Trapped (11 page)

Elijah smiled a little. I don’t think he was enjoying our misfortune. I think he’d just seen it coming. We were all watching him now, and he knew it. His little bone-white hand appeared from beneath the blanket and floated outward until it was pointing at the windowsill.

“Aw, you’re kidding me!” said Krista.

Les walked over and picked up what Elijah had been pointing at: the nearly empty pudding can.

“They don’t call it ‘going to the can’ for nothing,” Elijah said. “And then you just dump it out the window.”

Les handed it to him, and he held it out for us to see. Why did it have to be the chocolate pudding?

“Alright,” said Krista, rolling her eyes, “but … just … ugh!”

“We’ll need one for water too,” said Pete. “To melt snow to make water.”

“Yeah, we
cannot
use the same one for that!” said Julie.

Les walked back over and picked up the peaches. That one was more than half full, though. “Well,” he said, “looks like we’ll need some more cans.”

“It’ll take forever for the snow to melt in here,” I said, pushing out a long spout of white breath.

“We’ll need to build a fire,” said Elijah.

It was something we’d avoided. It just hadn’t seemed like a good idea. There was no ventilation in here, no fireplace, and nowhere to run if things got out of control. And wasn’t Elijah the one who’d said we were all going to die in here? What was he trying to do, make sure he was right?

“Man,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I was alone, though. Everyone else really liked the idea.

“What d’ya mean, man?” Pete said. “We need to melt the water, and it’ll be warm, man. Nice and warm.”

That sealed the deal. And anyway, I didn’t want to fall back into the super-cautious Ned Flanders role I’d had the first two days: “Should we really?” “Will we get in trouble?” I was a little embarrassed by all that now.

“Alright,” I said, “but we’ll need a separate room where we can keep a window cracked.”

“No problema,” said Les, eager to break another lock.

“And we’ll need something better than a peach can for it,” I continued. “And some way to start it and stop it quick.”

And that’s how I ended up on my way down to visit Jason in the shop a few hours before I’d planned. I had both hands on the railing as I headed down into the dark stairwell. Fire Marshall Weems reporting for duty.

“A fire?” Jason was saying. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

It had taken me a good fifteen minutes to get to the shop, feeling my way along the walls and lockers like a mole in ski gloves. The air was cold and tight and I was breathing harder than I should’ve been by the time I pushed open the busted door on the industrial arts room. The air was better in there because of all that opening and closing of the windows, I guess.

“No,” I answered, “but they’re all pretty set on it.”

“Mmmm,” he said as he leaned in to tighten a bolt with a monkey wrench. I wasn’t sure if that was a response or a grunt.

“Anyway, we’ve got to melt the snow somehow,” I continued, “and a room with some heat wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

“No,” he said, putting the wrench down and looking up. “But burning the school down would.”

“I’ll give you that,” I said, grinning like an idiot. The oversized goggles he was wearing made him look like a bug, and safety lectures from bugs are hard to take seriously.

“I’ll tell you what,” he went on, ignoring me. “That room would heat up nicely if we got some sun. Those two big windows … Then the snow would melt quick enough. You know how hot it gets in here.”

He waved his work glove at the wall of windows at the back of the room. He was right about that. It got hot as balls in here,
especially when you had all the safety gear on and were leaning into a belt sander.

“Yeah, dude, but we’d be out of here if we got some sun. All we’re getting is more snow, so I think, you know, we have to think about that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s true. I heard there was a nor’easter that lasted, like, a week. In the ‘60s or something.”

I sort of wondered where he’d “heard” this, and why he’d been keeping it to himself.

“Probably lasted a day,” I said. “Those people were so stoned.”

We both laughed. I was in a strange mood, not good exactly but not as bad as you’d think. The prevailing atmosphere of DOOM was making me a little punchy. It was nice to be out of that room for a while, in any case, so I figured I’d stretch it out a bit.

“Man, whatcha doin’ with this thing?” I said, nodding toward the
Flammenwerfer.
It was looking a lot different than the last time I’d seen it.

“You really want to know?” he said. From the big smile breaking out on his face, I could tell he was going to tell me anyway. “I’m turning it into a snowmobile!”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it’ll totally work better that way. Check it out—”

He was walking to the back of the kart to show me something, but as soon as I realized he was serious I cut him off.

“That’s dumb, man. You heard the radio. We’re supposed to stay put.”

“For how long? You’re the one who said ‘All we’re getting is more snow.’ Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “I didn’t say I was going to use it. It just, you know, gives me something to do … other than sitting around watching Pete make moonie faces at Julie. Ugh.”

“Yeah, can’t argue with that,” I said. I was secretly glad he hadn’t mentioned the moonie faces I’d been making at Krista.

