Winter Study (53 page)

“Damn you,” she whispered sadly.

Bob.

Presumably
he was still tripping at the foot of the tree. Rolling onto her side,
good arm beneath her taking the weight, Anna curled her legs into the
fetal position. There wasn’t as much pain as there had been; the cold
was numbing her. She’d been still too long, and an injury burned heat.
Using her elbow as a lever, she pried herself up till she was kowtowing
to the east, forehead on the ground, injured arm throbbing. For all the
motion her arm had, her right sleeve might as well have been empty. She
sat up on her heels, the bones in her shoulder and chest dragging like
knives across the soft tissues inside her body. For half a minute or
more, she could do nothing else. She hadn’t even the strength to
breathe. When breath came, it was in a cutting gust of icy air that set
her to coughing. The coughing threatened to tear her collarbone from
its damaged moorings.

Finally
the coughing wore itself out, and she took careful sips of oxygen. When
she could bear to move again, she unwound her neck scarf and laid it
over her knees. Catching up the cuff of her right sleeve with her left
hand, she lifted it, as a mother cat lifts a kitten by its scruff, and
laid it over the scarf. With her left hand and her teeth, she managed a
rough sling, and the pain lessened slightly.

“What in hell did you think you were doing?” she muttered. “Let people die. World’s overpopulated as it is. Christ.”

This
last comment was in reference to the snowmobile. In the flurry of
shared confidences, bone breaking and premature death, she’d forgotten
she’d tipped it over. Whole, healthy, she could have wrestled it back
onto its skis. In her present condition, even finding a lever big
enough to shift this part of the world was going to be a Herculean task.

Bob.

He
was still sitting, head atilt, mouth agape, a mute old hound trying to
bay at the moon. Anna attempted to lift her butt off her heels and get
one of the platypus Sorels out in front of her so she could stand. All
she managed was a rocking motion that set the nerves in her shoulder
and arm jangling. Pain was a good motivator. Death was better. If she
stayed where she was, she’d die of hypothermia. Bob would die as well,
but that wasn’t a particularly motivating factor. Her grunt of effort
turned into a shout as she forced herself up to one knee.

Her
shout roused Bob. He rolled onto all fours and swayed back and forth,
his eyes never leaving her. For an instant, she thought he was going to
charge like a grizzly, and the fear of being torn apart by teeth made
for grinding corn sent a jolt of fear through her that brought the bile
to her throat. His eyes focused, and he pulled himself to a standing
position, using the tree he’d been taking advantage of since he’d fled
the cliff’s edge. Upright, he looked no less like a grizzly and no more
like a man.

Blinking the image away, Anna tried to rise. She failed.

Bob
Menechinn walked toward her. He was unsteady on his feet, but she
thought his eyes were clearer. If Adam administered the ketamine awhile
before Anna arrived on scene, the stuff might be wearing off — or at
least wearing thin.

“Give
me a hand up, if you would, Bob,” Anna said, hoping normalcy would
beget normalcy. She stuck out her good hand. Bob reached down and
grasped it firmly. Apparently without effort, he drew her to her feet.

Anna started to thank him, but he kept right on drawing her, pulling her into his chest and belly.

“Easy,
easy, Bob,” Anna said. “Enough. Enough. Back off, God dammit.” Her face
mashed into his parka and his arm crushed her bad shoulder into him. He
held her like a lover, his other hand groping down her side, under her
arm.

Fighting
a revulsion that made the pain pale by comparison, Anna jerked a knee
toward his groin, stomped his instep and scraped his shin with the side
of her boot. It was like struggling in a dream. Thick-layered clothing
swathed them both, and she fluttered like a moth in the soft and
killing folds of a spiderweb.

His
big hands crawled over her body, pulling at her clothes. Then he
stepped back and shoved her hard in the chest. Anna landed on her rear
end so hard that, without the padding she’d just been cursing, she
would have broken her tailbone.

He
held up a rectangle of black and waggled it back and forth. He’d been
frisking her for her radio. As she watched, he carried it to the cliff
edge and threw it over.

She
didn’t ask what he was doing. She had a bad feeling; she knew. He
plucked the skis out of the snow one by one, then the poles. They
followed the radio over the escarpment.

Displaying the same ease with which he’d lifted her, Bob set the snowmobile to rights. The key was still in the ignition.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Pardon?”
Anna asked politely, hoping to get him to come closer to her. What she
would do, should she succeed, she had no idea, but there was nothing
she could do from thirty feet away, and she knew, if she could rise
again, it was going to take a while.

“You heard me,” he said. He threw a leg over the seat of the snow-mobile and reached for the ignition key.

