Ice Claw (5 page)

His gasping, rapid breath was drowned by the increasing roar behind him. His muscles ached with the effort of speed and maneuver, but he stayed focused on the spot he had to reach. The mighty fist of wind behind him was pushing him off balance. Max wasn’t laughing now. The avalanche wasn’t any distance away this time. It was raging all around him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the trees being flattened, snapping and cracking like kindling wood—the snow wave was overtaking him.

And then the monster hit him.

Swept into a maelstrom of confusion, he felt his snowboard’s bindings being ripped from his boots. Ice-cold fingers snatched at his face, tearing away his ski mask and, like grains of wet sand, snow was forced into his ears and mouth.

Memory kicked in. Some long-forgotten lesson from his father. Snatches of words. Survival. All about survival. Remember!
Don’t ever go skiing alone in the mountains
. Rule one—broken.
Never go skiing where there have been avalanches
. Rule two—broken. Avalanches happen where there’s new snow clinging to the mountain on the side facing away from the wind. He knew that! He knew it! And he had ignored it all in his stupid reaction to losing the competition.

As fast as the snow hurled him along, this secret voice in his mind taunted him.
Survive! How?

Swim! Stay on top of the snow as if you were doing a front crawl
.

Max churned his arms, trying to keep his face upwards towards the fleeting glimpses of sky visible through the snowstorm. He spat snow from his mouth, shook his head.
Keep looking at the sky!
The avalanche’s energy vibrated through him. Like a dog with a rat, it savaged him, shook him and then spat him free. For a moment the silence engulfed him. It wasn’t that the avalanche had stopped but that the wet snow had compacted in his ears.

A glimmer of hope. Blue sky. A deep breath. His arm lunged for the golden line of light. A sunbeam. A narrow band between the blue sky and the whiteout.
Breathe! Suck in the air! Reach for it! Break free from this crushing monster and live!
Darkness engulfed him.

Savage teeth bit into him again as he went head over heels, tumbled left to right. He was totally disoriented.

Finally the mayhem ended. Max was trapped, spread-eagled. A huge weight crushed his chest. Blue-tinged snow told him he must be lying on his back, facing the sky. How deep was he buried? If only he could scoop away the snow from his face and create space to breathe, but his arms were trapped. He must be a meter or more below the surface. He began to panic. He knew that if he fought the weight of the snow the energy would be sucked out of him. He had to take control of his mind. He had to calm down. Max tried to move his head, but managed only a few centimeters. Avalanche snow wasn’t fine and powdery; it was wet, heavy and compacted. How much longer would the small area above his face
allow him to breathe? The weight of the snow was crushing his chest, settling heavier by the second.

There was, he realized, no way of escape. What would kill him first? The cold or having the life squeezed out of him? He would lie frozen in this tomb, and when the snow melted his body would be washed down into the river where, only hours earlier, he had fought Sharkface. Like flash photography, his mind showed him pictures of the kayak attack. The same white, scattered design on the kayak that the killer had on his ski outfit. The gunman—slightly built—fast and light on the snow, quick to maneuver. Young? Couldn’t tell. Sharkface? No. Sharkface was more thickset—had broader shoulders—didn’t have that fast, fluid movement of the skier.

Max’s mind was wandering. The exhaustion and lack of oxygen dragged his consciousness down an underground passageway. Colors swirled: purple, brown, blue—a kaleidoscope blurring his senses.

When Max was in Africa, a lethal poison had taken him through death’s door. A shaman had saved him. The medicine man was a
BaKoko
, a shapeshifter, and had given Max a power that both confused and frightened him. When his concentration was centered, and his breathing slow and deep, he was sometimes able to project himself as an animal.

Max’s dad had taught him never to reject primitive beliefs, and Max vividly recalled flying as a falcon and running as a jackal. But he did not know how to trigger the transformation at will. And what animal could escape from where he was now? Buried alive.

