
The Dodge is within reach, but I don’t have a prayer of getting to it through
those mountains. Probably nothing left of it, anyway.” He glanced to the
southwest. That was his only hope.  
    Packing
up as quickly as prudence allowed, Jeff fitted the crampons to his boots,
strapped on the pack and hiked southwest into a westering sun. An hour later
his eyes hurt so badly from snow glare he could only squint. Cursing his
stupidity, Jeff fished out sunglasses. When he couldn’t force himself to take
another step and made camp, the tip of one ear was numb and his face painfully
sunburned.
    Setting
out next morning he sank to his knees in soft snow. He strapped on the
snowshoes and trudged off. Wherever he looked there was no sign of life or green,
only the blinding expanse of endless snowfields and intimidating mountains. He
closed his mind to that fact and concentrated on not falling.
     
     
    No
more than a dot lost in a wasteland of snow, Jeff snaked down an ice-caked
moraine. He picked his way around boulders with head down, resolved only to
find enough strength to take a step and yet another. Seared by sun and
frostbite, the skin on his cheeks had blistered, cracked open and was crusted
with ooze. Picking at bits of food frozen in a stubble beard, Jeff tried to
remember how many days he had been walking. He thought he had pitched the tent
six times.
    Something
wasn’t right. He stared at his legs and wondered why they wouldn’t move. He
eventually concluded he had entered a snowfield and they were buried to the
knees. Perched on a boulder, he made the switch from crampons to snowshoes then
thought he might rest for a while longer. It felt so very good just to sit.
When he decided to take a longer break, Jeff was surprised to find that he was
on his feet and walking. Unable to fathom how that had happened, he
concentrated on taking the next step in a world that had constricted to the
patch of snow in front of him.
    Dusk
was at hand when a snowshoe caught on an obstruction and he fell forward onto
his face. Breathing heavily, Jeff lay there and debated whether he had tried
hard enough now so that he could rest. On the verge of losing the debate for
the first and final time, Jeff heard a voice in his mind that was both real and
compelling.
    “Lift
your head and live. It is not your time to surrender.”
    He
gazed around stupidly for a few moments before becoming aware that he lay
sprawled in a copse of trees. Somehow he had inserted himself well into a scrub
forest before a snowshoe snagged a fallen limb. Hope discovered a foundation
and sprang to life. The thought of a fire spurred him to tear at the snowshoe
bindings in his haste to find tinder.
    By
nightfall the tent was assembled. He heaped wood onto the fire until it was
roaring, yet it never seemed hot enough. When he could function again, Jeff set
a pot in the coals to heat water. He found one packet of food at the bottom of
the backpack. Fool hens have to be around somewhere, he thought. The memory of
his feast in what seemed like another life set his mouth to watering.
    The
water came to a boil and he stirred in the packet of food. When he had scraped
the pot shiny-clean, he sank down on a log near the fire and stared into the
flames. Sometime later Jeff awoke lying on his side.
    A
degree of vitality had returned by morning. Holding his hands over new flames,
Jeff attempted to piece together the last six or seven days. He was about to
mark it off as a lost cause when a shot of anxiety hit him. He still had not
seen one feature of the land that was familiar. Jeff felt like yelling with
frustration but was too tired.
    “I
don’t care how big an earthquake there was,” he