Absolute Zero (35 page)

But then Earl held up his hand in a less hostile, moderating gesture. Allen came up from a crouch, balanced on his toes, with bandages and tape in his left hand; the haft of the slender stainless steel knife rested out of sight, just above his right palm. He steadied his eyes on the red skin just below the notch of Earl’s sternum.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Earl said, his eyes swelling.

“What?” Allen asked.

“The scotch. It was right there,” Earl pointed to the desk next to the fireplace. His face was pained.

“So?”

Earl shook his head. “Aw, Christ,
Jolene
? What a time to fall off the fucking wagon.”

There was this sleep-ocean
and he was sinking to the bottom, down in the dark where he bumped into fish without eyes, who were blind dreams.

The whiskey on his tongue tasted like cold kerosene. Dingleberries of frozen blood stuck to strands of his hair. Then, a dream with eyes swallowed him and he was surrounded by an empty playhouse where he was the only one in the audience, while up on the stage a cast went through the wooden motions.

And, ah shit, man, I’ve seen this one before.

Amy, Jolene, poor Hank blinking, Popeye the ostrich, and Earl Garf emerging out of the shadows with his hand upraised.

A bad play. Not quite real life. Real life came down to a question of altitude. Vaguely, Broker understood that he’d spent the last two years on his knees in a world that was three feet high.

No real life without kids in it.

No way.

Poor Amy. Poor Jolene. No kids.

Tried to live in their play. Fun for a while. Flirting. Sex. Some rough stuff.

But not real life. Uh-uh.

Real life was the sound of his daughter’s voice; and the way it worked, just when you thought you were going to get a good night’s sleep—every time . . .

Daddy, I need you
, said three-year-old Kit.

Broker thought she might be calling out to him from the other side of the world.

And he just had to get up.

Broker unglued his eyes
in a fit of uncontrollable trembling and wondered how the hell he got hair in his mouth, with clumps of frozen blood on it. His hair was too short . . .

Okay. So it was a nightmare, after all. A nightmare in which a flap of his scalp had ripped off and dangled down the side of his face, and that’s how the hair got in his mouth.

And now he made out the faint twinkle of stars, but they were inches away, right in front of his eyes, and that had to be a bad sign. They should be up higher, over the black horizon with the other stars and the sickle moon behind the spidery branches of the trees.

With an extra-deep shudder he saw what an empty witch-tit woods it was; bleak enough to give a druid insomnia. Then he saw he was surrounded by shattered glass and the pulpwood log that had almost taken his head off projected through the windshield. Some twinkles of this glass fell from his hair, and he saw it was the worst kind of nightmare.

Your basic North Woods nightmare about freezing to death in a car wreck on the coldest night in history.

A tiny voice way down at the base of his brain hissed:
Move, dummy.

Right.

He lurched against the seat belt, raised his hands, and found them frozen. Well, not quite; but definitely unresponsive. The individual fingers did not work and had joined together into a mittenlike flipper. His thumb refused to move. He raised his right hand and slammed it palm up against the steering wheel and felt excruciating, shark-bite pain. Good. Still some circulation left.

He moved the hand to the seat-belt buckle and . . . nothing happened. The opposed thumb, which separated him from other mammals, was no longer an option. He had a paw. In a few more minutes it would turn into a hoof.

He tried to picture Earl and the sequence of events that delivered him here, and immediately rejected the notion as a waste of time and heat. All he knew was now: shock, head wound bleeding, probably broken ribs, whiplash. And the biggie—hypothermia.

He was minutes—less—from passing out for good.

It was up to the lizard to save the human.

All he had was reflexes.

And a few old Indian tricks.

If somebody’s going to kill me in the woods, give me a city-boy mouse-clicker every time.

Earl, you fucking dummy, you should have checked my truck. Broker shoved his petrified right hand into the back and levered up the rear-seat backrest. His numb fingers pawed on the stock of the Mossberg twelve-gauge that he’d loaded and prepositioned within easy reach, because—always go with your gut—he was worried about Earl.

