Frozen Stiff by Sherry Shahan Read Free Book Online Page B

that one. For the first time since they’d battled the assaulting waves a few hours earlier, she really looked at her cousin. His hair was a matted mess, stuck to the bloody mosquito bites across his forehead. Watery blisters covered the freckles on his nose, and sea salt had dried on his cheeks in crusty white splotches.
    “You know what?” she asked. “You look like a character in an Indiana Jones movie.”
    “Yeah?” Derek was shaking. Hunger. Fatigue. Low body temperature. “You look like something in a disaster movie—the disaster.”
    Cody laughed, then realized her lips were as swollen as her sunburned hands. She pressed her T-shirt against her mouth so that her lips wouldn’t split open. The skin on her face felt tight too, as if she’d outgrown it. She hated being so fair, knowing she’d peel in a few days. More freckles.
    She tried wiggling her toes. The intense burning in her feet had lessened to a dull ache. The water that had seeped into her boots earlier had now mixed with body heat and created a layer of insulation. “How are your feet?” she asked.
    “What feet?”
    She took one last look at the iceberg as the kayak slipped around a bend. They left the narrow passage with its steep-sided walls and entered a broad stretch with enticing slopes. The iceberg boomed and cracked and split into a dozen smaller bergs as if in farewell.
    “Bergy bits,”
she said. “That’s what they call small icebergs. That and
growler ice
.”
    Not far ahead, a crop of granite boulders crowded together on a long stretch of bank above the waterline. The rocks appeared to have stumbled off the mountain in a landslide, clearing a bus-sized spot in the otherwise dense forest along the way. The clearing looked wide enough for a campfire. There might be room to pitch the tent if they had to.
    “Home sweet home,” she said.
    Cody held the bowline and balanced on the mossy rocks; in the wet climate any bare rock was quickly colonized by mosses and small plants. Shivering, she passed the gear to Derek, who tossed everything into the clearing.
    Neither one of them complained about hunger or aching muscles as they worked mechanically in their heavy, wet clothes.
    After tying the kayak with enough rope to secure a battleship, they gathered bits of dry grass and piled it in the clearing. A stroke of luck had placed the matches in a plastic bag
and
in the day packs.
    She blew on the stream of smoke rising from the dry grass. “As soon as we get this going we’ll look for something to eat.”
    Warmth first, food second. Anywhere else it might be the other way around. But not this far north in Southeast Alaska, in late summer.
    Derek worked at breaking the outer limbs off a downed tree, pulling out the drier ones underneath. Leaves and parasitic moss had long since died and fallen off.
    She kept fueling the small blaze with twigs. “Need help?”
    He shook his head and grunted, dragging a leafless branch over the rocky ground to the fire. “We can use the push-and-burn method.”
    Working to unload the kayak had warmed Cody’s core temperature. Her toes and fingers had finally thawed out. “We have to dry off.” She shrugged off her wet T-shirt and shorts, leaving on her sports bra and dance tights.
    Derek stripped to paisley surfer shorts, and Cody laughed at how silly he looked, here in the Alaska wilderness in surfer jams. She draped their clothes over the fallen trees. Derek added the tent and the ground cover and squeezed excess water from the sleeping bags before hanging them on the makeshift clothesline.
    The sky above Yakutat was still swollen and bruised, with sudden flashes of jagged light. An electrical storm raged on. No light planes would land in Yakutat as long as it was storming, and no planes would leave Juneau.
    “Hot roast beef sandwiches and thick chocolate malts less than ten miles away,” she said.
    “Do they deliver?” he joked.
    “I wish.”
    Cody pulled a squatty branch up to the fire, sat down,