“Breathing no problem?” He nodded, and I was pretty sure we weren’t looking at a sucking chest wound or any sort of lung damage. I pulled the thermal, shirt, and cloak back down; with the loss of blood, he’d be facing hypothermic symptoms soon enough without keeping him exposed. I concentrated on his face and packed snow on the wound to try to stop the bleeding. It worked, and I was able to get a gauze pad and medical tape to stick. “Can you move?”
He swallowed, and I could see that he didn’t like the idea.
“I wouldn’t ask, but there’s cover up ahead and I want to get you to it.”
His legs shifted, indicating that his core was intact, but he didn’t seem to be able to get them underneath himself.
“How about if I try and help?”
He nodded, but even between the two of us we didn’t get much lift. He looked at me, and there was something I’d never seen in the giant’s face before-just that little bit of panic.
“Virgil, can you move?”
He shook his head and slumped a little.
“Virgil?” Air escaped from between his lips, and more than a little panic now shot through me. “Virgil…” I placed a hand against his throat but couldn’t feel a pulse, which wasn’t unusual with the conditions. I moved my hand and felt along the side of his heavily muscled neck, still finding nothing.
“Lawman.” I glanced up and could see one large eye, the other now completely closed. “You must go ahead.”
“No.” I tried pulling at his arm, but he didn’t move; it was like trying to lift a grain mill. “C’mon, Virgil. I’m not going to leave you here.”
I pulled on his arm again, but his eye just stayed there, passive-almost as if I wasn’t there with him at all. Finally, he spoke in a soft but insistent voice. “You must go. The others are just ahead and you must save them- innocent people…”
“Shut up.”
He sighed a laugh. “Go. I will follow you very soon. Just let me sit here for a few moments and catch my breath.”
My voice broke as I lifted at his shoulders again. “Virgil, you’re going to die out here.”
He laughed again, softer this time. “Go, Lawman. I will follow, I promise.”
I stood and looked down at him and at the snow that had collected on the bear head. I tore into the pack, pulled out the sleeping bag, jerked it from the stuff sack, and then wrapped it around him.
As I started to leave, his hand came up and rested in his lap. He was holding the battered copy of Inferno. I looked at him, and he fumbled with the book. “This book… You know who the lowest ring of hell is reserved for?”
I kneeled back down. “Virgil, I don’t think you should be talking.”
“Traitors.”
I didn’t say anything at first, but the words were in my mouth, looking for a place to go. “I thought you said you hadn’t read this book?”
He tried to smile with a bunching of one of his cheek muscles. It must have hurt.
“Are you trying to tell me something, Virgil?”
He didn’t say anything more, but the smile faded and he looked sad. I glanced up the trail and then back to him. “I’m going to go up there and finish killing that son of a bitch, and then I’m going to come back with the others and get you under that overhang. Understand?”
He didn’t move, and his eye returned to the snow.
I tucked the bag around him a little closer and stood. “I’ll be back, you understand?”
15
I cradled the rifle in my arms Indian-style as I walked, a fresh round in place and my underlying finger on the trigger.
We had been closer to the overhang than I thought, and it seemed to move toward me like some devilishly open mouth yawning from the snow, the frozen stalactites looking like teeth.
I continued to follow the tracks that Shade and the two hostages had made, Virgil’s words echoing in my head. Traitors. Was it a confession? An indictment?
My eyes kept drifting to the rim overhead. The spot where I’d tagged Shade was disturbed, and there was no snow there. The closer I got, the less chance there was that he could hit me from above, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting in the relative gloom of the shelter straight ahead.
There were a few dislodged boulders that had fallen in front of the overhang a long time ago; I stepped between them, and it was like a curtain parting. A few flakes floated like fireflies following me in, but other than a drift that had sealed the western side, it was bare underneath the granite precipice.
From the light of a battery-powered lantern, I could see there were two of them toward the back, and the man jumped when he saw me. The FBI agent, Pfaff, was tied with nylon zip cords and a bandana tight around her mouth. She was leaning against the back wall with a sleeping bag underneath her and was evidently unconscious.
The Ameri-Trans guard was seated a little away with another sleeping bag hanging over his shoulders; he was apparently neither bound nor gagged. He leapt to his feet with his hands behind his back, a little unsteady. “Thank God.”
Some of the snow slid off of me and fell to the ground as I leveled the barrel of the Sharps. “Don’t move.”
He glanced at the woman and then back to me. “What?” He took a step forward, this one a little more composed. “Hey, I’m one of the good guys.”
I raised the barrel slightly, centering it on his chest. “I said, don’t move.”
He stopped, and I studied him, especially the way the sleeping bag seemed to hang up on something at his back. He was the one from the truck, the heavyset man who had been having trouble on the ridge when I’d spotted them through the binoculars. His nose had been bloodied, and it was probably broken, the swelling overtaking his eyes that shone in the darkness like wet paint.
The stocking cap on his head was pushed up but the rest of him looked normal-except for one thing: he still wore full ammo clips on his belt.
Traitors.
He tried to distract me by talking. “Hey, we need your help.”
“Why aren’t you tied up?”
He started to say something, realized it wasn’t something he wanted to say and certainly something he didn’t want me to hear, and then settled on something else. “I am. I mean, my hands are.”
“Show them to me.”
He started moving, and it was a little too fast for my taste.
“Slow.”
He hesitated, and there was that briefest of moments where I could see him trying to make up his mind. It all came down to judging-if you were a good judge of the man in front of you, you might survive; if not, then you were the honored dead. It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest-it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.
“I’m really tired, and I’ve already done this drill with the convict you left in the Thiokol. He made the right choice and is still alive-you make the wrong one, and I’m going to dislocate a couple of your solid organs.”
He remained motionless, and there was a dead silence as more flakes flickered to the ground in a semicircle behind me. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just drop it.”
“It might go off.”
I felt my finger maintaining a slight pressure on the trigger. “Well, then, bring it around carefully-like your life
