Winter Study

The Sked hit the back of her knees and she went down on all fours. Robin stopped beside her the way an old dog will stop when its master does.

“Fucking Ridley,” Anna gasped. “Fucking Bob.” The fetal position Robin had adopted was looking pretty good. Being devoured by beasts wasn’t looking all that bad either.

She tried to push herself up. Her arms buckled as if the bones had been boiled to the consistency of overcooked noodles and she fell face-first into the snow. She tried to find her feet and couldn’t. Her fingers, around the grip of the flashlight wouldn’t close.

“Robin!” she yelled. “Help me.”

Robin looked down into the sepia pool of light where Anna struggled. The biotech said nothing. Her face showed no emotion, not even recognition.

“Help me up, God dammit!” Anna snarled. “Do it or we both die.”

“Don’t die,” Robin whispered. Anna barely caught the sound under the sawing of the wind.

“I will fucking die and so will you if you don’t help me.” Anna’s language was deteriorating. Fleetingly she wondered if she used it to shock Robin out of her trance or because she was just that fucking tired of the whole fucking mess.

Something got through. Robin leaned down and extended a hand. Using the woman’s strength, Anna pulled herself upright, then began fumbling at the harness buckles. “Let the dead bury the dead,” she said. “Or eat them. I don’t” – she was going to say “fucking” again, but it wouldn’t afford the anger she needed, just indicate how desperate she felt – “much care,” she finished.

Without the Sked dragging her down, Anna felt almost strong for several yards, then exhaustion slammed back so hard it shut down her mind. She held tenaciously to three things: the faint tracks in the dimming circle of light, what it would do to Paul if she froze to death and the cuff of Robin’s sleeve. Anna could abandon the dead, and, once or twice, she’d turned her back on the living. Leaving Robin would be tough to get over.

The world shrank till even Paul could not fit in it. Only the circle of light and her hand clamped on Robin’s parka. Soon, Anna knew, one or the other of these would go; she would lose Robin or they’d lose their light. Anna managed to slide her hand up and close it around Robin’s wrist. If she was lucky, it would freeze there.

“Keep walking,” she whispered to the biotech. “Help me out here.”

Help me. The words that had formed on the window glass of the bunkhouse. They’d not saved Katherine. Had her spirit come and written them with the cold fingertip of the dead after the wolves had savaged her?

Help me. Help me. Help me. Anna let the chant move her feet. Lift on Help. Down on me. Lift on Help.

“The walking dead.”

Anna had not said that. She’d not said it in her mind and she’d sure as hell not said it aloud. Jerking Robin’s arm, she stopped and shined their pitiful light into the younger woman’s face.

Robin hadn’t said it. Robin was the walking dead.

A groan pushed through the dark and the wind. The beam of the flashlight wasn’t strong enough to penetrate more than a few feet, but it was strong enough to pinpoint her and Robin. Anna clicked it off.

“At first, I saw, but now am blind,” came the voice. Then: “Don’t tell me your batteries are dead.” Then an “Uff!” and “I sound like an old man.”

“Ridley?” Anna tried.

“Did your batteries go dead?”

Anna clicked the light back on and shined it down the trail. First the tips of skis, then the man came into the circle of illumination.

“Why are you here?” she asked. She would have shouted at him but hadn’t the energy for anything more than mild curiosity.

“Bob got ahead of me. It was too dark to catch him. Without a flashlight, I’d have killed myself trying to stay on the trail. So I waited for you.”

The flashlight fell from fingers gone suddenly numb. The butt of it stuck in the snow, sending the light up beneath Anna’s and Robin’s chins.

“Holy moly!” Ridley said. “You okay?”

“Is this the Feldtmann?” Anna asked.

“Yeah. What happened to the Sked?”

Anna had to chip each thought out of the ice of her brain. Putting them in words took even longer. A thousand years ago, Jonah had led her off the Feldtmann Trail. She’d been on her way back, about three miles from the bunkhouse.

Three miles. Ridley had on his skis.

“Here.” Anna picked up the light and gave it to him. “Ski back. Fast. Bring the snowmobile.”

“The Park Service…” he began, then stopped, undoubtedly realizing it would be easier to explain using an engine in the wilderness than the death by negligence of a visiting District Ranger.

“Sit tight,” he said.

“Don’t stop to kill Bob,” Anna managed. She put her arms around Robin and together they sank to the ground. Anna could have propped her back against a tree and unfolded her aching legs, but she chose to sit up straight in the middle of the trail. This was not the place to get too comfortable.

ROUGH PAWS WERE SCRAPING at Anna, pushing her back and forth, dragging her from the first warm, light, pleasant place she’d been in what was beginning to seem like forever. She’d been in front of the fireplace in Paul’s house in Natchez. There’d been a huge blaze and her husband’s arms were around her, and she was just settling down to a wonderful rest. Then the paws.

“Come on, sleeping beauties. Don’t want to wake up dead, do you? Wakey-wakey – well, I don’t have eggs and bacon, but I’ve got coffee. Hot coffee.”

Anna pushed the hands from her. A jolt of fear woke her up completely and she began shaking Robin. “Jesus. Right out of the textbooks,” she said when she saw Robin open her eyes.

Saw it.

There was light. Adam was hunched over them, his skis making him awkward, a bright light on a band around his head and another on each arm.

“Where’s Ridley?” The question sounded so pathetic it embarrassed Anna, but she couldn’t make sense of anything: how long they’d slept, if it was tonight or tomorrow night, who, if anybody, had been eaten by wolves or wogs or Jack Frost.

“I passed him coming out,” Adam said. “Soon as Bob showed up back at the bunkhouse all by himself with a cock-and-bull story about ‘getting things ready’ for when the rest of you arrived, I knew something stunk.”

With a couple of expert movements, he unlatched his skis and stepped out of them, then swung his backpack down and began rustling around in it.

“Ho, ho, ho,” Anna said stupidly.

Adam smiled. “Like Santa with a bag of toys,” he said.

That wasn’t it at all. Tall and covered with lights, he reminded Anna of a Christmas tree. Or the spaceship coming down in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her mind would not track; she had the attention span of a gnat; inside her cranium, things made a degree of sense, but when she tried to put that sense into words it didn’t work anymore.

Adam took out a thermos and Anna remembered he’d said “coffee.” To drink coffee would be as close to heaven as a woman with a checkered past would get. Hot coffee. Anna could almost feel it in her mouth, pouring heat into her.

“This’ll help,” Adam said and handed Robin a steaming cup. Anna wished he’d given her the first cup; she wished she was evil enough to snatch Robin’s from her. She would have given a year’s salary just to smell it but the wind took the steam and the perfume. Robin raised her hand to take the cup. Her fingers wouldn’t move and the cup fell into the snow. Anna wanted to cry.

The next cup he held to their mouths for them. A sip for Robin, a sip for Anna, just like the old days when nobody was afraid of catching diseases, when the offer of a swig out of one’s water bottle wasn’t considered creepy. The coffee was as good as Anna had known it would be. Her body was too far gone for a small infusion of