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.
“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.
“Robin, you must be about frozen to death,” he said and, curling himself around the biotech, he led her into the bunkhouse.
“Tell Robin to stay away from Bob.” Katherine had said that the day before she died. Anna wondered if ghosts felt jealousy.
Or if the warning had nothing to do with affairs of the heart.