Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) Read Online Free
Author: Shannon Hill
popped a ragged hole in the top with my length of re-bar, and then pried up part of the top. Compared to Aunt Marge’s homemade masterpieces, it was garbage, but right then it tasted like heaven.
I stared upward. I either needed fuel enough to not freeze till someone found me, or I needed out. The trapdoor was too heavy to budge, and too sturdy for a piece of rebar to do much damage to. But I couldn’t give up. It wasn’t in me. Not yet.
I crawled up the ladder, and started attacking the floorboard parallel to the trapdoor. Sure, it was an old, thick plank. With luck, however, it might be more old than thick.
I fell off the ladder twice, and my hands were numb from the vibrations from the blows I struck, before I scraped up a handful of splinters and threw them in the stove. I drank some more water. It didn’t help.
I tried Plan B. That involved heating the tip of the re-bar in the coals and trying to burn the wood planks above me. I succeeded in leaving some black gouges.
Plan C was trying to hold a flaming log to the trapdoor long enough for the trapdoor to catch fire. It smoldered, and it blackened, but it did not burst into flame. Admittedly, setting fire to the cabin wasn’t my best option, but I was getting pretty desperate by then.
Plan D involved sitting by the woodstove watching the coals slowly cool and darken.
It was around noon when I went to the far wall and started attacking it with the re-bar. I’d shut the drafts on the woodstove and banked the remaining hot coals as best I could. If I got lucky—phenomenally, even-better-than-lotto lucky—I might hack my way out into the forest and at least have access to firewood. Then I could do something intelligent and hightail it off that mountain before dark.
When dark came, I was exhausted, my back and arms in agony from repeated strikes of metal on stone, and the cellar had gotten very cold. I ate a can of soup cold by the light of one of the two battery-operated lanterns. I’d turned off the other to save it. I huddled against the woodstove more for comfort than any warmth it had to give, and slept.
3.
I ate the last can of soup the following morning. I ached all over, from cold, from weariness, from despair. The carpet burns on my feet, plus the long chill, left them both numbed and irritated. My hands weren’t any better. I was not really warm inside my cocoon of two comforters, but I wasn’t freezing, either. I tried for a few hours to hack at the far wall again, but the re-bar’s vibrations made my arms ache clear to my eyebrows, and I was becoming light-headed from lack of food. I loaded up on the spring water, and fell asleep. I dreamt I had been forgotten by Tall and Shotgun, and that this was the plan all along: let me die by slow inches in this cellar, instead of clean and quick in the open.
I started shaking before dawn, when the cold had settled in hard and fierce. I told myself to jump up and down to get warm, but my feet were blocks of wood even though I’d been curled up tight all night in the comforters. To get a drink, I had to inchworm along the cold stone floor, then stick my face directly into the water because I did not want to make my hands any colder by poking them out of the comforters.
I got back to my spot by the woodstove and dozed off again. I wanted to be awake. I wanted to get out. The problem was, I was finally warm again, and so sleepy my body shut down without my brain’s permission. I jerked awake three times, and the third time, I got to my knees. I crawled to the far wall and picked up the re-bar length. Just a hunk of some kind of steel or iron, as thick as my thumb, as long as my arm, that’s all it was.
It was Excalibur to me.
I made my hands curl around it to hold it, and I made myself thrust its tip between fieldstones and start working out mortar. I had yet to get one stone free, but I chiseled away in fits and starts until I fell asleep again thinking I was still working.
I woke to
I stared upward. I either needed fuel enough to not freeze till someone found me, or I needed out. The trapdoor was too heavy to budge, and too sturdy for a piece of rebar to do much damage to. But I couldn’t give up. It wasn’t in me. Not yet.
I crawled up the ladder, and started attacking the floorboard parallel to the trapdoor. Sure, it was an old, thick plank. With luck, however, it might be more old than thick.
I fell off the ladder twice, and my hands were numb from the vibrations from the blows I struck, before I scraped up a handful of splinters and threw them in the stove. I drank some more water. It didn’t help.
I tried Plan B. That involved heating the tip of the re-bar in the coals and trying to burn the wood planks above me. I succeeded in leaving some black gouges.
Plan C was trying to hold a flaming log to the trapdoor long enough for the trapdoor to catch fire. It smoldered, and it blackened, but it did not burst into flame. Admittedly, setting fire to the cabin wasn’t my best option, but I was getting pretty desperate by then.
Plan D involved sitting by the woodstove watching the coals slowly cool and darken.
It was around noon when I went to the far wall and started attacking it with the re-bar. I’d shut the drafts on the woodstove and banked the remaining hot coals as best I could. If I got lucky—phenomenally, even-better-than-lotto lucky—I might hack my way out into the forest and at least have access to firewood. Then I could do something intelligent and hightail it off that mountain before dark.
When dark came, I was exhausted, my back and arms in agony from repeated strikes of metal on stone, and the cellar had gotten very cold. I ate a can of soup cold by the light of one of the two battery-operated lanterns. I’d turned off the other to save it. I huddled against the woodstove more for comfort than any warmth it had to give, and slept.
3.
I ate the last can of soup the following morning. I ached all over, from cold, from weariness, from despair. The carpet burns on my feet, plus the long chill, left them both numbed and irritated. My hands weren’t any better. I was not really warm inside my cocoon of two comforters, but I wasn’t freezing, either. I tried for a few hours to hack at the far wall again, but the re-bar’s vibrations made my arms ache clear to my eyebrows, and I was becoming light-headed from lack of food. I loaded up on the spring water, and fell asleep. I dreamt I had been forgotten by Tall and Shotgun, and that this was the plan all along: let me die by slow inches in this cellar, instead of clean and quick in the open.
I started shaking before dawn, when the cold had settled in hard and fierce. I told myself to jump up and down to get warm, but my feet were blocks of wood even though I’d been curled up tight all night in the comforters. To get a drink, I had to inchworm along the cold stone floor, then stick my face directly into the water because I did not want to make my hands any colder by poking them out of the comforters.
I got back to my spot by the woodstove and dozed off again. I wanted to be awake. I wanted to get out. The problem was, I was finally warm again, and so sleepy my body shut down without my brain’s permission. I jerked awake three times, and the third time, I got to my knees. I crawled to the far wall and picked up the re-bar length. Just a hunk of some kind of steel or iron, as thick as my thumb, as long as my arm, that’s all it was.
It was Excalibur to me.
I made my hands curl around it to hold it, and I made myself thrust its tip between fieldstones and start working out mortar. I had yet to get one stone free, but I chiseled away in fits and starts until I fell asleep again thinking I was still working.
I woke to
Readers choose
Rachelle Ayala
Catherine Anderson
John Pilkington
Vanessa Gray Bartal
Chad Kunego
Linda Winfree
Debbie Macomber
John Corey Whaley
Donald Wigboldy