The Servants of Twilight

He was sitting on the ground, with his back to a tree. He rested his head against the trunk, too, closed his eyes. took several deep breaths, trying to stop shaking, trying to think positively, trying to convince himself that everything would turn out all right, failing. He had been an optimist all his life, and this recent acquaintance with soul-shaking doubt was devastating.

The Tylenol and the anaesthetic powder had only slight effect on his pain, but even that minimal relief was fading. The pain in his shoulder was gaining strength again, and it was beginning to creep outward, as before, across his chest and up his neck and into his head.

Christine was talking softly and encouragingly to Joey, though she must have wanted to weep at the sight of him, as Charlie had done.

He steeled himself and looked at the boy again.

The child's face was red, lumpy, and badly misshapen from hives caused by the fierce cold. His eyes were nearly swollen shut; the edges of them were caked with a gummy, mucous-like substance, and the lashes were matted with the same stuff. His nostrils were mostly swollen shut, so he was breathing through his mouth, and his lips were cracked, puffy, bleeding. Most of his face was flushed an angry red, but two spots on his cheeks and one on the tip of his nose were gray-white, which might indicate frostbite, though Charlie hoped to God it wasn't.

Christine looked at Charlie, and her own despondency was evident in her troubled eyes if not in her voice." Okay. We've got to move on. Got to get Joey out of this cold. We've got to find those caves."

"I don't see any sign of them," Charlie said.

"They must be near," she said." Do you need help getting up? "

"I can make it," he said.

She lifted Joey. The boy didn't hold on to her. His arms hung down, limp. She glanced at Charlie.

Charlie sighed, gripped the tree, and got laboriously to his feet, quite surprised when he made it all the way up.

But he was even more surprised when, a second later, Chewbacca appeared, cloaked in snow and ice, head hung low, a walking definition of misery.

When he had last seen the dog, out in the meadow, Charlie had been sure the animal would collapse and die in the storm.

"My God," Christine said when she saw the dog, and she looked as startled as Charlie was.

It's important, Charlie thought. The dog pulling through-that means we're all going to survive.

He wanted very much to believe it. He tried hard to convince himself.

But they were a long way from home.

The way things had been going for them, Christine figured they would be unable to find the caves and would simply wander through the forest until they dropped from exhaustion and exposure to the cold. But fate finally had a bit of luck in store for them, and they found what they were looking for in less than ten minutes.

The trees thinned out in the neighborhood of the caves because the land became extremely rocky. It sloped up in uneven steps of stone, in humps and knobs and ledges and set-backs.

Because there were fewer trees, more snow found its way in here, and there were some formidable drifts at the base of the slope and at many points higher up, where a set-back or a narrower ledge provided accommodation. But there was more wind, too, whistling down from the tops of the surrounding trees, and large areas of rock were swept bare of snow. She could see the dark mouths of three caves in the lower formations, where she and Charlie might be able to climb, and there were half a dozen others visible in the upper formations, but those were out of reach. There might be more openings, now drifted shut and hidden, because this portion of the valley wall appeared to be a honeycomb of tunnels, caves, and caverns.

She carried Joey to a jumble of boulders at the bottom of the slope and put him down, out of the wind.

Chewbacca limped after them and slumped wearily beside his master. It was astonishing that the dog had made it all this way, but it was clear he would not be able to go much farther.

With a grateful sigh and a gasp of pain, Charlie lowered himself to the ground beside Joey and the dog.

The look of him scared Christine as much as Joey's tortured face. His bloodshot eyes were fevered, two hot coals in his bumtout face. She was afraid she was going to wind up alone out here with the bodies of the only two people she loved, caretaker of a wilderness graveyard that would eventually become her own final resting place.

"I'll look in these caves," she told Charlie, shouting to be heard now that they were more or less in the open again." I'll see which is the best for us."

He nodded, and Joey didn't react, and she turned away from them, clambered over the rocky terrain toward the first dark gap in the face of the slope.