He sat back and smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing a smile uncoil as slowly as Bob’s did. It came over the lower half of his face, then rose to his eyes in the malicious sunrise of the day of Armageddon.
“You and Robin thought it was pretty funny when Ridley’s pet monster was pawing at our tent, didn’t you? Smirking like teenage cunts at a sleepover. Let’s see you smirk now. Come on, one little smirk. What’s the matter, ice got your tongue?”
Anna stared at him. Adam was dead, Katherine killed, Robin missing and this was what Bob was thinking of: that two women had seen him panic.
“Smirk,” Anna said.
“I think it’s pretty funny,” Bob said, his smile still in place.
Anna’s legs were hurting. Soon they would stop hurting. They would be completely numb. Then standing would be a bitch. “Okay,” she said. “I can smirk. What’s it worth to you?”
“Maybe a ride back to the bunkhouse. Maybe nothing.”
“Deal,” she said. “I’m only going to do it once. Get your fat ass over where you can get a good look,” she said nastily. The insult moved him off the machine. Anna’s left hand was shoved in her pocket. She worked it out of its glove.
“Women want balls now, that it? Fast-tracked into jobs you can’t handle. Scraping babies out of your cunts because you fuck everything that moves and don’t want to be mamas. You don’t want to wear the pants. No, that’s not good enough for you, is it? You want to have the cock. No more pretend. No more strapping it on and fucking your girlfriends. A real cock. You think you can take it right off a man, don’t you?”
Bob was working up a good head of steam. The euphoria of the cat tranquilizer was double-edged, and the dark side was rising. He stopped eight or ten feet from her.
Too far.
“Well, I wouldn’t take yours,” Anna said scornfully. “Size does matter.”
Bob stepped into her, almost straddling her. He grabbed her hood and jerked her head up. His fist went back.
And Anna’s went up. Bare-knuckled and hammer-hard, she punched up into his crotch. Her fist buried itself in cloth and soft flesh. Bob screamed and fell, crashing down on his side, his gloved hands between his legs. Scooping up snow, Anna flung it in his face, curled her fingers into claws and launched herself at his eyes. Her shoulder cracked again as she bounced into his chest, and she knew she’d broken the floating end of the collarbone. Her vision blacked at the periphery.
Bob backhanded her. As easily as a grown man would throw a cat off, Bob knocked her off him. One hand still on his privates, he crawled away. Confused by the ketamine and the sudden assault, he took a minute or more to get his bearings. Then he stood and went back to the snowmobile. From beneath the seat, he took out a spanner used to tighten the tractor treads and started back to where Anna lay on her back, holding her arm across her chest.
“Bob, you’re not guilty of murder, but you kill me and you will be,” Anna said rationally – or as rationally as she could from a supine position. Maybe I should have tried the rational approach before he’d gone for the spanner, she thought, but that was blood under the bridge now.
“I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to have an accident.” He grabbed her right boot, jerked it off and pulled her sock down. Holding the bare foot against the snow-covered rock, he smashed her ankle bone with the wrench.
Through the haze of misery that followed, Anna heard the snow-mobile motoring down the Greenstone.
Winter was going to do Bob’s dirty work for him.
32
For a while, there was nothing but the blinding pain and the knowledge that she could not save herself; that she couldn’t walk out. Had the thought of losing to an idiot like Bob not been anathema, Anna might have given up. Instead she opened her eyes; she sat up. With her uninjured hand, she hooked the boot Bob had jerked off and put it back on her foot. If one was going to die, it was important to die with one’s boots on. Soon the ankle would begin to swell. Then even the bulbous Sorel wouldn’t fit over it.
Put ice on it, Anna thought and almost smiled.
The glove she’d removed, the better to bust Bob’s balls, was still in her coat pocket. Wriggling her fingers like so many eels, she worked her hand into it. Then she sat, exhausted by the pain, wishing she believed in God that she might convince Him to get back into the smiting business. Without a radio, there was no one else she could call upon.
For what seemed an eternity, she sat in her broken bones and cooling blood and thought about Paul. It had been so good to talk with him.
On Katherine’s satellite phone.
“Thank you, Paul,” she said. The phone was in her pocket. She’d been carrying the wretched thing since she’d found it. Fumbling, twice dropping it, she got it out and again exposed her fingers to the cold. In CONTACTS, Katherine had the number for the Park Service offices in Houghton, Michigan. Anna pushed the SEND button and mashed the phone to her ear.
“Our offices are open from eight-thirty to five, Monday through Friday.”
It was Saturday. Anna jabbed 411, and, sitting crippled in the snow, made her way through the ether, into space, through a satellite and down to the National Park dispatch office. As clearly as she could, she told the dispatcher her situation. “Radio Ridley Murray,” she said. “Tell him what I told you. Tell him he needs to bring the Sked. I’ll hold.”
A scratchy muttering startled her, till she realized it was her radio, and Adam’s bleating from the bottom of the cliff. Three more times, they bleated.
“He’s not answering,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll keep trying.”
Anna closed the phone and stowed it back in her pocket. In a bit, when she was sure she had no more time, she would call Paul and say good-bye. How weird will that be, she thought, and heard her pathetic last words to her husband being replayed on the six o’clock news all over the country.
She could call Bob, tell him all was forgiven, she was in a serious smirking mood and would he come fetch her home.
That thought festered for a minute.
“Bob, you bastard, you are coming back for me,” she muttered suddenly. Action gave her hope and hope gave her courage and courage gave her the strength to lift her crippled leg and lay the damaged ankle on top of the sound ankle. Using her own body as a Sked, she inched herself backward with her good arm till she’d reached the side of the outcropping where the Greenstone descended into the trees. A dead branch provided her with twigs she could break free with one hand. Having snapped them into suitable lengths, she shoved them into her boot between the sock and the thick felt lining.
The ankle stabilized, Anna could stand. The branch that had kindly given her its twigs was as big around as her arm and no more than eight or ten feet long. A lesser branch, perpendicular to the main growth, sprouted from near the end. The whole didn’t weigh more than thirty pounds – forty, at most – yet shifting it with one hand, her weight on one leg, was a circus act that might have been amusing to an audience of sadists.
Whimpering and grinding her teeth because she couldn’t seem to stop herself, she dragged the longest, sturdiest part of the branch across the Greenstone Trail where it came into the open on the basalt ridge. Wind, carving up over the escarpment, had taken much of the snow from the rock. Where Anna laid her branch, it was scarcely six inches deep and powdery. Using the feathery end of a pine bough, she whisked the powder over the wood.
It was a lousy job. She moved with tedious slowness; her tools were crude and wielded with one weakening arm. A Boy Scout, a rank green Cub Scout, could see the branch and the attempts to cover it, if they were paying attention. Anna kept on. It was better than sitting and freezing to death, and if her Rube Goldberg, jury-rigged, half-baked plan failed, as it probably would, at least the sweat she worked up would hasten her freezing to death adventure when the time came.