High Country- Pigeon 12 (26 page)

A waltz rhythm kept time in her head. Not a classic waltz, but one she and Zach had danced to, the Rock and Roll Waltz: one, two, three-rock; one, two, three-roll. It was in this strange auto-induced trance that she came down out of the granite-polished high country into the gentler wooded slopes where the Illilouette ceased to tumble and fall and ran placidly beneath a skin of ice. It was four thirty-five in the morning. The six-cell flashlight she'd stolen from Mark was beginning to fade. She was three miles from Mono Meadows and her rental car and, with luck, codeine or Percocet or some other kindly obliviating painkiller.

Trees closed overhead. Anna could smell the closeness of the pine. Under this cover her crunching footfalls were muffled, less alarming. The trail bed was of needles, not rocks, and her ankle wasn't viciously jarred by a misstep every few feet. She moved faster.

As she was thinking she would make it out and was considering allowing herself the distraction of a small dream of a hot bath and a hot cup of tea, the white circle of light that led her brought a horror up from the ground with a suddenness that made her scream.

One smashed, but still attached, eye cried down a cheek as ashen gray as dirty snow. The other eye was red and weeping, swollen nearly closed. Floating on the darkness-the body that it supported invisible in black down and dark-blue denim-was Mark's face. He'd been sitting, waiting, like the spider that possessed him. Knowing she must come.

As the light hit him and Anna screamed, he roared to life. A gloved fist rose from his lap, the pistol clutched in it. Anna clicked off the flashlight and stumbled off trail into the black of the swallowing night. Bellowing, he crashed after. Shots were fired. None found her. As blind as he, she ran, fell, rose, ran again, struck a tree and reeled to one side. The flashlight was lost. Direction was lost. She could as easily run to him as away. It was over after all. He would catch her. The noise of her passage could not be masked.

She had but a twenty-foot lead. Forcing down the need to flee and keep on fleeing though the exercise was doomed from the onset, she stopped, became absolutely still.

For perhaps half a minute he bashed on, coming straight toward her. The urge to run was so strong it was a tangible thing, pulling at her heart and lungs. She didn't move. He veered, crashed, cursed. He was moving away from her now. She prayed he'd gone mad.

Then the crashing stopped. Heavy breathing rasped at her ears as if he were but inches away. Cold magnified sound. A minute more and the rasping ceased. Darkness froze over the mountains, a solid thing with no chinks or breaks. It pressed against Anna, clung to her eyelids, soaked into her clothes. She breathed it in and felt her blood turn black.

She waited.

He waited.

The waiting built, an unvoiced scream, until Anna wanted to clap or laugh or stomp just to end things. She didn't.

Mark broke before she did.

"It'll be light in half an hour. I'll kill you then."

His voice was gravelly, the throat dry and raw from his night's exertions. Weariness robbed the words of drama and made them more frightening; not a threat, a mere statement of fact.

Half an hour. Anna didn't dare look at her watch, but she figured he was right. Maybe even less than that. He didn't need the full light of day to see her. A slight graying in the east, enough to separate trees from the overcast sky, would be sufficient.

Probably she had a little over a quarter of an hour to live. She wondered if she should be thinking of anything in particular, maybe sending out a spam of last-minute prayers for forgiveness to assorted deities, making mental good-byes to loved ones, savoring her last moments, seeing her life flash before her eyes.

It was too dark for the last item on her list. Even inside her skull it was night.

No other thoughts coalesced till unto her awareness came a spectral voice.

"Come and take it."

She never heard anyone say that. She'd seen it crudely stitched on a homemade flag by the women of Gonzales, Texas, a tiny town on the Texas-Mexico border. Santa Anna was marching north with two thousand men. Orders came before him. All settlements were to turn over their weaponry. The town of Gonzales had one cannon and no shot. The townspeople loaded it with scrap, wheeled it to the edge of the settlement, draped it with the embroidered flag and stood their ground.

They were, of course, slaughtered, but the flag had made Anna cry.

Mark would have to take her.

Working as quickly and quietly as she could, she slipped the ruined pack off and pulled out the sleeping bag. The sound of fabric slithering out was as of a hundred snakes loosed on the snow.

"I hear you."

Anna kept working.

"What are you doing?"

She said nothing. She could hear him as well, tentatively feeling his way toward her. Mercifully the sleeping bag was still unzipped. Awkwardly she spread it in front of the tree she kept at her back.

Crunch. Shuffle. "Fuck." He was closer now. How close, she couldn't tell.

Groping in the near-empty pack she took out the last remaining items in her improvised arsenal, the camp stove and matches. Cold had numbed her hands, and she had to pull off her gloves to unscrew the cap from the stove's tiny fuel tank.

A slap of a branch. Another curse. He couldn't be more than a few yards away, homing in on the noise from her machinations.

The cap was off. The stove slipped from her frozen fingers and fell. No matter. By feel she found it and emptied what had not already spilled over the sleeping bag. That done, she straightened, put her back to the tree, faced into the darkness and said: "Come and take me."

CHAPTER 15

Anna used the noise of his approach to cover the sounds she made moving behind the tree. Ignoring the pain pumping up her leg, she scraped the side of her boot hard against the bark, making as much racket as she could.

