Racing Storm Mountain, page 8
“Just dig! The snow is crushing him.” She cursed savagely. “I’d give anything for a shovel right now.”
Finally a whole black-gloved hand was above the snow. It moved, all fingers but the thumb bending just a little, as though Kelton were trying to give a thumbs-up gesture, but was frozen stiff. Swann and Hunter punched and pulled and clawed. Her cold fingertips ached from ripping at the snow. Maybe they were bleeding. She didn’t care. Soon his arm was dug out. “Where’s his head? We have to clear an airway.”
Her fingers hit something hard. “Helmet!” Seconds later the round black dome of the top of his helmet was cleared.
“Swann,” said Hunter. “What if his neck is broken? Fractured or something? If we move his head too much we might do more harm than good.”
“None of that will matter if he can’t breathe.” The frantic digging had reduced Swann to a savage beast. She panted, grunted, and dug like mad, loosening and pushing away the more packed-in snow. Hunter pulled the extra snow out of the growing pit so it wouldn’t slide back down on top of Kelton.
“Hey.” Her fingers slid down the front of his helmet and gripped his visor. “I’m going to pull this up, get some air in there.”
“Won’t a bunch of snow fall right in?” Hunter asked. “He has to be cold enough al—”
She flipped up his visor. “Kelton! Can you hear me?” Some snow crumbles rolled into his helmet. She clapped her hands, trying to shake snow off her gloves before fingering around in there trying to pull snow out. Still there was no answer. “Kelton! Kelton, please. Please answer me.”
“So d-did you get a video of that?” Kelton asked quietly. “M-make a viral p-post?”
“No!” Swann shouted, laughing with relief. “Nobody cares about videos and social media at a time like this. I’m just glad you’re alive.”
“Oh. Well then, c-could you two please hurry up?” Kelton’s voice sounded like someone talking through a long cardboard tube. “It’s getting . . . kind of cold down here.” Kelton sort of laughed, but his laughter, like his speech, was flat, squeezed so that he sounded like an out-of-breath runner trying to talk after a long hard race. He must have been packed in pretty tight down there. “Plus we’re gonna really need to hurry . . . if we wanna . . . win the race.”
Hunter and Swann laughed. Swann blinked several times. “Don’t you worry, guy. Just breathe deep. We’ll have you out of there fast.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “Just lie there. Take it easy.”
“Oh, if I wasn’t frozen, and . . . you know . . . buried in the snow . . .” Kelton chuckle-wheezed. “Swear I’d punch you for that.”
CHAPTER 8
BY THE TIME MIKE IRONS REACHED CHECKPOINT ONE HE hadn’t spotted a single sled the whole way back. He dismounted even before his own sled had come to a full stop and tugged his beard, looking around the area in the diminishing light and the increasing snowfall. The volunteer had been sitting sideways on his own snowmobile like it was a bench. He checked his watched as he stood up.
“Is there a problem?” the guy said. He was a kid. Couldn’t be over twenty-five, and not too sharp, judging by the way he’d acted so far.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Pretty sure we got three missing kids, maybe lost out there in the snow.”
A big SUV pulled into the parking lot down the little slope just off the trail. Mike jogged down there. The kid followed.
Sheriff Hank Hamlin stepped out, bundled up in boots, overalls, coat, and full equipment belt. “Mike,” said the sheriff. He nodded at the kid. “Dylan. What’s the trouble? We got missing racers?”
“Sorry to bother you, Sheriff,” Dylan said. “Probably nothing. But—”
“Missing three kids. Daughter of that famous actor. My nephew Hunter Higgins. And that Fielding boy.”
“Josie Abbott’s son?” the sheriff asked.
“Think so,” said Mike.
A sharp cutting wind whistled through the open parking lot and Sheriff Hank shivered. “You two been out here a long time. We could talk about this in the truck. Warm up a little?”
Dylan looked like he was willing, but Mike shook his head. “Thanks”—he gestured at the increasingly dark and snowy woods—“but we need to hurry. Especially if someone’s hurt.”
“We start searching?” Dylan said.
Sheriff Hank nodded. “I’ll call the McCall police, ask them to check the kids’ homes and to look around in town just in case the kids gave up on the race and went back.”
