At the junction with the main Forest Service road the snow was turning to wet slush and mud and the chains were clanking. I stopped the van and took them off. Eleven minutes. I hurried. I hurried! Smeared myself with mud, making me look like I'd crawled through the trenches. And then back in the van and down toward the main highway…
They asked me later about a cell phone but it went over in Fleming's pack. I had to get down to a telephone.
Astonishingly, it was only nine in the morning. With the storm and season, there was no mountain traffic. I had the roads to myself until I got down to the Mountain Highway. The first telephone I could find was at Beedle's Store, which wasn't even open. The phone was in a weather hood but otherwise open, wet, and cold, and I remember the chill of its plastic and metal as I dialed 911 to report what had happened. I have no idea what I sounded like except that a dispatcher reported afterward that I sounded like hell. Kind of numb, she said. Shell- shocked. Incoherent. Still, I conveyed the emergency. The tragedy! The plan was to meet the assembling search and rescue team at the Forest Service headquarters eight miles down the road. I drove there and was welcomed with alarm and concern.
What followed was long and grim. I was too exhausted to go back up the mountain but I knew the terrain well enough to pinpoint to the experts where the rest of the class was. I explained the fall of the other two instructors, my decision to climb out alone to get help, our heroic efforts to rescue Fat Boy, and so on. I neglected to mention the fall of the other two kids. I was distraught, anxious, demanding, all the things I imagined I was supposed to be. It took until noon to get a team assembled, another hour to get them to the trailhead, another hour up to the cabin, and still the snow was falling. I made it to the cabin with them before collapsing. They went on up themselves, trudging up the glacier, but stopped at four P.M. as they neared the cirque below the saddle and heard avalanches rumbling in the clouds like the crack and thunder of artillery. One slide came down out of the mist and erased the tracks where they'd just been. It was getting dark and still snowing heavily and if they pushed on they'd risk an even greater disaster. Prudently, they retreated.
When they came back down I refused to leave the cabin for the comfort of a room down below. Those were my kids! Those were my kids! I would spend a second night.
The storm blew through during the dark hours and when the rasping trees began to hush I finally fell into what I pretended was a troubled sleep. They left me alone. The rescuers started up again at dawn and a helicopter was launched at the same time.
I sat up and managed to get down some coffee. Everyone was somber. Hope was slim. Two reporters hiked up to us as we waited and I haltingly went over the story again, how Fleming had let Fat Boy wander off in the wrong direction and we'd done our best to rescue him and I'd been left to go for help. I covered for the other two instructors as best I could, giving them the benefit of the doubt, mourning their loss, but the resulting stories painted me in a pretty sympathetic light. By God, I'd done my best! I was haggard with sorrow. Distraught. Exhausted.
The helicopter report came in an hour later.
Avalanches were still spilling down Wallace Wall, rinsing it clean. The pilots orbited the area for miles in all directions.
The ledge was empty. Fat Boy and all the others were gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The winter-overs gathered in the galley like a convocation of the damned, their faces revealing the underbelly of the human psyche. Dread. Anger. Suspicion. Depression. Their illusions about escape had been buried with Gabriella's body, her snowy grave marked by another bleak cross of black plastic pipe. It was months before the winter was over, and already everyone looked like toast. Several staff members had come in carrying makeshift weapons: lengths of pipe, knives, an improbable hickory-handled hatchet brought down for some long-forgotten purpose. Pulaski arrived with a six-foot length of galvanized water pipe that he'd sawed off at a sharp angle to make the point of a spear. In a society with no guarantee of safety, people were arming themselves as best they could.
Robert Norse had looked the night before like a faith-shaken priest, his shell of infectious confidence cracked by the discovery of Gabriella's body. The news of her death left him haggard, his eyes sunken, and he'd refused to help take down the forlorn corpse. 'I can't deal with the rest if I have to do that,' he'd said, his voice hollow at the news of her death. 'I have to function. One of us has to function.' So the dead woman had been laid to rest with no ceremony, her cross the fourth in a row, the gravediggers chilled and spooked and anxious to finish the task and get back inside to the light and warmth of the dome. Whoever had hanged Gabriella might be lurking somewhere out there in the dark of the plateau, waiting for the next one to pick off.
By the following day, however, Norse had collected himself. The disquieting breach in his calm had been repaired. In fact he seemed newly confident, newly knowledgeable, and he came around the tables to tell them all to stay after supper. It was important that they all talk, he said. Important that they use this to grow stronger. Important that he find strength to feed theirs. So they stayed.
When he stood up to speak, it was so quiet they could hear the drone of the ventilation and the burble of the drink dispenser. Their ranks were visibly thinner. It was awful, how small their gathering looked.
'I'm afraid I have some more disturbing news,' Norse began.
You could hear the sound of their breathing.
'I've radioed the Russian base at Vostok. There's no sign of Buck Tyson. He never arrived. We have no idea where he is.'
There was a long, despairing quiet.
'Don't we?' Geller asked.
Dana Andrews gave a low moan.
'We can't assume anything.' Norse looked at them soberly. 'Anything. We don't know it's Buck. And somehow, until we come through this, we've got to combat panic. Panic will kill us faster than anything. Distrust will kill us. Paranoia will kill us. I think we're going to have to reach inside ourselves and find the core of what's there. This is a test- a test of what we're made of.'
'Cut the psychobabble, Doc,' Geller replied. 'I'm panicked and distrustful and paranoid as hell. I'm freakin' ready to jump out of my skin, and I'm freakin' ready to call it quits for this winter. I didn't sign on for the Chainsaw Massacre. I want to get out of here before that North Dakota madman annihilates us all.'
There was a buzz of assent. If there'd been anywhere to run to, they'd have bolted.
Geller's complaint focused the psychologist on him. Norse looked resolute. 'You cut the fantasy, George. We're not going home. We can't go home. This is home, for six or seven more months. You know that.'
'So we just go about our little data-collection duties, waiting for Tyson to pick us off one by one?' Mendoza asked. Since the discovery of Gabriella's body he'd refused to hike out to the Dark Sector to continue his research. The other studies were also on hold. The plants in the greenhouse were yellowing, Lena too morose to tend to them. Their routine was breaking down.
'Why are you so sure it's Tyson?' Norse replied.
That startled them. They looked at the psychologist uneasily.
'I was never certain myself. I sent him away for his own safety as well as ours. He could still be traveling. His radio could be broken. He could have gotten lost and died. But coming back here, to prey on us, seems particularly risky. Where's his Spryte? Where is he surviving? Does Tyson really make sense?'
The survivors looked at each other.
'Who, then?' Hiro Sakura asked.
'My bet is Lewis,' Alexi Molotov spoke up.
Abby turned to glare at him.
'Goddammit,' Lewis groaned. Yet when he looked around the room for support, everyone except Abby shifted uneasily. Pulaski was staring resolutely away, the butt of his new spear on the floor. Lewis had a sense of foreboding. Something wasn't right.
'Lewis,' Molotov insisted. 'Who just happens to find all the dead. Who can never account for his whereabouts.