“Anyway, check it out. You know how I was having problems getting the driveshaft to work? Without, you know, spraying the room with shrapnel?”

Not to get too technical about it, but that had been the big problem with the kart so far. The engine was just a big lawn mower engine, so it had one shaft that spun straight underneath it. But the wheels were on both sides, not straight underneath. So he had to find some way to hook the engine up to the wheels. At first, he’d tried this heavy-duty bike chain hookup, but it had come apart at high revs and nearly killed Pete. Missed him by like a foot. So then he’d moved on to this “rotating coupling” thing, like on a real car, but that was super complicated. And, to be honest, it was probably more dangerous than the bike chain.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, I don’t even need to do it on this. I can just tilt the engine down so the shaft is pointing out the back and hook a propeller right to it.”

“Like, you mean, like those airboats they use in the Everglades?”

“Yeah, yeah, just like that! And instead of wheels, I’ll just make the bottom like a sled. Super simple!”

“Dude, man, that’s pretty cool.”

“Thanks. It’s a lot easier too. It’s not a go-kart.” He paused, smiling. “It’s a snow-kart! I think it might work.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’d break your neck if you actually used it. But you might get an A out of it.”

“You think?”

“Totally.”

He’d definitely get an A. “Stranded Kid Builds Propeller Sled.” How do you not get an A for that?

“Cool, it’ll be my legacy. They’ll find its charred remains after we burn down the school.”

“Yeah, they’ll probably award you the Nobel Prize and stuff,” I said. Then, because I still couldn’t get it out of my head, I added, “Elijah says we’re all going to die in here.”

Jason looked at me and snorted: “He would.”

That made me feel better, the way he just blew it off like that.

“We’ve got all the fixin’s, folks,” said Jason, kicking open the door to the main room.

It hadn’t been easy to haul all of this stuff back from shop. Our arms were full of pretty much everything we needed to set up a good, safe, and relatively small fire. At least we hoped it would be small.

Between us we had a blowtorch, sparker, fire extinguisher, empty paint cans, an old metal bucket half full of sand, and some 2x4s. We figured we’d start off by burning some clean wood before we started breaking up the furniture. We dumped the stuff in a heap by the door and stood there, leaning forward with our hands on our knees, breathing hard. The frost plumes of our breath pushed halfway across the room before disappearing.

“What, are you gonna build it right there?” asked Pete.

“No, you idiot,” said Jason. Pete was in his doghouse for staying up here with the girls instead of coming down and checking out his snow-kart, and for not helping us carry this stuff. “I just thought I’d get some feeling back in my shoulders for a second.”

Pete didn’t say anything. I think he kind of knew what was going on. Julie, not so much.

“Where should we build it?” she said.

Everyone was waiting for Jason to answer, and he kept them waiting for a few long moments. No one even looked at me.

“Need a new room,” he said finally, straightening up and rolling his shoulders.

“Why?” said Julie.

“Because,” he said, and for a second it seemed like that was all he was going to say. He seemed annoyed to be having this discussion. Finally, he added: “Well, for one thing, we’ll need to leave a window open.”

“For ventilation?” I said. I was like his dopey helper, asking him simple questions. I knew he wouldn’t necessarily explain things otherwise.

“Yeah,” he said, turning to me with a little smirk. He knew what I was doing, and that I’d probably keep doing it, so he explained everything nice and slow.

“Yeah, I mean, I think you guys might think this little fire is going to bring warmth back into our Happy Home, but mostly it’s just going to bring fire into it. We’ll have to crack a window above it, for ventilation and to give it enough oxygen. But an open window isn’t like a chimney. The smoke won’t just magically climb out, so the room is going to be seriously smoky anyway. And the window will let in more cold than the fire produces heat.”

“Well, that all sucks,” said Krista. She sounded legitimately sad about it, and Jason relented a little.

“Well, it will melt the snow quick enough, and if you’re sitting right by it, it’ll be warm. Plus, we can use it to, like, heat up our gloves and blankets and stuff. So that’ll, you know …”

Jason couldn’t bring himself to say “be nice,” so he just waved one hand around in a circular way that he probably considered the outer limits of girlishness and everyone got the idea. A big gust of wind rattled the windows, and Jason went on.

“And we should pick a room on the other side of the hall, facing the courtyard. There’s way too much wind out there to open a window facing the front. The smoke’ll never get out and we don’t want a sudden burst of oxygen like that around the fire either.”

So I was looking at Jason giving his little fire-safety lecture and I started picturing him in one of those red plastic fire hats. He looked over at the end and I had that same stupid grin on my face as before, like I was just about to start laughing. It was at least the third or fourth time since this started that he’d caught me acting like an idiot.

“This is serious, Weems,” he said. “Moron.”

So basically he let me off easy.