A gentle warmth washed over him. He was falling asleep.
His core body heat, essential if he was to live, was seeping away. Sleep was bad. Sleep was death. Now there were memory snatches of Sophie. Warm café. Smeared window. Hard, tough men gazing at him. Angels of death maybe. Was that what they were? Angels of death come to find him? The bear, Sophie had said. She was looking for a bear, stolen and shipped and probably destined to be shot.

A bear would hibernate. Sleep deep in a snow hole. It would roll and claw its way out into the spring sunshine and sniff the sweet, clean air. Max’s hand felt as though it clutched an ice pick. Impossible. He didn’t have one. The swirling colors merged, sucking him into a vortex. Max fought the sensation but his thoughts were being broken up into tiny pieces. And then he felt a surge of strength.

He struck out, felt, rather than heard, something rasp against the packed snow. His senses sharpened. A musty tang of sweat, like a wet dog smell, fur and stale air, filled his nostrils and caught at the back of his throat. An instinct made him grunt with effort as snow fell from the space he’d scooped out in front of his face. Through the indefinite light the ice pick looked like a claw—a bear’s paw that raked the snow—
his paw!

The sky seeped its blue more deeply into the crystal particles. It seemed he was going to burst through, but his chest and legs were still crushed by the pressure of the compacted snow, an invisible hand squeezing the life out of him. He was losing consciousness.

Someone smashed through the packed crust. A face. Wild. Spittle and snot clinging to a snow-caked beard. A madman dressed in black. His arm reached in, like a poacher
snatching a rabbit from a snare, and he slapped Max’s face. Max gasped, spat out snow and focused. The man’s mouth, with its old broken teeth, made shapes but no noise came from it. Max’s ears were still packed with snow. It was the monk, now digging furiously with his bare hands.

The monk grabbed Max by the front of his jacket and heaved. Max kicked and wriggled in an attempt to reach the daylight. Cold air stung his face. The monk’s calloused hand wiped away the snow caked around Max’s eyes. Max clambered out of the hole. The landscape had changed, but he knew he must have tumbled hundreds of meters down the mountainside, swept perilously close to the sheer drop that existed about halfway up the mountain. The monk’s cassock, matted with snow, looked cumbersome. The old man sat back, exhausted. A pink stain snaked across the snowfield behind him for twenty or thirty meters, showing where he had crawled, which told Max that the man was bleeding badly. Thankfully the monk had seen where Max went under the avalanche.

Max took a few moments to settle his breathing. Slumped on his knees, he carefully checked his arms and legs. Nothing broken. The old man was muttering something. Max pulled off a glove and tried to dig the freezing wet muck out of his ears.

“I’ll help you!” Max shouted. But he couldn’t hear his own words. The cold must have done something to his eardrums.

Clumsily, he staggered the few steps through the loose snow to the old monk. Now that he was closer, Max could see he was a big man. And he was barefoot. The avalanche must have ripped away his boots and skis. His tangled hair fell
across his face; his beard—snarled strands of white and gray, like lichen—was congealed and matted. Through the blanket-like thickness of the monk’s cassock Max saw a spreading bloodstain.

Marbles of snow scattered around Max’s feet. There was another tremor. The mountain was still unsafe. The monk was shaking his head, still muttering, pulling the hair from his mouth and eyes, fixing Max with a frightening, almost demented stare. He tried to get to his feet but fell, unable to wade through the deep snow. Max staggered closer, but fear suddenly gripped him. The monk had slid a meter away. The snow was shifting like sand on a steep dune. The monk’s eyes widened: he knew what was happening and fell forward, trying to lie horizontally, hoping his legs wouldn’t be pulled from under him.

The movement settled. Max lay as flat as he could, as if lying on ice, trying to rescue someone from going under.

“Don’t move! I’ll grab you. I’ll get you down.” He could just about hear his own voice now as it boomed inside his head. But as he yelled he had no idea how he would get himself down from the mountain, never mind the wounded man.

