“…little organization would go a long fucking way.”
“Hey, watch the language around the kids, bro.”
“You understand what’ll happen if—”
A woman breaks in, “You’re not thinking, Dave.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What’s his primary objective right now?”
“I don’t know…getting out of town?”
“How? In this storm? With his car toasted? No, he needs to get out of this miserable weather or he’ll freeze to death.”
The voices begin to fade, Ron lifting up, peering through the window, watching the crowd move by, down toward the frozen pond.
Light passes through the window, and he prostrates himself on the floor of the snow cave, listening for some indication he’s been seen.
After a while the voices have vanished completely, and he looks out the window again, the crowd nothing but distant, restless lightbeams, barely visible in the storm.
-26-
Ron massages his bare, blistered feet to get the blood circulating, colder than he’s ever been in his life, though he doesn’t think he’s freezing to death. This little snow fort is actually warm.
He wonders how long he’s been inside—thirty minutes, forty-five tops—and he’s spent most of it trying to convince himself this can’t possibly be happening. He’s had “horror dreams” before—car accidents, the death of friends and family, being chased by a murderous street gang through a parking garage, life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—but he always wakes up and the fear always leaves.
Even as he sits there, rubbing his cold, wet feet, he has a rock-solid premonition that in mere moments he will wake in that hotel in downtown Flagstaff he and Jessica checked into a little over twenty-four hours ago. It was their first night on the road, and they dined at a gem of a pizza joint near the university, went straight to the hotel, made love, and crashed, tired and giddy with the thrill of finally being on vacation, next stop Colorado.
He tells himself, and he believes, that he still sleeps in that hotel room. He’s really tossing in bed as he hides in this snow cave, Jessica probably kicking him under the covers, swearing at him in that sexy, sleepy voice of hers to quit moving or take his restless ass over to the sleeper sofa.
-27-
Ron inhales the scent of hotel linens and forced air from an unfamiliar central heating system, the covers soft between his legs.
He throws an arm across the mattress, feels the figure of his wife asleep beside him, her naked back rising and falling against his hand.
Later, they sit at breakfast, cream-cheesing bagels.
The light that blazes into the room washes out everything on the periphery and even the rogue strands of Jessica’s hair glow like incandescent silk.
“I had the worst dream last night,” Ron says.
“Tell me about it.”
He thinks for a moment, says, “I forgot.”
“Chilly in here.” As Jessica rubs her arms, Ron notices her breath clouding. He’s grown cold as well. He reaches down to lift his bagel, and it looks like a bagel, the circumference lightly browned, the lox spread warming on the surface, but when he touches it, it crumbles in his fingers like snow, freezing to the touch.
He says, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing, it’s…everything’s fine.”
“I’m so glad we came on this vacation,” Jessica says, but she’s turned into the Viking Goddess, the ice ax run through her throat, blood pulsing out of the side of her neck and making a sound exactly like a lawn sprinkler.
Ron tries to stand, thinking if he can walk outside into that clear morning light and climb into his Benz, Jessica will be there. He can make this real.
“We have to stretch this out,” he says, but the light passing through the windows has already begun to erode, the darkness encroaching so fast he can no longer see across the table, and then he’s back in the snow cave, curled up against the freezing wall, and so despairing, he believes he’s gone to hell, recalling from his collegiate reading of Dante’s Inferno (as if his subconscious has retrieved the most horribly perfect memory shard just to fuck with him) that the innermost circle of the underworld is built of ice.
-28-
Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.
It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.
He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.
-29-
The snow comes to his knees.
He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.
The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.
-30-
The sign reads, “Road Closed Due to Hazardous Driving Conditions.”
Ron swings a leg over, briefly straddling the yellow gate.
He falls onto the other side, engulfed by snow, stands up and brushes his clothes off as best he can, his fingers stiff, on a welcome descent from excruciating toward a beautiful numbness.
Beyond exhaustion, he sets off at the fastest walk he can manage, while in the east, the sky lightens above a skyline of jagged peaks—a warm lavender that chokes out the stars.
He trudges on through the predawn silence, crying, thinking, Jess is dead.
Passes another sign: “Aspen 23.”
The road climbs at a five percent grade, and he stops, breathless after an hour of walking, looks back, sees the valley the town rests in five hundred feet below where he stands.
He inhales a shot of cold, thin air. The spruce trees on the left side of the road droop with snow. Off the right shoulder, the mountainside falls away in a series of cliffs and steep forest, a thousand feet down to a frozen river.
He hears a distant growl.
The way the echo carries, it sounds like a vehicle coming down the mountain, but the lights—four of them—race up the road out of Lone Cone.
In the calm, subzero air, he studies the tone of their motors, the velocity with which they travel over the buried highway.
Snowmobiles.
He starts running, gets ten steps, then stops, looks back down the road—a narrow plane descending into Lone Cone, his tracks as clear as day.
Up ahead, the road makes a sharp left turn with the contour of the mountain.
Nothing to do but run, his arms pumping again, the momentary adrenaline charge making up for the loss of air.
The whine of the motors sounds like a swarm of giant bees closing in as he reaches the curve in the road, the noisy snowmobiles dropping into silence as he puts the mountain between them and himself.
He looks back over his shoulder trying to—
A horn screams.
He turns back to face a huge orange truck, ten feet and closing.
Ron bee-lines for the left shoulder and dives into a snowbank as the plow rushes by, burying him under sixty pounds of snow as the blade scrapes the powder off the road.
-31-
Ron lies on his back, suffocating in darkness, clawing at the snow and on the verge of losing consciousness.
His hand breaks through, fresh air flooding in, accompanied by idling snowmobiles and nearby voices.
He pulls his hand back into his chest, wondering if he’s been seen, enough of the snow on top of him pushed away to glimpse a piece of the morning sky and an overhanging fir tree.
Two helmeted figures walk into view, Ron praying he won’t have to fight, his fingers so numb he can’t even feel them holding the ice ax.
The two figures gaze up the mountainside for several minutes.