Secrets of Liberty Mountain (Final)

From what I understood about CO2 toxicity, which was almost nothing, it would take Alice and me at least twenty-four hours for our systems to restore a healthy oxygen balance as we purged the excess carbon dioxide from our bodies.

With each breath we took, our breathing became a little bit easier. Trying to stand up was a different story. I made it to my knees twice before wobbling and falling over. Alice didn't fare much better; she swayed sideways and toppled over like a tree in a hurricane when she tried to rise to her feet. We were a mess.

Finally, we got ourselves into sync and helped each other climb to our feet. Like, two drunken sailors, we staggered off toward our tent with the beams of our flashlights leading the way. A fuzzy part of my brain was engaged in trying to do a basic risk assessment. The math was so simple my foggy brain could do the calculations:

Hypothermia + CO2 poisoning = Death

"My God, I'm freezing."

Alice's teeth chattered in time with her shivering body. The sweat which had drenched us while we were frantically digging ourselves out of the cavern transformed our clothing into swarm of vampire leeches sucking the heat and life out of our bodies.

"We gotta lose these wet clothes before we freeze to death."

My teeth chattered like an old-fashioned typewriter. I stuttered and stammered so much I had to repeat every word two or three times.

Inside our tent, I ignored the chill as I raced to disrobe. My T-shirt was drenched. I stripped it off and used it as a towel to dry myself off. I knelt naked next to Alice, removed her clothing, and toweled her shivering body off the best I could. I glanced at my watch; it was a few minutes after nine o'clock in the morning.

Without another word between us, we slipped into the frigid sleeping bag and held each other as tightly as we could. For all the warmth we were generating, we might as well have been two ice cubes at the bottom of a martini glass. Our hands caressed each other's bodies and bare bottoms as we used friction to warm the surface of our skin. After several minutes, our shivering abated as we exchanged body heat.

Alice's body relaxed as her tension evaporated. We held each other in our arms as a deep, restful calm surrounded us in the warm and comforting cocoon of slumber. I smiled.

Butterflies do dream when they sleep.

Chapter 17

Morpheus, the God of dreams, wrapped us in a cocoon of dreams. But when he did, he forgot to include a bathroom. I awoke with a four-alarm "urgent need to go" moment as my bladder trembled in an effort to hold back a flood of biblical proportions. It would be wonderful to wake up nice and slow like I used to do in my younger days. I used to enjoy the delightful transition from slumber to wakefulness. No such luck. Personal plumbing issues are now at the top of my morning's To-Do List.

I groaned as I rolled away from Alice and felt around under the heap of clothes I used as a makeshift pillow. I breathed a sigh of relief when my fingers found my flashlight. My sigh turned into a groan when I saw that each LED bulb glowed no brighter than a dying firefly.

Damn it! I'd forgot to turn it off before I fell asleep. In an instinctive reaction, I shook the flashlight as if that would be enough to wake up a few extra sleeping electrons. I examined my light for the traitor it had become. The Chinese manufactured flashlight carried a guaranteed battery life of twenty-five hours. No way the charge should exhaust itself after a few hours of sleep. Friggin' imports.

My little light was almost useless. A dozen lightning bugs would've shed more light.

Hauling myself out of the sleeping bag turned out to be a real chore. My stiff muscles protested every move I made and my back was killing me. Payback for not having an air mattress. The atmosphere in the tent was rather brisk, a polite way of saying, "too damn cold."

First things first, I crawled naked past our saucepan, AKA: a chamber pot. Screw it! I didn't want to bother cleaning our makeshift toilet; besides, we would later need to melt snow to replace our drinking water. At the door to our tent, I climbed to my knees. An upset bride once asked a famous advice columnist, "My husband insists on urinating in our backyard. Why does he do that?"

Her answer became the stuff of legend, "Because he can."

I shuffled forward and, plumbing in hand, I sprayed the dry, dusty ground of our cave with a monsoon of yellow rain. The first moisture in more than a hundred years.

Lighting a cigarette and holding my prick in my right hand, I glanced at my wristwatch. The time glowed a few minutes after 11:30 in the morning. Huh?

We slept for less than three hours? Then I noticed the date in the tiny square on the dial's surface. Holy shit! We'd slept around the clock and then some. While I got busy irrigating the powder dry soil, goosebumps were busy marching in lockstep across my naked body.

