Bone Freeze

Chapter 1

I had to stop running. I had a stitch in my side and I was very tired, but at least my headache was better and I wasn’t cold anymore. I bent over, grabbed my knees and breathed out great white billows of breath like a venting steam engine. It was below freezing. How far below freezing? I didn’t know.

I turned and tried to see my pursuer, but there was no sign of him. All I could see was a great expanse of sunlit white wilderness. Before me the sun threw sparkling diamonds across the water. I was at the edge of the sea or maybe a bay of some kind. My headache was coming back now with a vengeance. This was not one of those I don’t think I’ll be able to go to the show tonight headaches. This was a nauseous blinding unable to keep my feet headaches. My world was turning gray from the pain. The wind suddenly gusted and I could hear it rise like a siren in the treetops at my back. Ice crystals stung my cheeks and I fell over, unable to stand against the strong gust. I almost disappeared in a snow drift.

I struggled to my knees and tilted my face toward the late afternoon sun. My nostrils were filled with the scent of pine. I had trees to my back, and a flat expanse of bluish white ocean in front of me. Nothing but snow and ice. There was nowhere to run. Who was chasing me anyway? I couldn’t remember. I suddenly couldn’t remember a lot of things. Where was I and what was I doing here? I wish this headache would stop so I could think.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Something on an ice flow about half a mile out. It was something white, like everything else here. It was… oh, no! The animal with the most sensitive nose is not the bloodhound as many would believe. It’s the polar bear. They can smell a man at twenty miles. They can smell blood at twenty five. There was one watching me right now. And guess which North American bear is the only one who will hunt and kill a man for food. Right again. The polar bear. Everything in this stark environment is food to them. I struggled to my feet and reached for my binoculars. They weren’t there! Shit, I must have dropped them somewhere while I was running. My rifle too. I couldn’t remember where I’d dropped it… or even whether I’d had one. I must have. I don’t venture out without one.

Disney and Coca Cola have made the polar bear seem cute and cuddly, but the truth is they’re ruthless killers with eight inch claws and six inch canine teeth, well equipped to survive in the arctic environment. I slid my goggles up off my eyes to get a better look at him, but he was gone. Where the hell did he go? I didn’t see any sign of him. Then it hit me. He was in the water! Coming for me! I turned and tried to run, but with one step I disappeared into another snow drift that was over my head. Dammit! I struggled back up onto the rise. I had to stick to the crest of the ridge I was on. I could see tufts of scrub sticking up in spots through the snow. If I ran along that line of scrub, I’d be okay. It was narrow but I could do it.

I had to get to some protection fast, but I had no idea where the closest shelter was. I decided to keep the sun on my left and head south along the shore. It just seemed like the right thing to do. I was laboring up a grade toward a small hilltop and each step was a huge effort. My legs felt like they were lead. I’d been running for quite a bit. How long? Why? I couldn’t remember. God, my head was throbbing! It hurt so bad my vision was beginning to tunnel. All I could see was the rise I was struggling toward. After several minutes of effort, I made the top and I was able to look down to the disappointing view below me. More endless miles of empty coastline. For some reason I was expecting a settlement to be here. But there was nothing. No town, no safe harbor and almost no color. Only black, white and bleak gray shoreline. I looked behind me and saw no sign of the bear. Maybe he’d found a seal or something more appealing. Unlikely. It was just wishful thinking on my part.

Instead of going down into the rocky ravine before me, I decided to skirt it, traveling along the ridge to the east. Then I could turn south again and get to the next hilltop and a good vantage point. But when I took a step, my knee gave out and I fell, then I rolled and somersaulted halfway down the hill. I tried to stand, but my knee hurt and I was dizzy. Shit! My throat was raw from breathing the freezing air so hard. I coughed and caught my breath. How the hell did I get here? And where was I anyway? I would guess by the rugged coast and bleak landscape I was in the Alaskan wilderness, but where? Alaska is a pretty big state. I finally began my long trek back to the top of the ridge above me. It seemed to take forever to make the top of the hill but I finally did. Then I struggled forward toward the next rise one plodding step at a time. I had almost reached the next hilltop when I heard rocks tumbling down on the slope behind me. I looked back and saw the bear. He was less than half a mile back and he had me in his sites.

The bear let out a roar. It was meant to intimidate, I think. It worked. I had to find a place to hole up, fast. I tried to hurry, but I had pushed my body to the limit. My head was pounding and flare-like pains shot through my right knee with every step. My legs felt like rubber. I was exhausted. I didn’t think I could make it much farther. I was fighting for every breath and faltering with each step. But I pushed myself onward along the ridge.

