Winter Tales

Chapter 13 - Trapped

"Hey, hey, you're okay, I've got you," I try to calm her down, cuddling her even closer to me. "Are you hurt?"

"I...I d-don't kn-know. I cannot move!" she chokes out, sounding slightly panicked.

Please, don't freak out on me now, pumpkin.

"Lily, I need you to be a really big girl, okay? We got caught in an avalanche. But it's fine. I'm gonna get us out of here. I just need to you stay calm. Can you do that for me?"

"I'm scared," Lily whimpers and I can tell that she is trying really hard not to panic even more.

I am so proud of her.

"I know. And that's okay. But we'll be fine, I promise."

My body forces me to take a deep breath. That worries me a bit. It must mean that the oxygen levels are slowly dropping. I need to get a move on if I want us to get out of here.

The thought of my brothers flashes through my mind.

Are they okay?

I force myself to remain calm and to push any negative thoughts to the back of my mind. This is not the time to lose control. I have been trained for extreme situations like these. My life has been in danger more than once in the past couple of years, and the only reason I always made it out pretty much unscathed was my ability to forget about everything else around me and to only focus on the task at hand.

Looking around, I am quite certain which way is up, since it seems to be a bit brighter when I slightly turn my head to the right. I decide that I am lying on my left side, which would explain why my left arm is still kind of trapped underneath Lily's body.

I start digging with my right arm, ignoring the whimpers that are irregularly coming from my little sister.

I have been digging for about five minutes when my hand suddenly doesn't meet resistance anymore. Instead it grabs what I believe to be air. I let out a small shriek of excitement which makes me laugh at myself, despite the less than funny situation we are currently in. But me yelping like a girl is embarrassing even if nobody heard me other than Lily, and I doubt that she cares.

"We'll be out of this trap in no time, baby girl," I assure her, feeling a lot more confident now than I did only a few minutes ago.

She doesn't respond but instead grabs my left hand even more tightly. Although it is kind of arduous to dig with only one hand, there is not much I can do about it since there is still not enough space for me to move enough to unwrap my other limb from around Lily's body. But I start to move my right leg around a bit now, too, to hopefully push some more snow off our bodies and speed up the process of getting us out.

Suddenly, it all goes a lot faster and it takes me a moment to realise that someone is helping me.

"Jordan?"

I don't think I have ever been happier hearing Sam's voice.

"Sam!" I call out towards my younger brother.

A hand grabs my own and squeezes it tightly.

"Are you okay?"

Sam's voice sounds kind of muffled, which is not really surprising, seeing as practically my whole body is still covered by layers of snow.

"I think so, yeah. Lily's with me. Just help me get us out of here," I tell him and then cough when I swallow a mouthful of snow that has come lose above my head.

"Jordan!" Lily screams, sounding terrified.

I suqeeze her against me to show her that I am okay while I try to get my coughing under control.