A Cave of Ice: Chapter 6

It was dawn by the time we reached the base of the cliff. The squirrel lay unconscious in my breast pocket. I could feel his ribs expand with his every slow, deep breath. His rest somehow allowed me to also feel a momentary respite. Although I could not relax myself, his stillness gave a small relief to my angst. I decided to open the pocket and watch him rest for a moment.

I didn’t have many friends growing up. I never knew what to say at the lunch table. The other kids all seemed to like the same things and speak the same language. It felt nice to have a friend– even if he was an albino squirrel.

My body began to feel fatigued as we continued walking through the woods. Despite feeling mentally fresh and alert, the journey had begun to take a physical toll. My legs grew heavy, and each step grew increasingly painful. I began actively searching for somewhere to camp out. My body finally reached its limit.

Eventually, I found a patch of flat earth beneath a row of trees. The trees were tall with thick, wrinkled bark. The earth was soft and would make a suitable place to rest. The trees offered some protection from the sun and the ground had few rocks sticking from the dirt.

Pulling a cigarillo from my pocket, I placed the plastic end in my mouth. The squirrel climbed across my chest and up to my face to light it.

“Thanks, guy,” I said. He laughed and crawled back to my breast pocket.

I lay my head back and watched the clouds while enjoying my cigarillo. The black smoke wafted from my nose and mouth as I finally relaxed for the first time in days. Letting my eyes close briefly, I wrapped my arm beneath my head to act as a pillow. My relaxation ceased after only a few minutes when my head began to throb from a headache. I reopened my eyes to find my vision clouded with stars and blue and green circles.

“Jesus,” I said. With a groan, I sat up and felt the sun beat down on the back of my neck, which felt warm despite the cool air. After a few minutes of sitting still, my body began to shake, and I began to vomit profusely.

There really was no telling what diseases these rodents carried. Viruses? Bacteria? Parasites? Christ! There was also no telling what sickness that slack-jawed mutant carried either. The world is a dirty, dirty place.

The world began to spin in the opposite direction when I tried to stand, causing me to fall back to my knees. My hands pressed into the soft ground as I took a few short breaths. I needed water. Most of the Pennsylvania woods hold some sort of creek or stream, but there didn’t seem to be one in our immediate area.

Eventually, I was able to get my feet back under me and begin moving again. We had to stop constantly, however, for me to vomit and eventually dry heave. The squirrel couldn’t stand being so close to the sickness, so I let him out of my shirt so that he could continue on foot. His little face quietly fixed into worry as we trudged forward.

We needed to find something– some medicine, or at the very least, water. Unfortunately, we never came across one of the many possible streams. There were only trees here.

Waking up with the sun the next morning, I found a small flock of turkey vultures circling above. They hovered and waited for me to stop breathing. My companion, who was understandably nervous, burrowed back into my breast pocket. He peeked his head out every so often but was scared back down at the sight of the birds.

“Well,” I said. “Don’t look then. They’re not going anywhere.”

The birds must have sensed that my end was near. Maybe they smelled the gallons of sweat that fell from my skin onto the dirt? They probably followed the long trail of mud and tracked me to my location and now that they had found me, they were going to see this thing through until the end.

I felt too weak to keep looking for water and tried to convince the squirrel to go looking on his own. He was too busy chain-smoking from his pack of Newport’s to listen. The cigarettes shook between his tiny paws and dropped from his mouth directly onto the ground when he finished. I lay and watched him for a while, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He was too concerned with the death that could descend from the heavens at any moment. Tiny puffs of smoke floated out of his tiny pink nose as he watched the sky.

I let my head fall back onto the ground. My eyes grew heavy as I watched the smoke rise from the cigarettes until I could no longer keep them open. I awoke briefly to a flurry of slaps from the squirrel, but he only prolonged the inevitable and my eyes sealed shut.