The monk snarled in his effort to reach Max; blood-flecked spittle caught his whiskers. His eyes locked onto the boy’s as he reached out. Max grabbed his wrist and realized for the first time that the man’s other arm was injured, from either the avalanche or the gunshot, and he must have overcome tremendous pain to dig Max out.

And then the slope moved again. A huge sheet of snow, like an ice floe, shifted away. Max held tight. The old monk growled. Max was holding him against the pull of the snow.
He jammed his legs into it for grip and realized his chest and stomach were pressing against a boulder just beneath the surface. That was why the spot where he lay was not moving.

“Ez ihure ere fida—eheke hari ere,”
the monk shouted in a language Max had never heard before.

“I don’t understand!
Je ne comprend pas!”
Max yelled, hoping the man understood French.

The monk’s grip loosened, so Max tried to take a firmer hold. The bare arms below the cassock were muscled and sinewy, but they were slippery with blood and sweat and gave him nothing to grab effectively.

Max stared in horror.

Two hundred meters away, silently and without warning, a massive chunk of snow disappeared. It had dropped into a void. And then other huge slabs followed and vanished. The slope they clung to was false. The snow had dammed itself up over the top of a massive chasm and this last tremor had released the pressure. Gravity sucked the crust of snow down, and the snowfield the size of a football pitch had disappeared into nowhere.

The monk saw the terror in Max’s eyes. He twisted his head and squeezed Max’s arm tighter. If another slab fell away they would both be dead—a drop of at least five hundred meters had opened up, like the mouth of a volcano, and it belched powdered clouds from the weight of the snow as it impacted far below.

The monk shook his head. It was useless. He knew he was going to die. His wounds were draining his strength and life force.

“Don’t let go!” Max screamed.

But the monk’s hand, slippery with blood, was losing its grip.

Max’s arm felt as though it was being torn out of its socket, and his ribs hurt from the pounding he’d taken, but despite the pain he pressed himself against the hidden boulder and pulled on the man’s weight as hard as he could.

The monk shouted again, the desperation as strident as before, this time in French, but a sucking, collapsing roar overtook the first words, and all Max heard was a broken cry. “… 
allez … Abb … aye! … le crocodile et le serpent!”

Max stared in disbelief. There were only twenty meters of snow left behind the monk, the rest had gone. When this slab dropped, they would both die, plunging into a gray, mist-shrouded nothingness.

The monk’s other arm snatched something from around his neck, broke the cord that held it and threw it at Max. It was a crucifix and what looked like a medallion, but Max’s eyes were on the wounded man’s as they pleaded, and his faint, desperate words reached out again.
“Ez ihure ere fida—eheke hari ere.”

Max shook his head. Why didn’t the man realize he could not understand him? And then the remaining block of snow fell, and the monk with it, sucked from Max’s grip. His eyes stayed on the boy’s as his clawing fingers ripped away Max’s glove, his father’s watch; nails raked his skin.

In the fraction of a second it took before the monk was swallowed by the churning mist, he shouted one word that Max had no problem understanding.

“Lucifer!”

The ski patrol found Max less than an hour later, straddled across a jagged rock that, in turn, stuck out in space across a massive precipice. He was hypothermic and unconscious. The four-man team, wary of the gaping void, roped themselves together and brought Max up on a rescue stretcher. Within ten minutes they had eased him a safe distance down the slopes and called in the Mountain Air Rescue helicopter, which flew him straight to the main hospital at Pau, less than half an hour by air to the south.

Max stayed in the darkness of his mind, at times plummeting through the blackness as if that terrible vortex that had sucked out the bottom of the world was still trying to claim him. The helicopter’s mechanical shuddering snatched at his consciousness. Once, through half-open eyes, he saw the blurred whirring of blades against a gray sky and felt the exhaust vapor sting his nostrils. He tried to get up but he was
strapped down and the winch man placed a gloved, comforting hand against his chest. The man smiled. Everything was OK. He was safe.