in an awkward circle on the cliff top. A chore that was a moment’s work to the able-bodied took Anna a painful forever.
By the time she got herself pointed back in the right direction, Bob Menechinn was standing at the head of the Greenstone.
The side of his face was a mask of blood and snow. His arms hung at his sides, the huge hands clublike. His eyes were almost lost in the flesh of his face, but the heat and hatred in them bored through the masking beef until they took up most of the space in the world. Moving with the creaking strength of rusted iron, he staggered into the middle of the trail.
Anna had neither the time nor the inclination for negotiating. She opened full throttle and, bent over the handlebars, engine and woman screaming, the snowmobile leapt forward. Banshees of flesh and metal, they shrieked toward Menechinn. The nose of the Bearcat struck him. With a crunch Anna hoped was bone, he fell. The Bearcat’s skis jerked over his leg, jolting the snowmobile. Agony smashed into Anna’s brain, and she clenched her hand on the throttle to stay upright. The Bearcat bucked free of the obstacle and stalled.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Anna muttered in language no self-respecting Disney fish would use and pawed at the key with gloved and frozen fingers. An animal roar rose from Menechinn. In the tiny rearview mirror, Anna saw the hulk of him rising. Biting the ends of the glove’s fingers, she ripped it off and turned the key. The engine came to life and she blessed Arctic Cat.
Then she was moving. The Greenstone took her. She was going to make it.
Without warning, the Bearcat slued to the left, the engine crying like a dying calf, as Bob grabbed onto the back, his weight forcing it to the left into the trees. Anna jerked the handlebars wildly, fishtailing down the steep incline, a moose – a dying moose – trying to bash the wolf from its flanks. The Bearcat sideswiped a tree. Gripping with her knees, as if riding an unbroken horse, she yanked the handlebars the other way and veered across the trail, gaining speed on the downhill run, and banged the other side into a chunk of rock. Bob let out a guttural shriek, and the snowmobile surged ahead, crazy with speed and freedom, hurtling down the narrow trail.
Vision blurred. Black trunks snapped at her face, white strobed till she couldn’t tell where movement left off and hysteria began. Her injured arm fell from where she’d zipped it in a makeshift sling in the front of her parka and the dislocated shoulder tore at the muscles. She started screaming – or kept screaming – her noise melded with that of the laboring engine.
The trail switched back on itself in a hairpin turn, and Anna cranked the handlebars as far as she could. The Bearcat raised up on two skis, the nose fighting for purchase as it was jackknifed to the right. With a slam that brought the black of the trees and the glare of the snow into the tiny pinpoint of an old television going off the air for the night, the snowmobile righted itself. Anna forced her frozen fingers to back off the throttle.
The snowmobile slowed.
Then it stopped. For a long moment, Anna sat on the cooling machine, trying to find the energy to peel her bare hand from the throttle and turn the key. With the cessation of the cries of flesh and blood and the roaring of metal and fuel explosions, the silence was eerie, ringing. Anna listened to the echo of quiet fading into the inexorable softness of falling snow. True silence whispered in where the ringing had been. She drew it into her mind and into her lungs, let it touch the ruined parts of her body. The pain didn’t lessen with the kiss of the quiet, but she ceased to mind as much.
She didn’t want to move. Ever. Had she not been in love with Paul, she might not have bothered turning the ignition key.
Except to the Catholic God, it wouldn’t have mattered either way.
The snowmobile was out of gas.
34
Anna did not get off the Bearcat. It would be no warmer, no more comfortable, lying in the middle of the trail, and she knew that was as far as she would get. She dug for the cell phone but it was gone, fallen from her pocket somewhere between being knocked from one rock and scraping Bob off with another.
No last, last, really last calls for the six o’clock news. No telling dispatch that if Ridley didn’t answer his fucking radio, he should be shot on sight.
Bob might be dead, might be too injured to walk or he might be coming after her. Mayhem paraded through her mind: making a Molotov cocktail with her water bottle and the gasoline from the fuel tank, tipping the Cat over and using it as a bulwark for throwing rocks – or snowballs – peeling the decorative chrome-colored stripping from the chassis and planting the sharp metal strips beneath the snow.
As the engine cooled and she listened to the pings and clicks of metal assuming new shapes, her brain cooled with it. Thoughts of attack turned to thoughts of retreat, of crawling to a snowbank, sweeping her drag tracks out with a branch and burrowing deep into a personal igloo, of working the skis free of the snowmobile and fashioning a sled that would carry her downhill.
She listened past the pings, listened up the hill through the fog of snow. Bob wasn’t moving. Had he been, she would have heard him. He had no stealth, only strength.
Cold, a living thing, a being as bodiless as gas, as all-pervasive as air, as cunning at finding every crevice and pore as water, insinuated itself past the fur around her hood, trickling beneath her sweat-drenched hair, then filtered through her fleece collar to slip an icy hand around her neck. Squirming like rats, it squeezed into her pockets and under the cuffs of the parka, up the legs of her ski pants and down into her boots. Winter’s teeth gnawed on the flesh of her feet and tore at her chin and nose.
To take her mind off her troubles, she imagined the rats chewing up Bob Menechinn. Then she imagined the rats dead from consuming the poisons in his psyche.
After a while, the teeth weren’t teeth anymore, the rats weren’t rats. Winter had gone soft, touching her with kittens’ paws, claws sheathed. A hearth fire started in her stomach and warmth radiated out as the soft pad of winter crept inward. Freezing to death was supposed to be a very nice way to die. But, then, she’d heard that about drowning and that had been a bust.
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.
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
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
