Page 83 of The Merger
“Fuck,” he shouted from the stoop.
I grabbed a blanket off the couch and wrapped it around me before going to see what was wrong. The wood floor was icy under my feet, but I pressed forward to look out the door. At least a foot of snow had drifted in front of the door, and covered every available surface. More was coming down in fluffy white clumps.
Stryker was working hard to secure the tarp over the firewood by the door. “There’s only enough wood here to last a few days, a week tops. If it gets wetter than this we’re going to freeze.”
The lines of tension in his face scared me more than the snow. This was a man who stood up to danger and managed to land a plane after the pilot jumped out. A man who built us a shelter out of branches so we’d survive the first night.
“We’re not going to be able to walk out of here. Once it snows this high in the mountains it sticks,” he said.
If anyone was looking for us, they had no idea where to start searching. To make it worse, we couldn’t let anyone know where to look either.
“We need to ration the food,” I thought aloud.
“Tomorrow we need to see if we can find anything to let us know exactly where we are. A map would be good too because knowing where we’re at doesn’t help if we can’t find our way out. But, the one thing I know for sure is that we can’t wait for someone to find us, because if we do, we could be here until the spring thaw,” he said.
All the air whooshed from my lungs. “It’s only October. That could be six months from now.”
His eyes flicked down to my stomach, and I put my hand over it protectively. “We might not have that kind of time,” he murmured.
ChapterThirty-One
Stryker
We spent a few days wrapped up in each other. We were acting out of denial, but it gave us a break from thinking about the sword that had been hanging over our heads since the moment we stepped foot on the plane. It was all just too much, so for a few days, we both pretended that we were on a romantic retreat, rather than fighting for our lives. We were still careful about rationing the food stores we had, and I kept a close eye on the firewood. It wasn’t like there was anything we could have done otherwise, except maybe drive each other crazy worrying about what was going to happen next.
When I woke up in the loft several days later it was both literally and figuratively. After my mental vacation, it was time for me to figure out what our next step was. The heat from the fireplace rose up to the loft making it warmer than on the main level. Sabrina was sleeping next to me. Laying on her side, she had the blanket draped only over her hips, her arms were tucked under her chin, and covered all but the sides of her breasts from my perusal.
I would have loved to roll her onto her back and feast on her rosy nipples before sliding down her body and burying my face in her perfect pussy. I wanted to feast on her until she woke up the way I did the morning of the crash, but she was exhausted from the number of times I’d reached for her over the night. There were bruise-colored shadows under her eyes, and after our activity over the last few days, I was pretty sure she was already pregnant. Not that we would be able to tell this soon, but if she was, our circumstances were more dire than before. I needed to let her rest now more than ever.
As it was, there were plenty of things that needed to be handled. I needed to chop some wood and get it dry enough to burn before we ran out of what was there when we found the cabin. Thankfully, Sabrina thought to wash our clothes in the sink and hang them up near the fire. My clothes weren’t warm enough for the weather when we crashed, but it was better than chopping wood while wearing a blanket. But, now that we were stranded on what looked like the set of a Hallmark Christmas movie, my clothes weren’t much better. Instead of a parka, all I had was a thermal shirt, a lined flannel, and jeans. Which meant I looked like the hero from one of those movies as well. Too bad our only dilemma wasn’t to save the hometown maple sugar factory from the evils of corporate greed.
To complete the winter wonderland aesthetic the snow had continued to fall steadily the last few days. This was the first morning the sky wasn’t obscured by a curtain of falling snow. I hadn’t paid enough attention to the weather reports in the days before we left, at least not what the weather in Idaho would be, because we were supposed to be in Denver. Of course, there were warmer clothes in our bag, but that was still in the storage container of the plane.
Without access to the news, my best guess was a rogue storm had traveled south from Canada. There were snow drifts in places up to my knees, and over a foot everywhere else. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it certainly complicated our situation. We needed a plan, but to do that I needed to know where we were. I was only guessing that we were in Idaho. Without knowing where we were I couldn’t justify leading Sabrina into the wilderness in search of a town.
