Winter Study (58 page)

To
Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been
meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair
and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your
face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so
obvious.

Expert.

Lord!
You’re a whore, Menechinn, a prostitute; you screw whoever hands you a
dollar. This time, Homeland Security; next time… well, anybody with a
buck and a quarter. You’re not even a good whore. You can’t get it up
personally or professionally. You’re a limp dick.

“Your
raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not
there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t

literally

kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You

literally

do
nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chinned fat fuck, you’re
going to have to do it personally, because, unless you do, I won’t die.

“I. Won’t. Die.”

That
was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was
possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was
a damning and disdainful manner, she settled the last of her strength
in her wrists and waited.

Through
the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her
future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his
face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the
melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.

She
realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and
his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark,
but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three
mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet Anna couldn’t
have reported the color with any more accuracy than that. They were the
color of old water moccasins, the thick, unpretty snakes that took on
the greenish brown shades of the muddy water of the Mississippi ditches
where they thrived. Like the moccasin’s eyes, Menechinn’s had a
flatness. In the snake, Anna knew it to be myopia and dullness of mind.
In Menechinn, she wasn’t sure what it indicated but doubted it boded
well for her continued good health.

Time
wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and Anna
watched Menechinn’s face for a moment, then an hour, then a heartbeat.
She waited for the look of sly craftiness to take it the way it had
before he’d gone into a berserker rage and stomped the life out of the
National Park Service’s tarp. She waited for it to grow still and
raw-beef red as it had when he’d walked over to slap her on the cliff
top. She waited for the gleam of joy and triumph to come into his eyes
as it had when he hefted the wrench to smash her ankle.

She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.

Bob
Menechinn’s face crumpled and tears squeezed from the corners of his
eyes. They froze before they’d traveled halfway down his face. His jaws
yawned wide, rows of teeth bleached too white by the dentist’s art
appearing false in the black of his mouth. He ducked his head and
brought his forearms up to hide his face like a child ashamed of its
tears but too broken to keep them from falling. Maybe he had regressed
to a childhood state, when he’d been abused. Maybe he’d had a psychotic
break and thought Anna was his dead puppy, Spot or Toughie or whatever.

A
better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as Anna was
concerned, whatever hell he was going through was way too good for him.

Then
he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed
through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her.
Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by
surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an
avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high
school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.

Anna
went over like a stone, Bob’s weight pinning her knees to her chest,
her hands trapped between thighs and breasts. Air gusted from her lungs
and she couldn’t get it back. Bob’s hands scrabbled at her head, trying
to work under the layers to her throat to strangle her. Hot blood or
snot or spittle hit her face. Moans and grunts, expelled on breath like
sulfur, burned her nostrils. Like a trapped animal, Anna howled. Then
she bit. Catching his nose between her teeth, she clamped down and hung
on. Bob roared and thrashed, his fists pummeling her head. But for the
hood, she would have been knocked senseless. Salty liquid filled her
mouth, streamed down her throat, but she didn’t unlock her jaws. With a
jerk, Bob freed himself. A chunk of his nose was still in her mouth.
She spit it into his face. He reared back and her knees were free; her
hands were free.

The
flares were still clutched in her fingers. Striking one against the
other, she heard the hiss of red fire and pushed them up into Bob’s
gut. The down of his coat took the flames, then he screamed high and
wild as the fire cut into his body. Anna pushed them deeper. He rolled
away, pawing at his middle. Then he was up and running. Crazed with the
fire in his belly, he crashed into the trunk of a tree several yards
away, then fell. Screams turned to cries and cries turned to silence.
Finally the only sound was the hissing of the flares, ships’ flares
designed to burn underwater, under blood and flesh.

The
smell of it sickened her. For a long time, she lay where she was,
curled up like a sow bug, the taste of Bob Menechinn in her mouth and
her mind. It was hard to remember why she lay like this, where she was
and who she had killed. Presumably killed. Her eyes drifted closed and
she began to fall. Through the rush of the canyon walls flashing by in
her brain, she heard a growl. Bob had come to his feet, a human torch;
he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, fire streaming from his
hands.

