Free The Blue (The Complete Novel) by Joseph Turkot

been ripped free. And the next thing I know, I’m rising out of the water. Into Russell’s arms. And when I look down, in shock and worrying about what I’ll see, I find that the bottom of my pants on the right side are gone, and it’s my bare leg I’m looking at, and there is a stream of red. A pulse of blood courses down and blends into the ice. The ice melts around my foot where I try to walk, and the blood keeps coming. Spurts of a bright river, so stark against the clean white, forming pockets of red in fits and starts. I try to twist my leg to see the gash, but I can’t. It must be right on the back of my leg. And then, Russell lets me go and I drop to the ice. He stands by the edge of the water, panting from exhaustion, watching and waiting for the seal to come back up. My mind replays the gun jam, how I fell with it, right down into the water. Voley walks up to me, shaking, and starts to lick at my wound but I pull away, startled. And then, in what feels like an eternity, Russell comes back to me, satisfied we’re going to be left alone, if only for a moment. He’s bare-chested, his sweater in his hands, and then he’s wrapping the sweater around my leg. Squeezing tightly. You’re going to be okay, he tells me. It’s not bad. But when I try to prove that he’s right, and stand up on it, I stumble down. I try again, but as soon as I plant weight on the right side I drop. So I do the only thing I can, and collapse on the ice. I lie, forgetting we’re under attack, keeping Voley away from my bleeding leg so that he’s licking my arms and my face, but not my cut. And then, when I can see them both in the corner of my eyes, Russell and Voley, quiet and alive, out of the water, I close my eyes and let the gray light fade to black.
     

Chapter 9
     
    When I wake up, Russell fills me in. He stands over me, naked chest, eyes sunken, face gaunt. Tent’s gone, he says. Rifle too. When the ice broke it made a landslide and everything went in.
                No more pistol either. Lost when I fell in the water after it jammed. The thermometer too. Gone. But he saves the worst for last. The fuel for the stove is lost. Down with everything else. What about the stove itself? I ask. He tells me that he saved it, but it’s got hardly anything left in it. And then, I ask about seal. He tells me he hasn’t seen it again since the attack. Voley walks off to investigate the edges of the new, tiny floe we’re trapped on now. I hear his feet hit slush as he walks, like everything is turning to liquid now, and we’re losing the last remnants of any firm surface.
                At last, when Russell helps me test my leg, raising me up on his arm, he says there’s one good bit of news. What’s that? I ask, hardly able to believe anything good could have come from this. Then he tells me to feel the wind, and I tell him I don’t. Because there is none, he says. And he points off to the blue, reborn, hanging in the sky just where it used to be. Weather passed us, he tells me. No storm.
     
    Before he lets it sink in, that we won’t have to face a storm on the pack, and see the ice crash down on our heads and slide us into the sea, he says we have to get moving. Right away, he says, like he’s been mapping out a path already. And hanging onto him, Voley by our feet, we make for the thinnest slit in the pack—a lead of sea separating our floe from the next one in the direction of the blue. Each step I take with my right leg hurts like hell for just an instant—the moment it touches the ground and my weight plants—but then it goes away just as fast, and Russell absorbs the impact for me. I lean into him as the pressure transfers to the bad leg, and then I’m okay. I look down at the tightly wrapped sweater on my leg. It’s soaked with red ice, and the streaks that fall down from my calf run in crisscrossing lines, dried cake, until they reach my boots where the icy slush rides up to wash them