We picked the room right across the hall, just next to the one Elijah and Les had staked out. There were pros and cons to this. Pro: It was close to both rooms, and we could keep an eye on it. Con: It was close to both rooms, and a fire in a bucket in the middle of a tile floor seemed like it could get out of hand pretty quickly. I’d heard that this kind of tile burned better than wood once it got going.

Jason’s thinking was that if the fire got out of control we were all going to die, regardless of where it started. It was probably true, but again, not too comforting.

We also designated that room as our new bathroom. It
was unisex: We were, like, true progressives. You went in there, pulled the blind down on the door, and did your business right in front of the fire. Then you dumped it out the already open window into fifteen or sixteen feet of snow, swished a little water around in the can, and left it for the next customer.

It was a good plan because the bathrooms had been getting a little too cold even before the pipes froze. It had been like instant open-air shrinkage. Plus, it guaranteed that there’d be a steady stream of people into the room, to keep an eye on the fire and feed it more wood now and then.

The fire was just a little pyramid of broken-up chunks of 2x4s to begin with, stacked neatly on top of the sand in the old metal bucket.

“Like a cookout on a beach,” Jason said.

The sand was originally meant to throw on chemical fires in the shop, but it was also good at keeping the bottom of the bucket from getting too hot against the floor.

So we started with the 2x4s, but after a while, any wood would do. If you want to know a secret, textbooks were even better. The big ones burned slow, like Yule logs. We had the blowtorch and sparker, so it was no big deal to start it up. And we kept the fire extinguisher by the door. It seemed like a pretty slick plan all around.

By afternoon, the commode situation was sorted out and our little fire bucket was working fine. We were all back in the main room together and, well, you could kind of smell it. Even in the cold, we were starting to smell and feel a little funky. I’d had
the same socks and underwear on since Tuesday morning. My hair felt oily, itchy, and gross under my hat. No one really took their hats off anymore. And looking around, I could see that I wasn’t the only one having acne trouble.

Anyway, by the time the smell of smoke started creeping under the door, I think we were all a little glad. It did a decent job of covering up our funk. And the fire wasn’t out of control or anything. It seemed small and harmless in its little bucket. It was just that it was too windy, even out in the courtyard, for the smoke to make its way out the window without a lot of detours. The thick, oily smoke from the burning lumber seemed almost curious, the way it crept under every door and into every corner. And if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine a fireplace crackling away somewhere nearby.

So our little fire-in-a-bucket was working pretty well, and I’ve got to say, the hits just kept on coming. That afternoon, for the first time since the storm had started, the snow really slowed down. It didn’t quite stop, but it let up enough so that you really noticed. Just a quick look out the window and you could see it was different.

And so, of course, that’s what we were doing. We were staring out the window, all of us except for Jason, who’d gone back down to the shop. It was around three o’clock. We were getting down to the last of our cafeteria supplies and were talking about who should go back for more and if maybe we could make a torch or something for the trip. The emergency lights hadn’t come back on, and we were kind of on a fire kick anyway.

“Look at the snow,” Julie had said. It sounded like a tremendously stupid statement, considering that it had been snowing for days and we were almost buried in the stuff, so most of us didn’t look over. But Pete did, of course.

“Wow,” he said, and then everyone looked.

Now we were sitting in our chairs or standing by the window and watching. I was thinking: This is just a normal snowfall. It looked like snow in all of those old movies, just some fluffy
flakes drifting lazily to the ground while some crooner is singing in the background and everyone is dreaming of a white Christmas or going to grandma’s house or whatever.

How many snowfalls just like this had I seen in my life: dozens, hundreds? It wasn’t the foot-an-hour whiteout that had shut everything down on Tuesday, or even the hard, driving snow that had kept it shut down since then. It was just snowing. The only thing remarkable about it now was that it still hadn’t stopped for three days.

With the snow so much lighter, it seemed like maybe the cell phones might have a shot. Everyone tried and got nothing, but then Pete had the bright idea to open the window and, like, lean out. It was kind of a shot in the dark, but his phone was basically out of battery power at that point — too low for his game or his flashlight app — so it was like a last hurrah.

The wind had died down, along with the snow, so it was cold when the two of us wrestled the heavy window open, but there was no blast of arctic air or anything like that. Pete brushed away the mini-snowbank on the sill and leaned out into the open air with his elbows on the frame and his phone out in front of him.

“Anything?” said Julie.

Pete had this look of intense concentration on his face, like he was trying to communicate with ESP instead of AT&T. “Nah,” he said. “Nuh-uh.”

Then he leaned out a little farther and held his phone up above his head.

“Careful,” said Julie.

“Watch it,” I said.

