Catchers

Mariam Pirbhai

Chicken Catchers

  In memory of the ten migrant workers who lost their lives on February 6, 2012, near Stratford, Ontario, in one of the worst road accidents in Ontario’s history. And for the three men who survived.

  “THE VAN LEAVING!” Hector bellowed from the doorway of the bunkhouse that housed him and twelve other men.

  Reggie gently prodded the man lying on the cot next to his. “Amaru, wake up!” Amaru grunted and weakly pulled the steel-grey blanket over his ears.

  “Ándale, amigo!” Hector held the door open with one gloved hand, fumbling to pull on the second glove with his teeth. Reggie wanted to caution Hector not to bite down on the same gloves he wore while handling the chickens, certain they were contaminated. Then he thought better of it. Hector saw himself as a mentor to the other men. In all fairness, he helped Reggie buy gloves when it was abundantly clear that no one would be supplying him protective gear for their work on the poultry farms. The gloves had eaten into the little money he had set aside for a winter coat, but Hector assured him an affordable coat could be found when the time came. The gloves, on the other hand, were indispensable.

  “You must find a pair thin enough to grab a chicken by the neck, and thick enough to save your own neck!” Hector laughed, pleased with his joke, more so because he had made it in English, which he spent the evenings teaching himself on one of those language-learning programs.

  Grab one chicken by the neck? Reggie had balked. That hardly seemed worth the price of the gloves!

  “No, no no!” Hector chided. “No solamente un pollo por mano, hermanito! Cuatro pollos por mano!”

  Reggie looked perplexed, so Hector translated: “One chicken, one hand—no good! Lose job. Hasta luego! Four chickens, one hand. Eight chickens, two hands. First you catch, then you hold.” Hector splayed out his fingers in demonstration: “Hold neck between fingers. Like this. Five fingers, four necks. Comprendes?”

  Reggie still couldn’t hold more than three chickens in one hand, but he was faster at catching them than anyone else. By day’s end he managed to round up as many chickens as the other men.

  “Vámanos!” Hector urged again.

  Reggie caught a glimpse of the white van that transported them to the poultry barns, its headlights illuminating a “Danger: Keep Out” sign on a massive shed containing the farm’s overstock of pesticides.

  “Amaru!” Reggie placed his hand on the sleeping man’s hunched shoulders and felt him shivering under the blankets.

  “Hector! Amaru’s sick!”

  “Si!” Hector countered. “Sick on tequila, maybe!”

  “He’s sick, I tell you!”

  “Why he is your problem?” Hector was growing increasingly impatient. Their wages would be deducted if the driver was delayed.

  Reggie hesitated. Then he heard Amaru mutter something under his breath. He leaned in, resisting the temptation to run his hands through Amaru’s generous crop of black, glossy hair. “You say something, man?”

  “Hector … right,” an enfeebled voice responded. “Not your problem. Go!”

  Reggie smarted at the dismissal. He was about to shout back to Hector to wait up for him when Amaru fell into a coughing spasm that came from somewhere deep within his lungs.

  “He’s in bad shape. Someone’s got to stay,” Reggie determined, taking his blanket from his bed and throwing it over Amaru.

  As the door swung shut, Reggie could have sworn he heard Hector curse him with the kind of taunts that people hurled at him back home. Like the vitriolic sports commentary broadcast in the aftermath of any defeat suffered by the West Indies cricket team—an unforgiveable sin in the eyes of his countrymen—Reggie had heard every possible brand of derisive speculation about “his type.”

  Reggie relaxed when he heard the driver rev up the van. As the wheels crunched down on the dirt road running through the Dumfrey family’s three-hundred acre farm, he vowed not to dwell on Hector and the other men, several of whom had arrived only a week ago, and whose names he didn’t even know.

  Seeing that Amaru had quieted down, Reggie stretched out on his cot, grateful for the chance to close his eyes. Within minutes he drifted off to sleep.

  A dog barking somewhere in the distance jolted Reggie awake, his heart skipping a beat in thinking he had missed the van and an entire day’s pay.

  “Él … es,” Reggie heard Amaru mumble.

  “Amaru?” Reggie whispered, not wanting to startle him.

  “Élesa….”