Once upon a time, those little bumps at the base of our body hairs served an evolutionary purpose. They helped us fluff up our fur to better insulate us from the cold. When we were threatened, the same fluffing mechanism raised our body hair and turned our ancestors into instant Chia pets, making us appear a bit larger to potential adversaries or hungry predators. That was then, and this is now.

In the eons since, we've lost most of our fur, and the bumps no longer keep us warm and fluffy. Instead, the zillions of goose pimples give our skin the appearance of used sandpaper. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor?

Shaking the last drops into the night, I collected my thoughts. At least I had one thing going for me; things could only improve. There is no place to go except up when you start your day naked and freezing while pissing in a pitch-black rattlesnake den. Right?

After taking one last drag from my cigarette, I used my thumb and forefinger to flip the butt away from me. Like a spent tracer round, the red streak sailed off into blackness before bursting into a shower of sparks as it bounced off the low ceiling of the cavern.

Nice, a mini-fireworks display.

~~~

"Dennis, I can't believe you're so careless! How could you forget to turn off your light?" Alice stuffed her shirt into the waistband of her pants and glowered in my direction.

"I'm sorry. It's not like I left the damn thing on to piss you off. It was an accident." I finished lacing up my boots.

"Well, it was a stupid thing to do. Now we're down to one flashlight and one lantern," Alice said as she brushed loose strands of hair out of her eyes.

Resisting the temptation to respond with a snappy comeback, I only muttered under my breath, "Thank you, Captain Obvious."

"What did you say?"

"I said we need to get something to eat. We're hungry and cranky." I picked up two military-style MREs. "We have two choices. Chicken Pesto Pasta or Beef Ravioli. What's your pleasure?"

"Does one of them contain flashlight batteries?" Alice examined the MREs. "How about this one? Maybe it's a misprint. I'm sure they meant to say, Chicken Pesto and Battery Pasta," she said as she shook the MRE.

I clenched my jaw and did a slow count to ten. "Alice, you've already plowed this field. Give it a rest."

I zipped up my jacket and picked up the Rayovac lantern along with our survival saw as I crawled toward the tent opening.

"God damn it! Don't you walk out on me when I'm talking to you," Alice grumbled.

I stopped and turned back to face her. "First of all, I'm not walking, I'm crawling. Secondly, you're not talking to me. You are cranking, and right now you sound like an old, ah, err, oh never mind."

Better my words remain unspoken then to spend the rest of my life apologizing.

"If we get stuck in the fucking dark, it will be your fault," Alice growled.

I took a long deep breath and did another slow ten-count. "You can vent anytime you want, and I will listen. Once. But, I draw the line at recycling. Like I said, you've already plowed this field. What's the point of doing it again?" I searched Alice's eyes for any sign she appreciated what I was saying.

"Dennis, you don't get it. I hate being in the dark. Because of your carelessness, we're down to a single flashlight and one lantern. That's not much of a safety margin." Alice crossed her arms, shook her head side to side, and frowned.

"Alice, mistakes happen. When they do, we need to build a bridge and get over 'em. Look around you; there's nobody keeping score. You and I are the only living creatures within earshot. The snakes? They're as deaf as doornails. They're not listening, and they don't care." I gave Alice a hug and kissed her cheek.

"I'm frightened." Alice's frown melted as her lower lip started to tremble as tears appeared at the corners of her eyes.

"So am I. So, too, am I. Trust me, we'll get out of this together. I don't know how, but we will survive," I said with more optimism than conviction as I gave her another hug.

Nature has a superb sense of timing. As our embrace ended, a faint glimmer of slowly brightening light radiated from the entrance to our cave.

Something was happening.

Chapter 18

Alice and I hurried toward the source of illumination like moths to a flame. A glimmering halo of white light surrounded the hole Alice cut through the snow drift at the tunnel's entrance. I crawled into the air shaft that she'd excavated and punched through a thin cap of frost at the end and was instantly dazzled by blinding sunshine.

"Alice, come here and take a look, you aren't going to believe this," I shouted over my shoulder as I emerged into the open air.

The blizzard had passed us by, and the heavy overcast it left in its wake was riddled with expanding patches of brilliant blue sky. The sun had broken through the clouds at the center of the largest patch of sky and blazed in magnificent glory.

A few moments later, she emerged from the tunnel and took her place next to me. We stood together, speechless and in awe, with our arms around each other.

