Up Close and Dangerous Read online

  He watched her do this, a quizzical little frown on his face. “Are you practicing for a sobriety test, or something?”

  “I’m measuring you. You’re an inch or so longer than seven feet—my real feet, not the twelve-inch kind. I don’t want to make the shelter too short for you.”

  She tried to make their bed maybe an inch longer than that—rather, she tried to make one side of it longer than that, because overall the thing was kind of lopsided because of how the trees were positioned. She figured she’d take the short side.

  Over the crosshatch of limbs and needles, she put the foam pads she’d removed from the plane’s seats. She had six short pads and one long piece from the bench seat, and she figured that would give more cushioning than they’d have in sleeping bags. Given her druthers, though, she’d have taken the sleeping bag—at least that way she’d be warm. Staying warm tonight, without a fire, would be a real challenge.

  When she had the pads positioned, she went to work with the bigger limbs. Obviously she needed some sort of frame, and just as obviously her roll of duct tape was called for to lash the limbs together, but she was oddly reluctant to use it. The roll was a small one, and wouldn’t go far. If she used strips of cloth to tie the skeleton frame together, at least the strips could be reused if she didn’t get it right the first time, whereas the tape, once it was used, was gone.

  The ruined silk jacket was perfect for cutting into pieces.

  At first she tried making an inverted V-shaped thing, but that was evidently beyond her building skills, which wasn’t surprising. After the rudimentary frame collapsed for the third time, she made an executive decision and stopped wasting time on that method.

  Returning to where Justice lay under the mound of clothing, she crouched beside him and said, “Remember when I said I suck at construction?”

  He cracked his eyes open. “Is this your way of telling me we’re sleeping in the open tonight?”

  “No, this is my way of asking for help. Help! Just give me some instructions. Pointers. Anything. If you have any experience at this, you know more than I do.”

  “I thought you’d been rafting before.”

  “I have. I’d like to point out that you don’t raft on top of a snow-covered mountain.”

  “Didn’t you set up a tent?”

  She made a scoffing noise. “I was a college student. Of course not. We slept in sleeping bags, around a campfire.”

  “Okay.” He thought a moment. “What type were you trying to build? An A-frame, or a lean-to?”

  “A-frame. I can’t get it to stand up.”

  “Make the base first. Lay out the long sides with two parallel long branches, then lay the cross braces on top, one on each end, and secure all four corners.”

  That sounded easy enough. Returning to the site of collapse, she sorted out the variety of limbs, sticks, and branches into the two best fits for the length of the bed, which she then placed, one on each side. Then she positioned two shorter limbs, one on each end, and used the strips of silk to tie each short limb to the two longer ones. When she finished she wiggled the frame to see how sturdy it was, cautiously pulled each knot tighter, and wiggled the frame again. Good enough.

  “What now?” she called.

  “Now you need to establish the height. Get four branches that are taller than you want the height to be.”

  That was easy, but all four branches still had a lot of limbs and needles attached. Using the knife, she trimmed off what she could. “Got it.”

  “Take two and make a rough X with them. The point where they cross will be the height of the shelter. You want to tie the second pair where they cross at the same height as the first pair. Then get two shorter pieces and put them below the crossing point of the Xs, as braces.”

  Hmmm. She thought she saw where he was going with this. She got busy with her silk strips, and when she was finished she had what looked like two letter As, with horns sticking out the top. “Now I tie these to the base, right?”

  “First get another long limb and put it in the notches of the two Xs, and tie it off on both ends so the upper frame is as long as the base. Then you attach the whole thing to the base.”

  Even with his instructions, the shelter’s frame sort of listed to the left and sagged at the back, but when she looked for the sun she saw that it had slipped behind the mountains, and time was too short for her to try to improve her handiwork. Instead she tied bracing pieces of limbs wherever the thing seemed to need it most, which was pretty much all over. When she judged it sturdy enough to stand, at least for one night, she moved on to the roof.

  Technically, she supposed big black trash bags draped over the top didn’t qualify as a real roof, but they were the closest thing to a tarp that she had. She taped the trash bags to the wooden frame, then threw the cargo net on top of that to anchor them in case the wind got up, and for added weight and insulation wove the pliable tree branches, needles intact, through the webbing of the net.

  The trash bags didn’t completely cover the sides of the A-frame, but she didn’t have enough of them to do the job. She attached more limbs to cover the gaps, then even more limbs, then began sticking clumps of needles everywhere she could stick them. With one eye on the steadily decreasing light and part of her attention focused on the dropping temperature, she forgot to keep her movements slow and easy. Instead, a sense of urgency drove her faster and faster, until her breath was coming in audible gasps.

  As she stood up to reach for yet another limb to cover a tiny gap she’d just noticed, her vision went black. She stumbled, reaching out in panic to grab something, anything, but her hand waved uselessly in the air as she pitched headlong into one of the trees.

  When her vision returned she was on her knees in the snow, one arm wrapped around the slender evergreen, her heart hammering in panic. Not wanting to risk falling, she stayed on her knees, gritting her teeth as she clumsily covered the small gap. Nausea, oily and bitter, rose in her throat, and she swallowed it back.

  She still had to enclose the ends, and her only way to do it was by crawling. After standing the limbs and branches to cover the back, she piled snow against them; heaven knew the snow wasn’t going to melt, and it made an effective barrier against the swirling wind. The front end could be only partially enclosed, because they had to get inside somehow; more branches, starting at the sides and working in, leaving barely enough open space for him to crawl through. To cover the entrance, she clumsily tucked the biggest piece of leather into the inside of the frame and let the flap hang down; it didn’t completely cover the entrance, but it didn’t have to. The gap that remained she could fill by pulling one of the trash bags containing her clothes into it.

  The biggest problem facing her now was getting upright, staying upright, and somehow getting Justice into the shelter. She couldn’t drag him, because she was dragging herself. Carefully she pulled herself to a standing position, gripping one of the trees for support. Her knees threatened to buckle beneath her, and her head gave such a vicious throb that she almost blacked out again. When the threat passed, she stared tiredly at the ramshackle, lopsided structure. It would do because it had to do; they had no other options.

  WOBBLING, STAGGERING, SHE made her way down the slope to where Justice lay. In actual distance it wasn’t far, no more than thirty feet—just far enough to get out of the path of the plane if it should start sliding. Still, for the effort it took her to go those thirty feet, it might as well have been a mile.

  “It’s ready,” she gasped, staggering to her knees beside him. Her hands were numb and clumsy with cold, the mountains were doing a slow swirl around her, and she was fighting off nausea again. “I don’t know how you’re going to get there, though, unless you can crawl.”

  His eyes opened, the irises pale amid the dark bruises that had already formed. “I think I can stand. If I can’t, then I’ll crawl.” He took in the pallor of her skin, the way she was shaking and shivering, the dampness of her sweatpants from the k