I knew they wrote down names in Kansas, I only hoped they did the same in Virginia.
The biggest problem we had was the weather. Not the snow or ice, but the cold. Callie said orders were changed because they expected uninhabitable weather in a week.
When she said it, I found it hard to believe. As I stood in my home, the bone chilling cold showed me the reality of it.
Bottom line, for our safety we had to get south as quickly as we could.
We debated on how we would do it. Would we stop or drive through the night with the spotlights on? Stopping was just as dangerous as driving.
We had made it from one end of the country to the other and still had not found what we were looking for.
By joint decision, we were going to push through, drive into the blackness of the night. That choice only took us so far. Fear of going over the side of the road, seeing only twenty feet in front of us, caused us to stop and pull over.
We didn’t quit for the entire night, just long enough to get brave again. Despite refueling, and leaving the vehicle running, stopping for those two hours was our biggest mistake.
As we originally believed, it was too cold to stop.
We only needed to make it another two hundred miles.
Half way through West Virginia was our goal. Things had to switch up there, they had to.
A mere hour after we resumed our trip, the engine felt sluggish. I felt I had to push it, depress the gas as much as I could just to get juice.
Before long, the Humvee sputtered and choked. On the highway south, for some reason, it just died.
It reminded me of the night with Callie and Stone. The night we were attacked. Out on the road, everything so black, the headlights reflecting off of nothingness.
We had lights, but the engine wouldn’t start.
“The fuel line is frozen,” Madison said. “It has to be the fuel line. We have battery power.”
“What do we do?” I asked.
Del shook his head. “If that is what’s going on, unless some freak warmer weather happens, then there is nothing we can do.”
The Humvee was done. None of us knew how to fix it. Even if we did, we didn’t have the means or parts. But even if we had all the parts and know how, we still couldn’t fix it as we wouldn’t last five minutes outside.
“Well, this sucks,” Madison said.
“Yeah,” I glanced over to my notebook and the picture of Davis and the kids clipped to the front. “Yeah, it does.”
We were done.
We knew it.
Our journey, although unfinished had come to an end on a cold, dark West Virginia highway.
“They say,” Madison said. “That freezing to death isn’t a bad death. Not supposed to feel anything. You just get tired, the shivering stops and you die.”
“Who says?” Del asked. “I don’t think those who froze to death got to say how it felt.”
Madison shrugged. “It’s better than falling from a building.”
“True,” I said. “We could have suffocated like those people in California.”
“Or cooked,” Del added.
“We could have been shot, or stabbed,” I said. “That’s a horrible way to die. I always feared choking.”
“Thinking about it,” Madison said. “There could be worse ways to go other than freezing to death with people you care about.”
We lit candles to add not only light but warmth and sipped on the remaining airline size bottles of alcohol while talking. I took some time to write one final entry in my notebook. Not that Davis would see it, he wouldn’t. Neither would the kids. However I needed to do it. I needed to say my goodbyes.
We were going to make the best of it. What else could we do? Walking was out of the question, and soon enough, we’d freeze to death whether we stayed or walked.
We weren’t there long, maybe two hours. Longer than I thought we’d last. We shivered out of control. My face went numb, and I had to keep cupping my hands around my mouth, breathing into them to stop my lips from freezing together.
I watched as Del’s head started to tip forward. He’d catch himself, but was fighting the drowsiness. I felt it too.
It was when I stopped shivering that I knew the end wasn’t far off.
Just as I resolved myself to that, there was a triple bang on the window, followed by a beam of a flashlight.
Instantly, I felt rejuvenated. I sprang forward. Del snapped awake.
“Oh my God,” Del said. “Is someone out there?”
“Hey!” the male voice yelled. “Anyone alive in there?”
We couldn’t make out the face. The light caused him to be a shadow, but I was certain there was more than one person out there.
“Yes!” I screamed.
All three of us enthusiastically cried out, our voices meshed together. “We’re here. Yes. We’re in here!”
They tried to open the door, it rattled.
“It’s frozen!” he shouted. “Can one of you kick it?”
He was pulling on the passenger door and Madison turned her body and just started slamming her foot into the door. She was relentless. Slam. Slam. Over and over until finally, with a huge crack, the door flung open.
Two men bundled in winter gear shone the light inside.
“Everyone all right?” the one asked.
“We are now,” Madison said.
“Let’s get you on the bus. Hurry. Get what you can,” he instructed.
Without hesitation we obliged.
I could tell by their gear they were military and when I saw the bus, I knew. A convoy had found us.
We didn’t grab much, we didn’t need much, just our personal belongings. I grabbed my backpack and took a moment to some transfer things from my suitcase and I left that behind.
Then we boarded the bus. There were about twenty people on it, and I scanned each face, hoping, thinking maybe by chance my family was on there.
They weren’t. The bus was warm. My legs and body were weak. I didn’t realize how much the cold had battered me until I stepped on that bus. One of the soldiers handed me a blanket. I was so excited, so happy, I couldn’t even speak. Moments earlier I was resigned to dying.
Now, all that had changed.
Immediately, I pulled out my notebook.
“What are you doing?” Madison asked through shivering breaths. “You just wrote in that.”
“I know. I know. I just have to add something.” I grabbed my pen.
I had written my farewell, I just wanted to add to the bottom, that it was premature. All was well. We had been rescued. I wasn’t dying after all.
THIRTY-ONE – Switch
I’ll take it from here.
Before she did anything else on that bus, Lacey wrote in that notebook. They offered her coffee from a thermos. She refused. She had to write something in that notebook. Her hands were still trembling from the cold.
“Really?” I said to her. “You can’t wait until you warm up?”
“No, no I can’t.” She smiled at me. It was weird, because Lacey didn’t really smile much. Always so serious looking, even when she wasn’t being serious.
Del sat in the seat directly behind her. “Leave her alone,” he said. “When she realizes how bad her hand writing is right now she’ll stop.”
“It is pretty bad, huh?” She adjusted herself in the small seat to turn her back more against the windows, catching some of the light that came from the spotlights on top of the bus.
“Here.” I grabbed the flashlight out of my pack and just to get her to stop moving, I aimed the beam on the page for her.
It didn’t take her long, and she closed the notebook, resting it on her lap. She had a picture of her family clipped to the front of that beaten journal. The notebook had seen better days.