He herded, perhaps paddled, the shotgun forward and pawed it across his lap. Then he reached back, hooked a strap of the survival pack on his thumb, and yanked it out. Panting jerky clouds of breath, he pawed the bag to his chest and used his teeth to open the snap, fumbled inside, and found the haft of a Buck sheath knife. Using both palms and his teeth, he tore the knife from the scabbard. Then, with the knife awkwardly positioned between two hands frozen in an attitude of prayer, he sawed though the seat belt.

Faintly in the slender moonlight, he saw blood on the blade. Didn’t feel the slash he put in his thigh.

Onward.

Tipping sideways, Broker fell through the open driver’s-side door holding the knife, the shotgun, and the bag in his cramped arms, and crunched down on the icy ground. His insides milled around, confused; having fallen, he found it impossible to get up.

So here’s the deal, which his dad had beat into him, and the Airborne sergeants at Benning had refined:
After
you die,
then
you get to quit.

Yeah. Yeah. Broker lurched up on elbows, blundered to his knees, and fumbled in the pack. There was a heavy fleece sweater, mittens, a space blanket; but he was too far gone for that. What he needed was . . . a flare.

He held the beautiful red cardboard tube between his palms—sulfur, wax, sawdust, potassium chlorate—and strontium nitrate for its own internal oxidation. This fucker would burn at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit underwater.

Yes.

Urgent now, he left the flare with the shotgun and lurched forward on his knees because his feet wouldn’t work, his ankles ended in wooden blocks. He’d adjusted to horror as normal working conditions for this night, so he didn’t waste time being surprised when he saw that Earl had exchanged his warm boots for running shoes.

He tottered on his knees and fell against the crumpled front fender of the Jeep where one headlight still burned weakly. Thus illuminated, he knee-crawled past the pile of pulpwood logs to where the loggers had heaped the pile of slash.

He filled his arms with branches and knee-crawled back and heaved the thicker branches under the gas tank. Going back and forth in this fashion, his head was briefly occupied with warm hallucinations from his childhood. Hot chocolate. Toasted marshmallows.

Now he moved to the front of the Jeep and kneed and elbowed himself up between the stack of logs and the crumpled hood. Clamping his forearms and elbows, he hauled at the pulpwood. One by one, he yanked the tiers of logs forward, piled them on the hood and through the shattered windshield.

He rolled over, fell off the Jeep, and, as he studied his makeshift pyre, he entertained more childhood memories. “To Build a Fire,” one of the first stories he’d ever read, by Jack London. Except that guy fucked up.

Not me.

His knees buckled and he toppled over and crawled on his belly, a crab shape shifting to a snake. He wormed his way to the pack.

Holding the flare and the shotgun between his palms, he kneed his way back to the pile of wood under the gas tank. It was too dark to read the instructions printed on the flare, but he knew they said, among other things: always point fuse away from face and body while igniting

Just have to ignore that little bit of advice for now.

Broker couldn’t use his hands for fine gripping, so he had to clamp his teeth on the strip of black tape on the side of the flare and yank it to expose the cap. Then, carefully, he bit down on the metal cap and pulled it off.

To ignite the torch he had to strike the friction surface on the top of the cap against the fuse end he’d uncovered. But right now, the friction surface was between his teeth, pointing down his throat. When he used his knuckles and his teeth to revolve it around so it faced out, the cap promptly froze tight to his lips and tongue.

But it was generally in the right direction.

Immediately, he gripped the flare between his palms and struck it like a fat red match across the cap in his mouth. The sulfurous whoosh charred his cheek and shot a fiery spout in the night. Broker dropped the flare in the wood under the gas tank, thrashed the frozen cap from his lips, and scuttled back with the shotgun.

Cradling the Mossberg in his elbows, he crawled away from the flames sputtering under the Jeep—six feet, seven, eight. Enough.

The flare might do the trick by itself. But the wood was really cold and the gas tank far away from the flame. He didn’t have the time to wait and find out. So he rolled over, pawed the safety latch, and set the gun to fire.

