Snowblind (10 page)

The wolf will not wait. It must be fed. Its hunger calls me through the wind. I call it back in my father's name. He gave me the taste for flesh, he gave me the power. I knew my mother's scent in the dark, I drank her blood like water. Women are weak, and the weak are taken first. They lie all night naked, without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. They offer themselves to me. They will not withhold their flesh from the hungry. Their flesh is soft and warm with blood. I will take their flesh in my teeth, and put their life in my hand.

The wind carries their scent like the breath of God. By the breath of God they will perish.

*  *  *

Andrea and the girls slept on the floor of the cabin; none had been willing to take the trapper's fusty bed. They lay like worms in their sleeping bags, curled by the radiant heat of the stove. Shadows loomed over them on the timber walls, and the wind wailed and whispered through their fitful sleep like the intonation of a dream.

Out of the dream came a scrambling rat.

Andrea awoke abruptly. She had heard it, or dreamed it — she couldn't be sure. She raised her head and listened.

The wind whistled, and the wood crackled in the stove. No sound of scampering feet came to her ears. She peered into the darkness around her, searching the floor for a glimpse of the creature. She saw nothing. But something else struck her — the smell. The stench from the cellar had seeped up through the wood floor, suffusing the musty cabin with the effluvium of death.

A sense of uneasiness crept over her, an anxiety that drove out any thought of sleep.

Andrea's leather boots stood upright on the floor beside the stove. She reached into the left one, pulled out her wristwatch, and held it in the dimmed light of the lantern.

11:46 P.M. She'd been asleep for barely an hour.

She wiggled out of her bag, opened the metal door to the stove, and slipped in three more sticks of cordwood. Then she pulled on her boots.

Erin stirred. "Mom?"

"Go back to sleep, honey."

"What time is it?"

"It's almost midnight."

They were whispering. Kris was still asleep.

"Where are you going?" asked Erin.

"I'm going out to the Cherokee to see if I can get a radio report." Andrea put on her parka.

"Mom — the ranger said to stay inside."

"He said to stay close to the cabin. I'm just going to the car. Now go back to sleep." Andrea pulled on her gloves, raised her hood over her blonde head. Erin was watching her. "I'll be back in five minutes," Andrea told her.

She picked up the lantern and stepped to the door. When she opened it, a brisk blast of wind swept into the room. At the threshold, the snow had blown into a three-foot drift. Andrea stepped out over it and quickly pulled the door shut behind her.

The Cherokee was parked twenty yards down the hill on the edge of the road. She could barely see it in the swirling snow. Andrea stepped off the porch and made her way down through the deep powder one step at a time, her boots plunging in nearly to her knees. The wind lashed her face and grabbed at the lantern. Andrea continued her descent until she reached the road. Then she stopped dead in her tracks.

There were fresh prints in the snow.

Andrea raised her lantern. The light revealed a track of huge footprints, crossing perpendicular to her own, diagonally across the road. It was impossible for her to tell which direction they were headed, but they were definitely human, probably made within the last half hour.

She followed them toward the woods. She tried to step in the prints with her boots, but the spread was too far between the plunging holes. At the edge of the trees, she held up her lamp and peered into the dark snow-laden forest.

"Hello!" she called, "Is someone there?" Her voice tore off in the wind. "Curly?" she shouted.

She heard no reply, and after a moment, turned back. She followed the footsteps up to the road, then followed them in the other direction. They brought her directly to the Cherokee, which lay buried in a deep drift of snow. The footprints made a half-circle around the vehicle, then appeared to head up the hill past the cabin. Andrea walked a ways up the hill. She called into the wind, "Is anybody there?"

She waited, then shouted, "Ranger Tom!"

She heard nothing.

Suddenly she remembered the weather report, and headed back to the Jeep. It was close to midnight; she hoped she'd be able to pick up something from the airwaves.

The Cherokee was a mountain of snow in the dark. Andrea poked her way through, pulled open the snow-caked door, and climbed inside, setting the lantern on the seat beside her.

She was in a cave of snow. The windows were covered with a thick layer of powder, and the space in the car felt cramped and close. Andrea's foggy breath filled the air and clung to the windows. She fished the keys out of her pocket and turned on the ignition. The engine, deadened with the bitter cold, took a moment before it finally turned over. Then it idled fast and loud, cold air blowing hard from the vents. Andrea flipped off the heater; it would take a while before the engine was hot enough to deliver warm air.

