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avalanched into her lap.
Icicles hung from the edges of the tarp and the ropes that suspended her
hammock. There was a constant cracking sound as wind whipped branches up and
down, and a constant clatter of ice hitting the frozen tarp. One of her hands
was exposed, and it was stiff and chapped as she reached across the gap and
prodded Gaby.
"Huh? Huh?" Gaby looked around with one bleary eye, the other held shut by
frozen lashes. "Oh, damn!" She was racked by coughs.
"Are you okay?"
"Except for a frozen ear, I guess so. What now?"
"Put on everything we have, I guess. Then wait it out."
It was hard to do, sitting in a hammock, but they managed it. There was one
disaster as Cirocco fumbled with numb fingers, then saw a glove quickly vanish
in the swirling snow beneath them. She cursed for five minutes before
recalling they still had Gene's gloves.
Then they waited.
Sleep was impossible. They were warm enough in the layers of clothing and
blankets, but they wished for face masks and goggles. Every ten minutes they
shook the accumulation of snow from their bodies.
They tried to talk, but the spoke was alive with sound. Cirocco found the
minutes stretching into hours as she reclined with the blanket over her face
and listened to the wind howling. Over that sound, and much more frightening,
was a sound like pop- ping corn. Branches, overloaded with ice, were snapping
off as the wind whipped them.
.They waited five hours. If anything, the wind grew colder and stronger. A
branch snapped near them, and Cirocco listened to it crash through the
ice-crusted forest below.
"Gaby, can you hear me?"
"I hear you, Captain. What do we do now?"
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"I hate to say it, but we're going to have to move. I want to be on thicker
branches. I don't think these will break, but if one breaks above us, we've
had it."
"I was just waiting for you to suggest it."
Getting out of the hammocks was a nightmare. Once out of them and standing on
the tree limb, it was worse. Their safety ropes were frozen and had to be
painstakingly bent and twisted before they could be used. When they began to
work their way in, it was strictly one step at a time. They had to attach a
second safety line before going back to remove the first, then repeat the
process, tying knots with gloved hands or removing the gloves and doing it
quickly before their fingers grew numb. They used hammers and picks to chip
ice from branches they had to walk on. With all their caution, Cirocco fell
twice and Gaby once. Cirocco's second fall resulted in a strained muscle in
her back when the safety line stopped her.
After an hour of struggle they reached the main trunk. It was steady and wide
enough to sit on.
But the wind blew harder than ever with no branches to break its force.
They drove spikes into the tree, lashed themselves to it, and prepared once
more to wait it out.
"I hate to bring this up, but I can't feel my toes."
Cirocco coughed for a long time before she could talk. "What do you suggest?"
"I don't know," Gaby said. "I do know that we'll freeze to death if we don't
do something. We've got to either keep moving, or look for shelter. "
She was right, and Cirocco knew it. "Up, or down?"
"There's the staircase at the bottom."
"It took us a day to get this high, with no ice to complicate things. And it's
another two days back to the stairs. If the entrance isn't buried in snow."
"I was about to get to that."
"If we move, we might as well go up. Either way, we'll freeze unless this
weather breaks soon.
Moving would postpone that a while, I guess."
"T'hat was my thought, too," Gaby said. "But I'd like to try something else,
first. Let's go all the way to the wall. Remember earlier you talked about
where the angels might live, and you mentioned caves. Maybe there's caves back
there."
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Cirocco knew the main thing was to become active again, to get the blood
flowing. So they crawled along the tree trunk, chipping ice as they went. In
fifteen minutes they reached the wall.
Gaby studied it, then braced herself and began attacking the ice with her
pick. It fell away to expose the gray substance, but she did not stop
chopping. When Cirocco saw what she was doing, she joined her with her own
pick.
It went well for a while. They hacked a hole half a meter in diameter. The
white milk froze as it oozed from the wall, and they chipped that away, too.
Gaby was a demon of snow; it caked her clothes and the woolen scarf drawn over
her mouth and nose, turned her eyebrows into thick white ledges.
Soon they reached a new layer that was too tough to cut. Gaby attacked it
viciously, but eventually conceded she was getting nowhere. She let her hand
drop to her side and glared at the wall.
"Well, it was an idea." She kicked disgustedly at the snow that had fallen
around them as they worked, shaken down by the vibrations. She looked at it,
then craned her neck and stared up into the darkness. She took a step back, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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