The Wall (The Woodlands) (42 page)

My eyes didn
’t want to open. My poor body clock was so back to front. Waking at dusk and going to sleep at dawn was killing me. My body ached from sleeping on the rock floor and I felt like I was frozen to it. I wiggled around and heard cracking and something sliding across my bag with a nylony ‘zip’. Careen had turned towards Pietre and her warmth deserted me.

I looked out the cave opening
. It was still light. I blinked, unbelieving, and prayed for the rain to return.

A
late snow.

T
he woods had been transformed to winter again. The entrance to the cave frowned to the outside, white iced around its mouth. Jagged icicle teeth grinned at us and swallowed us whole.

I shook Careen
’s shoulder and she batted me away with the flat of her pale hand, smacking me the face. I punched her shoulder hard and she sat up with an irritated look on her face. But when she saw the snow, her face changed to utter dismay.
What the hell were we going to do?
It had been hard enough to walk in the rain in the dark. With icy rocks and roots to slip on, it was going to be disastrous.

Careen rattled Pietre. He sat up violently.
“Crap!” he said and then he proceeded to curse for a good couple of minutes while we watched. His shoulders and head hunched, he kicked things around our tiny cave.

Finally,
I’d had enough. “Will you shut up? There’s no point in getting angry—we have to keep moving.” Jolted out of his rampage, he took a deep breath and shrugged.

“
You’re right, we…” The sound of metal slicing the air silenced us both. We turned our heads to the cave opening and saw a blade flying towards a young deer that had, surprisingly, not been scared off by Pietre’s cursing.

Pietre
’s eyes opened wide in horror and his mouth fell open as the blade hit the creature in the throat, blood spurting out onto the fresh snow. The poor deer stumbled around uselessly, trying to shake the blade from its neck, and collapsed awkwardly against a tree. Sweet black eyes frozen like its surroundings, unblinking.

Pietre
was furious. Angry whispers progressed to shoving as he manhandled Careen to her feet and shook her. “Have you got a brain between those pretty ears?” he spat.

“
What?” Careen said bewildered, between shakes. We were genuinely baffled at his anger. I thought what she’d just done was awful but I didn’t understand why
he
was so upset? I thought he enjoyed this kind of thing.

“
Do you think we can eat a whole deer, or even carry the carcass somewhere safe? You’ve just alerted every wolf in the area there’s a fresh kill waiting for them.” Pietre put his hands down and flexed his fists while he talked. “And once they’re done with the deer, who do you think they will come after next?”

Careen eyes became pools of
alarm as she realized her stupidity. “I’m sorry,” she stuttered. Pietre turned his back to her and started shoving his things into his pack.

He swung around and jumped out of the
cave, burying his legs up to the knees in snow. Bashing his way to the deer’s body, he grabbed it by the back legs and threw it into a branch. It was grotesque and as good a warning as any to get as far away from it as possible.

The sun had
set. The blood was dripping down the tree trunk and pooling in the snow like a red ink blot. Pietre turned his head up to us, his eyes showing a hint of panic, and said bleakly, “We have to run.”

We ran in the dark
est dark, bashing our way through trees and slapping branches. The snow had stopped falling but it was icy, cold, and slippery. Every time I put my foot down, I would think it was safe, only to find my heel digging into a sharp rock or a buried branch catching my foot and sending me flying face first into the snow. Every now and then Pietre would stop abruptly and listen, his ears pricked for the sound of a wolf following us. But we heard nothing, save footsteps crunching through the powdery snow and our own breathless panting.

After hours of running, I stopped. I couldn
’t breathe. My heart and lungs a connected bulge of stabbing pain. I had to rest for a second. I reached out in the dark and found Pietre’s sleeve. I tugged it and he halted. “I… have… to stop… for a… second,” I said between puffs.

“
No. We have to keep moving.”

“
Please?” I begged, releasing his shirt and bracing myself over my knees, desperately trying to drag in another breath.

He hadn
’t ignored me. I couldn’t hear his footfalls moving away. He raised the screen to his face and tried to ascertain how far we’d traveled by tracing his finger along the path we’d followed.

“
One more hour. Then we’ll stop and find shelter,” he said, gripping my wrist and squeezing it uncharacteristically gently.

I couldn
’t do one more hour. Careen was puffing and panting behind me but she didn’t back me up. She was probably feeling too guilty for forcing us to set this ridiculous pace.

He didn
’t wait for me to answer but I saw the handheld floating further away from me. Then I felt the drag of someone pulling me along like a donkey. I had no choice. I put my head down and thought of my mother.

The blinking arrow brought us
closer to the rock formations and sometimes when I stuck out my hand, it grazed the natural wall. The rock was sharp and cold, but reassuring. If wolves were chasing us, we could scramble up there quickly if we had to.