When she pulled on the headlight switch, the blanket of snow on the windshield glowed bright, and the dash lights came up. She punched the power button for the radio. Static blurted out of the speakers. Andrea began searching the digital tuner, and found only one station that came in anywhere near audible range. It was playing an acid rock song, something loud and abrasive she remembered Erin blasting in her room at home. She recalled the band's name: "Razorblade Suitcase." Music to warm a mother's heart. She turned down the volume. Hoping this was the last song before the top of the hour, Andrea sat back in the seat to wait, staring at the windshield's crystalline glow.

She thought about the footprints. Who would have come — and not stopped? Who would be out in this blizzard at night? The ranger had said there were no other cabins around for miles. If Curly had returned, why hadn't he come to the door?

The snowy windshield suddenly darkened, then lightened again.

Andrea's heart leapt into her throat. Had someone passed through the headlights?

She turned on the windshield wipers. The blades plowed heavily through the thick white powder, gradually clearing a view. Andrea leaned forward, wiped the fog from the windshield. She peered out at the road, dimly illuminated by the snow-covered headlights.

There was no one there.

A sudden shimmer of panic swept over her. Instinctively, she pounded the locks shut on the doors. She looked around her at the blanketed windows. She could see nothing.

The rock band blared on the radio. She shut it off. Then she turned the key, shut off the car, and listened.

The silence filled with the anxious sound of her own breathing. A blast of wind rocked the Jeep. Andrea jerked around, checked the windows. They were blanks.

Then she heard a sound — behind her. The crunch of snow. Andrea wheeled around in her seat, scanned the windows on her side of the car. White blanks.

Then her window darkened.

Andrea gasped, pushed herself back from the door.

The shadow remained on the window.

"...Curly?" she stammered.

The dark form shifted. The doorknob rattled.

"No!" shouted Andrea. She backed across the seat, knocking the lantern to the floor. The flame went out.

Andrea stared at the driver's side window. She could no longer see the blurry form. Out the foggy, snow-dusted windshield, she could barely make out the ghostly white road in the headlights. She sat pressed against the passenger door, scanning the windows across from her, frozen with fear.

She did not see the snow fall away from the window behind her. She did not see the eyes that appeared in the glass. She heard only the sound of her own fevered breathing, and the howl of the wind as it swept down the road.

Josh crossed the airport parking lot toward the control tower, its high luminous windows like a lighthouse through the blowing snow. He hoped Dean Stanton would still be there, and that Stanton would let him in. The old man knew Josh because he knew Josh's father, an aircraft salesman from Fairbanks, now retired in Seattle. Josh had learned to fly a single-engine Cessna 206 when he was just a kid; too young, according to Stanton — but not by his father's reckoning. "If you grow up in Alaska, you should learn to fly before you learn to walk," his father had insisted.

Stanton, then a regional inspector for the FAA, had always suspected that Josh's father — along with his father's brother, the wily Uncle Mark — sold used planes that didn't pass muster. He was wrong, of course. If Josh's father was anything he was a stickler for safety. But the reams of federal paperwork sometimes went by the wayside. Josh crossed his fingers, hoping the old man had forgotten old times.

A big gray-haired man in an open sport coat with a badge on his belt stood at the ground-level entrance to the tower, his arms crossed over his barrel chest. As Josh approached, two camouflage-painted National Guard trucks suddenly rumbled across the lot, pulled up and stopped in front of the man. A full platoon of combat-equipped troops spilled out the back of the trucks, their rifles at the ready. A young officer stepped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saluted the man with the badge.

"Lieutenant Walbourne reporting for duty, sir."

The big man started to salute him back, then reached out awkwardly to shake his hand instead. "Lieutenant, my name's Adashek, I'm the Chief of Police." He seemed a bit overwhelmed by the forces massing around him. "Uh... Bring your men and... follow me, Lieutenant." He turned and headed inside, nodding to the Inuit security guard standing at the door. The Lieutenant and his troops fell in behind him.