There were too many variables to deal with. The weather was proving to be a formidable adversary. Not knowing where we were, I wasn’t sure what kind of wildlife we might face, if we’d be able to forage for any food at all, or how remote this cabin was. Those unknowns could prove fatal if we decided to set out for help when staying put at least guaranteed us warmth and safety. We could search the area for food, set traps, and do other things to gather food if we ran out of supplies. In fact, I’d probably start seeing what I could find and store now before that happened. I wanted to wait until Sabrina was awake before I tackled the tasks outdoors, but there was still the matter of seeing if there was any indication inside about where we were.
The cabin was filled with years of memories for the owners. In the days we’d been here, Sabrina and I had been through all of the cabinets and drawers, but there’d been no need to dig through the desk or junk drawers. But then, all we had needed before was the basic necessities. Finding something with the address written on it was a tall order considering there was no mail service out here. But, I couldn’t give up hope that I’d find a map or something I could use as a frame of reference.
There were lots of keepsakes scattered throughout the cabin. I really didn’t keep up on decorating trends, unless it was about hotel suites. The first real home I’d had since my mom died was Sabrina’s apartment. The first thing I was going to do if we managed to get back to Seattle was to start looking for a new place for us. One that had an elevator, because if Sabrina was actually pregnant we’d need way too much stuff to be carrying up and down the stairs.
In the kitchen area of the cabin there was a spot that served as a work/storage space. There was a small linen closet, drawers, and a built-in desk. We’d already gone through the linen closet where we’d found the blankets. The drawers were too small to hold anything we’d have needed up until now. I still wasn’t sure what I could possibly find discarded in one of these drawers. This entire cabin was like a large time capsule.
One drawer was filled with keys of all sizes, shapes, and purposes. Some looked like the tiny keys that came with a teenage girl’s journal. There were skeleton keys, door keys, hell, there were even a few hex keys loose in the drawer. What there was not was any indication of what all those keys went to. Even if I did know what they went to, keys weren’t going to get us back to Seattle.
The next one gave me hope when I pulled out a collection of maps. Until I realized they were from cities all over the world and none of them where we would find a remote cabin somewhere between Seattle and Denver. Like the keys, this seemed to be a collection that only meant something to the people who gathered it. There were some rural maps, but I didn’t think we were in the Pyrenees Mountains, the Swiss Alps, or the Appalachians. There were some maps with routes planned, but there were others that were pristine and untouched. None of them were any help to our situation, so I placed them back with care.
* * *
After Sabrina woke up I set out to gather more firewood. We had a few more days of wood left, and it would take that long for any wood I split to dry. That was if I could find some already downed trees. There was an axe stuck in a large block of wood used to split logs. I trudged through the snow, filling my boots with sludge, to drag every downed log and branch I could find. There was enough to keep us going for a while, but if I had to take down a living tree, there wasn’t enough time to season it for it to be usable.
After I stacked the wood up by the front of the cabin, I wandered over to the other side of the property I hadn’t had a chance to explore yet. There was a slope that curved down to a road. There were no tracks cutting through the snow, no berms on the side of the route from a plow coming through. If anything, the presence of the road drove home how isolated we were. No one was coming up here, and we were so far off the beaten path they didn’t even bother to clear the roads from snow. Which meant we weren’t near a ski resort, nor were we located in between towns.
A rumbling sound bounced off the rocky slopes surrounding us. I looked everywhere to see if I could locate the source, but nothing was around except snow, rocks, and trees. I didn’t even see the signs of any animals. I waited a few more minutes, then turned around and made the trip back to the cabin.
“What’s wrong?” Sabrina asked when I walked in.
I stopped in the middle of peeling off my soaked clothes. “Nothing, and that’s what’s wrong. I thought I heard something, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. There’s a road down the hill, but there’s no sign anyone has been on it since it started snowing, which means-”