  A woman’s name aroused a pang of jealousy, but this didn’t stop Reggie from springing into action. He had purchased some over-the-counter medicines on one of their brief Sunday shopping trips—stuff that the pharmacist recommended to fight off what he called the local range of common afflictions. Assessing Amaru’s symptoms, Reggie rooted through a shoebox containing a packet of antihistamines, an ointment for muscle and joint pain relief, nasal spray, eye drops, Extra Strength Cold and Flu medication, and a bottle of aspirin.

  “Amaru, you must take some medicine,” Reggie touched the man’s shoulder softly. Amaru acknowledged Reggie through half closed eyes, managing to take a sip of water from the bottle long enough to wash down a pill. Expending all of his energy on this one small act, Amaru fell back onto his pillow and was lost to a bout of fitful sleep.

  Reggie sat vigil this time, partly to watch for signs of further distress and partly to seize the opportunity to study, in unhindered admiration, his new-found patient. Amaru was not handsome in any way that Reggie was familiar with. As a Jamaican whose own family was as “mix-up as callaloo,” as his grandmother liked to say, Reggie thought he had seen every gradation of skin colour and every type of face created under the heavens. But Amaru was as foreign an ingredient as any he had encountered. It was a combination of things: Amaru’s brown skin held undertones of the deepest reds, like the earth below an Amazonian river or at the inner core of a setting sun. Amaru’s kind, intelligent eyes were as black as the heart of a dormant volcano. They sat below a wide forehead and above cheekbones that seemed unusually pronounced for a man, even in Reggie’s estimation. The overall effect was alluring, particularly when Amaru laughed and revealed deep-set creases that wizened his otherwise youthful face.

  “Élesa … espe … ra … me,” Amaru sputtered.

  Reggie leaned in closer just as Amaru shifted to his right side. The movement launched another coughing spasm and forced Amaru to lift himself onto his elbows. Opening his eyes a little more than he had the first time, he looked up at Reggie. “You stay? Why?”

  Reggie winced, feeling thwarted again. He reached for the water bottle and handed it to Amaru. “You can’t see you’re really sick, man. Shivering and shaking like the leaves out there.”

  “I no sick. I work,” Amaru feebly threw off the blankets and hauled himself into a seated position. Before Reggie had a chance to object, Amaru fell back into the cot.

  “Cha!” Reggie exclaimed, re-covering Amaru with the blankets. Seeing Amaru yield to his ministrations, Reggie furtively touched Amaru’s temple. It was burning up.

  Reggie thought he should try to assess the seriousness of Amaru’s condition, launching what he imagined to be a series of “doctorly” questions: How long have you had that cough: More than one week? Sí. More than two? Sí. More than a month? Sí. Have you had any other symptoms, like nausea, vomiting … bleeding? Sí and sí to the first and second, Amaru nodded, but no to the third. Reggie breathed a sigh of relief. Have you noticed any other symptoms over the past few months, like dizziness, chest pain, headaches, fatigue? Amaru nodded in the affirmative to most of the items on Reggie’s list, but indicated that he didn’t understand the word “fatigue.” Reggie tried to translate in the little Spanish he had picked up from a Dominican lover who had used Jamaica as a clandestine stopover on his migration north. “Muy can…” he struggled to recall the word, “cansado.”

“Sí, todo el tiempo.”

  Reggie frowned, unsettled by Amaru’s responses. Then Amaru pulled his arms out from under the covers and proceeded to scratch his forearm. “Y cómo se dice…”

  “Itchy?”

  “Sí, sí, itchy,” Amaru nodded, and placed his arms under the covers again.

  Reggie was hoping Amaru had a case of the flu, which would run its course. But these were chronic symptoms, a few of which Reggie, himself, was starting to experience, like itchy skin and the occasional dizzy spell. It was clear Amaru required medical attention but Reggie was at a loss. He had no choice but to wait for the driver and Hector. They would know who to call or at least how far the nearest hospital was.

Without the boisterous chatter of the other men filling up the bunkhouse, Reggie realized how isolated they were, and how little he knew of his surroundings. They were picked up so early in the morning that it was dark out. There was barely a soul on the roads except the occasional freight truck transporting goods—livestock, farming equipment, and the like—to and from the farms. Now that winter had arrived, it was also dark on their drive back to the farm, a loss of daylight hours he felt he could never get used to.