Polar bears are very fast. They can run at about thirty miles an hour, but they can only do that for about a hundred fifty yards. They overheat very rapidly because of their heavy insulation of fat and fur. When was the last time I came up against a polar bear? I don’t remember. How could I remember all that stuff about polar bears and not remember how I got here? Or who had been chasing me? Or my name? Oh my God! It’s getting worse! I can’t even remember my name now! My brain is starting to go. How can that happen to a person? Did someone put something in my drink? Did I get injected with something? Well, no time to consider that now. I had bigger problems to worry about. I looked back and the bear was trying to close the distance.

I stumbled across an old canoe. Just its nose was sticking out of a snow bank. It was the first sign of civilization I’d seen since I’d been running. It was a wooden one, made of cedar and turned upside down. I pulled it out of the snow and flipped it over. It was pretty old and had seen better days. I could see cracks in the floor of it. I don’t think I would trust it in the water, but it might hold together long enough to get me down this hill. I drug it out to the lip of the ravine, then I climbed in and rocked back and forth building momentum until it tipped and slid over the edge. When I glanced at the bear, it was about a hundred yards away. He stopped running and just watched me go. How do you say fuck you in bear?

It started out slowly at first then the canoe started picking up speed quickly over the rocks and dirt. The ride got rougher and bumpier and I knew at once I was going to have to bail out. I had no control over this thing, but I would wait until the angle wasn’t quite so steep. But I never had that chance. When it had reached an estimated sixty miles an hour, the canoe slammed into a boulder and I was ejected. I flew through the air and came to rest in one of those stunted oaks that grows on rocky hillsides. I was scraped up pretty good, but alive. I looked up to see if the bear would follow me. He was looking over the edge of the cliff, trying to decide whether he wanted to try it.

I climbed painfully out of the tree and kept my feet as I did a controlled slide to the bottom of the hill. The canoe was wrecked but it was a promising sign. Someone was around, or at least someone had come around and used that canoe. But how long ago? I walked along the shore on the sandy beach, occasionally looking over my shoulder to see where the bear was. But the last time I glanced back at the cliff, he was gone. I walked around the curved beach until I could see around the bend. There was just more shoreline and nothing else. After about a half mile, I came across the mouth of a frozen stream emptying into the sea. I walked alongside the shallow little stream a ways, pushing aside scrub and snow covered juniper. I got down on my painful knee, tugged off my gloves and goggles, and I used my hunting knife to break the ice covering the surface. I dipped my hands into the clear icy water. I splashed some on my face and neck. It was very refreshing, and I immediately started feeling better. I took a drink from my cupped hands. The water was good and I relished the coolness of it as it soothed my ragged raw throat. Taking a deep cleansing breath, I felt my tension began to ease, but I really couldn’t allow myself to relax. I didn’t know where the bear was.

Then I saw a footprint in the sand next to the stream. A man’s footprint! Then I saw another. Someone had been here recently. Although the ground was frozen, and these footprints could be days old, I decided to follow the trail of footprints upstream to see where they lead. They went up the hillside through a crevice cut into the hillside by the stream. The going was difficult because it was so narrow, but I struggled on. I finally broke out into the open on top of a hill and immediately looked around for the bear, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’d given up on me. I found another few footprints next to the stream, but then they seemed to disappear. There was heavy tundra grass, some of it covered by snow, and there was no place for a foot to leave a print. I decided to follow the stream as far as I could.

It wound up a hill through a forest like a frozen serpent. At one point it seemed to disappear in heavy undergrowth, but I picked it up again after exploring a little. My headache seemed to be better, but not my memory. Something had been done to my mind. Whatever it was, it was something potent. It had caused almost total amnesia. I was exhausted and night was coming on. The temperature was going to drop below zero and that was a death sentence for anyone caught out in the open. I had on my heavy parka, my North Slope trousers, heavy insulated boots, thermal underwear, but none of it would help in this brutal climate. As temperatures plunge and the chill seeps into your bones, you become very tired and sleepy and all you want to do is close your eyes and rest. You want to lay down. Not to die, just to sleep a little. Blissful sleep. The sweet irresistible peace of Morpheus beckons to you. But if you lay down, you’ll never get back up!

I still had no idea where the bear was. The wind was picking up again, snow was beginning to fly in sheets off the ridge and the light was fading. The sun had passed behind a thick layer clouds and wouldn’t be out for the rest of the day. This was early spring. I think. Or was it autumn? It didn’t feel like winter. Too much sunlight for winter.