When she stopped, there was silence. Mark was waiting. She didn't know where. But she could see something; above her was the faintest lightening. Just a hint of day. Enough to differentiate black of pine from sky. To see her was to shoot her. Soon it would be over.

With all her strength she hurled the empty stove straight up, then covered her head with her arms. The metal made a satisfying disturbance, crashing into the boughs and loosing a cascade of snow. A thump let her know it had come again to earth nearby.

"You some kind of damn polecat?"

The voice was so close Anna jerked like a trout on a line, but she made no sound. Had the pine not been between them they would have been face to face. The evil that had called forth its namesake from within her and stalked her dreams as she lay in her hollow log poured forth into the darkness, a palpable miasma that sickened Anna body and soul. Her knees shook, her stomach heaved, her head ached and swam. From the other side of her tree she could hear the whispering of Mark's feet, wrapped in layers of fleece and wool, as he shifted them over the sleeping bag at the tree's base.

Soon. A few seconds more, she told herself. Having him so fiendishly close made the back of her neck tight and loosened her bowels.

"You're some kind of fucking she-devil. You can forget whatever you're planning. I'm not climbing the goddamn tree."

Four shots rang out, one after the other. Anna flinched as if the bullets had hit her. Snow cascaded down her collar. The deafening reports were disorienting. She touched the bole of the tree that she might know up from down.

She could wait no longer. Hoping osmosis had done its thing, she knelt, leaned around the tree and struck a match. It flared to robust life. She blessed the quality control people at Blue Diamond.

"What the-"

Anna touched the match to the gas-soaked sleeping bag.

Night was swept away on a voracious orange wind. The sleeping bag didn't so much catch fire as explode with a suddenness that sucked the air in at ground level and blew the flames upward. From what seemed an eternity of black, light blasted forth. Anna's eyes hurt with it and at the same time drank in the incredible blessing of sight. It was a glory simply to see color, shape and form.

This visceral celebration lasted only an instant. Then Mark began to scream. For a while-it seemed a long time but couldn't have been more than a few seconds-Anna was transfixed.

Evil became manifest in a Dantean vision. A creature in flames, face monstrous, feet outsized, danced and capered in orange and blue fire.

The creature was a man. And Anna had burned him alive.

Reality was worse than a visionary hell. Staggering, she pushed into the remaining dark. The macabre beacon from behind lit her way with singular clarity for the first fifty feet, then, like the screaming, died.

Maybe Mark had saved himself, dropped to the ground and rolled. Maybe the fire had consumed the available fuel in record time.

A rule from her wildland firefighter's training clicked on in her brain and she had the compassion to hope Mark was wearing cotton underwear. Other fibers had a nasty way of melting into burned flesh. Anna wanted him gone-dead even-but torture was not part of the plan. It moved her too close to the spidery force that had helped her to gouge out his eye.

Just as if somebody's world had not ended, the sun began to rise. A difference was born between earth and sky. She could see enough to move between the trees. She pushed in the direction where she remembered the trail was.

Anna woke in a hospital bed. Twice she'd awakened in like situations. Much as she loathed hospitals, it was a happier ending to her adventure than she'd foreseen, and she had the grace to be grateful. Sun poured in the window, real, gold, honest-to-God, bright sunlight splashing in a distorted square across her knees and feet. Having been so long in gray and black, Anna felt like rolling in the stuff. She might have done so had an IV needle not been taped into her arm. Out the window, she could see roof-tops, branches of winter-bare trees and dusty green live oaks. She was in Merced.

Bits of memory led her to this moment: tumbling out of her rental car into the parking lot of the Yosemite Valley Medical Clinic. A woman ranger, the same one who'd given her a lift to the Ahwahnee dorm the night Nicky had been assaulted, sitting beside her in the back of an ambulance saying: "Don't worry, you're not dying. The doctor gave you a sedative." A nurse in funny pink scrubs with blotches of baby blue and yellow on them clucking. "My Lord, what have you been up to?"

Anna pushed herself into a sitting position. The use of her hands gave her a jolt and she looked at them. The right had a loose gauze wrap and the tips of three fingers on the left were bandaged. Fire flashed behind her eyes and she saw again the explosion of flame. Her hand had been engulfed for a moment. The left brought forth no images. A touch of frostbite maybe. She pulled at the tape and unwound the dressing. Not bad. Blisters on the heel of her hand over an area about the size of a half-dollar. Painful, but it would heal quickly and leave no scars.

There was no memory of other injuries but for her ankle. She threw back the covers to assess the damage. The move elicited an unladylike grunt. Muscles ached and flesh was bruised till she felt twice her age. Her foot and calf were swathed in an Ace bandage, her toes, looking pathetic and young, peeped out the end. Assorted scratches and scrapes accessorized her bruise collection, but no one had seen fit to bandage or splint any other portion of her anatomy.

Her greatest sufferings at the moment were from lightheadedness and hunger. The lightheadedness convinced her not to go scavenge. She had had her fill of falling down for one lifetime. Once one's center of gravity grew more than twenty-four inches from the ground, these gravitational visits became jarring. A clock on a metal bed stand said it was two-thirty. Way past lunch and far too long till dinner. Anna pushed the nurses' call button. Unless there was some injury she wasn't aware of-a concussion that left no headache or a mysterious fever-she'd been here for less than twenty-four hours.