Turned to Stone by Jorge Magano Read Free Book Online

cold for two more hours.
    As he shivered, he tried to locate a switch to turn off the fans, but either the switch did not exist or it was beyond his reach. He had to find a way to turn off the refrigeration, and he had to do it quickly, before the cold began to paralyze him.
    Tracing the current of cold air back to its source, he found an opening that concealed one of the fans. The cavity was located in a corner of the ceiling, three meters up. Drawing upon the little bit of warmth left in his body, he made his way back to the corner where he’d found the wooden crate and discovered an entire tower of them. He stretched to reach the top one, hobbled back to the other side of the freezer with it, and set it down on the floor. By standing on the crate he was able to reach the metal grille that protected the fan. Jaime stuck all his fingers into the holes and pulled with all his strength, but the grille was screwed into the ceiling and wouldn’t budge. He cursed the freezer’s manufacturers and their security measures. What had they feared would happen? That a group of frozen cows would attempt to reenact The Great Escape ?
    He then noticed the dark cables running across the ceiling. These came out of the fan nearest to him and crossed to the other fan, located in the opposite corner of the freezer. If he could destroy the cables, perhaps he could shut down the fans’ motors. Using the cow’s backbone as a lever, he managed to pop out a refrigeration tube and tear out one of the cables at the point where it attached. Then he grabbed the box and put it under the other fan, repeating the process. Once the cables were hanging from the ceiling and the tubes had been split in half, Jaime was relieved to see that the fans had stopped. Exhausted, he threw himself to the floor. Unbelievably, he was sweating. However, the satisfaction of destroying the refrigeration system was fleeting, because it felt to Jaime as though he’d done nothing more than raise the temperature from absolute zero to freezing. The huge quantity of frozen food and the freezer’s effective insulation would soon turn his sweat to frost.
    Thinking it might help to have a shelter, he improvised one using the wooden crates. But within five minutes he’d crawled back out from his refuge, knowing that he had to do something to warm up or there’d soon be two stiff carcasses in the freezer. He had to find some way to keep warm until his would-be murderers came to collect his body. When they opened the door he would attempt his escape, but he had to survive another hour and a half of cold first.
    Desperate, he looked around again for something he could use to force the door open, but found nothing. The sweat on his chest had become a breastplate of ice. He unbuttoned his shirt and beat himself until the frozen perspiration fell from his body.
    Then he remembered a warning that his mother used to give him as a boy: If you sweat and then get cold, you’ll get sick.
    Of course! He had found the solution. He looked at the wooden crates, knowing what he was about to do would be tough but that it was his only chance. But he figured he’d been meaning to join a gym, anyway.
     
    At four o’clock in the morning, a white van bearing an egg company’s logo stopped in front of the entrance to Casa Genaro. A man dressed in black climbed out and crossed the pavement as nimbly as a grasshopper. The light from a nearby streetlamp fell on his face, revealing blue eyes over a long nose and a large mustache. As he reached the guesthouse door, he heard one of the van’s windows being lowered and turned back toward it. “Be quick about it,” said the dark-haired woman inside the vehicle. “The sun’s about to come up.”
    The man spread his arms and smiled. “Don’t worry! When has your cousin Clark ever failed you?”
    The woman snorted. The man strode into the guesthouse humming a tarantella and then headed down the stairs to the kitchen, where just a few hours before