Winter Study

Gingerly she eased the throttle open. The engine revved, but the machine didn’t move. She rotated it farther back; the skis broke loose and the snowmobile lurched, nearly unseating her. Then she was on the flat and moving slowly. Bob still lay across the downed trunk, his bare head on the snow.

Maybe he was dead. The thought cheered her as she maneuvered the heavy Bearcat in an awkward circle on the cliff top. A chore that was a moment’s work to the able-bodied took A

By the time she got herself pointed back in the right direction, Bob Menechi

The side of his face was a mask of blood and snow. His arms hung at his sides, the huge hands clublike. His eyes were almost lost in the flesh of his face, but the heat and hatred in them bored through the masking beef until they took up most of the space in the world. Moving with the creaking strength of rusted iron, he staggered into the middle of the trail.

A

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” A

Then she was moving. The Greenstone took her. She was going to make it.

Without warning, the Bearcat slued to the left, the engine crying like a dying calf, as Bob grabbed onto the back, his weight forcing it to the left into the trees. A

Vision blurred. Black trunks snapped at her face, white strobed till she couldn’t tell where movement left off and hysteria began. Her injured arm fell from where she’d zipped it in a makeshift sling in the front of her parka and the dislocated shoulder tore at the muscles. She started screaming – or kept screaming – her noise melded with that of the laboring engine.

The trail switched back on itself in a hairpin turn, and A

The snowmobile slowed.

Then it stopped. For a long moment, A

She didn’t want to move. Ever. Had she not been in love with Paul, she might not have bothered turning the ignition key.

Except to the Catholic God, it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

The snowmobile was out of gas.

34

A

No last, last, really last calls for the six o’clock news. No telling dispatch that if Ridley didn’t answer his fucking radio, he should be shot on sight.

Bob might be dead, might be too injured to walk or he might be coming after her. Mayhem paraded through her mind: making a Molotov cocktail with her water bottle and the gasoline from the fuel tank, tipping the Cat over and using it as a bulwark for throwing rocks – or snowballs – peeling the decorative chrome-colored stripping from the chassis and planting the sharp metal strips beneath the snow.

As the engine cooled and she listened to the pings and clicks of metal assuming new shapes, her brain cooled with it. Thoughts of attack turned to thoughts of retreat, of crawling to a snowbank, sweeping her drag tracks out with a branch and burrowing deep into a personal igloo, of working the skis free of the snowmobile and fashioning a sled that would carry her downhill.

She listened past the pings, listened up the hill through the fog of snow. Bob wasn’t moving. Had he been, she would have heard him. He had no stealth, only strength.

Cold, a living thing, a being as bodiless as gas, as all-pervasive as air, as cu

To take her mind off her troubles, she imagined the rats chewing up Bob Menechi

After a while, the teeth weren’t teeth anymore, the rats weren’t rats. Winter had gone soft, touching her with kittens’ paws, claws sheathed. A hearth fire started in her stomach and warmth radiated out as the soft pad of winter crept inward. Freezing to death was supposed to be a very nice way to die. But, then, she’d heard that about drowning and that had been a bust.

Not the drowning itself, she thought, mildly surprised that she could think philosophical thoughts while seated on a snowmobile. It was the not drowning that was so miserable, the choking and vomiting and scraping and coughing. Still, that first suck of water into the lungs had to be hard. Certainly the last few seconds before the first suck would be tough. There’d be that impulse to fight, to not breathe in.

Freezing to death had it all over drowning. Winter didn’t want you to fight; she wanted you to curl down snug and warm in her bosom and die.

What a bitch, A

Moving so slowly molasses would have beaten her in an uphill heat, she pulled up the leg Menechi