Wesley rolled to the side, smoothly getting to a kneeling position and finding his own clothes. “During the hike, I’m going to be giving a lot of orders and commands, but I’ll need your help. I know the woods, and I know survival, but I also know it’s been a really long time since I was green. I need you to tell me if you think you can’t make a climb, or if a path I choose looks too much for you to handle. This part is going to be the hardest too. Once we hit the lake level, we can more or less skirt the water as it curves around, and it’ll be level. But up here? It’s going to be rocky and icy.”
“I can do that,” I said, pulling the rest of my long underwear on. “I think I can handle it.” In all honesty, I wasn’t too sure. But I had Wes at my side, and that at least gave me enough confidence to keep going.
Wesley smiled, his confidence returning. “Good. Now, let’s go through your backpack and pitch out what we don’t need. I’m going to distribute the remaining food between the two of us, and lighten your pack at the same time. When we originally packed, I thought you’d be on level ground, not going down rocks. The big problem with that is that I didn’t pack any climbing rope—I didn’t think we’d need it.”
“What do we have?” I asked, going over to my pack and opening it. Instead of taking my time, I decided to cut the proverbial Gordian Knot and dumped out everything, finding a fresh pair of pants and pulling them on. I figured I could get by with the same tops from yesterday, but I wanted to give Wesley as much support as I could. “Uh, should I have done that?”
“Why not?” He laughed, coming over in his own pants and socks and kissing my cheek. We hugged quickly. “I would have done the same thing anyway. I’ll do the same to my pack too, so we might as well get started. As for your question, I have about a hundred meters of what the military calls five fifty cord, because it’s supposed to be able to support five hundred and fifty pounds, but it’s not a climbing rope. We used it for parachutes, but there’s supposed to be a lot of lines to support one soldier. It’ll still be useful, though.”
I watched, nodding as Wes pulled his pants and boots on, tying them quickly and tucking the laces into the tops. Huffing into his hands, he went to the door and looked back. “It’s going to get cold in here. I need to have light to be able to see. You okay?”
I shook my head and hurriedly pulled on my boots. I could stand the cold on my hands, but my toes? No way in hell. “All right. I’m ready.”
The temperature was just about freezing when Wesley opened the door, a sharp wind cutting me to the bone. Wes grimaced and smiled back at me. “Don’t worry, it’ll feel better once we’re packed up and walking,” he said reassuringly, heading outside. I could see a bit of the outdoors from my spot and groaned. The ice and snow were evident, although it was no winter wonderland. I looked out the windows on the other side of the plane, and I could only see sky at first. It looked pretty cloudless, at least, so I didn’t think we were going to be facing snow or rain or anything like that. There was no way in hell I wanted to even think about trying to hike out in weather like that.
I finished dressing, pulling on my knit cap and gloves from my bag before Wesley returned. I helped him into the cabin, pulling the rest of the rations with him. “All right, this should be enough food for us to make it most of the way to our goal,” Wesley said, taking five of the envelopes and tossing them over by my backpack. “A soldier is expected to be able to get by on two of those a day. Honestly, we can get by on one, and I’d like to do that, supplementing with whatever things I can find and scrounge on the way. But just the rations means mighty slim pickings. If you want, I still have the crackers and some of the stuff from my meal last night. Old soldier’s habit.”
“I was thinking of actually splitting that sandwich the pilot had in the cooler,” I said, my thoughts for the first time turning to the dead man on the other side of the cockpit door. I shuddered slightly, realizing that I had just had sex with my stepbrother less than ten feet from a freezing body. Creepy, unless you are into the whole Tim Burton thing, which I’m not. “Jeez, what are we going to do with him?”
Wes shrugged. “Not much we can do. You really don’t want to see what was left of him. I marked the map, we can bring a recovery team back here later, or at least show them where he’s at. Now, let’s get our stuff packed and moving so we don’t have to set up camp in darkness.”
Wes moved efficiently and quickly, tossing out all but one change of my clothes, and doing the same for himself. The rest of our packs were filled with food, tools, our sleeping bags and other various gear. I sighed when I saw that our new “tent” consisted of what was originally ponchos with grommets at the corners. “It’s not much, but we’ll be fine,” Wes assured me, cinching his pack closed.