The land itself lay before us, transformed by the blizzard into a visual wonderland of strange beauty. The storm swept all the colors of the world away, and only vivid blues, dazzling whites, and a thousand shades of gray remained. The thin, clear air distorted distance judgment in such a way that far away mountain ranges appeared close enough to reach out and touch. Snow-capped summits all along the western horizon blazed white with reflected sunlight against a sky so blue that the color bordered on black.

"Have you ever seen anything so beautiful, Dennis?" Alice gave me an extra hug and rested her head on my shoulder.

"Not in this lifetime." I kissed the top of her head and returned her hug. "Where did we park Mr. Kawasaki?"

I searched the blanket of snow before us for any sign of our ATV. It was nowhere to be seen.

"I think our Mule is under the drift."

Alice pointed to a low mound of snow about 10 yards to our right. The chest-high snow made forward motion almost impossible without an extraordinary amount of effort. Any thought of walking back to Liberty Base vanished before I had gone five yards. Our buried ATV wasn't going anywhere until next spring, and there was no way we would be able to hike the fifteen miles back to base through this snow cover.

"Do you know how to make snowshoes, Alice?"

"No, but the Spanish SAS Survival Manual has a section on how to make them," Alice said.

"Can you read Spanish?"

"Nope, but we can copy the illustrations in the manual. We'll need to get branches from a pine tree."

Alice ducked back into the passageway and emerged with our survival saw a few minutes later. We set off together to explore the nearest stand of evergreens about a quarter mile to our left. The human body is a remarkable machine, but it's a lousy snowplow.

I was utterly exhausted by the time we reached the trees. I had never been athletic as a youth, and my physical stamina hasn't improved with age. Alice, on the other hand, looked like she was ready to do a twenty-mile hike. I grimaced; nobody should be so fucking perky after slogging through waist-deep snow.

After about thirty minutes of labor, we had cut or collected enough pine branches, garlands, and barrows to decorate the Sistine Chapel. We knitted the load together using paracord and dragged our Evergreen sled across the snowy valley instead of carrying the greenery back to our shelter. We spent a few minutes scooping out a semi-sheltered work area: a depression surrounded by piles of snow to block most of the wind upon arrival.

We had plenty of green pine fuel. We got our hobo stove started and burning in short order and melted snow for drinking water. Our all-purpose chamber pot came in handy, and the steam was an excellent hand warmer. Alice's attempt to build a replica of the snowshoes pictured in the Spanish survival manual was a perfect copy of the illustration.

"Viola!" she said as she triumphantly held her completed set of Spanish snowshoes aloft for me to view and admire. "It was too easy," she laughed as her smile shifted from grin to gloat.

"Nice," I mumbled, too embarrassed to speak.

I knew in my gut that I was never going to hear the end of this one. At the age of five, I became a legend as the only kid in my hometown to ever flunk kindergarten Arts and Crafts.

Alice decided to strut her stuff for the hell of it and started tromping across the top of the snow in her snowshoes. Pride goeth before fall. Her footwear fell apart no more than five steps into her victory march. She practically vanished from view as she sank to her neck in powdery snow. The devil lives in the details in the snowshoe business.

We played woodland cobbler and tried to make a working pair of snowshoes for the next several hours. Alice's creations were things of beauty. Although my efforts were less than stylish, they had one thing in common with my partner's design. Neither one of them worked worth a damn.

The one thing we didn't count on in our fight against frostbite and hypothermia was getting sunburned. A UV barbecue is exactly what we got. After about thirty minutes of labor,our faces looked like supermarket tomatoes: red, juicy, and overpriced.

"The cupboard is bare, and we've officially run out of food." Alice licked her fingers and stared forlornly at the empty MRE packages at our feet.

"Correction; we've run out of prepared food. We still have a pantry full of legless protein awaiting our culinary expertise." I waved my arm at the sleeping snakes in the darkness beyond our tent.

"Yuck! Do you even know how to cook a rattlesnake?" Alice's body shivered in disgust.

"Easy as pie. Cut strips of meat, grill 'em, and they're done when they start to burn." I grinned as I fished around, trying to find our pot stash.

"Time for dessert. Our sunburns are as good of an excuse as any to research the medicinal benefits of Liberty Mountain's legally homegrown marijuana."

