Free By Royal Command by Charlie Higson Page B

There was a small gap here where his breath had melted the snow.
    He flexed his fingers, strained with all his strength, and the hand came free. He clawed at his face, compacting the area around it, then dug the snow out of his mouth. This small victory, though, had cost him a lot of energy. He felt weak and dizzy. The blood was roaring and banging in his ears like an orchestra.
    It was going to be one hell of a job digging himself out of this.
    Then an awful thought struck him – he had no idea which way was up and which was down. He could be lying on his front for all he knew, or even upside-down. There was no point in struggling to escape until he knew for certain how he was placed, or he might only succeed in burying himself deeper. Tears of rage and frustration and helplessness sprang into his eyes. He managed to blink them away and felt them crawling across his skin.
    He smiled. He laughed. He gave a small shout of triumph. The tears were trickling over his forehead, towards his hairline. That meant he must be upside-down. It was a start. He could use his legs to kick upwards.
    But how deep was he? He could be under twenty feet of snow. A hundred. He pictured himself as a tiny speck in the side of the massive mountain. Best not to think about that . The idea of dying all alone down here, buried alive, was too horrible to contemplate. His body wouldn’t be discovered until the snow melted in the summer, and there he would be, perfectly preserved by the cold.
    He shuddered. There was only one way to find out how deep he was. He started to apply pressure with his feet, forcing them upwards into the snow. At the same time he dug with his fingers, enlarging the space around his head. His legs had made some progress; he could now hammer them backwards and forwards. He worked his hand towards his belly, hoping to move the snow aside and scoop it out of the way, and it was then that he felt the rope. This was a fresh encouragement. He could use it to pull himself up to the surface, and with any luck Miles would be on the other end.
    He set to work – wriggling, digging, kicking, clawing – and, ten minutes later, he had made a space around himself large enough to turn round in.
    Soon he was the right way up and, as he had found so many times before, once he attacked a problem, once he started working hard, his fears faded away and he could shut out everything else until the work was done.
    He had a plan, a goal. It didn’t matter how long it took, how hard it was, how much it hurt, he had to get it done.
    It was either that or die.
    He reached up above his head and started to pull down the loose snow with his gloves. As it fell to his feet he stamped on it, creating a solid base to stand on and raising himself higher. This way he could slowly bore a tunnel upwards, barely wider than his body. It was back-breaking work, reaching up the whole time in the pitch darkness and shuffling the snow down his body to his boots. He had long since lost all feeling in his feet. They felt like two large rocks attached to the end of his legs. Despite being under all that snow he was sweating. He could feel rivulets of warm moisture trickling down his skin under his clothes and the space around his face was filled with stale, damp breath.
    Every now and again he stopped and stood still, making sure that he was still going straight up and hadn’t gone off at an angle. Once he was sure he was still on course he would start up again, gouging out a handful of snow, dropping it, shuffling it down his body, stamping on it. He worked like a machine and had no real idea of what progress he was making, if any. His little bubble stayed the same size. His body was begging for rest and sleep, but he shut these signals out, and just kept the one small part of his brain active, the part that told him to keep moving, to keep digging.
    Slowly, slowly, as the minutes turned into hours, he groped his way up through the darkness, his throat sore, his lungs