With
a lurch that triggered the pain in her shoulder, Anna came awake. Bob
was where he had fallen. She’d gone to sleep. If she fell asleep again,
she would freeze to death. More out of the habit of surviving than a
force of will, she bunched her legs under her and, using the tree
trunk, climbed to her feet.

Menechinn
was dead. There’d be no last-minute rising from the jaws of death to
make one last stand for the final scene. “Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna
muttered. He lay on his side, his hands hidden in the melted, blackened
ruin of his coat where they’d clawed at the fire consuming his insides.
The front and back of his parka were tarry messes of bodily fluids and
goose down and synthetic fabric.

For
a while, Anna stayed, looking at the wreck that had been, at least
nominally, human. The sight of the damage she’d done didn’t please or
displease her. It had taken time and pain to hobble the few yards to
where he’d finally collapsed, and she hadn’t the energy to move away.
She spit and spit again, not from disrespect — once one killed a man,
there was little point in lesser forms of malice — she wanted the taste
of him out of her mouth.

She
also wanted his coat to keep herself warm, but hadn’t the strength to
wrestle the garment off the body. Much of it would be melted to his
skin. Its value wasn’t worth the calories it would take to harvest it.
A story she’d read when she was a teenager flitted into her mind. To
keep from freezing to death in a blizzard, a man had killed his horse,
cut it open and crawled inside.

“Gross!”
she said. She left coat and corpse unmolested. His radio had been
melted, the leather case burned away, the buttons a mass of plastic
still hot to the touch. Anna made her way painfully back to the
Bearcat. Beyond hurting or thinking or much caring, she rolled herself
in the army blanket, then the blue plastic tarp, leaned back against
the snowmobile and let the winter coalesce around her.

36

“I told you not to breathe into your sleeping bag.”

Robin’s
voice drifted into Anna’s cloudy brain and she smiled. Her face might
not have moved, but, in her mind, she welcomed the young woman. It was
good to have her company again.

A
soft warmth crept under the bundling around Anna’s throat, and she
wondered if, unlike the depictions in literature and lore, Death did
not have a cold and bony hand but one warm and open, a kind and
relieving touch welcoming saints and sinners alike, taking away the
pain of the suffering, the cravings of the addict, the sorrow of the
bereft.

“She’s not dead.” The warmth receded, and Anna knew she’d flunked the test. Her bell wasn’t tolling. Death had not come for her.

A
new blessing came in its stead. The warmth that touched so briefly at
her throat spread over her face. “Anna, you’re not dead,” Robin’s voice
told her. “Since you’re not dead, you have to wake up or you will be
dead. Come on, wake up.”

Anna
opened her eyes. Robin’s hands were on her cheeks, her face only inches
away, so close it was hard to bring into focus. “You’re not dead
either?” Anna asked.

“Just hungover,” Robin said.

It took Anna’s cold brain a minute to put two thoughts together.

“Ketamine.”

“Yeah.
Adam freaked. He was afraid what happened to his wife was going to
happen to me. He got hold of Gavin and Gavin came and took me to
Feldtmann tower.”

“She
only looks light,” said a voice. Robin’s face moved away, and Anna saw
the speaker, a tall, slender, Byronesque man with the deep-set green
eyes of a poet offset by the square jaw of a pugilist.

“The wog,” Anna croaked.

“I am the wog,” Gavin said and smiled, a sweet blink of teeth and good nature. “Robin and me and Adam.”

“Adam’s
dead,” Anna said. The words should have meant more to her than they
did. By the shock she saw in the faces of Robin and Gavin, she knew she
had told them a horrible truth. To her, it seemed so long ago, hundreds
of years. One didn’t cry over history, didn’t break down when telling
the third-grade class that George Washington was dead, Napoleon lost at
Waterloo or Atlanta was put to the torch.

“Bob Menechinn’s dead,” Anna said, to see if the news felt any different. “I killed him.”

Robin
and Gavin did not react with shock this time, just a minute freezing of
the facial muscles. Robin put her deliciously warm hands back on Anna’s
face. “You poor thing,” she said as Gavin said:

“Did you kill Adam too?”

Anna tried to remember all those thousands of years ago. “I don’t think so,” she said finally.

“I killed Katherine,” Gavin said.

“You did not!” Robin cried.

“You thought I did.”