Dark Winter (35 page)

"That's sweet. I'll remember that."

"So let me kiss you again."

"No." She held out her hand to pull him up. "Come on, Enzyme. We've started over, and we'll see how things go. Doctor Bob sent us for a reason."

"Dang." He looked wistfully at the mattress.

"People store stuff upstairs. Oddball stuff that they've smuggled down and then don't want to bother taking back. Musical instruments, obsolete stereos, leftover hobby kits, ancient laptops, even a Foosball set. Our mission is to bring back something fun."

"Even if it's other people's stuff?"

"It becomes our stuff when we sign on, like an inheritance. We share it."

"Like Santa Claus?"

"Maybe we're anti-Claus, since we're at the South Pole. Gathering data is fine, but we've got to have something more at the end of the day, right? That's what our shrink said. Bring it back to the others. Become The Waltons. Or Little House on the Prairie."

"Oh, yuck." He looked around. "Instead of hauling stuff out of the attic, maybe we should just have a party out here. Not a scientific instrument in sight."

"It's too small to fit everybody and we need everybody right now. We need to lighten up the galley."

"I've still got a hangover from the last party." He looked at a ladder that led to a trapdoor and shook his head. It reminded him uncomfortably of the entrance to the underground base. "It's got to be freezing cold up there, Abby. Let's pass for now and just go back to what we were doing."

"No. We'll never get to it." She stood. "I'll go first." She marched to the ladder and pushed up on the trapdoor, letting it fall over and bang down with a thud on the plywood floor above. Light from below gave a pillar of pale upward illumination but the room, jammed with junk, was mostly shadow. "I need a flashlight."

"You're letting in the cold," Lewis grumbled, feeling the draft. He went to his parka to get a light.

Abby glanced around as he fetched it, letting her eyes adjust. It was fun, like peeking into Santa's workshop. There were boxes, a guitar case, an improbable single-speed bicycle. Old skis and snowshoes, skates and a runner sled. What could they bring back for the others? There was a trombone: That might be fun. In one corner something white and shapeless hung like an old dress, moving slightly in the column of warm air that was wafting up from below. Next was a broken Universal gym, a driving wood, an unstrung racket… It was bitterly cold in the unheated upper floor, a deep freeze as effective as a time capsule. Frost spotted the boxes but there was no rust, no decay. It was too dry.

Then Abby realized what she'd seen.

Shadows can confuse the mind's eye. Sometimes one sees what isn't there. Sometimes one misses what is. Her head was turning back, her brain reassembling the patterns even as Lewis handed up the flashlight. It was with growing dread that she suddenly swung back to that white form in the corner.

It had feet.

She turned the flashlight beam on and jerked so violently she almost dropped it. Then screamed, "Oh my God!"

"What, what?" Lewis shouted from below. He was climbing up next to her, trying to get past her.

Her blood was a roar in her ears, her vision dazed. She forced herself to play the light across what was hanging there. The body was ghost-white, all right, the head tilted, the tongue purple, everything waxy and elongated and sad.

"Abby, what the hell…"

"It isn't over."

"What isn't over?"

"The bad stuff." She forced herself to look, sickened. The toes were small and pointed down, like the broken wings of a bird.

Jammed in next to her, Lewis took the flashlight and aimed it. The face that stared back at him had been made hideous by strangulation, completely transformed by a cruel death. A naked and forlorn Gabriella Reid hung limply from a ceiling crossbeam, turning slowly in the current of warmer air.

"Ah, Jesus."

He finally forced his way past Abby and stepped up onto the floor. The body was frozen by now, a noose around its neck. He approached it cautiously. Suicide?

No, of course not. There was a sign around her neck. He played the light across it, reading block letters that had been cut and pasted from a magazine like a ransom note:

I Go for Help By the time I topped the cliff the visibility on the mountain was down to a hundred yards. I could no longer hear the wailing of the kids on the ledge, which was a considerable relief, and instead the only sound was the stutter of my clothing as the wind blew over the saddle. The ripple of fabric was welcoming, reminding me that I was alive. Alive! And off that damned wall! Because I'd acted for myself.

Snow was falling heavily, which meant avalanches were likely sometime soon. I had to get over the hump and down the glacier as quickly as possible. I had to get a rescue team back up to the rest of the class before it was too late. I had to refine my story. So I untied the rope and put it in my pack. It would raise too many questions to abandon it and answer some if I could point to its frayed break. You have to understand that I no longer had any means to haul up the others. I had no choice but to walk out on my own.

I had to hurry. The storm was getting worse.

I made good time. Freedom! Without a team of blundering neophytes in harness I felt release. I was tired but electrified with adrenaline, my thighs chugging like pistons and my torso warm from their burn. I made the crest of the saddle in near-whiteout conditions, acutely aware that it would be easy to repeat the blunder of Fat Boy and go down the slope in the wrong direction. But I'd been up the main route several times and I felt an uncanny sense of direction. Maybe I was being directed! Maybe all of this was fate! Maybe Fat Boy was some kind of agent of my own destiny! Or maybe I was simply the victim of blind bad luck, saved from hideous misfortune by my own skill and fortitude. Maybe- and this is what I really felt, as I stood on the shoulder of that white volcano with snow swirling around me- I had been granted a revelation, an understanding of how the universe really operates. All is cruelty, except whatever you can draw from yourself. There's nothing Outside, no angel of mercy. The goal of life, its test, its meaning, is survival itself- and survival is a lonely thing, harsh, merciless, and the direction of any herd of sheep is set by the few individuals who recognize this cold reality and set a sensible direction. Most people are carried, the victims of mass delusion. The visionaries carry them. And if some lambs are lost along the way… well, it's no loss, is it? It weeds and strengthens the remainder. What had just occurred on Wallace Wall was an act of natural selection. I was its evolved product.

