The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [29]
Her hips slid through the crack. He let off the bar a little.
“You okay?” he asked.
She whispered back to him through the crack, “I don’t like it in here. It’s cold.”
“I know, but you’re in. You need to go across the gym to the kitchen. See if it’s open.” He shoved her parka to her through the gap. “Take this.”
“I think they’re in here, John. I can feel them.”
She put her hand back through the crack. He took it.
“Just go across the gym to the kitchen. Go.”
He let go and she pulled her hand back.
“Go,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”
He could hear her footsteps move slowly away from the door, and then the screaming started.
THE WEATHER BROKE at four in the afternoon. The wind died. The rain stopped, and suddenly the sun came through and the dull grey day transformed. In minutes the phones were ringing and the boy had his hands full. Taxis began pulling up, unloading people carrying shopping bags and cardboard boxes full of groceries.
A slender young man sauntered in carrying a can of Coca-Cola and tugging at the carefully creased brim of his baseball cap. He pulled an aluminum clipboard off a nail in the wall and turned and pointed to the two of them.
“You two are headed to New-num-chuck,” he said with a slow southern accent. “I gave up trying to pronounce these village names a year ago, ’bout the time I got here. You ready? Grab your gear and let’s start flapping. I’m Randy.”
The two of them stood up, grabbed their bags, and followed Randy out the door. As they walked out on the tarmac, Anna mouthed to John, “How old?” He smiled and shrugged.
Randy stopped at a blue and white Cessna 185. He opened the back and looked at their bags. He lifted each one carefully and then started stuffing them in. “You can hop right in that seat there, Missy. I’ll need the big guy up front with me, in case I need to take a nap mid-flight. From the looks of it you guys never flown in a small plane before.”
They both shook their heads.
Randy took Anna’s hand and helped her step up into the plane. “Me neither.”
Before they had any more time to be nervous about their young pilot, they were taxiing down the runway. John sat in the co-pilot’s seat staring at the controls, while Anna looked from side to side out the windows. Bethel stretched off in the distance on one side of the runway, and on the other the lake-pocked land seemed to have no end. The little plane picked up speed, and Randy pulled back on the yoke. The plane lifted off the runway and banked hard right, the earth falling away beneath them, flattening and stretching out all around them for as far as his eyes could see. John’s stomach dropped as they gained altitude.
Randy pointed at a pair of headphones hanging on the console. John took them and slipped them on his ears. The pilot’s voice crackled over the headset.
“Ever laid your eyeballs on anything like that?” Randy asked.
He pointed at the horizon, a panorama speckled with lakes and rivers that extended in every direction. “See that drive-in movie screen–looking thing? That’s White Alice, Cold War radar, meant to catch invading Russkies. Quite a view from the top of it. Almost like flying. Out there, to the west, that’s the Bering Sea. You can just barely see it. That shimmer there, that’s the sea. Off to the left here—that giant bitch of a river, that’s the Kuskokwim—a mile wide in some places and well over five hundred some miles long. Those mountains out that way, south, are the Kilbucks, the Alaska Range on the other side—nothing but mountains forever that way. Nothing but bare open tundra to the north for a long, long ways. You can sort of see the Yukon River over there. That river’s even bigger than this bugger. You’re really in the middle of nowheres.”
They flew along the edge of the Kuskokwim. John looked back at Anna. She grinned and widened her eyes to show her excitement.
“Whatcha think?” Randy asked. “Pretty damn desolate, eh?