Alpine

Gambit 1 - Ghosts

"Hey, are you listening to me?"

"What?" I shook my head to clear it. God knows how long I had been semi-conscious. I felt cold and sluggish. The car had stopped. Snow came down hard. We were parked under a steel roof. A gas pump stood before the front-window. I groggily wormed around to stare at his seatbelt. "Gas and coffee?"

He huffed. "You really ought to sleep in a bed tonight. Stay here and rest. I'll take care of the coffee once the car is fueled up. You're easy to order for anyway, since it's just black."

With that, he left the car. Brisk air rushed in, fully waking me up. I rubbed my eyes and undid my seatbelt. My neck was sore again. Standing up and walking around would hopefully do it some good.

Pushing the door open, I stepped onto a crisp, snow film. All I heard were my crumbling footsteps and his credit card sliding through the card reader. I approached the six-inch snowbank at the station's edge. To keep my thin sneakers dry, I tapped the bank with my shoe-tip. That snow felt heavier, wetter than the fluff that had blown around the pumps. I held my hand out to catch fresh flakes. They fell as mangled ice crystal clumps.

I shook my hand clean. "Hey, do you know how many inches we're supposed to get?"

"Well, you'd know if you had watched the news with me last night." Metallic jangling as the pump nozzle left the filler pipe and returned to its holster. "I think it was just a few inches." Three clicks as he overturned the gas cap. A fourth as he closed the fuel cover.

I squinted at the sky. "We've already got a few inches. It doesn't look like it's letting up any time soon."

"I wish I could change the weather for you, but I don't think you could pay me enough to do it!" He laughed and got back in the car. "I'm going to move closer to the store, okay?"

Panic. Absolute frozen panic. There was no chance to say anything before he turned the ignition and rolled away. I mumbled something like, "Not here, please not here, anywhere but here." Helplessly rooted in place, I watched the car ghost from tan to cream to white through a screen of falling snow. The tires became the only visible element. They stopped a few yards away. I exhaled hoarsely. He was not abandoning me in this wasteland.

He got back out and walked into a convenience store that was barely visible through the haze. I ambled towards it, following the tracks his car left. We were one of two cars at the station. The other would have belonged to whatever poor soul was stuck working the convenience store counter. It had been so long since any other vehicle had come, that the only tire tracks were ours.

When I reached his car, I put a hand on it. I had to touch it. To prove it was real. It was there. That simple action brought such relief. The nearest tire's black was so intense against the white snow, that it drew my gaze. I stared numbly at it. No.

I hurried to the driver's side door. Unlocked. I opened it and pulled the lever to pop the trunk. Racing to the back, I saw Alpine. Christ, I forgot it was in there. That shiny, metal brick weighed at least 200 pounds. Without his help, there was no way I could get at the spare tire compartment underneath it. The little, green, pine tree logo on that metallic beast's far-right corner mocked me. I rested my forehead on the raised hatch's lip.

A little bell rang at the convenience store entrance. He came up to me with a coffee in each hand. A paper bag was tucked between his left arm and jacket. "What are you—?"

"You have the snow tires in here, right?"

"I put new tires on the car like you asked, yes."

"That. Is not. What I asked for." His expression became curiously blank. I rarely raised my voice with him. Every time I had, something different had happened. I guess that made me unpredictable to him. Especially after the last time. "I told you to buy snow tires. Are there any snow tires in this car?"

In a toneless voice, "I thought new tires would be good enough."

"Fuck!" I slammed the trunk closed.

"It hasn't been a problem so far."

"If it keeps snowing this this, it's going to be a problem! You don't even know how to drive in snow, do you?"

"It hasn't. Been a problem. So far."

"We're gonna die." I stormed to the passenger's side. Got in. The door banged shut. A garbled, closed-mouth, furious scream escaped me. Given the present company, it did not matter how childish that scene made me look.

He wasted a few minutes standing by the trunk doing nothing. If he were anyone else, I would have gotten back out and apologized for losing my temper. I would have felt bad that he was out there in the cold trying to regain his composure. But that is not what he was doing.

Planning. Scheming. Recalibrating. He was a program presenting the hourglass icon as he comprehended new data. The only benefit of the doubt he deserved was that, for once, it felt like this was legitimate mistake. A corner he cut without understanding its consequences.

Eventually, he got in the car. He held out a coffee. I wanted to ignore it, but I was cold. Mumbling "thanks" despite myself, I took it. A hard gulp of magma-hot fluid. My burnt tongued hated me for that decision, but it was the right choice. Having heat back in me took the edge off.

He placed the paper bag on the unopened Crossroads carton. "It's gauze." Reflexively, I clenched my left hand into a fist. He noticed. "You're supposed to change the bandages on cuts like that pretty often."

"Yeah. Probably."

"Do you want help?"

"No." We sat in silence. Staring straight ahead. Drinking coffee. Neither of us could see anything. The front window was covered in a lumpy snow sheet, blocking a view of even more snow. With a groan, I snagged the bag and shoved the Crossroads back to reveal a cup holder. Putting down the coffee, I opened the bag. "I wish you would just say, 'I'm not driving until you change the bandage.'"

He said nothing.