1 Chapter 1

Jarrod banged his head against the steering wheel of his truck in frustration, hoping the end would come soon. The snow fell around his truck in large flakes, the size of cottonwood leaves from the previous autumn. Wind shook the vehicle, rattling every loose bolt and setting the pair of handcuffs hanging from his rear view mirror in motion.

What would it be like to freeze to death? he wondered. Do I lose consciousness first or do I just turn to solid ice? I thought a hairy body was supposed to keep you warm. He scoffed. So much for that theory.

Despite all the lectures from his father, Jarrod never heeded his advice for traveling during the winter, never took precautions for being stranded on the side of the road in a snow drift. No food, no blankets, no caps or gloves.

Jarrod glanced at the passenger window of his pickup truck. Snow packed against the pane where he had slid off the road into a deep ditch. Although he had four-wheel drive, the vehicle could not climb out of the hole. His tires just spun in place without finding traction. Jarrod had gotten out several times to see if he could dig his truck out, but the cold wind and driving snow and ice forced him back inside. Besides, he had no shovel or any other tool to remove the snow.

For the umpteenth time, he looked at his phone. In this remote area, he couldn’t get a signal strong enough to call for help, and then the battery had died from his repeated attempts to connect to a service provider.

He was running the engine to keep warm, but now the gas was low and wouldn’t last much longer. He killed the engine to preserve the remaining amount of fuel.

Another chilling thought occurred to him: what if his tail pipes were encased in snow and ice? If the exhaust fumes couldn’t be expelled, they had to go somewhere, which meant the interior of the vehicle. He recalled stories of stranded motorists dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because they’d run the car to stay warm. The deadly gas collected inside the car since the exhaust pipes were clogged.

Jarrod never paid much attention to these stories, dismissing them as idiots for not knowing any better. But now he faced his own mortality, seemingly face to face.

If I had listened to Dad, I wouldn’t be in such a miserable situation. If I had not listened to Mom begging me to come home for Christmas, I wouldn’t be here at all. Of course, if I hadn’t listened to myself and followed common sense, I wouldn’t have taken this damn short cut

His plan to start his journey with plenty of time to get home had been doomed when his friends invited him to go drinking the night before. He’d gotten in late and then overslept, waking up with a hangover that could kill a T-Rex. Thus, he had started several hours later than he’d planned. In his haste to get home, Jarrod had been driving faster than safe on slick roads and hit a large patch of ice, ending up here.

His father’s voice saying “I told you so” resonated through his mind, giving him a foretaste of what he would face if he made it home.

“I mean ‘when’ I make it home,” he said out loud, as if to drive off the jinx he feared he had invoked. “Not ‘if’.”

Jarrod wrapped his light jacket around himself tighter, trying to generate enough heat to calm his shivering body, but the cold penetrated his jeans and sneakers, through his jacket with icy fingers to his skin. His warm clothes and coats were in the suitcase, covered by a frozen tarp, now encased in snow in the pickup bed.

His beard and mustache dripped with condensation from his breath but the water soon froze, forming ice on the blond hair. He curled up on the seat with his head under the steering wheel, praying the end would come swiftly and painlessly.

A soft knock on the driver’s window shocked him and he yelped in surprise. A small point of light glowed outside. Jarrod’s heart leapt for joy in his chest as he fumbled with the door handle, spilling out of the truck.

“Hello! I’m so glad you found—” The words caught in his throat as he saw his visitor through the blowing snow. A large man with full white beard and mustache stood bundled up against the cold holding a kerosene lantern in one hand and an axe in the other. Jarrod recoiled in horror.

“Aw, damn,” the man said, turning to toss the axe on a sled full of chopped wood he had been pulling. “Sorry ‘bout that, son. Didn’t mean to scare you. Thought you might be needin’ some help.”

“Uh…yeah,” Jarrod managed to utter, relieved the axe wasn’t so handy now. “I ran off the road a while back. Can you help me dig my truck out?”

The white-haired man stepped toward the rear of Jarrod’s truck, holding the lantern close to the tires. He walked around the truck and examined the snowdrift which buried most of the vehicle.