Frozen Stiff by Sherry Shahan Read Free Book Online

coughed, unable tocatch her breath. She felt as if she were drowning; still in the kayak and above water, but choking instead of taking in oxygen.
    Even now the noise wouldn’t let up—the relentless gusts, the scream of seagulls, the slapping of paddles—all loud enough to wake the dead.
    Cody clung to the paddle as to life itself, shouting to Derek to do the same.
    The kayak finally pulled out of the wave and glided into the open air. Cody coughed up seawater. She’d swallowed a ton. Salt scraped the back of her throat.
    “You okay?” she called back.
    “Yeah,” Derek returned weakly.
    “Paddle?” she barely managed.
    “Got it.”
    Both paddles still in hand. Two sticks. This crumb of news filled her with hope.
    With a death grip she paddled hard on the right to turn the kayak before the next set of waves hit. Being slammed head-on was better than taking a lateral strike. It came, as she’d known it would.
Slam!
Not quite as hard as before. But the kayak still spun like a kicked bottle.
    Each time a wave hit the kayak, water seeped into the rubber skirt. Several inches sloshed in the bottom of the craft. Some had even worked its way inside her knee-high boots. Everything was drenched: clothes, gear, and paddlers.
    The waves finally weakened, dying into swells lessthan a foot high. Cody slumped in her seat; her shoulders sagged. She was utterly exhausted. “We made it.”
    High above the kayak and less than a half mile away the glacier mirrored a dozen shades of blue. Some of the ice was so light it was nearly colorless; some of it was so dark it looked black. The face of the glacier, where the ice had broken off, wore a new expression now, an ice sculpture of hundred-foot-high spires and turrets.
    Catching her breath, she thought about how much of the earth was covered with ice—one-tenth, she’d learned from the outfitters. An entire ocean was covered with it, like a white layer of congealed fat on a pot of cold turkey soup.
    She forced herself to put her paddle back in the water. Her muscles screamed at the first stroke. Her shoulder blades felt as if someone were tightening them with screws.
    “We have to get away from the glacier,” she said. “Before it calves again.”
    “I can’t lift the paddle.”
    But Derek did. Barely. One stroke, then two.
    Soon the kayak skimmed water that spread across the fjord like soluble paints on paper, bleeding colors too mixed up to have their own names. They were alone in this vast maze of land and water and disconnected from everything that was familiar. Everything that was safe.
    Cody wished they’d never left Yakutat.

The violent tailwind died to an occasional gust, but the undercurrent stayed just as fierce as before, drawing the kayak toward the ocean—toward Disenchantment Bay and Hubbard Glacier.
    “Some people think the Ice Age is still with us,” Cody said. “That we’re in a warmer phase of it.”
    Derek strained with each stroke. “Do you think that berg is like the one that sank the
Titanic?”
    “That’s just a baby,” she said. “Some of them are over a hundred miles long.”
    “No way!”
    “Way.”
    Cody looked back at the clouds suspended over Yakutat: a solid wall of black. “Maybe we’ll luck out,” she said. “Maybe the storm will dump all its rain in town. It’s about time we had some
good
luck.”
    The kayak skimmed away from the calving glacier, away from the three-story iceberg, in case it rolled. “No one in California will believe this,” Derek said.
    Cody’s strokes were as lifeless as her arms, with about as much power as a frayed bow rope. Her shorts and T-shirt were soaked. Her sleeping bag was a soggymess under her rear. She wondered if wet clothes could freeze to skin.
    “If it’s raining in Yakutat,” Derek asked, “won’t all the water drain into the fjord?”
    “Add tons of water from rivers and streams and runoff from glaciers,” she said.
    Cody peeled off her rain slicker, then unsnapped the rubber