  Reggie regretted not taking the time to explore the area while the weather held out. He just could not pull himself out of bed in those early weeks unless he absolutely had to, their long shifts made all the longer because there was nowhere to take a decent break on the farm, most of them stealing a few minutes to relieve themselves behind the poultry barn, or release their hands from their gloves just long enough to eat a sandwich or smoke a cigarette on days that seemed far too cold for such a robust display of vegetation.

  Reggie looked over at Amaru who was nodding off again, the bunkhouse eerily quiet except for the sound of an increasingly fierce wind whipping against the flimsy exterior walls. He figured he should be grateful for this rare moment of quiet stillness, but he could not shake the feeling of unease and foreboding brought on by his confinement.

  Four months to go, he thought anxiously, counting down his ten-month contract. At least it’s going fast, he reassured himself, assessing the time he had already spent here, from the moment of his arrival in the summer. He distinctly recalled being picked up from Pearson International Airport in the same white van, but the driver was not the young man who drove them around locally. He was a much older Latin American man. Apart from a few words of welcome, they shared a silent drive for over an hour before stopping at a city that made him think of his father’s old records by the famous calypsonian, Lord Kitchener. After filling up the van with a group of Mexican men, and two or three women, the van exited onto a smaller highway, which opened up to an expanse of rolling hills, endless cornfields, and the kind of pine trees he had only seen in those feel-good Christmas Hollywood movies. The combination of the scenery and jetlag must have lulled him to sleep. By the time the van entered the Dumfrey estate, he had missed the names of the towns along the way. Nor did he have the chance to talk to his fellow passengers since he was the only one to get off here—the others were on their way to a tobacco farm farther west. This confirmed the recruiter’s brief indication that most of the seasonal agricultural work would be needed in the southwestern part of the province, a geography that made little sense to him. Thinking back on all that now, he also recalled some bureaucrat in the Kingston recruitment office making a crack about the workers becoming regular “arts patrons” at some Shakespearean theatre festival the region was famous for. Perhaps in his effort to tune out the clearly intended sarcasm, Reggie had dismissed the comment at the time.

  Sure enough, Reggie had seen several posters advertising King Lear, one of the few plays he’d enjoyed reading in school, plastered around the stores where the driver took them for a few extra dollars per passenger, so they could buy more supplies. Reggie found the elegant posters so incongruous with the bland one-storey building that housed the stores. As underwhelming as it was, the building contained the basic necessities of any small town: a pharmacy, a coffee shop that was usually packed with crusty old-timers and the stray teenager, the hardware store where they purchased their gloves and boots, and a small bank that the men spent most of their time in, wiring money transfers to family back home. When the driver was less rushed, he would take them to another small strip-mall a few minutes away, where they could buy a bucket of chicken at a KFC, and some beer at a liquor store that, Reggie noted, carried a few bottles of outlandishly over-priced Jamaican rum. Reggie figured that the plaza was a good twenty-minute drive from the farm, which ruled out the possibility of his setting out on his own for help. Some of the men still biked all the way to the stores and even as far as the neighbouring towns, but Reggie could hardly picture himself, a child of the tropics, getting around on a bike in this kind of weather.

  At least if they had the facilities, he thought, he could have drawn a hot bath infused with fever grass and cascarilla, one of his grandmother’s special cure-alls that would be sure to help break Amaru’s fever. But they only had a set of portable toilets at the side of the bunkhouse, which was getting progressively harder to use in the cold. Inside the building there was barely enough space for their beds, a set of lockers, a few dilapidated arm chairs, a small table and four plastic chairs, and a curtained-off area that served as a makeshift kitchen, with a hot plate, a sink, and a relic of a fridge that needed a frequent kick to keep its motor running. Reggie tried to minimize his time in this area because it also contained a single stand-up shower that made the room perpetually damp and mouldy. Only two men per night were permitted to use it and, even then, they agreed not to keep the water running since clean water, much less hot water, was a commodity that came in dribs and drabs.

  Holed up in the bunkhouse with no one to talk to, Reggie felt the wretchedness of his predicament get the better of him for the first time in months. He never counted on feeling this bizarre concoction of homesickness and dread, as if the idea of home had taken on the spectre of both ailment and remedy.

  Unable to get back to sleep he decided to make himself and Amaru one of his favourite Jamaican brands of herbal tea. It was always a staple in his mother’s kitchen, used to help alleviate all manner of stomachaches, including the kind induced by an entire summer spent devouring Julie mangoes. He smiled at the image of his grandmother seeing fit to reprimand the children for their gluttony, and to curse the adults for throwing good money after the commercially packaged teas that had taken over household pantries.

