Winter Study (56 page)

not

drowning
that was so miserable, the choking and vomiting and scraping and
coughing. Still, that first suck of water into the lungs had to be
hard. Certainly the last few seconds before the first suck would be
tough. There’d be that impulse to fight, to not breathe in.

Freezing
to death had it all over drowning. Winter didn’t want you to fight; she
wanted you to curl down snug and warm in her bosom and die.

What a bitch,

Anna thought.

I’d rather drown.

Moving
so slowly molasses would have beaten her in an uphill heat, she pulled
up the leg Menechinn had attacked with the wrench and dragged it to the
downhill side of the Cat. The key was still in the ignition. Having the
sled stolen wasn’t one of her worst fears. She tried to pull it out,
but her frozen fingers couldn’t execute the complex movements required.
She cannibalized her right hand for its gear and put the glove clumsily
backward on the five Popsicles she had, until the race downhill,
considered her “good” hand. With the still-mobile fingers of her right
hand, she teased the key out and managed to thread it into the lock
between her knees below the seat. Maneuvering till she got her butt off
the vinyl, she turned the key and the seat popped up. In the small
storage space beneath was a plastic tarp, two flares, an old first-aid
kit, the kind she used to carry in her backpack, and an army blanket.

Winter
outfitters had lightweight high-tech blankets that salvaged body heat
and harvested the heat of the sun with the efficiency of a

Dune

Freman’s
stillsuit. The Park Service had an army blanket. Anna wrapped it around
her shoulders and lifted out the rest of the cache. The flares and
first-aid kit she shoved into her jacket on top of the rude sling of a
half-zipped coat. Working one-handed and moving her feet as little as
possible, she put one edge of the tarp beneath her boots, then shook it
like a bedsheet. The fold of the material billowed four or five feet
away from her knees.

In
the short time since Bob had bludgeoned it, her damaged ankle had
swollen. This was good. The swelling filled the boot, and the makeshift
splint of twigs became more rigid. Anna found she could stand and even
walk a bit, at least as well as she had before the more recent
topplings and batterings.

The
remaining third of the plastic she draped over the snowmobile, creating
a bivouac, with the tarp forming floor and ceiling and the Bearcat the
wall. The rude tent would keep her dry and keep out the wind. With
luck, and the army blanket, she would still be alive when Ridley got
word where she was.

Anna lowered herself gingerly to hand and knees to wriggle into her den.

A
low, piggish “Ungh!” ground through the sifting silence of the snow.
Bears grunted that way. Boars did. On ISRO, the only thing that made
that sound was Bob Menechinn.

The grunting became staccato: “Ungh! Ungh! Ungh!”

Bob
was running or maybe limping; the grunts were from pain, not exertion.
Either way, he was up and moving. He was coming after her. Bob was
always interested in saving himself. He’d be scared. Maybe he’d leave
her alone, leave her to die of “natural causes” as he’d done on the
cliff top. Unless he hadn’t come across Katherine’s cell phone with the
damning pictures and messages — the one Anna no longer had — then he’d
take her apart trying to find it.

Anna
scuttled backward into the trees. She hadn’t time or strength to cover
much ground. A couple yards from the sled, she stopped and whipped the
snow with the army blanket to help obscure her track. That done, she
wormed beneath the low boughs of a spruce tree, pulled her knees up
under her chin, spread the army blanket over her head, reached up and
shook the bough, bringing down an avalanche of snow on herself.
Theoretically, under the dark brown wool and snow, she would look like
a rock. Army blankets put high-tech thermal wraps to shame when it came
to disguising women as rocks.

Bob
would kill her; he was that much of a rotter. But she was hoping he was
too lazy and cowardly to go out of his way to kill her. She was hoping
he would try to start the Bearcat, then leave without bothering to look
farther than the plastic lean-to.

Hoping, hoping, hoping.

Anna
stopped that chant before the gay blue fish could swim any further into
her mind. Hoping was well and good, but it was better to focus on Plan
B in case the hoped-for didn’t manifest.

The grunts stopped.

She opened a tiny window in her wall of rough wool. Menechinn was not yet in sight.

A whuff gusted from up the trail, then regular panting and the crunch of boots on snow.

Pushing
pain and fear out on a soft sigh, Anna stilled herself internally and
tried to think rocklike thoughts. Behind the bough of the tree, in the
purdah of wool, snow falling thickly, she was nearly blind. For a
moment, it panicked her, as if to see was to be in control.

Poor eyesight is the least of your problems,

she
mocked herself. She had become as the littlest things in the
wilderness. Concealment and cleverness, blending in and putting away
acorns for an unseen winter, were the keys to survival. Bunnies and
ducklings, chipmunks and sparrows, were not nature’s big risk takers.
Anna schooled herself to timidity and hugged her protective coloration
around her.

A
black square loomed out of the trees at the switchback. Bob was walking
with a list as if gale-force winds buffeted him from the north. Either
being bashed by a tree limb or being scraped against rocks had injured
his left leg. The imaginary gale let up, and he staggered the other
direction for a few steps, then went back to favoring his left side.
Head injury or ketamine, or both, was affecting his balance. The goose
down sticking out from where his jacket had been torn was a rich true
red.

