Ryan stood, fighting to control his breathing, still hearing the ground rumbling miles below his feet. Also catching the sound of the Russians, running and calling. Now he saw a couple of flaming torches as they started to search for their lost prisoners. He guessed that J.B. and Krysty, if they'd stayed together, would be making for the south to meet with the others. But his fall had put him on the wrong side of the enemy. Now he'd have to try and loop around.
Ryan took stock. Guns and ammo, check. Clothes and knives, check. Health, bruises here and there but nothing too threatening: check. Compass, check. Food and drink.
"No," he said to himself.
Nor heat.
The land was so barren that his chances of finding food were remote. But he knew from experience that he could exist for several days without food, even in the bitter cold. But he had to drink. He stooped and cupped some of the water around his feet, tasting it cautiously. The fact that it was flowing and not frozen was a sign that it originated higher up probably near the dam that he'd spotted earlier and had been melted by heat from a volcano. The taste was bitter, iron with a dash of sulfur. If he could drink now and fill his belly, it would last him a couple of days.
If he didn't find the others after a couple of days in the lingering nuclear winter, then he was going to be dead anyway.
He knelt and lapped like a dog, lifting his head every now and again to peer into the gloom. At the bottom of the steep valley he was sheltered from the bitter wind, but he knew that he couldn't stay there long. The Russians would be searching. Judging from what he'd seen of him, their amber-eyed leader wasn't the sort of man who gave up easily.
Far above Ryan, there was a burst of automatic fire that raked the far side of the ravine, bullets ricocheting and whining into the darkness. Someone shouted and Ryan ducked, huddling against the cold rock, wearing his hood so that his face wouldn't show white.
But the shooting wasn't repeated, and the voices moved toward the south. The earth finally ceased shaking, and all he could hear was the faint whistling of the wind.
"Time to move," he said.
Back in the Deathlands, winter had been a time of bitter hardship, with blizzards and fiercely low temperatures. But here in Alaska the long nuclear winter still had the land in its thrall. In places there were deep snowbanks that had been piled up by the endless winds, and in other places, just bare rock, scoured and shattered by permafrost. Gray and dull green lichens clung precariously to the more sheltered places, but life was almost extinct, clinging to the edges of an abyss.
Either a man found protection or he tried to keep moving. After an hour of walking steadily west and then curving cautiously back toward the south, Ryan was feeling exhausted. Much of the time he was battling against a shrieking gale that plucked at his hood, blasting splinters of ice into his eye. Such a buffeting soon cuts away at the senses of even the strongest man. It becomes difficult to think rationally, and all a man wants is to lie down and rest a little, just sleep for a few minutes.
A few long, long, long minutes.
Ryan tried to keep moving, without going too fast. He remembered that Finn had urged care. To sweat was to lose body heat; to lose body heat was, eventually, to die. He knew the signs of frostbite: small, gray-yellow patches on the skin, accompanied by numbness, later leading to the blackening of gangrene and finally to death. That was something he didn't need to fear. Either he'd find the others in the next day or so, or he'd be dead anyway.
To counter the cold on his face, Ryan exercised his muscles, alternately scowling and smiling, so that his cheeks wouldn't freeze and lose all sensation. He checked the small chron on his wrist, finding that he'd been away from the Russians for nearly three hours. Unless they scattered, he figured he was safe from stumbling back into their arms. Once, he heard the distant sound of gunfire. It lasted only a few seconds and wasn't repeated.
With little light, it was hard going. He was constantly slipping and falling, slogging on, pausing now and again to listen. Once there was the sound of running water, but it seemed to come from his left, away from the direction he'd taken.
Ryan knew all the survival tricks of lighting a life-saving blaze using a lens, or even by taking apart a couple of bullets to ignite tinder or paper. But in that desert of ice and stone there was nothing he could burn. No wood at all.
"Shelter," he said, panting hard. A pale sliver of moon danced above him, occasionally visible through the shreds of high, gray clouds. It gave enough light for him to see a big drift of snow banked against the overhanging lip of a ridge of rough stones a hundred paces ahead of him.
With his panga, he began to carve the white bank, cutting eighteen-inch cubes, stacking them to make a wall to break the wind. He worked steadily, creating a tunnel, gradually expanding it until it was large enough for him to climb into. The wall of snow bricks, which had grown higher and higher as he'd carved out the tunnel, was arranged around the entrance. If he'd had better tools, he could have tried to make a full house of snow, or "igloo," as Finn had called it. But he also remembered that there was a danger of such places melting and caving in, trapping the occupants.
Ryan sat down, making sure his coat was tucked beneath him. Immediately he was aware of the shelter that his snow cave provided against the weather. Out of the gale, there was no longer the bitter numbness in his face. Every few minutes he stood up and shuffled his feet, swinging his arms to keep his circulation going.
Around five in the morning, he dozed for a while, waking when the first light of dawn came sliding over the eastern mountains.
"Feels like a stone buried in your flesh," Ryan muttered. He was again slogging relentlessly onward in a great loop south, hoping to meet the others.
His toes hurt and he could feel a faint prickling on his exposed face. His hands were also becoming swollen and tender.
"Stone in your flesh," he repeated. That was how Finnegan had described what the early symptoms of frostbite felt like.
It was nearly midday, but the temperature seemed to be dropping. Off to the north, he could see a great smear of yellow across the sullen sky, where a volcano was erupting. At the top of a ridge, he stared out through the swirling wall of snow, looking for any sign of life, friendly or otherwise. He thought he saw the great dish of the radar installation many miles ahead, but it seemed impossible to reach before evening. And he was beginning to doubt his ability to survive another night without proper shelter and some food.
The mutie polar bear came blundering out of the mists of evening, padding on huge, shaggy paws. Ryan was close to the limits of exhaustion and hunger. His concentration was slipping. Still, he plodded onward, trying to make as much ground as he could before hacking another shelter from the unyielding snow.
"Fuckin' fireblast!" he cursed, stumbling back a few paces, leveling, the Heckler & Koch G12 at the hulking beast that stood less than twenty paces away. Its red eyes glared at him; breath plumed from its jaws. For a few moments, man and beast stared at each other, neither sure of the other's intentions.
"Just fuck off out of my way," said Ryan, finger on the trigger of the automatic rifle.
The creature moved its head back and forth, almost as if trying to hypnotize its intended prey with the regular pendulum swinging.
Saliva dripped from the long, tusked teeth. The head moved faster and still faster. Ryan blinked, fighting against tiredness to hold the gun steady, knowing that one lapse of concentration would be fatal.
Noticing a sudden tensing of the hump of muscle across the bear's shoulders and guessing it presaged a charge, he didn't hesitate any longer. The gun set on continuous fire, he squeezed the trigger, bracing his hip against the recoil. In a crosswind the 4.7 mm bullet was liable to a degree of drift, though the trajectory drop was excellent.