Winter Study

bit, at least as well as she had before the more recent topplings and batterings.

The remaining third of the plastic she draped over the snowmobile, creating a bivouac, with the tarp forming floor and ceiling and the Bearcat the wall. The rude tent would keep her dry and keep out the wind. With luck, and the army blanket, she would still be alive when Ridley got word where she was.

Anna lowered herself gingerly to hand and knees to wriggle into her den.

A low, piggish “Ungh!” ground through the sifting silence of the snow. Bears grunted that way. Boars did. On ISRO, the only thing that made that sound was Bob Menechinn.

The grunting became staccato: “Ungh! Ungh! Ungh!”

Bob was running or maybe limping; the grunts were from pain, not exertion. Either way, he was up and moving. He was coming after her. Bob was always interested in saving himself. He’d be scared. Maybe he’d leave her alone, leave her to die of “natural causes” as he’d done on the cliff top. Unless he hadn’t come across Katherine’s cell phone with the damning pictures and messages – the one Anna no longer had – then he’d take her apart trying to find it.

Anna scuttled backward into the trees. She hadn’t time or strength to cover much ground. A couple yards from the sled, she stopped and whipped the snow with the army blanket to help obscure her track. That done, she wormed beneath the low boughs of a spruce tree, pulled her knees up under her chin, spread the army blanket over her head, reached up and shook the bough, bringing down an avalanche of snow on herself. Theoretically, under the dark brown wool and snow, she would look like a rock. Army blankets put high-tech thermal wraps to shame when it came to disguising women as rocks.

Bob would kill her; he was that much of a rotter. But she was hoping he was too lazy and cowardly to go out of his way to kill her. She was hoping he would try to start the Bearcat, then leave without bothering to look farther than the plastic lean-to.

Hoping, hoping, hoping.

Anna stopped that chant before the gay blue fish could swim any further into her mind. Hoping was well and good, but it was better to focus on Plan B in case the hoped-for didn’t manifest.

The grunts stopped.

She opened a tiny window in her wall of rough wool. Menechinn was not yet in sight.

A whuff gusted from up the trail, then regular panting and the crunch of boots on snow.

Pushing pain and fear out on a soft sigh, Anna stilled herself internally and tried to think rocklike thoughts. Behind the bough of the tree, in the purdah of wool, snow falling thickly, she was nearly blind. For a moment, it panicked her, as if to see was to be in control.

Poor eyesight is the least of your problems, she mocked herself. She had become as the littlest things in the wilderness. Concealment and cleverness, blending in and putting away acorns for an unseen winter, were the keys to survival. Bunnies and ducklings, chipmunks and sparrows, were not nature’s big risk takers. Anna schooled herself to timidity and hugged her protective coloration around her.

A black square loomed out of the trees at the switchback. Bob was walking with a list as if gale-force winds buffeted him from the north. Either being bashed by a tree limb or being scraped against rocks had injured his left leg. The imaginary gale let up, and he staggered the other direction for a few steps, then went back to favoring his left side. Head injury or ketamine, or both, was affecting his balance. The goose down sticking out from where his jacket had been torn was a rich true red.

A nice color, Anna thought. His nose was white and waxy, as were his cheekbones and the tips of his ears. Gone to frostbite. They’d be black in twenty-four hours.

Black was a nice color too. Anna wanted to be around to watch parts of him fall off in painful and ugly ways.

“Ungh!” Bob saw the snowmobile in its blue shroud and began to run down the hill, his arms windmilling to keep him from falling. Spittle flew from his mouth and appeared on the snow in spots of red.

A broken tooth, a split lip, Anna told herself, not wanting to count on massive internal injuries bringing him down anytime soon. Bob braked his downward rush by slamming into the side of the snowmobile. The Bearcat rocked up, showing the tractor treads that powered the sled. Packed with snow, the treads looked like the maw of a beast with many rotting teeth. They bit down again, and the heavy machine creaked with the force. Bob continued to lean on the seat, supported by his arms, hands on the saddle.

