She didn’t want to move. Ever. Had she not been in love with Paul, she might not have bothered turning the ignition key.
Except to the Catholic God, it wouldn’t have mattered either way.
The snowmobile was out of gas.
34
Anna did not get off the Bearcat. It would be no warmer, no more comfortable, lying in the middle of the trail, and she knew that was as far as she would get. She dug for the cell phone but it was gone, fallen from her pocket somewhere between being knocked from one rock and scraping Bob off with another.
No last, last, really last calls for the six o’clock news. No telling dispatch that if Ridley didn’t answer his fucking radio, he should be shot on sight.
Bob might be dead, might be too injured to walk or he might be coming after her. Mayhem paraded through her mind: making a Molotov cocktail with her water bottle and the gasoline from the fuel tank, tipping the Cat over and using it as a bulwark for throwing rocks – or snowballs – peeling the decorative chrome-colored stripping from the chassis and planting the sharp metal strips beneath the snow.
As the engine cooled and she listened to the pings and clicks of metal assuming new shapes, her brain cooled with it. Thoughts of attack turned to thoughts of retreat, of crawling to a snowbank, sweeping her drag tracks out with a branch and burrowing deep into a personal igloo, of working the skis free of the snowmobile and fashioning a sled that would carry her downhill.
She listened past the pings, listened up the hill through the fog of snow. Bob wasn’t moving. Had he been, she would have heard him. He had no stealth, only strength.
Cold, a living thing, a being as bodiless as gas, as all-pervasive as air, as cunning at finding every crevice and pore as water, insinuated itself past the fur around her hood, trickling beneath her sweat-drenched hair, then filtered through her fleece collar to slip an icy hand around her neck. Squirming like rats, it squeezed into her pockets and under the cuffs of the parka, up the legs of her ski pants and down into her boots. Winter’s teeth gnawed on the flesh of her feet and tore at her chin and nose.
To take her mind off her troubles, she imagined the rats chewing up Bob Menechinn. Then she imagined the rats dead from consuming the poisons in his psyche.
After a while, the teeth weren’t teeth anymore, the rats weren’t rats. Winter had gone soft, touching her with kittens’ paws, claws sheathed. A hearth fire started in her stomach and warmth radiated out as the soft pad of winter crept inward. Freezing to death was supposed to be a very nice way to die. But, then, she’d heard that about drowning and that had been a bust.
Not the drowning itself, she thought, mildly surprised that she could think philosophical thoughts while seated on a snowmobile. It was the not drowning that was so miserable, the choking and vomiting and scraping and coughing. Still, that first suck of water into the lungs had to be hard. Certainly the last few seconds before the first suck would be tough. There’d be that impulse to fight, to not breathe in.
Freezing to death had it all over drowning. Winter didn’t want you to fight; she wanted you to curl down snug and warm in her bosom and die.
What a bitch, Anna thought. I’d rather drown.
Moving so slowly molasses would have beaten her in an uphill heat, she pulled up the leg Menechinn had attacked with the wrench and dragged it to the downhill side of the Cat. The key was still in the ignition. Having the sled stolen wasn’t one of her worst fears. She tried to pull it out, but her frozen fingers couldn’t execute the complex movements required. She cannibalized her right hand for its gear and put the glove clumsily backward on the five Popsicles she had, until the race downhill, considered her “good” hand. With the still-mobile fingers of her right hand, she teased the key out and managed to thread it into the lock between her knees below the seat. Maneuvering till she got her butt off the vinyl, she turned the key and the seat popped up. In the small storage space beneath was a plastic tarp, two flares, an old first-aid kit, the kind she used to carry in her backpack, and an army blanket.
Winter outfitters had lightweight high-tech blankets that salvaged body heat and harvested the heat of the sun with the efficiency of a Dune Freman’s stillsuit. The Park Service had an army blanket. Anna wrapped it around her shoulders and lifted out the rest of the cache. The flares and first-aid kit she shoved into her jacket on top of the rude sling of a half-zipped coat. Working one-handed and moving her feet as little as possible, she put one edge of the tarp beneath her boots, then shook it like a bedsheet. The fold of the material billowed four or five feet away from her knees.
In the short time since Bob had bludgeoned it, her damaged ankle had swollen. This was good. The swelling filled the boot, and the makeshift splint of twigs became more rigid. Anna found she could stand and even walk a 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.