Squirming now, he came around with the shotgun still cradled in one elbow and jammed his blunt fingers into the trigger guard.

All his life he’d lectured people about not riding around with loaded guns in their cars. And because he was basically a lizard right now, his memory was faulty. Had he jacked a round in the chamber in J.T.’s Quonset hut? Because if he didn’t, there was no way, with these hands, he could work the slide and load one now.

Broker aimed the muzzle at the gas tank and poked at the trigger.

The gun kicked back and out of his elbow. But a streak of flame shot from the barrel and tore into the under side of the Jeep. For a split second the muzzle flash illuminated the piled logs and brush. A gasoline mist curtsied with the flare’s chemistry. Then the gas tank erupted.

The explosion filled the woods with fire, rolled Broker over, popped his eardrums, and blistered his face.

He came up grinning.

Now
that’s
how you build a fire, Jack.

But it was way too toasty, so he scrambled away from the blaze that now reached up twenty feet into the air, snapping and sparking through overhead birch branches.

He was in agony, of course, smashed between freezing and roasting. He might lose fingers and toes. But he was back in the game. He thanked the lizard, proceeded up his brain stem, and tried to marshal conscious thought.

Earl. Somehow followed them.

If Earl did this then Amy and Jolene were in danger.

And Hank.

These thoughts, though dire, grabbed no traction on his shivering. More immediately he struggled to stand and tried to stamp circulation back into his feet. He managed one pirouette in front of the bonfire and toppled over. The blood in his hands and feet had turned to broken glass and needles.

Getting up, he noticed the reflection of the flames glitter beyond the trees. Lake ice.

And then Broker saw more lights appear across the lake. Squares of electric lights popping on. Windows.

Stamping, falling, getting up, he hugged himself and tried to flex blood back into his stinging fingers. Using his teeth, he managed to pull on woolen mittens from his pack. After working up the courage to explore the gash on his scalp, he pulled off a mitten and touched his fingers to his face. Nothing. Feeling ended at his wrists. He licked at the numbness next to his mouth and tasted blood Popsicles. Burnt steak from the flare.

His concern for Amy, Jolene, and Hank was still relative and dreamy, far removed from the local question of his own survival.

Then, a pair of lights beyond the trees caught his attention. They moved with purpose, slowly getting larger. A vehicle. But was it attracted by the fire?

Broker stamped and staggered and fell down and got up and waited as the headlights poked and lurched through the woods and materialized in the form of a Ford pickup. He hobbled to it as the driver got out and peered at him. They recognized each other.

It was Billie’s neighbor, Annie Lunder, which meant that Earl hadn’t hauled him very far from the lodge. In her late sixties, swaddled in wool and fleece, Annie had not changed one bit and was still edgy and mean as a doubled-bladed axe. She and his Uncle Billie had fallen out of love and hated each other since the Korean War—something about a property-line dispute and Billie marrying her sister, Aunt Marcy, now departed.

Annie winced, seeing his torn face in the firelight. “Philip Broker, you feral child; I swear you were raised by wolves. Look at you out here in tennis shoes in this weather. And playing with matches. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn down my woods?”

“Phone,” Broker croaked. “Life and death.”

“What’s that?” she squinted, cupping one gloved hand to the side of her hat.

“Nine one one. Billie’s lodge.”

She had grabbed Hank’s
legs and hauled him unceremoniously off the daybed, through the kitchen, and bumping down the hall into the bedroom. She positioned him with a pillow at his back, tilted against a closet door so he could clearly see her go to Amy on the bed.

“Okay, get a good look. Now you can be happy because we’re all going to die when they get back.” Jolene yanked the IV from Amy’s hand. Christ, his eyes were rolling again. She didn’t even know if he saw it.

Then, not even rolling. Shut. He now lay on the floor truly looking like a corpse. A few feet above him, Amy nodded on the bed, her breathing shallow and labored. A single tendril of blood marked her left wrist where the IV had been inserted. The plastic stent now dangled along her shoulder.