I followed the stream out of the forest and into a clearing. I saw the little barnwood shack at the same time I heard the roar at my back. I looked back and there he was. The shack was about three hundred yards away and the bear was about the same distance behind me. Could I make it? I began running for all I was worth, bad knee be damned. It was going to be close. As I said before, polar bears could run fast, but they can’t keep it up very long. I, on the other hand, couldn’t run fast, but I could keep it up for at least three hundred yards. I looked back and the bear was loping toward me and he was moving fast. I was less than two hundred yards away from the little shack now and the bear was probably a hundred yards behind me. I tried to squeeze out a little extra speed, but I couldn’t. My knee was killing me and my lungs were aching as they puffed out white streams of vapor. I could hear the bear behind me thumping along the ground with his heavy paws. He was very close. I was still a hundred yards away from the cabin and I knew I wasn’t going to make it. Maybe someone was in the cabin. I screamed as loud as I could, Hey, in the cabin. Help! But nothing moved in the cabin. Not even a flicker at the window. It was probably empty and worse. It was probably locked. I screamed again. Hey! Anyone!

I was beginning to doubt the facts I’d learned about polar bears, especially the thing about bears not being able to keep up a sustained run. This one was a marathoner. I could practically feel the breath of the thing on me now, but then something miraculous happened. It stopped. Just as I reached the door of the cabin, the bear collapsed exhausted in a great heap, but it was trying to get back up, slobbering and blowing hard, sending out huge white clouds of breath. When I saw the rheumy look of its eyes, I knew it had overheated.

I tried the brass handle on the wooden door. It was locked. I walked around looking at the windows. I had to select one before the bear recovered. I chose the window facing south. I took out my knife and pried the outer storm window loose, carefully placing it on the ground. I heard the bear snorting and struggling. I expected him to be recovered in a matter of minutes. I had to hurry. I struck the glass with my knife handle. Once, twice and on the third time it shattered. I broke away the shards from around the edges, leaned my torso inside the window, then began wriggling until I was through. I fell to the floor, then looked around for something to block the window with. I spotted a bureau. It was tall and when I tried to move it, I discovered it was heavy. What was in it? Lead? I pushed at it and heaved until it finally slid across the wooden floor and blocked the broken window.

I relaxed for a few minutes and caught my breath. I was exhausted! I think I might have even drifted off, but I was awakened by the bear raging outside the window. Fully recovered now, he was pushing at the bureau and rocking it. He tried a few more times then roared in frustration and left. I pulled my aching body to a standing position using the bureau for leverage. My head was better and my vision, but my knee hurt and was wobbly. I stood there until I felt stable enough to take a few steps. I was in a small bedroom with a bed, an oak bureau and not much else. There was a picture of a galloping horse on the wall above the bed, but something was wrong. It was the smell.

There was the smell of rotting meat or something, but it had a metallic scent with it. At once, I knew what the odor was. I’d experienced it before. It was the stink of death. I went to the open doorway of the bedroom. I was looking at a pine-paneled living room with a hunter green sofa, two matching easy chairs, a franklin stove and a set of moose antlers over the door. My eyes were drawn to the man sitting on the sofa in a plaid flannel shirt and black trousers. There was a black hole where his right eye used to be, and a tennis ball sized hole in his stomach. It looked as if someone had taken a hole saw to his midsection. His head was back and his mouth gaped wide open. I wondered how long he’d been dead. Quite a while, I’d say. He looked dessicated. All the moisture had left his body and the skin over his sharp cheekbones was paper thin and there were dish-shaped hollows under his eyes and at the sides where his cheeks should be. His left hand was balled into a fist beside his leg and the right formed bony-fingered claws digging into the arm of the sofa. His neck was as thin as an ax handle and his lips had shriveled to almost nothing, exposing large teeth. The wind picked up and began to howl around the roofline of the little shack. There were only three rooms as far as I could tell. bedroom, living room and kitchen. Oh, and a bathroom off the living room. Thank God there was a bathroom inside instead of an outhouse like so many cabins out here.

I had a sense of deja vu. I’d been here before. I went to the dead man and looked at his face. He was little more than a skeleton with skin the color of a dead mackerel, and his shriveled tongue was deep charcoal gray, almost black. How old was he I wondered. He had a fringe of gray hair around his head, and his expression seemed to register surprise as if he’d seen his death coming. I wondered how he’d died. I didn’t see any blood. I had a strange feeling I knew him. His name is… shit. I still couldn’t think. I started a fire in the Franklin stove and began to heat the place up. This would warm me, but create a problem as far as the corpse in the room. It would hasten the decay and the odor would likely become unbearable. I couldn’t drag him outside or the bear would get him. But when I looked through the rear facing window I saw a solution, a large barnwood outbuilding about twenty yards away. It was big enough to house a small airplane. That would be a good place to put him, but first I needed a weapon in case that bear is still around. I saw a rifle leaning next to the door. I picked it up. An old bolt action Browning 30.06 with eight rounds in the magazine. That should be enough.

