“Come on,” she said, changing tactics. “Up. Get up. We’re moving.” She uncurled Robin and forced her hands away from her ears.
“Stand while I untangle you.”
When the harness and the pull ropes were straight, Anna gave the front of Robin’s parka a tug, much the way she used to give her horse Gideon back in Texas a tug to get him to go.
Robin didn’t budge. She turned her head as if she heard something besides the howling, a call from the woods that was above the frequencies humans could hear. For a long time, she stood, staring, and a cold more severe than winter crept deep past Anna’s bones and into her brain.
“We’ve got to go.” She’d meant to say the words in a normal way, a comforting, leaving-the-mall-before-traffic kind of way. What came out was a squeak that would have emasculated the tiniest vole. She said it again and had a better result.
If Robin heard, she showed no sign. She showed no sign of knowing Anna was close, so close her fists were doubled in the front of her parka.
“They’ve decided to kill,” Robin said.
Her voice held the same note of sorrow as the howl.
18
Anna would have thought any self-respecting werewolf or wog would have taken Robin’s show of weakness as an invitation to come to dinner, but, after she’d cried out, the slithery, sneaky sounds of their uninvited escort ceased. Robin didn’t bounce back. Youth and strength and athleticism went out of her. Her skis tangled and tripped her as if she were the rankest novice. She stumbled and fell, and each time it was harder for Anna to get her up. Finally Anna removed Robin’s skis, stowed them on the Sked and put the harness on her own shoulders. To keep the biotech close, she insisted Robin keep one hand on the lead rope and help.
Help was the word Anna used to try to break through the walls that had formed around the young woman’s brain and were suffocating her body. Robin had lost even the strength to close her fingers tightly enough to keep her hand from constantly falling away from the rope and her feet from slowing to a stop.
The flashlight began to brown out. Ski tracks leading back to the main trail were filling with blowing snow, becoming harder and harder to follow. Wind carved up the storm and slung freezing snow at them from every direction. Anna’s eyes watered and the tears froze her lashes together. The drag of the Sked on her shoulders grew heavier. Her feet turned to chunks of concrete in leaden boots the size of canoes.
Ridley never came back. Then Anna forgot she’d once hoped he would.
There was a place in her about the size of a softball just behind her sternum. A surgeon or MRI or X-ray would never find it, but it was where her center of energy resided; the tiny machine that had to be kick-started at the beginning of every hike, revved up when the natural laziness of mankind wanted to crawl back into the hammock. Muscles could be tired or weak or cramping, and she could push on as long as that motor kept running.
Whatever it was – will, stubbornness, pride – ground to a stop.
The Sked hit the back of her knees and she went down on all fours. Robin stopped beside her the way an old dog will stop when its master does.
“Fucking Ridley,” Anna gasped. “Fucking Bob.” The fetal position Robin had adopted was looking pretty good. Being devoured by beasts wasn’t looking all that bad either.
She tried to push herself up. Her arms buckled as if the bones had been boiled to the consistency of overcooked noodles and she fell face-first into the snow. She tried to find her feet and couldn’t. Her fingers, around the grip of the flashlight wouldn’t close.
“Robin!” she yelled. “Help me.”
Robin looked down into the sepia pool of light where Anna struggled. The biotech said nothing. Her face showed no emotion, not even recognition.
“Help me up, God dammit!” Anna snarled. “Do it or we both die.”
“Don’t die,” Robin whispered. Anna barely caught the sound under the sawing of the wind.
“I will fucking die and so will you if you don’t help me.” Anna’s language was deteriorating. Fleetingly she wondered if she used it to shock Robin out of her trance or because she was just that fucking tired of the whole fucking mess.
Something got through. Robin leaned down and extended a hand. Using the woman’s strength, Anna pulled herself upright, then began fumbling at the harness buckles. “Let the dead bury the dead,” she said. “Or eat them. I don’t” – she was going to say “fucking” again, but it wouldn’t afford the anger she needed, just indicate how desperate she felt – “much care,” she finished.
Without the Sked dragging her down, Anna felt almost strong for several yards, then exhaustion slammed back so hard it shut down her mind. She held tenaciously to three things: the faint tracks in the dimming circle of light, what it would do to Paul if she froze to death and the cuff of Robin’s sleeve. Anna could abandon the dead, and, once or twice, she’d turned her back on the living. Leaving Robin would be tough to get over.
The world shrank till even Paul could not fit in it. Only the circle of light and her hand clamped on Robin’s parka. Soon, Anna knew, one or the other of these would go; she would lose Robin or they’d lose their light. Anna managed to slide her hand up and close it around Robin’s wrist. If she was lucky, it would freeze there.
“Keep walking,” she whispered to the biotech. “Help me out here.”
Help me. The words that had formed on the window glass of the bunkhouse. They’d not saved Katherine. Had her spirit come and written them with the cold fingertip of the dead after the wolves had savaged her?
Help me. Help me. Help me. Anna let the chant move her feet. Lift on Help. Down on me. Lift on Help.
“The walking dead.”
Anna had not said that. She’d not said it in her mind and she’d sure as hell not said it aloud. Jerking Robin’s arm, she stopped and shined their pitiful light into the younger woman’s face.
Robin hadn’t said it. Robin was the walking dead.
A groan pushed through the dark and the wind. The beam of the flashlight wasn’t strong enough to penetrate more than a few feet, but it was strong enough to pinpoint her and Robin. Anna clicked it off.
“At first, I saw, but now am blind,” came the voice. Then: “Don’t tell me your batteries are dead.” Then an “Uff!” and “I sound like an old man.”
“Ridley?” Anna tried.
“Did your batteries go dead?”
Anna clicked the light back on and shined it down the trail. First the tips of skis, then the man came into the circle of illumination.
“Why are you here?” she asked. She would have shouted at him but hadn’t the energy for anything more than mild curiosity.
“Bob got ahead of me. It was too dark to catch him. Without a flashlight, I’d have killed myself trying to stay on the trail. So I waited for you.”
The flashlight fell from fingers gone suddenly numb. The butt of it stuck in the snow, sending the light up beneath Anna’s and Robin’s chins.
“Holy moly!” Ridley said. “You okay?”
“Is this the Feldtmann?” Anna asked.
“Yeah. What happened to the Sked?”
Anna had to chip each thought out of the ice of her brain. Putting them in words took even longer. A thousand years ago, Jonah had led her off the Feldtmann Trail. She’d been on her way back, about three miles from the bunkhouse.
Three miles. Ridley had on his skis.
“Here.” Anna picked up the light and gave it to him. “Ski back. Fast. Bring the snowmobile.”
“The Park Service…” he began, then stopped, undoubtedly realizing it would be easier to explain using an engine in the wilderness than the death by negligence of a visiting District Ranger.