Jolene stood at bay, between them.

She held the scotch bottle in one hand and a shotgun she’d found in the bedroom closet in the other. Except the goddamn gun wasn’t loaded because she couldn’t find any goddamn shells for it. And the room was a shambles from her desperate search.

Fucking gun safety for you.

And looking for those shells may have been a fatal diversion, because she’d neglected to get her cell phone from the living room, and there was no phone in the bedroom and now they were in the house. She’d heard the glass break at the backdoor and heard the shuffle of their footsteps and their voices. Then she saw the doorknob twist. And the voices moved on, into the main room where they’d discover she had moved Hank.

Then they would be back.

Okay, she had to do it.

She raised the bottle, took a drink, and the whiskey surged in her throat, teared in her eyes, and caused her to cough. She set the bottle down on the floor and studied the door which was secured only by an old-fashioned hand slip lock. She picked up a straight-backed chair from next to the dresser and stockaded it at an angle, the backrest wedged under the knob. That would stop Earl for maybe half a second.

There was the window. Nothing but thermal glass and storms. She didn’t see them trying to break in through the window on a night like this.

“Okay, now what?” she said to Hank’s prone form. He’d apparently passed out from fatigue, so he wasn’t even there to witness her one big moment.

“Just like a fucking man, build me all up and then—pfsst—go limp on me.”

He’d never explained how there were no rules for this hero stuff; you kind of made it up as you went along. Being scared shitless was the main thrill so far.

She appreciated the irony; how she had quit drinking to change her life. Now she was drinking to get the courage to really change it.

No, she was drinking because Earl would understand the behavior under stress. And when she drank she always went to him for help. God, if only there was a phone in here.

Get . . . them . . . fight
.

“Okay, baby,” she said under her breath. “I’m working on it.”

It meant she’d have to open the door enough to show the gun and let Earl smell her breath. Oh, Christ. It all came down to that. Here we go. Bottom of the ninth, two outs and two strikes, and one pitch to decide the World Series.

She reached for the Johnny Walker and took another slug, a big one that flooded her with warmth. And the footsteps were coming back down the hall, no longer cautious shuffling, striding. Angry.

A fist pounded the door.

Earl.

All her adult life she’d had to anticipate and avoid Earl’s anger. She had never manipulated it. Now it was the only way out of this mess.

“Jolene, goddammit, I know you’re in there.”

Earl. Real mad but, judging by his voice, trying to control it.

Good.

She put down the bottle and wracked the slide on the shotgun like they do in the movies because it sounds cool except, Earl always said, if you’re in the shit it’s kind of dumb not to have one in the chamber already and telegraph your position.

Silence after the mechanism. Like they heard.

Jolene blurted, “Earl, I got a gun in here. A shotgun was in the closet. I’ve been thinking, and no way I’m coming out if Allen is there.” The slight slur and wavering control in her voice was real, not faked. Thank you, Johnny Walker.

“Open the door,” Earl said.

“I don’t trust him and the more you’re around him I don’t trust you,” she shouted.

“Open the door, now!”

Jolene took a deep breath, removed the chair, shoved the lock latch, and cracked the door.

The big .45 came
up smoothly at the full extension of Earl’s right arm so the business end of the barrel made a cool circle against Allen’s forehead.

Under his breath, Earl said, “Sorry, but you got to go along until I get her calmed down. Jolene management is an art I have spent a lifetime acquiring.”

Allen stared at the door, at the sounds of the chair moving, the latch freeing up. He was not reassured. They were getting tricky on him. They were deviating from his plan, and now there was the wild card of Jolene’s drinking on the play.

The door opened an inch, just enough to see one of Jolene’s eyes over the huge tube of a shotgun that poked out at them. The sour musk of alcohol was unmistakable on her breath.

“Okay, Jolene, see?” Earl wagged the pistol in Allen’s face.

“I’ll only talk to you if we’re alone,” Jolene said.

Allen spoke up. “Jolene, put down the gun. Where’s Hank?”

“Shut up,” hissed Earl.

