Winter Tales

Chapter 16 - Battle Scars

++Josh's POV++

We may have gone through more bad stuff than the average family and should probably be used to it, but the past nine or so hours have potentially aged me by a decade.

One minute I was walking through the door of our cabin with Jack and Aidan trailing behind me, catching up on all the messages that Alex was spamming our family chat with, and the next, my hastily typed appeal for him to calm down refused to go through. I tried it a few more times, cursing to myself when Jack took the phone out of my hands, looked at it for a couple of seconds and then declared that I simply had no signal.

I muttered some choice words under my breath and stomped back outside, looking for a better connection. To no avail.

Ben got home an hour later. By then, I was already a nervous wreck, having figured out that something must definitely be wrong. It should not have taken him that long only to pick up a few groceries on the way here.

The news he brought with him were bad.

He and Noah had just come out of the supermarket when disaster struck and they witnessed the avalanche come down. They were about a mile away from its path of destruction. Ben shoved Noah into the car, attempting to drive back the way they came from to check on the rest of our siblings only to find out that the road had been blocked by trees and masses of snow.

Although he is normally a very level-headed person, Ben panicked, turned the car around and tried to make it back to the cabin as quickly as the chaos on the road, that had ensued only shortly after the avalanche had struck, allowed him to.

His reasoning, when I asked him later why he didn't stay and see if they needed his help, was that he didn't have any way of contacting me or Alex and his instinct told him to come home and at least make sure that the five of us were back together. I cannot say that I don't understand his reaction, but I know that Ben blames himself for acting so cowardly and running away instead of offering assistance.

I managed to make him see that his decision was the right one. It was bad enough that our family had been separated by this disaster. There was no need to make it even harder on everyone by keeping those apart who were able to be together.

Since the phone lines were down, so was the internet. And we only had digital radio, which obviously didn't work, either. With no means to get an update on the situation, I considered driving back into town to see for myself. If nothing else, I hoped I could help clear the road and once there was a way to get to the other side, I wanted to be one of the first to make use of it in order to reconnect with the rest of our family.

My brothers convinced me to stay with them, claiming that it was not wise to separate while we had no idea where they were and if they were even okay. I reluctantly agreed with them.

According to Ben, it was hard to tell how much of the town had been affected or was even destroyed by the avalanche. But he believed that it hadn't been wide enough to go all the way to the gondola. It looked like its path had been such that it mainly struck a sparsely inhabited part of the town, which consisted of the road and a few buildings that dotted the landscape. The main part of the town was further south, behind the parking lot where we left Alex to wait for our siblings.

Jack was the first to bring up the topic of whether our snowboarding brothers and sister might have been caught up in the avalanche, but we were quick to assure him that there was simply no way that they had still been up on the mountain by the time it came down. In hindsight, I am glad that we believed this ourselves and were therefore convincing enough, because as it turned out, this was far from the truth.

By the time it was 8pm, our levels of anxiety started to rise. We had still not heard from Alex or anyone else. Which was not exactly surprising, since the phone lines were still dead.