Nothing exists past the road.
At least that’s what Price tells himself, driving carefully over the flattened snow, under which the road must exist. No one has seen it for weeks. He can see the trees, the mountains behind him in the rear view mirror, but it does not exist for them. Veer off the road, and no one will see them again, him and Abby, neither of them will see the Christmas tree lighting the tiny living room, won’t taste the bright warmth of mom’s gingerbread cookies.
Where they are now, no one will find you until it’s too late. He rounds the corner, and the radio crackles into life, a rare spot with reception. God, he wishes he could turn it down, but no one can. It’s just set, and he’s gotten very good at tuning it out. He hopes.
“Anyone who sees or hears of augmented, undocumented, or otherwise unnatural humans is to report it to the authorities immediately. They must not escape the country. We ask all our citizens to comply with this request, in light of the lawless state outside our borders. America will not fall prey to the anarchic whims of these aberrations. Failure to relay information will be treated as conspiracy. If you wish to receive immediate assistance, use codeword “Nephilim”. The number is…..”
The radio crackles dead again. Same announcement, same old choking feeling. Aberration. It feels too close to home.
He sees the patch of black ice far too late, and skids wildly into the ditch, the car bucking and fishtailing, completely out of his control.
It is fully, terribly stuck, and the guard at the city limits took their shovel, for spite. He feels hope drain out his toes.
“Wha...what…...fuck fuckkkfuck Price what happened are you ok!?”
Abby stares at him with wild eyes, dark hair splayed over her forehead, voice still thick with sleep.
“I was…’
He never finishes the sentence, because someone knocks on his window and he does piss himself, just a little.
A pair of eyes stares at him, deep, bright blue. They’re familiar somehow. The huge man pulls down the heavy scarf around the rest of his face.
Where the fuck did he come from? They’re fifty miles away from any habitation at all.
“Will you let me help you?”
Price nods, terrified. Either he helps them or kills them and roasts their corpses for dinner, but they have no better option.
The man smiles. “I won’t hurt you, scout’s honor. Stay in the car.”
The car is ten feet off the road in a drift as tall as Abby. He cannot possibly…..
The front wheels leave the ground, and the car moves, easily, as if it is a wheelbarrow full of spring flowers on a June afternoon. The man is holding the car in his hands, pushing them. They reach the road, and he sets it gently down.
“Ok to go?” The man asks.
Price gingerly presses the gas, and the car moves forward. It sounds fine. Feels fine. Relief floods him like drunkenness.
He rolls down the window and starts to babble his thanks. “Holy shit sir thank you thank you thank you who are you we would have been so fucked.”
“I’m the budget guardian angel.” The man says with a smile, and Price feels his entire insides melt with a very different kind of drunken feeling. It is the most beautiful smile he has ever ever seen. He glances over at Abby and encounters her saucer eyes, equally entranced.
“You don’t look old.” He says. Jesus, what kinds of idiot says that?
“That’s kind of you. Safe travels, kids.”
“Y..you too.”
They pull away down the road, Price’s ears burning.
He glances in the rear view mirror for one more look at those shoulders, and almost goes off the road again. There are three men standing there, two more than there were just a few seconds ago. Then they are too far away to know anything else.
Abby finds her voice.
“Was that…...can it be…..he’s alive? It looked like…..” she drops her voice “the captain...and those others, were they…”
“Maybe we hallucinated it. Maybe we crashed, maybe we’re dead and heaven is just as cold as earth. You gotta go to hell if you want heat, I think. Abs, we can’t tell anyone. They would hunt them down. Not even Mom and Dad. No one outside this car”
He keeps his voice down: no one is sure how the Conglomerate gets their information, and he’s not about to chance it.
“Yes. It’s our secret”
She falls silent, and he turns his attention to the road. It’s sixty miles still, with no reception and no radio, and there won’t be any guardian angels a second time.
Steve watches the car disappear. He hears Sam open his mouth to rib him about being a Good Samaritan, but he cuts him off by complaining.
“Jesus undead Christ, fellas, I’m so hungry.’
“You’re always fucking hungry. You’re a bottomless pit with good hair.” Says Bucky.
That makes Sam giggle, and Steve knows that’s why Bucky said it. He loves to make a handsome man laugh.
“I have a great ass, Buck, and you know it. Howard was an ass man, he saw to that.”
“You smell like blood, Barnes” says Sam. “I know you caught something.”
“It’s strung up, at the camp. Let’s go, before anyone else needs one-handed help.”
Steve doesn’t take the innuendo bait, but he does file it away for later. Buck pretends like Steve won’t take him up on it, sometimes. It’s a cute act.
They walk back, into the deep dark of the forest, towards the mountains.
There is a specific quality to the cold beauty around them, an indifference.
Utter indifference to whether they live or die, no source of light or warmth except yourself for farther than you can walk before you freeze stiff and are found in the spring like a lost mitten.
It is reassuring to them in a way, protecting them, keeping wanderers and snitches at bay, safeguarding them in its icy embrace.
They pass through a ravine, to the base of what would be called a mountain in some less craggy geographies, but at the feet of the mighty Canadian Rockies it’s just a foothill.
Their camp is small, the smoke dissipating neatly, invisibly into the starry sky. Sam knows how he does that. It’s a neat trick, but they teach it in special ops too, Barnes, you ain’t special.
The two supersoldiers set about prepping the camp for dinner and sleep, and Sam takes a moment. The last two weeks are a blur, a hundred vagaries of fate and luck bringing him here, to the foot of a mountain range, fingers warm in the fur-lined mittens Steve had lifted neatly, silently, cleanly from the base. Captain Sticky Fingers. A spring inventory would show quite a few discrepancies, but Sam doubts they will bother to check that abandoned shell of a place.
Then they had run, following the note, written in red, signed with a stick figure spider. “Come to Europe boys, the water’s fine and the Nazis want punching. Meet me at the only English bookstore in Paris on March 15th, at 3:12 am exactly.”
Steve had eaten the note, but not before Sam caught the deep fondness behind his eyes as he read and reread it, lingering over the dopey spider doodle, committing every detail to memory. Then down the hatch, the natural acid bath, the failproof deletion.
They will begin crossing the mountains tomorrow: the wall the Canadians built does not cross the mountains, and generally no people survive the crossing either. Sam watches Bucky’s broad shoulders as he neatly carves the deer from the spit, and stretches his legs, feeling the muscles respond: he’s done harder things than climb a bunch of rocks.
He yanks his eyes from the two hunks in front of him, silhouetted against the fire, and stares up at the sky, vast and velvety and bright with uncounted points of light. The brilliance of it strikes him pleasantly dumb.
He’s only seen Paris once, and these fossils he’s with saw it last from the haze of a war, or through the miasma of electrocuted neurons healing themselves, over and over and over.
The light really is pink there. He remembers it: the buttresses slicing a sunset sky into neat, graceful sections, and the river flowing past in majestic silence.