It was mostly calm, like I said, but every now and then a little gust of wind would whip sideways across the front of the school. There was another one right then. It wasn’t big or anything, but it must’ve blown some snow into Pete’s eye or something like that.

“Son of a …” he said, reaching back toward his face with his left hand.

The phone was still out there in his right hand, just on his fingertips, and then it wasn’t. We all watched as it tipped and fell. I leaned forward and ducked my head out the open window just in time to see it hit the snow. It dug in a few inches, but you could still see it in there, just this faint glow rising up through the snow.

“Oh, crap!” said Pete.

I made the snap decision not to bust on him about it. Les made the opposite decision, but Pete wasn’t really listening. He was just looking down at the little glowing line in the snow, not all that far below the window now but too far to reach. After that, there was nothing to do but shut the window before the room got too cold. It closed with a heavy thud. So long, little flashlight, I thought. It had been worth a shot.

After that, we just went back to what we were doing. I was standing there with a blanket wrapped around me, watching this seen-it-a-thousand-times-before snow as if it was some fascinating new phenomenon. And that’s when I saw it. At first, it was
just a shape, something dark moving behind the shifting patterns of the fat white flakes. I thought maybe it was a bird, but it was too far away. It was too far away, and that meant that it was too big. It was too far away and too big and too metallic. And then it must have turned toward us because I could see its light.

“Does anyone … Do you see?” I said. “It’s a helicopter!”

It made this big sweeping turn in the air, flew a little closer, and then moved steadily away. It didn’t really come all that close to us. It was hard to gauge distance with all that altitude between us, but I guessed it was maybe a half a mile away. So it wasn’t exactly a flyover. We couldn’t hear its rotors or anything, but it was close enough so that we could see that it was dark green. It was military.

I was thinking, Man, Jason’s going to be mad he missed this, and right then he burst through the door. “There was … Did you see?” he huffed. “There was a helicopter!”

It’s funny, because that’s almost exactly what I’d said. But how did he know about it? The shop was on the other side of the building. What, had he used his MSP: military sensory perception?

“It just swung around over the river and then I lost sight of it,” he said.

“Oh, man,” I said. “It, like, circled the building!”

“Yeah?” he said. “How close did it come on this side?”

“Maybe like half a mile.”

“Yeah, it was about the same on the other.”

“Do you think it saw us?” said Julie as if the helicopter was some sort of creature.

“They don’t need to see us,” said Les. “They know we’re here.”

I hoped that was true, and I felt a little embarrassed that I’d waved my arms as it flew by, half a mile away. I wasn’t the only one, though.

Anyway, that was downright exciting. We all stayed there for a while, even Jason, chattering about it and what it meant. We all thought that maybe this was it. The storm was winding down and pretty soon everything would be running again and we’d be out of here.

Les and Elijah went back to their room so they could keep an eye out from that side of the building. Jason went back down to the shop, and some of us came and went from the fire room, and then at some point I looked up and it was just Krista and me in the main room. Pete and Julie were gone. There’s no chance Pete would go into the other room with Les, and I hadn’t seen them when I’d gone to take a leak.

I looked over at Krista. All of a sudden I was nervous again.

“Uh?” I said. It wasn’t much, but she knew what I meant.

She just put her finger up to her lips and made a small shushing sound. So she knew they’d slipped off together. Pete had just snuck out on me, but I guess Julie must’ve told Krista. Chicks always talked more about that stuff than guys.

I was thinking: Where are they, back stairwell? I looked
across the floor, and sure enough, Pete had taken his blanket. That dog!

I looked back over at Krista. None of this was news to her. She was looking down at her book again. She was reading
The Great Gatsby,
which is a really small, thin book, and she was trying to turn the page with her big ski gloves. It took her like three tries and she had this look of total concentration on her face the whole time. Her knees were pulled up to her chest and her feet were crossed. She was wearing these little white slip-on sneakers.

I was staring, but I sort of couldn’t help it. It’s like my muscles weren’t responding. The look on her face, the way her feet were crossed, just everything … Make fun of me if you want, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I was lost in it.

Did you ever go to the beach when you were a little kid and get wiped out by a wave? You know how you get tumbled around down there and come up spitting saltwater? You’re dizzy and disoriented and all you can do is try to stand up, even though you know another wave might hit you any second? Well, that’s pretty much how I felt right then. I wasn’t spitting water, though, at least not much.

I was thinking: Is this what love is, feeling like you’ve been spun around underwater? Forgetting how cold you are, until she looks up and you look down and you’re embarrassed and the world comes rushing back in? Or is love not being able to get that image out of your head, the image of the moment right before she looked up?

Or was I just being an idiot? When her head had started to come up, I’d assumed she was looking up at me, but I was wrong. She was looking out the window. It was something she’d seen out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh, no,” she said softly.

I looked over. It was really coming down again.