  Amaru’s eyes were shut when Reggie returned with the tea, so he set the mug down on the stack of crates they used as bedside tables. He was about to prod his sleeping patient awake when Amaru opened his eyes and thrust his hand forward aggressively. Before Reggie could straighten up, Amaru grabbed Reggie’s shirt and pulled him down. “Why you here?” he demanded gruffly, his coiled fist bearing into Reggie’s chest.

  “Me cyaan lef yuh deh,” Reggie gasped, lapsing into the Jamaican Creole the recruiter had advised him not to speak in Canada where, he had added for effect, they only speak the Queen’s English, though Reggie hadn’t spoken to enough locals to confirm if this were true.

  Amaru’s grip tightened, sending a current of heat through Reggie’s chest. “Digame!”

  “I don’t understand!” Reggie pleaded. “For … dinero. Like you! Just like you.”

  Amaru released Reggie with a force that made him stumble. Shaken and disoriented, he managed to set himself down on his cot, his gaze finally resting upon a single set of windows placed at an elevation that no one could see out of, except from a distance. Snow was sticking to the edge of the glass. It wasn’t snowing when the men left this morning, he thought vacantly.

  “Discúlpame,” Amaru said contritely, and reached for the tea.

  An awkward silence ensued till Reggie ventured, “My father had a farm. A dairy farm.”

  “A farm? Why you leave?”

  “Where to start?” Reggie said, still looking up at the window. “The farm supplied milk. All local. All steady. Till the market got flooded with imported powdered milk. Even mothers were convinced their blesséd milk wasn’t good enough for their babies, much less my father’s milk. Soon the dairy farm turned into a meat farm, but who’s crazy enough to buy one Jamaican cow for the same price as three Guatemalan cows, or two Texan cows, for that matter.”

  Reggie took a deep breath. “I wanted to study medicine. Not this kind,” he said, pointing to his shoebox of pharmaceuticals. “The kind my grandmother knew. But I was eighteen when my father lost the farm, and I ended up in the city looking for work. Factory work sewing Nike shorts. Cleaning rooms at some luxury resort. Pumping gasoline. Selling souvenirs to tourists. I did whatever came my way. But it wasn’t easy. I got turned away more than I got hired.” Then, more to himself than to Amaru, he said: “I’m bad for business, naah mean.”

  Reggie snuck a sideways glance at Amaru. “Then I met this guy who was just getting back from seasonal work up North, picking grapes for some vineyards next to Niagara Falls. He warned me not to go, saying it was like the old days on the bakra plantation—a new kind of slavery,” he clarified. “I thought he was exaggerating. And I hated the city. The idea of getting back to a farm didn’t seem so bad. The recruiters only look for real men, he said. I’d be crazy to think they’d take me! Maybe there was some truth to what he was saying, but I lucked out. For one, the recruiter needed to fill his seasonal quota and, you know what they say: nuh jus one way fi heng dog.” Reggie wasn’t sure how to translate this. “Let’s just say I found a way to give him a little extra incentive. I’m not proud of it….” Reggie bit down on his lower lip, wondering if he’d revealed too much. Deciding it was too late to hold back now, he continued: “The rest was surprisingly easy. He took care of all the paper work. And I just signed on the dotted line: Reggie Taylor.… I was named after my maternal grandmother, you know. Reggie, short for Regina Abigail Taylor, as if my … well, mothers always know.”

  “Regina,” Amaru repeated, reminded of an article in the Canadian Geographic magazines he had purchased at the local thrift shop. “Como la ciudad.”

  “I guess so,” Reggie said uneasily. “But you won’t mention any of this—to Hector and the other guys, I mean?”

  “You is Reggie. Only Reggie.”

  Reggie and Amaru sat in silence again.

  “Your father’s farm,” Amaru’s voice broke the tension. “It have normal cows? And normal chickens?”

  Reggie wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  “Not like here! Aqui, muy extraños,” Amaru grinned broadly. “Strange chickens. Maybe strange cows also!”