I unlocked the front door and stepped out with the rifle. I didn’t see any sign of the bear. I went back and got a grip on the dead man’s collar and began to drag him. He was in full rigor. His joints were locked in a sitting position which made it harder to drag him. His knees kept knocking into everything, the couch arm, a chair, the doorframe. I finally got him to the outbuilding and opened the small personal door in the larger hangar door. Inside there was a pristine blue and white Cessna of some kind. I drug the corpse inside and closed the door behind me. I looked around and saw the tracks of a snow cat, but it was gone. Dammit! I could’ve used that. There was no way out of this place now except on foot. I found a Honda generator and checked the gas tank. Empty. But there was a red fifty gallon drum that said Gasoline on the side. Opening the cap and looking in, I rocked the tank and listened to the sloshing. It was about half full. I snaked the thin gas hose into the little generator fuel tank and flipped the pump switch and it began to hum. In only a few seconds the tank was full, and I had the little Honda generator running.

I went back to the cabin and noticed immediately it was warmer. The little Franklin stove was doing its job. I flipped a few switches, and I had lights! I tried the water and I had hot water too! It was probably heated by propane. I decided to take a shower. That’s when I got a shock. When I stripped out of my parka and pants, I found blood. A lot of blood. My flannel shirt and long johns were soaked with it. But it was old blood. It had dried and turned brownish red. Was it my blood? I didn’t think so. I stripped and carefully examined my body. No. I had no open wounds anywhere, just some bruises, cuts and scratches, but I probably got those when I fell down the hill. I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror, hoping that the sight of my image would trigger something in my mind. I had a strong muscular build, serious blue-gray eyes, brown salt and pepper hair and a beard that had gone to gray. I was probably fifty, maybe less. I seemed to have a lot of scars.

So, whose blood was on me? Was I a killer? The more I thought about that the more troubled I became. The answer, I think, was yes. I’m a killer, and I can remember the faces of some of the men I’ve killed. They haunted me. Each losing a battle to stay alive and shocked by the starkness of coming to the end of their road. The unbelievable finality of it.

After I’d showered, I started looking for something to wear. In the bedroom I found a closet with flannel shirts and pants. I borrowed a nice green plaid and a pair of jeans. The shirt was tight on me. I decided to trade it for a sweatshirt with a Budweiser logo on it. It was tight too but I could move better. Less restrictive. Then I started looking for food. There wasn’t much. A few cans of beans and a box of corn flakes. There was a freezer in the other building. I’d seen it when I was out there, but I hadn’t looked in it. I loaded the coffee maker and began making a pot of coffee.

When I picked up my blood-soaked clothes, there was a lump in the pocket of my parka I hadn’t noticed before. I found an inside pocket and reached in and pulled out…a wallet! Was it my wallet? I opened it and there was my picture on an Alaska driver’s license. Roy Bohannon. Yes! That’s my name, Roy Bohannon! Damn! And my home address is in Anchorage. I began to take the wallet apart. I found a company ID card from Northwest Blue Corporation. Yes! That’s my company. We do geological survey for the oil companies. It’s starting to come back to me now. But wait…that doesn’t square with the feeling that I’ve killed people. There was an Anchorage phone number written down on a folded piece of paper and a picture of a pretty blond girl. My wife? No. I wasn’t wearing a wedding band. Probably a girl friend. There was also a picture of a young man. My son? He didn’t look familiar at all. There was a credit card and and two hundred thirty four dollars in cash.

I felt in the pockets for anything else. I found a key ring with a set of car keys and what looked like a house key on it. I searched again and found a cell phone. I turned it on, but I had no reception. That’s typical in Alaska. I started looking around for a phone in the cabin, but there wasn’t one. I wouldn’t expect one out here. A lot of people have radios though, but I didn’t see one of those either.

I started looking around the cabin. The coffee was ready so I poured myself a cup and concentrated on everything. There was a large picture of something. What was it? A horse farm? There were rolling green hills, a white frame house and a red barn. It was all surrounded by a white rail fence with white horses in the foreground. I looked at the solid looking front door… and the lock. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key ring. I opened the door and tried the house key. No go. There was a small maple side table next to the sofa. It had been next to the dead man. I opened the drawer in it and saw a note on yellow paper.

Roy,

If you are reading this note, it means they came back.

You have to get to Vanessa at Blue Caribou and tell her what’s going on.

Bailey, Oct 13

This note was to me! It was dated October 13. What’s today’s date, I wondered. Bailey? Is that the dead man? I think it is. Bailey? Bailey? Bailey Hope! It just jumped into my mind. The dead man’s name was Bailey Hope and he was helping me somehow, and he obviously didn’t die of natural causes. I pulled out my cell phone and turned it on. On the start up screen it said October 15. That means he died after he wrote the note which was two days ago. My God! How did he get so dessicated in that amount of time? I would’ve guessed that he’d died months ago. He’d looked like a mummy.

I needed a map.