Jolene’s voice was quick to capitalize on the edge of anger and frustration in Earl’s: “Don’t you see what he’s doing?”

The pistol pressed against his forehead was a steel tether that held Allen motionless. The shotgun sticking out the door was pointed at his chest. They were ganging up on him. Allen felt a rivulet of nervous sweat streak down between the scalpel handle and the hollow of his right wrist.

So this is what it’s like to be a patient. This was street surgery. He was on their level, which was the level of desperation and anger and drunken decision-making. He had lost control of the situation and was smack at the bottom of the behavioral ladder with the two classic caveman options: he could try to run or he could fight. Not fight conceptually, like with the Fentanyl. This time it was fight with his hands.

“Earl, honey,” Jolene blurted. “I was so worried when you went off with him that you wouldn’t come back.” Her voice teetered on an alcohol crutch and was beautifully nuanced with fear, need, and tiny tugs of long-dormant affection.

“You and me,” Earl said.

“There it is,” Jolene said.

“For Christ’s sake, you two,” Allen’s voice cracked with distress.

The hammer on the big Colt clicked back. “Hands on your head. Now slowly turn around.” As Allen turned, the pistol left his forehead and returned as an insistent prod at the base of his neck. “Outside, Allen. Move,” Earl ordered.

This numbing awkwardness must be shock, thought Allen. In disbelief, he raised his hands carefully, so as not to dislodge the scalpel. “I don’t get it; I came all this way to show you a way out of this mess.”

“Shut up. Now, real easy, get out your car keys.”

“My car keys?” Allen gulped, uncertain.

They were into the main room now, heading for the door. Then they were outside where the cold clamped down, solid, crushing.

“Get out your keys and open the trunk of your car,” Earl said.

Allen’s teeth chattered as hysterical laughter almost took him, because he couldn’t tell if his shaking jaw was the stammers or the temperature. He flashed on the image of his car in long-term parking at the St. Paul Minneapolis International Airport. A ripe smell would seep from the trunk around spring thaw.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Allen said.

Earl’s reasonable tone was at odds with the impossible temperature, with his misshaped posture and attire, bare-chested in the heavy coat, the humped sling.

“Allen, listen carefully. She’s got a gun and she’s boozed up. And she’s got Hank in there. She won’t come out as long as you’re walking around free. So I’m going to tuck you away for a while, disarm her, talk her down, and get us all back on the same page. We still need you to fix his eyes, right?”

“Why do I have to get in the trunk?” Allen protested.

“What would you prefer? More fresh air? How about I nail you to a fucking tree. C’mon—get in the trunk.”

Allen stared at his car. He was certain that if he climbed into that trunk he would never get out alive. His eyes darted left and right. There was enough moonlight to make out a lattice of birch trees against the star-blistered sky. A dull glare of ice glimmered on the lake. A few feet away were bristles of frost-coated, weathered white planks. A sturdy boat dock extended twenty yards into the lake.

But the boat dock led nowhere. There was no place to run. Earl had the gun.

Carefully he lowered his right hand to his right jacket pocket and began to work out his key ring. As he did he let the handle of the scalpel slide down into his palm.

Allen had only a second to decide. He pulled out the keys, letting them jingle; then as he thumbed through the keys, searching for the right one, he fumbled, then dropped the key ring.

For a beat Earl’s eyes followed the keys. Then he said, “How come you don’t have your gloves on?”

In that fraction of a second, Allen let the scalpel drop from his sleeve. His fingers caught the familiar curved handle, twirled the knife, and, in one smooth decisive movement, he wheeled and struck upward at the notch where Earl’s ribs joined over his diaphragm.

* * *

The moment that Earl
marched Allen away from the door, Jolene slipped out of the room and shadowed them down the hall. As they went out the front door she tore through the main room, going through drawers, checking shelves, looking for a box of shotgun shells.

Nothing.

So this was making amends to people we have harmed.

With an empty shotgun. Right.