Dylan checked his watch again. “The race ought to be about over by now. Maybe the last of the racers finishing up. The girl’s father will probably be near the finish line to award the prize.”
“Now, we don’t want all those snowmobilers to help with the search,” Mike said. “We’ll just end up with more people missing. But we need our best local guys to start looking right away. If the kids went off-trail between checkpoints one and two . . . Well, that’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“Should I head for the finish line, to gather our best guys for the search?” Dylan offered.
Was this guy crazy? Mike shook his head. “No. You and me are going to start searching off-trail starting from the first checkpoint.” Mike looked up. The evening was turning miserable-snowy. “Snow coming down this hard is going to make it difficult to spot their tracks. First we’ll comb the race trail, try to see if we can find a spot they turned off.” He looked at the sheriff. “I sent Allie Hennes onward to the next checkpoint. Get in touch with her. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’s found them.”
“Let’s hope so. I’ll drive around to the finish line, check if the kids are there,” said Sheriff Hank. “There’s still a chance that this is a clerical error and they slipped past your checkpoint unnoticed.”
Mike cursed. “I hope that’s what happened.”
“I can also notify the girl’s folks and, like you said, get the best locals looking.” The sheriff opened his truck door.
“Don’t let ’em get too crazy, Hank,” Mike said. “This is turning into a bad night. We send everybody off into the woods helter-skelter, we’ll just make things worse.”
“Lived all my life right here in the heart of Payette National Forest. Twenty-two years in law enforcement.” Hank slapped Mike’s arm. “This ain’t my first search. I know it’s not my nephew out there, but around here, our kids are our kids. We’ll find ’em. Promise.”
KELTON WAS USELESS. EVEN WHEN THEY HAD HIM DUG out down to his waist and he should have helped, he found he couldn’t. His arms and fingers, his legs, were super-stiff. And when they finally pulled him all the way out of his snowy tomb, his legs below the knees didn’t feel real. It was as though he were perched atop wobbly stilts. Kelton fought hard to push away paralysis fears.
He flopped down on his belly on top of the snow. “OK, so I can hardly feel my feet. That’s not how paralysis works right? If you break your back, you lose all the legs, right? You lose control of your whole body below the point where you break your back, right?”
“Oh yeah,” Hunter said. “You were just kind of walking.”
“You’re cold,” Swann said. “Numb with cold.”
“Like your hands get if you’re having a snowball fight without gloves,” Hunter added.
Kelton rolled over on his back. The snow was coming down even heavier than before, and it was getting dark. They didn’t have much daylight left. “I gotta get back on my sled. We have to get out of here.”
“Kelton, you almost died,” Swann pointed out. “Maybe the race isn’t so important?”
Kelton kicked his legs, trying to thaw them. It was the snow all down his boots that was his biggest problem. “No, forget the race.” It hurt to say it, to give in to yet another failure in his life, but no matter what his teachers or anyone else thought, he was no dummy. “We’re about out of daylight. It’s only going to get colder. The snow is falling even heavier. It will be a lot harder to find our way back. An avalanche at night? Ain’t nobody digging anybody out of that.”
“There are headlights on our sleds,” Hunter pointed out.
“Yeah, but they won’t be much help, especially in this snowstorm,” Kelton said. He was impressed that Hunter seemed to be taking what he said seriously.
“It’s getting worse,” Swann pointed out. “Like, a lot worse. I know I’m from California and may be a bad judge of snowstorms, but this is really coming down and blowing hard. Bigger than most of the snowstorms I’ve seen here.”
Kelton grunted in cold, pain, and frustration. “I won’t be able to drive my sled. I gotta warm up and thaw out. I have some dry clothes in my emergency pack. We need a fire.”
“In this snow?” Swann asked. “Is that possible?”
“The snowmobile pro guy on the YouTube video did it.”
Swann laughed. “Well, good. That’s all we need.”
“There’s the mine,” Hunter suggested. “Up on the hill behind us. Back there a couple hundred yards.”
Swann frowned. “What do you mean, a mine? Like a gold mine? A coal mine?”
