I know not when, but quite some time later I could swear I heard a peculiar sound from somewhere in the distance, although by that time I had weakened to a point where I could no longer be certain even of my own name. As the strange noise continued, growing louder, I thought I discerned a dull clacking, and I fancied it to take the form of a large wooden cart rolling noisily along the trail, approaching the hole in which we lay huddled.
Summoning the last ounce of my strength, I was able to stir slightly, only to find myself still against the dirt wall and the movement hampered further by some sort of fabric bundled all around my body, the ends tucked underneath me—my coat, I realized slowly through the confused fog clouding my brain. But I took it off. It was over both of us, how…? I could not bring the thought together, could not answer the question, my mind starting to black out again, and I fought the weakness, desperate to keep above the inundation of terrifying mortality surging upon me by the second. I cracked my eyelids open painfully and was forced to squeeze them shut almost at once, due to the dawning light filtering through the snow, burning my eyes. I felt as though the light should hold some significance, something I should understand, but my head spun uncontrollably again and the exhaustion was absolute.
I tried to look around again and turn my head, tried to judge if Carter still lived, but I could not move a muscle. The major lay perfectly still, not a sound escaping from him. My hand had slipped down and lay crookedly across the dirt floor, empty, and I found I lacked any trace of the energy necessary to move it. Indeed, I was unable to so much as feel the man's body pressed against my own—my nerves had entirely lost any and all sense of feeling, and my vision faded to black.
The Earth melted around me as I rested, forsaken by all, and I felt myself drifting blind in an illimitable void of darkness, where nothing remain to tie me down, nor draw me forward; I was a solitary consciousness, in a world where all else had ceased to be, or had never been at all.
Yet the clatter came still, closer than ever, pulling me back to reality, and it shaped itself now into the form of human beings, incoherent shouting; then came the stomp of running boots stumbling through the dense snow, and even as I felt myself sinking rapidly, my ears focused momentarily on a single voice rising above the commotion, youthful and strangely familiar, though I failed at this time to place it with a face, the name long erased from my memory. With the expiration of the dying words, my mind went blank, and I knew no more.
"Here! They're over here!"