And all she had was part of the truth to go with. Even if it damned her. She grabbed at the phone on the desk, which was hard-wired so the emergency dispatcher could trace the call. Strangely, as she punched in the numbers, she was not thinking of Amy, or Hank, or Broker out there in the dark; she was thinking of that poor, dumbass NoDak store clerk.

“Nine one one,” the operator said. “Is this a life-and-death situation?”

“They’re going to kill us next,” Jolene shouted.

“Who’s trying to kill you?”

“One of them’s a doctor. He gave the nurse an overdose of narcotics to make it look like suicide, and the guy who lives here—he drugged him and put him out in the cold to die. He’s in a red Jeep. An old one. Please send me some help.”

“Calm down, where are you now? What kind of narcotics?”

“Uncle Billie’s on Lake One outside of Ely.” Jolene held up the empty glass ampule. She wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, so she sounded it out: “Fentanel, I think it says. Goddammit, hurry; we need cops and an ambulance.”

The gunshot rearranged the flimsy architecture of her resolve and she screamed, “They’re shooting.”

Jolene dropped the phone, seized the shotgun like a club, and yanked open the door. There were witnesses and there were witnesses and, goddammit, it was time to pick and choose.

The problem was that
when Allen spun to strike, so did Earl.

“Hey,” Earl shouted, irritated. Swatting at Allen’s face with the big pistol. He did not see the tiny wafer of the world’s sharpest steel streak up.

But Allen was not used to sticking scalpels into moving targets. He attempted to adjust the angle of his thrust to compensate for Earl’s sidestep. Earl grunted when the blade went in.

Shit.

Allen could tell by the tension on the tip that he’d missed the heart and hit the sternum and tangled into muscle.

Then the Colt exploded right in front of his face. Not aimed; reflex on the trigger.

Blam! And the cold shattered with the explosion because Allen’s ears stung and needles of cordite pincushioned his nose and cheeks.

Blood was all over, slippery black, coursing over his hand, steaming and freezing on his face. He must have nicked an artery. Reassured, he withdrew the knife. Earl staggered back, his knees wobbling, but he swung the gun.

Allen ducked, dodged, and sprinted to the dock, the only way open to him. His hope was that Earl couldn’t manage to turn, aim, and stay on his feet. And he was right, because Earl toppled over, falling heavily on his broken arm.

As Earl bellowed in pain, Allen’s shoes pounded a creaky tattoo down the frosted decking. Left and right, moonlight reflected on glassy planes of ice. Would it hold him? Skim across that ice, double back to shore, hide in the trees until Earl lost consciousness.

Blam!

Ha. Missed.

The second time, Allen didn’t hear the shot; he felt it rip into the back hollow of his left knee and tear out the side of the kneecap. In an air pocket of shock, he could clearly visualize the shattered bone, tendon, and torn muscle. Then the icy planks rushed up and smashed his face. He rolled over and saw Earl trying to get up. But Earl was so far away and Allen lost the sound. Time and space elongated. He didn’t know how long he coiled there, watching Earl rise in slow stages like a drunken elephant.

But finally, Earl did stagger to his feet and lumber forward, waving the pistol uncertainly in front of him.

Then a glare of headlights blinded Earl and threw his shadow huge against the trees. Somewhere in that glaring light, Allen heard Earl shout, “Fucker, you cut me.”

Allen giggled. Shock and now hysteria. Earl had fallen down again.
Bleed out, bleed out.
He marveled at the anesthetic virtues of physical shock; he felt no pain yet. So he scrambled crablike on two arms and one leg down the icy dock.

The lights went out. People were yelling. The dock planks shook under oncoming, trudging footsteps that were overtaking him.

“Okay, you,” Earl suddenly loomed over Allen, blocking out the stars. Somewhere in that black mass Earl was pointing the pistol.

Allen kicked frantically with his good leg, hooking one of Earl’s unsteady feet, and the gunshot jerked away. As Earl lost his balance, Allen kicked wildly again and slashed up with the scalpel, drove it into Earl’s inner thigh and butchered through denim and muscle for the femoral artery.