Kelton bit his lip and groaned as he forced himself to his feet. “Abandoned gold mine. It’s why this road is here.” It hurt to shrug. “Well, there’s sort of a road here. Swann, they call Idaho the gem state for a reason. Still, every kid who grows up in Idaho is told a zillion times that abandoned mines are dangerous.”
“Can’t be more dangerous than freezing to death,” Hunter said. “If you have to be warmed up before we go home, the mine is your best chance.”
Kelton groaned again, forcing himself to move to his sled. “Right. We go to the mine. Just hope my snowmobile is up to it. So you g-guys thought I w-was buried with my snowmobile? Wish I had been. Got out sooner.”
“How could it still run?” Swann asked. “After it was so far under. The only part of it above the snow was the tip of the orange flag.”
“W-well,” said Kelton, “it is d-designed to run in the snow. I mean . . . that’s its whole point.” Kelton groaned in pain, gritting his teeth, as he forced his fingers to curl around the handle of the pull start.
Hunter moved toward him. “Here, let me do it.”
“I got it!” Kelton shouted. “You two get your snowmobiles started. ” He grunted as he finally forced his hand into a firm hold on the handle. “Come on, snowmobile. I need you. Let’s . . .” He yanked the pull start. The engine coughed and then roared. “Fire up! Yeah!”
“Woo-hoo!” Swann shouted. “First try!”
Kelton flopped down on the seat. He wouldn’t be able to stand and ride his snowmobile like the pros. He’d have to hang himself over the handlebars and steer with his whole upper torso, his hands being the frozen useless clumps they were. “Hunter! You saw the place. You lead the way.”
Hunter grabbed the pull start on his own sled. Then he stopped and looked back at Kelton. “You sure you’re up to this? I mean, you were just completely buried in—”
“It’s really c-cold out here,” Kelton said sharply.
“Let’s go, Hunter!” Swann shouted.
They all put on their helmets. The bit of remaining snow inside Kelton’s sent a fresh chill through his body. If he hadn’t been wearing this helmet during the avalanche, he’d be dead. It had trapped what little air he had left when he was buried to prevent the snow from drowning him. Still, wearing it again reminded him of being helplessly encased in the bone-chilling black.
The cold. As Kelton followed, a distant third behind Hunter and Swann, the frigid wind cut through his wet snow-sodden clothes, freeze-stiffening the fabric and numbing parts of his body that before now had been mostly OK. His sled hit a bump, and he nearly fell off. If he couldn’t warm himself, at least a little, he’d never be physically able to drive his snowmobile out of the backcountry. If he didn’t get out of here, he could freeze to death.
“Come on, Hunter,” Kelton whispered. “Please just find the mine. Hurry.”
SWANN FOLLOWED HUNTER, BUT KEPT GLANCING BACK TO make sure Kelton was still behind her. The poor guy was hidden behind the visor of his helmet, but she didn’t need to see his face to know he was miserable. He was hanging over the front of his snowmobile like a mannequin or a corpse. They’d tried to get the snow brushed off him and out of his clothes, but he didn’t have the best snow- and water-resistant gear, and he had been ice-packed solid like the fresh-caught salmon her parents sometimes had shipped in back home at their old house.
“Oh, I wish we were in California now,” Swann said quietly. “Like, in the middle of July. This guy could use a hot day on the beach.”
Hunter mostly led them back along their old tracks, but a few times he seemed to find a better course, routing them a different way around some mostly snowed-under trees or toward a more level path. A couple of times he stopped and looked around, their old tracks lost in the growing drifts of fresh snow.
Finally he stopped so long that Swann caught up to him. She flipped up her visor and shouted to him over their engine noise, “Where is it?”
“I don’t . . . It’s close!” Hunter shouted. He wasn’t only yelling to be heard over the noise of the engine, but he sounded as frustrated as Swann was worried. “The woods look different on the way back. A tree or boulder is shaped one way when you look at it from one direction, but is completely different heading the other way, plus now everything is covered in more snow. And the farther we go, the older our trail, the harder it is to find. Our older tracks have been blown and snowed over, like someone took a giant eraser and wiped them out.”