I lit my glass pipe, took a long toke, and passed it to Alice. Wow! We were smoking weed with attitude. Four tokes from the bowel and we were as stoned as the faces carved on Mount Rushmore.

We undressed for bed as our cannabis high wrapped us in a calm and relaxing fog. Alice stripped down to her birthday suit and climbed into the sleeping bag. I shed all my clothing except for my jockey shorts and a T-shirt and quickly joined her under the blankets.

We snuggled together like two spoons in the kitchen drawer. While I was content to drift off to dreams, Alice had other ideas. She caressed the side of my face with her fingers and slid her hand down my chest in a southward journey.

Alice gave a contented sigh and nestled closer to me. She nuzzled her head on my chest. She ever so carefully slipped her hand under the waistband of my briefs and explored the contours of my growing interest.

"Does this guy have a name?" Alice tenderly squeezed my guy and held it between her thumb and forefinger as she began to gently stroke.

Aarg! Some treacherous male had revealed one of manhood's most closely guarded secrets. We gave pet names to our junk. My appendage answered to the name of Harvey (as in Harvey the Hard-on).

"Let's see, would Harvey like to come out and play." Alice used both hands to slide my shorts down to my knees.

Freed from his fabric prison, Harvey joyfully sprang into the air, nearly poking Alice in the face. Turning her head to face me, Alice leaned into me and kissed the end of my nose.

"Do you like this?" she stared into my eyes as her fingers played.

Her gaze was as penetrating as the sensation of her fingers frolicking with the family jewels. I turned out the lights and let her explore in the dark, anatomy by braille.

"Oh, God, yes!" I let out a low groan as my pelvis moved in time with her caresses.

I closed my eyes as a spreading ocean of delight sparkled and surged from my fingertips to my toes.

Guided only by our sense of touch, taste, and hearing, Alice and I delighted in each other's skin in a world without light. Like castaways on a sunless sea, we drifted on the tides of pleasure and followed the currents of passion. Occasionally, as we smooched and moved under the covers, sparks of static electricity twinkled like fireflies in the night.

The space around us became a timeless point of union as we nestled together like two pieces of a puzzle, a perfect fit. As my tongue investigated her entrance, Alice's mouth and lips surrounded me with wonderful sweet butterfly kisses. Sensations of ecstasy streamed through me like a rising tide and, as impossible as it seemed, the night around me appeared to shimmer with sensual shades of color as our bodies merged into one. We were yin and yang.

A glittering circle of intense bliss began to glow at the center of my mind. Alive with delicious pressure, every nerve in my body converged at the core of my being. Waves of tension and joy flowed inward as my arousal became a tower of increasing desire. The tingling warmth in my feet collided with the pricking in my groin. I began to fly toward the point of release.

Damn it, I'm losing it. Things were happening too fast. I was too close to the finish line! I rolled away from Alice's stimulation and tried to cool in place.

"Come back here, I'm not done!"

She shifted her body to follow as I squirmed away.

"Just a second! Geesh, I gotta slow down, I'm about to finish too early."

I was tottering on the point of no return. I gritted my teeth and willed myself to back away from the brink. Premature pleasure is a real buzz kill.

As I started to regain control, Alice's searching hand found me in the dark. The tender feeling of her delicate fingers tickled me over the edge. My body and hips jerked as I squirted all over her hand and arm.

"Oh, crap!"

What a waste of an orgasm.

Nobody wants to sleep in the wet spot. I dribble like a leaky faucet as I searched the gloom for our flashlight. I clicked on the power. Out of habit, I glanced at the array of light emitting diodes to determine the remaining strength of the battery. Bad move. After prolonged blackness, my eyes were at maximum sensitivity. The dazzling brightness was painful in its intensity. Alice vanished behind a blizzard of blue dots drifting across my retina.

"Idiot!" I scolded myself as I shook my head in a useless effort to get rid of the afterimages floating in my field of vision. "Sorry about that."

My undershirt did double duty as a towel as I cleaned stuff from Alice's hand and arm. Memo to self: survival kits should include a friggin' face cloth.

"That was interesting," said the Alice-shaped blue dot.

Chapter 19

The prolonged stillness in our fabric cave drifted from awkward to uncomfortable as we each waited for the other to speak. Silence and rubber bands share at least one thing in common. If you stretch them far enough, they'll snap. In our case, the break came when Alice's stomach rumbled in hunger. A few moments later, my gut responded in kind.