Josh had been watching from behind the trucks. This looked like as good a chance as he'd get. He pulled off his red headband and straightened the collar on his khaki jacket. As the troops filed in, he squeezed his way in among them, trying to look as official as he could.

Apparently, it wasn't official enough. The security guard was eyeing him.

"Uh, excuse me — Sir?"

Josh continued walking past. "Marino, Chief of Operations," he called back over his shoulder, throwing the man a half salute.

The guard looked like he smelled a rotten fish. "Operations?" he said aloud. But Josh was gone, and the troops continued filing by.

*  *  *

As he followed the Guardsmen into the layered haze of the air traffic control room, Josh heard a familiar voice.

"The governor ordered them in?" Dean Stanton had been taken by surprise.

"That's right," Adashek told him. "Top priority from the man himself."

"You've got to be kidding!"

The Chief glanced at the men behind him. "Does it look like I'm kidding?"

Staring in amazement at the assembling troops, Stanton dropped his cigarette on the floor and crushed it out. The other air traffic controllers gathered behind him.

"Just what is it you're planning to do, Chief?" asked Stanton.

Adashek turned to his officer. "Lieutenant — how soon can your men be ready to fly?"

Lieutenant Walbourne stepped forward. "We've got four choppers fueling as we speak, sir. We can be in the air in less than twenty-five minutes."

"Over my dead body!" said Stanton.

The Chief bristled. "I gotta take control of this situation, Dean. The governor's given me direct authority—"

"For your information, neither you nor the governor has any authority here," said Stanton. "This isn't a state facility. It's under Federal jurisdiction. And until I say so, no National Guard helicopters are flying out of this airport. Not tonight or any other night. Not until I say it's safe to do so."

"Now you wait just a minute, Dean. We got ourselves a homicidal maniac on the loose out there. A man that's killed at least twelve people we know of. How many more you want see him slaughter before this storm is through?"

"This airport is closed," Stanton said. "Now get these men out of here!"

"Wait a minute!" Josh said, pushing his way through the troops. He stumbled out and stood beside the Chief. "You gotta let us out there, Mr. Stanton—"

"Marino? How the hell did
you
get up here?"

"I uhh—"

"Don't tell me — you joined the National Guard." Stanton barked at the controllers behind him, "Will somebody please get Security up here,
now!"

"Wait — please," Josh pleaded. "Mr. Stanton, I've got friends up there, they're stranded near that mountain. A woman and her daughter and... and a friend of mine — she's blind and... they're lost up there in that storm. They could be in serious danger, sir."

Adashek and Katukan stared at Josh.

"He's right," said the doctor.

Adashek eyed Josh grimly. "We got a report a couple hours ago from a forest ranger up at Caribou. Says he found three women holed up in a trapper's cabin, waiting out the storm."

"Were they all right?" Josh asked.

"Yes. But the ranger..." He turned, looked at Stanton. "The ranger hasn't been heard from since."

Stanton glared hard at the Chief. Then he looked at Marino, and Katukan, and the battalion of soldiers massed in front of him.

"All right," he said. "Now listen up, all of you. You're not the only ones worried about what's going on out there. I've got a pilot went down six hours ago in that storm. His name's Jake O'Donnell, and he's been one hell of a friend of mine for twenty-two years.

"Jake was delivering Christmas presents when the Chief here asked if he could do him a little favor. Well he did the favor, and now Jake O'Donnell and his copilot are probably freezing to death out there. Believe me, there's nobody in this room wants to get a search plane to that mountain any more than I do. But I'm telling you, it won't do any good if we lose a rescue party, too. You can't fly in a storm like this without somebody gets killed, and that's not something I want on my head."

Stanton looked directly at the Chief. "When my radar screen says the weather's clear enough to go — that's when you'll go, not a minute sooner."

Adashek stared back at him a long moment. Then he looked at Katukan, and turned to the Lieutenant.

"Looks like there'll be a delay, Lieutenant. Maybe Dr. Katukan here can give you and your men a briefing while we wait." The Chief looked at Josh. "We'll try to get to your friends as soon as we can, son."

"I'm a pilot myself," Josh said. "I'd like to go out with them, if I can."

Adashek looked at Dean Stanton. "I guess that's up to Mr. Stanton here. Him and the Federal government, that is."

The Chief turned and walked out of the room.