I was desperately trying to keep up but I was so much smaller than the two of them
. One of their steps was two of mine. My legs pulled up out of the three-foot deep ditches of snow and slammed down hard against the earth, begging me to slow. Trying to keep myself motivated, I imagined the wolves were right on our heels and the adrenaline caused by my fear spurred me on. All I could hear was our breathless pants and our chorus of crunching boots. We sounded like twenty men, not three.

A wolf howled.

I heard a shuffle of fabric as something caught and nylon ripped open with a neat shriek.

Then
, a sickening snap.

I reacted quickly, stumbling over to the glowing screen of the
handheld. I kneeled down and found his face. I clamped my hand over his mouth but not before he let out one hollow scream.

He pulled himself to sitting
, my hand still over his mouth, his hot breath on my palm. In the half-light, I caught him nod and I released my hand. I risked the torch in my pack and turned it on, shining it on his face and down his body.

His expression was
painful, his jaw tight, but to his credit he didn’t scream again. His face was greenish white and beads of sweat were forming on his brow, despite the cold.

Several wolves howling broke my concentration. They
’d heard him. They were coming.

Careen was standing over us
, her hand covering her mouth in shock, her body trembling slightly.

I tried to think.
What should I do? What would Joseph do?

Pietre spoke before I could make any decisions.
“My leg is broken. You’ll have to leave me.” He clenched his jaw and tried to find a more comfortable position but found none.

I was
stunned. “What? No.” No way was I leaving him there to be eaten.

“
It’s ok; at least I’ll slow them down. Give me the stunners and a torch,” he said calmly, holding out his hand.

Careen fumbled around in her bag and handed him two stunners. He
dragged himself towards a tree and leaned his back against it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. These Survivors. This self-sacrifice stuff was so over the top. “I’m not leaving you here. Get up. We’ll help you walk.” I tried to get him to put his arm around my shoulder but he sank into his position like an immovable rock.

“
No, you won’t. The mission is too important. Besides, they’ll catch up to us and then we’ll all die. Just stay out of it, Rosa. This is
my
decision.”

I stoo
d there, exasperated. This wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t let it. There had to be another way.
Think. Think.

I took a few step
s towards him and smacked the side of his head with my torch. His eyes went blank and he slumped forward. The stunners tumbled out of his hands, coming to rest at his feet, stark black against the white.

“
Rosa, what the hell did you do that for?” Careen whispered angrily. I ignored her and set to cutting down a straight branch with my knife. I lined it up, cut it down to size, and used the set of bandages we had to splint Pietre’s broken leg. I unrolled a sleeping bag, unzipped it, and tried to roll him inside. He was so heavy, a dead weight.

“
Careen, help me.” The clueless redhead squatted down with me and we rolled him into the bag, zipping it up. I shone the torch up at the rock formation, searching for a cave entrance, a hole, anything. My heart fell when the only opening I could see was three meters off the ground.

One
mournful, long note sounded off, not far away.

“
We have to get him up there,” I said, pointing with my torch, tracking the seam of rock where snow had settled. It zigzagged upwards to the entrance, showing us a way up. It was only a foot and a half wide but it would have to do. Careen nodded and we started to drag him towards the base of the cliff.

Pietre wasn
’t a huge man but unconscious, and not giving us any help at all, it was like he weighed three-hundred kilos. We pushed, pulled, and heaved until we’d dragged him halfway up the cliff. Resting on the ledge for a second, I thought my arms might actually twist and fall off if I tugged on them hard enough. My lungs burned from the cold, my legs strained as we tried to roll him up and over the next ledge, his whole dead weight crushing us both.

H
e woke up and started cursing and wriggling, his unaware antics sending him sliding down the ledge and on top of us. My heart buckled at the idea we would have to start all over again. Without thinking, I grabbed his broken leg to stop him from slipping all the way back down. I clamped down on it hard, wrapping both my arms around him while pinning my front to the rocks’ surface. My muscles pulsed, ticking involuntarily. He shrieked and then, silence.
Thank God.
He passed out from the pain, but then we were back to dead weight.

I don
’t know how we did it. It was a blur of pain and pressure. The wolves were approaching—the air was stripping my lungs. But we got him up there. We pushed him up over the ledge and into the cave like a sack of potatoes. We watched as he rolled over a few times, deep into the cave like a loose one, and came to a stop, nestled awkwardly around a boulder. I stood at the edge, shining my torch down over the side of the rock, shaking my head in disbelief. What we just did was impossible. The rocks petered down towards the ground with barely a foot of outcropping to cling to. I’ll never understand how we did it.

Careen
rolled and then arranged Pietre at the back of the cave. She laid out some food, one stunner, and filled his water bottle with fresh snow. We piled both our sleeping bags on top of him and stood to look out of the entrance. She put her arm around me and pulled me close. I turned to face her and hugged her fiercely. Her body initially stiffened but gradually relaxed.