Swann bit her lip. This couldn’t be happening. A few years ago, flipping through the channels, watching TV at her grandmother’s house, Swann had found a show about some hunters being lost on a snowy mountain in Alaska. They had nearly died out in the snow before a helicopter could finally fly in to rescue them. Even then, the men were hospitalized with frostbite and hypothermia stuff. Was that what was happening to them? “Are you saying you’re lost?”
“What?” Hunter glanced at Kelton as he pulled up on his snowmobile. “No! I just . . . Come on. Let’s go.”
They drove off again, and now Swann was sure they were completely off their old trail. Hunter was making this up as he went along. She was getting cold now herself. She hoped Hunter would make up the correct way to the mine soon.
But he didn’t find it soon. The three of them worked their way back in the direction from which they’d come, moving up the mountain and then back down. Searching. Freezing. And it was getting harder to see out there as the snow picked up and the afternoon began to darken toward evening.
Swann checked behind her again and her heart jumped. Kelton’s snowmobile was stopped. He’d fallen off and lay facedown in the snow. She shouted for Hunter, tried to wave, but he wasn’t watching and couldn’t hear her. “Oh no. Kelton, don’t be dead.”
She couldn’t wait for Hunter to turn around and notice something was wrong. Kelton couldn’t wait. She cranked her snowmobile around and sped back down the slope to stop beside Kelton. “Kelton!” She slid to her knees at Kelton’s side and took hold of his shoulders, shaking him. “Come on, Kelton. Answer me!”
“I’m OK.” He slid around in the snow, trying to get up. “Just so cold. D-don’t know if I can get back on my sled.”
This was turning into that rescue show. Only nobody knew the three of them were back here. Cynthia knew she was in the race, but was the race over yet? Would anyone even notice she hadn’t turned up at the finish line? How long would it take people to realize something was wrong? Swann slid her arms under Kelton and tried to pull him up. He was a skinny guy, like most of the boys in her grade, but he was still heavy. “Come on, buddy. You have to help me here. Let’s get on my snowmobile. I’ll drive us both to the mine. Hunter’s probably found it by now.”
“No,” Kelton mumbled. “Got t-take my—”
“No arguments,” Swann said. “This is the only way.”
“My stuff,” Kelton mumbled. “Swann, wait a second . . .”
“It’s OK,” she assured him. “I got you.”
It took a while, but she finally helped get him seated on her snowmobile. There was just enough room behind him for her to sit if they were close, and sitting close was the only way she was going to be able to keep him from falling off. With her arms on either side of Kelton, she hit the throttle again, and backtracked toward Hunter, trying to put on extra speed to catch up fast.
The problem was that on the way up the mountain, eventually a bunch of snowmobile tracks crossed in all directions, and it was impossible to be sure of the correct path after Hunter.
“Kelton, keep talking to me, OK?” Swann had no idea if this was one of those situations where a person going to sleep or passing out was a terrible problem, but sometimes in the movies or on TV people had to keep a victim awake. “Can you believe Hunter wasn’t watching behind him and lost us? You guys don’t get along so well, huh? I bet you’re really mad at him now. What a jerk, huh? Is that what you think?”
“He’s OK,” Kelton said. “Shot a wolf.”
“Yeah,” Swann said. “I read about that in the school newspaper. Crazy stuff. I can’t believe I live in a place with actual wolves.”
“G-gotta . . . find that mine,” Kelton said. “Or just a p-place for a f-fire.”
“We’ll get there,” Swann said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “We’re almost there now.”
A light shined from behind a big snowdrift ahead. Swann slowed down a little. Finally Hunter rode into view. He stopped, waved frantically at her, and turned around. He must have found the mine. Why else would he be so excited?
“I think Hunter’s found it,” Swann said. “We’re almost there.”
And finally, the three of them reached their temporary destination. The headlights from their two snowmobiles shining on a dark hole in the snow, big enough to walk inside if they ducked.
Parking just outside the cave, Hunter and Swann helped Kelton off the snowmobile and through the deep snow. “Seriously, a mine?” Swann asked. Kelton could barely walk. He slipped, and she nearly fell under his weight. “I mean, mines are in cowboy movies and stuff.”