A nice color,

Anna
thought. His nose was white and waxy, as were his cheekbones and the
tips of his ears. Gone to frostbite. They’d be black in twenty-four
hours.

Black was a nice color too. Anna wanted to be around to watch parts of him fall off in painful and ugly ways.

“Ungh!”
Bob saw the snowmobile in its blue shroud and began to run down the
hill, his arms windmilling to keep him from falling. Spittle flew from
his mouth and appeared on the snow in spots of red.

A broken tooth, a split lip,

Anna
told herself, not wanting to count on massive internal injuries
bringing him down anytime soon. Bob braked his downward rush by
slamming into the side of the snowmobile. The Bearcat rocked up,
showing the tractor treads that powered the sled. Packed with snow, the
treads looked like the maw of a beast with many rotting teeth. They bit
down again, and the heavy machine creaked with the force. Bob continued
to lean on the seat, supported by his arms, hands on the saddle.

Anna’d
forgotten how big he was. His splayed fingers reached across the vinyl
seat. His shoulders, rounded and padded, heaved like a walrus’s back
when it barks. Liquid ran through his gasps, the gurgling of lungs
worked too hard in air too cold to process. The blood on his face had
turned dark, forming into lumps that cracked to show the brilliant red
of the new blood beneath as his jaws worked, trying to chew more oxygen
from the air.

Drool
fell from his lips to the seat and he pawed it up, surprised maybe at
how much red was in it. Anna expected him to rip the tarp free, jump on
the Bearcat, then go nuts when he didn’t find the key in the ignition.
Unless he was blind with desperation, he’d find it in the side where
she’d used it to unlock the storage compartment, get back on the
snowmobile and go through the whole fit again when he realized it was
out of gas.

Bob
did none of these things. Straightening, he looked around him, as if
there might be prying eyes from the upstairs unit of the spruce tree
next door. With an expression Anna could only describe as crafty, an
overblown twisting of his face the way an actor’s playing Fagin in

Oliver Twist

might
when playing to the back row, he tiptoed around the sled. As in the sly
moue of a moment before there was an element of exaggeration, of the
theatrical, in the way he picked his big feet up, bending the knee, and
put them down toe first.

A
terrifying urge to laugh swelled inside Anna’s lungs, a need to howl
and guffaw. Partly the long tension, the waiting, but mostly because
Menechinn was being funny. Very funny. Adrenaline born of the fear that
she would give away her hiding place did nothing to quell the hilarity.
Balling her hand into a fist, she punched her boot above the place Bob
had so diligently applied the wrench. Searing pain cleansed her of
laughter. Nausea and relief took its place, and she began to shake. Her
teeth started to chatter uncontrollably, and she shoved the corner of
her shirt collar between them lest the clatter call his attention to
her. Her body trembled so hard, she could feel her skin touch the
fabric of her clothes in a rapid pattern of waves and retreats. Belly
and bowels and heart and spleen and liver shook inside of her.

Holding
herself together, teeth clamped on the fleece, she watched Bob finish
his half circuit of the sled. In front of the slit she’d been about to
crawl through into her plastic lean-to when he’d announced his
impending visit in porcine fashion, he stopped. Bending at the waist,
he started to peek inside. A better idea came to him before he’d gotten
his eye to the proper level. He straightened again, shuffled back three
steps, took a running leap and came down, crushing the tarp to the
ground. Demons took him then, and he stomped and kicked and jumped till
the tarp was ripped free of the sled and mangled in the snow. Nowhere
did it stick up more than an inch or so.

He had meant Anna to be inside.

He meant to trample her to death.

That was so rude.

It
had crossed Anna’s mind that, at some future date, she would take a
moment to feel guilty for all the evils she’d wished upon him. Now,
should opportunity present itself, she would gloat. The shaking ebbed.
Maybe she was getting better. Maybe that was her body’s last attempt to
shiver warmth into her, and her vital organs would start shutting down.

The
fit of violence over, he stood in the ruin of the tarpaulin and looked
around him, eyes narrowed against the snow, breath coming in wet gasps.
He was so close, Anna could smell the sweat boil off of him. She envied
his heat, his ability to move. She wasn’t sure she could move anymore,
that, if a time came when it would be safe to stand, she would be able
to get up.

Tilting
his huge head back, Bob sniffed the air. Less than three yards
separating them, Anna could see his nares expanding and contracting the
way a dog’s will when it seeks scent. Fleetingly she wished Katherine’s
cell phone hadn’t been responsible for the howls, that a pack of wolves
had come to devour her. It would have been more civilized than dealing
with Bob Menechinn. What with the killing and maiming and the nearly
being killed and actually being maimed, along with the hallucinogenic
effects of the ketamine, he had been stripped of the veneer of urbanity
he cultivated. Even the coat of arrogance had been taken from him.