Anna’d forgotten how big he was. His splayed fingers reached across the vinyl seat. His shoulders, rounded and padded, heaved like a walrus’s back when it barks. Liquid ran through his gasps, the gurgling of lungs worked too hard in air too cold to process. The blood on his face had turned dark, forming into lumps that cracked to show the brilliant red of the new blood beneath as his jaws worked, trying to chew more oxygen from the air.

Drool fell from his lips to the seat and he pawed it up, surprised maybe at how much red was in it. Anna expected him to rip the tarp free, jump on the Bearcat, then go nuts when he didn’t find the key in the ignition. Unless he was blind with desperation, he’d find it in the side where she’d used it to unlock the storage compartment, get back on the snowmobile and go through the whole fit again when he realized it was out of gas.

Bob did none of these things. Straightening, he looked around him, as if there might be prying eyes from the upstairs unit of the spruce tree next door. With an expression Anna could only describe as crafty, an overblown twisting of his face the way an actor’s playing Fagin in Oliver Twist might when playing to the back row, he tiptoed around the sled. As in the sly moue of a moment before there was an element of exaggeration, of the theatrical, in the way he picked his big feet up, bending the knee, and put them down toe first.

A terrifying urge to laugh swelled inside Anna’s lungs, a need to howl and guffaw. Partly the long tension, the waiting, but mostly because Menechinn was being funny. Very funny. Adrenaline born of the fear that she would give away her hiding place did nothing to quell the hilarity. Balling her hand into a fist, she punched her boot above the place Bob had so diligently applied the wrench. Searing pain cleansed her of laughter. Nausea and relief took its place, and she began to shake. Her teeth started to chatter uncontrollably, and she shoved the corner of her shirt collar between them lest the clatter call his attention to her. Her body trembled so hard, she could feel her skin touch the fabric of her clothes in a rapid pattern of waves and retreats. Belly and bowels and heart and spleen and liver shook inside of her.

Holding herself together, teeth clamped on the fleece, she watched Bob finish his half circuit of the sled. In front of the slit she’d been about to crawl through into her plastic lean-to when he’d announced his impending visit in porcine fashion, he stopped. Bending at the waist, he started to peek inside. A better idea came to him before he’d gotten his eye to the proper level. He straightened again, shuffled back three steps, took a running leap and came down, crushing the tarp to the ground. Demons took him then, and he stomped and kicked and jumped till the tarp was ripped free of the sled and mangled in the snow. Nowhere did it stick up more than an inch or so.

He had meant Anna to be inside.

He meant to trample her to death.

That was so rude. It had crossed Anna’s mind that, at some future date, she would take a moment to feel guilty for all the evils she’d wished upon him. Now, should opportunity present itself, she would gloat. The shaking ebbed. Maybe she was getting better. Maybe that was her body’s last attempt to shiver warmth into her, and her vital organs would start shutting down.

The fit of violence over, he stood in the ruin of the tarpaulin and looked around him, eyes narrowed against the snow, breath coming in wet gasps. He was so close, Anna could smell the sweat boil off of him. She envied his heat, his ability to move. She wasn’t sure she could move anymore, that, if a time came when it would be safe to stand, she would be able to get up.

Tilting his huge head back, Bob sniffed the air. Less than three yards separating them, Anna could see his nares expanding and contracting the way a dog’s will when it seeks scent. Fleetingly she wished Katherine’s cell phone hadn’t been responsible for the howls, that a pack of wolves had come to devour her. It would have been more civilized than dealing with Bob Menechinn. What with the killing and maiming and the nearly being killed and actually being maimed, along with the hallucinogenic effects of the ketamine, he had been stripped of the veneer of urbanity he cultivated. Even the coat of arrogance had been taken from him.

Bob’s inner man was this stomping, sniffing brute, a beast that preyed on women, for whom the physical rape was merely the appetizer. Control by fear and humiliation was the main course. Hate rose from him with the sweat smell, hate and a darker odor. Shame, Anna guessed. Not for what he did; he was proud of that. Shame for not