“Yeah,” Anna said to stop him leaving. “Sure, I’m scared. What kind of an idiot wouldn’t be scared.”

He
sat back and smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing a smile uncoil as
slowly as Bob’s did. It came over the lower half of his face, then rose
to his eyes in the malicious sunrise of the day of Armageddon.

“You
and Robin thought it was pretty funny when Ridley’s pet monster was
pawing at our tent, didn’t you? Smirking like teenage cunts at a
sleepover. Let’s see you smirk now. Come on, one little smirk. What’s
the matter, ice got your tongue?”

Anna
stared at him. Adam was dead, Katherine killed, Robin missing and this
was what Bob was thinking of: that two women had seen him panic.

“Smirk,” Anna said.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” Bob said, his smile still in place.

Anna’s
legs were hurting. Soon they would stop hurting. They would be
completely numb. Then standing would be a bitch. “Okay,” she said. “I
can smirk. What’s it worth to you?”

“Maybe a ride back to the bunkhouse. Maybe nothing.”

“Deal,”
she said. “I’m only going to do it once. Get your fat ass over where
you can get a good look,” she said nastily. The insult moved him off
the machine. Anna’s left hand was shoved in her pocket. She worked it
out of its glove.

“Women
want balls now, that it? Fast-tracked into jobs you can’t handle.
Scraping babies out of your cunts because you fuck everything that
moves and don’t want to be mamas. You don’t want to wear the pants. No,
that’s not good enough for you, is it? You want to have the cock. No
more pretend. No more strapping it on and fucking your girlfriends. A
real cock. You think you can take it right off a man, don’t you?”

Bob
was working up a good head of steam. The euphoria of the cat
tranquilizer was double-edged, and the dark side was rising. He stopped
eight or ten feet from her.

Too far.

“Well, I wouldn’t take yours,” Anna said scornfully. “Size does matter.”

Bob stepped into her, almost straddling her. He grabbed her hood and jerked her head up. His fist went back.

And
Anna’s went up. Bare-knuckled and hammer-hard, she punched up into his
crotch. Her fist buried itself in cloth and soft flesh. Bob screamed
and fell, crashing down on his side, his gloved hands between his legs.
Scooping up snow, Anna flung it in his face, curled her fingers into
claws and launched herself at his eyes. Her shoulder cracked again as
she bounced into his chest, and she knew she’d broken the floating end
of the collarbone. Her vision blacked at the periphery.

Bob
backhanded her. As easily as a grown man would throw a cat off, Bob
knocked her off him. One hand still on his privates, he crawled away.
Confused by the ketamine and the sudden assault, he took a minute or
more to get his bearings. Then he stood and went back to the
snowmobile. From beneath the seat, he took out a spanner used to
tighten the tractor treads and started back to where Anna lay on her
back, holding her arm across her chest.

“Bob,
you’re not guilty of murder, but you kill me and you will be,” Anna
said rationally — or as rationally as she could from a supine position.

Maybe I should have tried the rational approach before he’d gone for the spanner,

she thought, but that was blood under the bridge now.

“I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to have an

accident.

”
He grabbed her right boot, jerked it off and pulled her sock down.
Holding the bare foot against the snow-covered rock, he smashed her
ankle bone with the wrench.

Through the haze of misery that followed, Anna heard the snow-mobile motoring down the Greenstone.

Winter was going to do Bob’s dirty work for him.

32

For
a while, there was nothing but the blinding pain and the knowledge that
she could not save herself; that she couldn’t walk out. Had the thought
of losing to an idiot like Bob not been anathema, Anna might have given
up. Instead she opened her eyes; she sat up. With her uninjured hand,
she hooked the boot Bob had jerked off and put it back on her foot. If
one was going to die, it was important to die with one’s boots on. Soon
the ankle would begin to swell. Then even the bulbous Sorel wouldn’t
fit over it.

Put ice on it,

Anna thought and almost smiled.

The
glove she’d removed, the better to bust Bob’s balls, was still in her
coat pocket. Wriggling her fingers like so many eels, she worked her
hand into it. Then she sat, exhausted by the pain, wishing she believed
in God that she might convince Him to get back into the smiting
business. Without a radio, there was no one else she could call upon.

For
what seemed an eternity, she sat in her broken bones and cooling blood
and thought about Paul. It had been so good to talk with him.

On Katherine’s satellite phone.

“Thank
you, Paul,” she said. The phone was in her pocket. She’d been carrying
the wretched thing since she’d found it. Fumbling, twice dropping it,
she got it out and again exposed her fingers to the cold. In CONTACTS,
Katherine had the number for the Park Service offices in Houghton,
Michigan. Anna pushed the SEND button and mashed the phone to her ear.