“Damn you,” she whispered sadly.
Presumably he was still tripping at the foot of the tree. Rolling onto her side, good arm beneath her taking the weight, Anna curled her legs into the fetal position. There wasn’t as much pain as there had been; the cold was numbing her. She’d been still too long, and an injury burned heat. Using her elbow as a lever, she pried herself up till she was kowtowing to the east, forehead on the ground, injured arm throbbing. For all the motion her arm had, her right sleeve might as well have been empty. She sat up on her heels, the bones in her shoulder and chest dragging like knives across the soft tissues inside her body. For half a minute or more, she could do nothing else. She hadn’t even the strength to breathe. When breath came, it was in a cutting gust of icy air that set her to coughing. The coughing threatened to tear her collarbone from its damaged moorings.
Finally the coughing wore itself out, and she took careful sips of oxygen. When she could bear to move again, she unwound her neck scarf and laid it over her knees. Catching up the cuff of her right sleeve with her left hand, she lifted it, as a mother cat lifts a kitten by its scruff, and laid it over the scarf. With her left hand and her teeth, she managed a rough sling, and the pain lessened slightly.
“What in hell did you think you were doing?” she muttered. “Let people die. World’s overpopulated as it is. Christ.”
This last comment was in reference to the snowmobile. In the flurry of shared confidences, bone breaking and premature death, she’d forgotten she’d tipped it over. Whole, healthy, she could have wrestled it back onto its skis. In her present condition, even finding a lever big enough to shift this part of the world was going to be a Herculean task.
He was still sitting, head atilt, mouth agape, a mute old hound trying to bay at the moon. Anna attempted to lift her butt off her heels and get one of the platypus Sorels out in front of her so she could stand. All she managed was a rocking motion that set the nerves in her shoulder and arm jangling. Pain was a good motivator. Death was better. If she stayed where she was, she’d die of hypothermia. Bob would die as well, but that wasn’t a particularly motivating factor. Her grunt of effort turned into a shout as she forced herself up to one knee.
Her shout roused Bob. He rolled onto all fours and swayed back and forth, his eyes never leaving her. For an instant, she thought he was going to charge like a grizzly, and the fear of being torn apart by teeth made for grinding corn sent a jolt of fear through her that brought the bile to her throat. His eyes focused, and he pulled himself to a standing position, using the tree he’d been taking advantage of since he’d fled the cliff’s edge. Upright, he looked no less like a grizzly and no more like a man.
Blinking the image away, Anna tried to rise. She failed.
Bob Menechinn walked toward her. He was unsteady on his feet, but she thought his eyes were clearer. If Adam administered the ketamine awhile before Anna arrived on scene, the stuff might be wearing off – or at least wearing thin.
“Give me a hand up, if you would, Bob,” Anna said, hoping normalcy would beget normalcy. She stuck out her good hand. Bob reached down and grasped it firmly. Apparently without effort, he drew her to her feet.
Anna started to thank him, but he kept right on drawing her, pulling her into his chest and belly.
“Easy, easy, Bob,” Anna said. “Enough. Enough. Back off, God dammit.” Her face mashed into his parka and his arm crushed her bad shoulder into him. He held her like a lover, his other hand groping down her side, under her arm.
Fighting a revulsion that made the pain pale by comparison, Anna jerked a knee toward his groin, stomped his instep and scraped his shin with the side of her boot. It was like struggling in a dream. Thick-layered clothing swathed them both, and she fluttered like a moth in the soft and killing folds of a spiderweb.
His big hands crawled over her body, pulling at her clothes. Then he stepped back and shoved her hard in the chest. Anna landed on her rear end so hard that, without the padding she’d just been cursing, she would have broken her tailbone.
He held up a rectangle of black and waggled it back and forth. He’d been frisking her for her radio. As she watched, he carried it to the cliff edge and threw it over.
She didn’t ask what he was doing. She had a bad feeling; she knew. He plucked the skis out of the snow one by one, then the poles. They followed the radio over the escarpment.
Displaying the same ease with which he’d lifted her, Bob set the snowmobile to rights. The key was still in the ignition.
“You scared?” he asked.
“Pardon?” Anna asked politely, hoping to get him to come closer to her. What she would do, should she succeed, she had no idea, but there was nothing she could do from thirty feet away, and she knew, if she could rise again, it was going to take a while.
“You heard me,” he said. He threw a leg over the seat of the snow-mobile and reached for the ignition key.
“Yeah,” Anna said to stop him leaving. “Sure, I’m scared. What kind of an idiot wouldn’t be scared.”
He sat back and smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing a smile uncoil as slowly as Bob’s did. It came over the lower half of his face, then rose to his eyes in the malicious sunrise of the day of Armageddon.
“You and Robin thought it was pretty funny when Ridley’s pet monster was pawing at our tent, didn’t you? Smirking like teenage cunts at a sleepover. Let’s see you smirk now. Come on, one little smirk. What’s the matter, ice got your tongue?”
Anna stared at him. Adam was dead, Katherine killed, Robin missing and this was what Bob was thinking of: that two women had seen him panic.
“Smirk,” Anna said.
“I think it’s pretty funny,” Bob said, his smile still in place.
Anna’s legs were hurting. Soon they would stop hurting. They would be completely numb. Then standing would be a bitch. “Okay,” she said. “I can smirk. What’s it worth to you?”
“Maybe a ride back to the bunkhouse. Maybe nothing.”
“Deal,” she said. “I’m only going to do it once. Get your fat ass over where you can get a good look,” she said nastily. The insult moved him off the machine. Anna’s left hand was shoved in her pocket. She worked it out of its glove.
“Women want balls now, that it? Fast-tracked into jobs you can’t handle. Scraping babies out of your cunts because you fuck everything that moves and don’t want to be mamas. You don’t want to wear the pants. No, that’s not good enough for you, is it? You want to have the cock. No more pretend. No more strapping it on and fucking your girlfriends. A real cock. You think you can take it right off a man, don’t you?”
Bob was working up a good head of steam. The euphoria of the cat tranquilizer was double-edged, and the dark side was rising. He stopped eight or ten feet from her.
Too far.
“Well, I wouldn’t take yours,” Anna said scornfully. “Size does matter.”
Bob stepped into her, almost straddling her. He grabbed her hood and jerked her head up. His fist went back.
And Anna’s went up. Bare-knuckled and hammer-hard, she punched up into his crotch. Her fist buried itself in cloth and soft flesh. Bob screamed and fell, crashing down on his side, his gloved hands between his legs. Scooping up snow, Anna flung it in his face, curled her fingers into claws and launched herself at his eyes. Her shoulder cracked again as she bounced into his chest, and she knew she’d broken the floating end of the collarbone. Her vision blacked at the periphery.
Bob backhanded her. As easily as a grown man would throw a cat off, Bob knocked her off him. One hand still on his privates, he crawled away. Confused by the ketamine and the sudden assault, he took a minute or more to get his bearings. Then he stood and went back to the snowmobile. From beneath the seat, he took out a spanner used to tighten the tractor treads and started back to where Anna lay on her back, holding her arm across her chest.
“Bob, you’re not guilty of murder, but you kill me and you will be,” Anna said rationally – or as rationally as she
