“Sit tight,” he said.
“Don’t stop to kill Bob,” Anna managed. She put her arms around Robin and together they sank to the ground. Anna could have propped her back against a tree and unfolded her aching legs, but she chose to sit up straight in the middle of the trail. This was not the place to get too comfortable.
ROUGH PAWS WERE SCRAPING at Anna, pushing her back and forth, dragging her from the first warm, light, pleasant place she’d been in what was beginning to seem like forever. She’d been in front of the fireplace in Paul’s house in Natchez. There’d been a huge blaze and her husband’s arms were around her, and she was just settling down to a wonderful rest. Then the paws.
“Come on, sleeping beauties. Don’t want to wake up dead, do you? Wakey-wakey – well, I don’t have eggs and bacon, but I’ve got coffee. Hot coffee.”
Anna pushed the hands from her. A jolt of fear woke her up completely and she began shaking Robin. “Jesus. Right out of the textbooks,” she said when she saw Robin open her eyes.
Saw it.
There was light. Adam was hunched over them, his skis making him awkward, a bright light on a band around his head and another on each arm.
“Where’s Ridley?” The question sounded so pathetic it embarrassed Anna, but she couldn’t make sense of anything: how long they’d slept, if it was tonight or tomorrow night, who, if anybody, had been eaten by wolves or wogs or Jack Frost.
“I passed him coming out,” Adam said. “Soon as Bob showed up back at the bunkhouse all by himself with a cock-and-bull story about ‘getting things ready’ for when the rest of you arrived, I knew something stunk.”
With a couple of expert movements, he unlatched his skis and stepped out of them, then swung his backpack down and began rustling around in it.
“Ho, ho, ho,” Anna said stupidly.
Adam smiled. “Like Santa with a bag of toys,” he said.
That wasn’t it at all. Tall and covered with lights, he reminded Anna of a Christmas tree. Or the spaceship coming down in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her mind would not track; she had the attention span of a gnat; inside her cranium, things made a degree of sense, but when she tried to put that sense into words it didn’t work anymore.
Adam took out a thermos and Anna remembered he’d said “coffee.” To drink coffee would be as close to heaven as a woman with a checkered past would get. Hot coffee. Anna could almost feel it in her mouth, pouring heat into her.
“This’ll help,” Adam said and handed Robin a steaming cup. Anna wished he’d given her the first cup; she wished she was evil enough to snatch Robin’s from her. She would have given a year’s salary just to smell it but the wind took the steam and the perfume. Robin raised her hand to take the cup. Her fingers wouldn’t move and the cup fell into the snow. Anna wanted to cry.
The next cup he held to their mouths for them. A sip for Robin, a sip for Anna, just like the old days when nobody was afraid of catching diseases, when the offer of a swig out of one’s water bottle wasn’t considered creepy. The coffee was as good as Anna had known it would be. Her body was too far gone for a small infusion of heat and caffeine to do much for it, but her mind sharpened. Even Robin’s face took on a bit of life. When they could hold the cups without endangering themselves, Adam went again into the pack and brought out a box of six Hershey bars.
Dormant hunger raged through Anna and she took half of one in a single bite. It was beyond good. The gods didn’t dine on nectar; they ate Hershey’s chocolate, milk chocolate with almonds. “Canonize Hershey,” she said sincerely through a third bite.
By the time Ridley roared back into their night following the beam of the snowmobile’s headlight, Anna and Robin had enough strength to climb on behind him. The seat was designed for only two riders. The chocolate had raised Anna’s spirits to such an extent, she offered to wait for the second trip. Ridley and Adam saw something in her and the biotech that made them veto the suggestion. Robin was squeezed in the middle and Anna on the back of the seat. Using bungee cords he carried in his pack, Adam lashed both of them to Ridley.
Little of the ride back registered with Anna. The life of the candy bars and the coffee was short-lived. The trail wasn’t made for machinery and the ride was bumpy. Ridley seemed to waver back and forth between the need for speed and the need for safety, and each waver carried a bump at one end or the other. Mostly Anna hung on and tried to keep her face behind Robin’s shoulder so the cold wouldn’t scour it off.
Finally they drove out of the woods and onto the graded road. Anna was too tired to be grateful. When they reached the bunkhouse, she couldn’t get off the snowmobile. Jonah was out as soon as he heard the machine coming up the hill, bare-handed, in his old ragged flannel shirt, his boots unlaced. He hadn’t taken time to more than grab his wool cap and shove his feet into his mukluks.
“Ovaltine is on,” he called. “We’ll get you warmed up. I fired up the sauna. Food, heat, hot drinks. We’ll make new women of you. Not that I’m complaining about the old women, not to suggest you are old, Ranger Pigeon. I doubt you are much older than I am.” While he chattered, he helped take the bungee cords from around the three of them. Ridley let him. He wasn’t as spent as Anna and he hadn’t been hit emotionally as Robin had, but the man had skied over thirty miles among other things and he didn’t seem anxious to take on any unnecessary tasks.
Anna tried to get off so Robin could move and managed to only flap her arms feebly. Jonah put his arm around her and lifted till, between the two of them, she was standing, if unsteadily, on her own.
“Give Ridley a hand,” Jonah said, just as if Anna was capable of doing so. Because he treated her like she was able, she found she almost was. As she tottered to the front of the machine, Bob Menechinn emerged from the bunkhouse, hat and gloves on, coat zipped up.
“I had the snowmobile warmed up and was about to come looking myself,” he said as he clomped down the snow-covered steps from the deck. “Then Ridley beat me to it. Supper will be ready when you’re ready to eat it. I made beef stew. That ought to stick to your ribs.” He hustled down and elbowed Jonah out of the way to tend to Robin.
“Honey made it,” Ridley said.
“Whatever,” Bob said. “It’s hot and ready.”
“You heated it up. My wife, Honey, made the stew.” Ridley lurched from the machine without any help from Anna and faced Menechinn. Bob had both arms under Robin’s armpits and his hands on the front of her coat.
Copping a feel. Anna shook that off. As many layers as they all wore, all anybody would feel would be fleece and goose down.
“Well, let’s get in and eat it before it gets cold,” Jonah said.
Ridley stepped in front of Menechinn and the difference in their size was apparent. Bob outweighed the lead researcher by a hundred pounds, if not more. Still, Anna would have put her money on Ridley, if this had been a betting match. Ridley pulled off his thick glove, and, for a second, Anna thought he was going to slap the other man’s face with it in classic challenge fashion. Instead he poked Menechinn hard with a slender forefinger.
“Honey made the stew,” he said. Ridley didn’t yell or curse or threaten, but there wasn’t any doubt, at least not in Anna’s mind, that he was dangerous.
Bob must have sensed it too. He backed down, and Anna doubted it was out of consideration for the feelings of the other man.
“I just heated it up,” he said. Anna heard the fear in his words and saw it in his face. So did Ridley. Bob tried for his smile but his face wouldn’t cooperate. Then he saw the scorn in the faces around him. It was a replay of the night in the tent when he’d freaked out. Anna wondered who he’d use to build back his self-esteem now that Katherine was dead.