  “No, not like here! Not like here at all!” Reggie said, relieved to see that Amaru had eased up and that some colour had returned to his face. He reflected on Amaru’s observation about the local livestock. He had never thought of it before, but the chickens they had to vaccinate were a little odd. Their breasts were two or three times the size of any chicken he had seen back home. They were so large that the poor creatures wobbled about unsteadily under the weight of their disproportion.

  Yet the Dumfrey farm, Reggie had gleaned from Hector, was considered a producer of organic eggs, because the chickens were what they called “free-run.” They were free to run all right, but only to make our lives a living hell, Reggie thought resentfully. Day in and day out, all they did was chase after these hapless animals through the din of their clucking and cackling; the heavy thud and steamrolling of their boots cushioned by a slimy cocktail of feces and feathers. And the smell—the unshakeable, putrid smell coming from barns so big they looked like a hundred poultry farms collapsed into one. It was no wonder the workers were hired to ensure every one of those chickens was vaccinated before being put to the slaughter. That was all they were hired to do. Catch the chickens and hold onto them by their necks just long enough for some guy to inject them with antibiotics or some cocktail of drugs, with dosages strong enough to turn even the most unyielding creature into a sad, lifeless lump of flesh. And they had to work so fast that, on more than one occasion, he was quite certain the needle had missed a chicken and pierced through his gloves.

  “These chickens don’t look right, man!” Reggie laughed.

  “Exactly! Why these chicken breast so big?” Amaru laughed back. “In Peru, no one want that part. Everyone want this part!” he added, mustering the energy to slap his leg.

  The mention of Peru took Reggie by surprise. He assumed all the guys were Mexican, like Hector.

  “How you say this part, in English?” Amaru asked, pointing to his leg again.

  “The thigh,” Reggie said. “When we were kids we used to fight over the legs and thighs! My parents even took the white meat so we could get the dark meat!”

  “Lo más sabroso!”

  “Amen!” Reggie concurred. “But everyone want white meat here. Did you see the two-dollar special at KFC the last time we were there? A whole meal, with all the sides, but only if you take the thighs!”

  “Si! Muy especial!”

  “Here, dark meat sells cheap.”

  “Lucky for us!” Amaru said, and the two of them howled with laughter till Amaru’s coughing cut their amusement short. He sat up, convulsing with pain, and covered his mouth with his sleeve.

  Reggie wasn’t sure what to do. He grabbed a face towel from a bag of bathroom supplies stashed under his bed. It was streaked with blood when Amaru handed it back, but Reggie pretended not to notice, not wanting to add to Amaru’s distress. He anxiously checked his watch and noted it was barely noon. It would be hours before Hector and the other men returned, hours before they could convince the driver to take Amaru to the nearest hospital. In the effort to do something useful, he placed an extra pillow on Amaru’s cot, and motioned for him to lie back once the coughing had subsided. “You need more water, bredda? More tea?”

  Amaru waved his suggestions away but yielded to Reggie’s gentle prodding to lie back.

  “I have daughter,” Amaru said breathlessly, after settling back on the pillows. “Her name is Élesa.” He withdrew a crumpled photo from his shirt pocket and passed it over to Reggie.

  “She’s beautiful. Like her father,” Reggie observed, emboldened by their newfound camaraderie.

  “Like her mother,” Amaru smiled, the lines deepening around his eyes.

  Reggie didn’t flinch over the mention of a woman this time. If anything, it comforted him to know that Amaru had a family, that he wasn’t alone.

  “Mi hija: she sick,” Amaru continued gravely. “Every month, I send money. For treatment.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Leukemia.”

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  “Now I sick. Maybe go to hospital, yes?”

  “Yes, as soon as Hector gets back, I’ll…”

  “No!” Amaru cut him off. “I no have money for hospital here, and for Élesa, there.”

  “Are you sure you have to pay?” he asked helplessly. He was so grateful to have been recruited, that he had barely looked over the terms of the contract.

  “I no have health card. I no take risk.”

  “That’s simple then! We get a card!”

  “How?”

  Reggie vaguely recalled the recruiter saying something about a probation period after which certain benefits would take effect, but the information had come at him too fast.

  “I’ll get my contract. Maybe there’ll be some information there—a number I can call,” Reggie offered, with a renewed sense of purpose. Surely it would be easy enough to make a few phone calls to the Agency or some kind of local representative. After all, what excuse did he have? At least language wasn’t a barrier for him—not in the same way it was for Amaru and Hector, or the other men who came here speaking only a few words of English.

  “No, all that take time,” Amaru objected more forcefully. “If I go now, I pay. Or maybe el patrón—the Boss—maybe he have to pay for me. I cannot risk. I need job.”

  Reggie walked over to a set of lockers, and fished out an envelope filled with his savings, the equivalent of approximately one month’s pay. Unlike the other men, there was no one at home waiting on his remittances. His mother had passed away shortly after they lost the farm, and his father was far too proud to accept any help, at least not Reggie’s. If anything, he had always seen Reggie as a liability. The idea of home needled him again, this time enough to consider sticking out this chicken catcher gig for another year, as wretched as it was. In hindsight, no one really bothered him here. Hector and the other guys seemed too preoccupied or too tired to pay him too much mind. It was a new sensation—the space to consider what more one could be when released from the grip of derision. Hadn’t his grandmother always said this was his special gift—to be more than one thing at once?

  Amaru’s palpable suffering shored up Reggie’s resolve.

  “Whatever you need. Just take it! Pay me back whenever,” he said, thrusting the envelope into Amaru’s hands.

  “No puedo!” Amaru pushed it back.

  “Please! Por favor!”

  Amaru didn’t have the chance to respond, because the door was thrown open by a woman wearing hefty boots and a dusty red jacket that reminded Reggie of the pointed crown of flesh on the chickens’ heads. She was carrying a large empty duffle bag, which she set down for time enough to pull down her hood and reveal a messy ponytail. Reggie assumed she was here to check on Amaru, that Hector must have requested a doctor after all. But she didn’t as much as look at them. She headed straight for the lockers and set about prying each one open by force with a crowbar.

   “Hey, what are you doing?” Reggie protested, rushing over to slam his locker shut. “You can’t do that!”

  It took the woman a few seconds to register the fact that she was being spoken to, that there were two other people in the room. She said nothing and hurriedly returned to whatever mission she had come to fulfil.

  Reggie protested again, making a point of standing sentinel in front of the lockers, his arms crossed defiantly.

  “Step aside!” the woman growled, without looking up.

  “That’s not your property, lady!” Reggie barked back.

  “This is my property. All of this is my property!”

  Alarmed by her razor-sharp authority, Reggie stepped aside but remained close. “What happened? Why are you taking their things? Did something happen?”

  The woman remained undeterred till every item had been cleared out of the remaining lockers. Then she headed over to the cots, where she proceeded to gather all the men’s personal effects, including watches, notebooks, Bibles, even Hector’s language CDs—whatever she could find of the men’s belongings. She worked at a furious pace before heading for the door.

  “Wait! There’s a sick man here! He’s coughing blood, for god’s sake. He needs a doctor!” Reggie ran after her like a storm chaser following the path of an angry tornado.

  The woman stopped and turned around, dropping the duffle bag by her feet and using the weight of her back to hold the door open. Wafts of snow and a wicked wind blew into the bunkhouse, dousing the little heat generated over the course of the night.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked sternly. Reggie could see that she was much older than she had at first appeared. He also noticed the Dumfrey farm crest on her jacket’s upper right breast pocket.

  “Regina,” he blurted out. “I mean, Reggie. Reggie Taylor.”

  “And him?” She glanced over at Amaru who was now sitting upright at the edge of his cot, the strain of getting up visible in every line of his angular face.

  “Amaru … López,” he managed to say, trying to stave off the mounting pressure in his lungs. “Where is Hector? Why you take their things?”

  The woman looked at her watch, clearly nervous about something. “There was an accident this morning. A truck hit the van.”

  “This morning?” Reggie’s mind struggled to catch up: accident, hit, van.

  “Worst crash of its kind around here. Only one survivor.” Then, looking at Amaru, she declared: “You sure picked the right day to be sick, pal. I’d say you’re pretty damn lucky.”

  “Lucky,” Amaru repeated, the word floating past Reggie in a cold-induced stream of ghostly vapour.

  The woman lifted the duffle bag now heavy with the men’s belongings and walked into the blizzard, releasing the door to close on its own. The door started to swing itself shut but couldn’t surmount the force of the wind that held it ajar.

  “Wait!” Reggie shouted, rushing to the door. “You said ‘survivor’? One survivor!”

  Reggie’s voice was clipped by the sound of the door slamming hard against the bank of snow amassing at the threshold of the bunkhouse.