I chose my direction and prepared to glissade. It was as if I could see through the snow, so certain was I of my direction. I'd never felt so powerful! I sat on the steep slope, my ice ax ready as a brake, and began to butt-skid down the mountain, flashing down in seconds the elevation it had taken us long painful minutes to slog up only hours before. I was exhilarated. Ecstatic! I was alive, forged in the fire, and newly capable of seeing through the bullshit of existence. I was reborn, really. Born again, as they say! I felt the breath of an uncaring, implacable divinity as I careened down the glacier, the breath of a monster I had bested, snow stinging my face like a joyous shower, and I dropped through the clouds until I popped out of their lower reaches and could see a good mile or more down the glacier, the smudge of the first dark trees far below me. I'd escaped the dark god.

The glacial slope began to bottom out and my easy ride came to an end. I stood, a bit unsteady from the emotion of the last hours, and began to walk. Our tracks were gone, erased by the new snow, but I swear I could have found my way in an unfamiliar cavern. It was as if I could see through the fog. I'd been purged of fear and doubt. I had direction! I got off the ice and removed my crampons, descended down the snowy moraine to the tree line, and then into the trees to the cabin where we'd spent those few hours of uneasy rest before the midnight climb. The walking was gray and ghostly under the trees, quieter away from the wind, and in the stillness I began to imagine shapes behind the shrouded firs as if someone were watching me. No one was, of course. Still I hurried, mindful of those kids stuck up on the ledge. Mindful of how this must all play out.

I got to the university van, found the key where its magnet case stuck it to a wheel well, and unlocked the frozen door. My pack inside, the scraper out, my mittened hands brushing the snow from the windows. I climbed onto the cold vinyl, pumped the accelerator, got the engine to turn over, and waited a few minutes while the vehicle warmed. As I sat there it occurred to me I might need tire chains in the storm and rooted in the back until I found them and began putting them on. The engine exhaust was choking me and so I had to stop to shut the van off again and then went back to the chains. I wasn't very practiced and I was cold and tired and had to take a moment for a candy bar and some water, so it took me a while. I checked my watch: forty-seven minutes. There might be questions about things like that later on, so it was smart to know. I couldn't be too precise, however, or I'd sound too calculated. Then I started the van again, put it in gear, and began driving down the mountain. The snow was slippery and deep and I had to go slow at first. Being all alone, I couldn't risk going into a tree!

At the junction with the main Forest Service road the snow was turning to wet slush and mud and the chains were clanking. I stopped the van and took them off. Eleven minutes. I hurried. I hurried! Smeared myself with mud, making me look like I'd crawled through the trenches. And then back in the van and down toward the main highway…

They asked me later about a cell phone but it went over in Fleming's pack. I had to get down to a telephone.

Astonishingly, it was only nine in the morning. With the storm and season, there was no mountain traffic. I had the roads to myself until I got down to the Mountain Highway. The first telephone I could find was at Beedle's Store, which wasn't even open. The phone was in a weather hood but otherwise open, wet, and cold, and I remember the chill of its plastic and metal as I dialed 911 to report what had happened. I have no idea what I sounded like except that a dispatcher reported afterward that I sounded like hell. Kind of numb, she said. Shell-shocked. Incoherent. Still, I conveyed the emergency. The tragedy! The plan was to meet the assembling search and rescue team at the Forest Service headquarters eight miles down the road. I drove there and was welcomed with alarm and concern.

What followed was long and grim. I was too exhausted to go back up the mountain but I knew the terrain well enough to pinpoint to the experts where the rest of the class was. I explained the fall of the other two instructors, my decision to climb out alone to get help, our heroic efforts to rescue Fat Boy, and so on. I neglected to mention the fall of the other two kids. I was distraught, anxious, demanding, all the things I imagined I was supposed to be. It took until noon to get a team assembled, another hour to get them to the trailhead, another hour up to the cabin, and still the snow was falling. I made it to the cabin with them before collapsing. They went on up themselves, trudging up the glacier, but stopped at four P.M. as they neared the cirque below the saddle and heard avalanches rumbling in the clouds like the crack and thunder of artillery. One slide came down out of the mist and erased the tracks where they'd just been. It was getting dark and still snowing heavily and if they pushed on they'd risk an even greater disaster. Prudently, they retreated.

When they came back down I refused to leave the cabin for the comfort of a room down below. Those were my kids! Those were my kids! I would spend a second night.

The storm blew through during the dark hours and when the rasping trees began to hush I finally fell into what I pretended was a troubled sleep. They left me alone. The rescuers started up again at dawn and a helicopter was launched at the same time.

I sat up and managed to get down some coffee. Everyone was somber. Hope was slim. Two reporters hiked up to us as we waited and I haltingly went over the story again, how Fleming had let Fat Boy wander off in the wrong direction and we'd done our best to rescue him and I'd been left to go for help. I covered for the other two instructors as best I could, giving them the benefit of the doubt, mourning their loss, but the resulting stories painted me in a pretty sympathetic light. By God, I'd done my best! I was haggard with sorrow. Distraught. Exhausted.

The helicopter report came in an hour later.

Avalanches were still spilling down Wallace Wall, rinsing it clean. The pilots orbited the area for miles in all directions.

The ledge was empty. Fat Boy and all the others were gone.

The winter-overs gathered in the galley like a convocation of the damned, their faces revealing the underbelly of the human psyche. Dread. Anger. Suspicion. Depression. Their illusions about escape had been buried with Gabriella's body, her snowy grave marked by another bleak cross of black plastic pipe. It was months before the winter was over, and already everyone looked like toast. Several staff members had come in carrying makeshift weapons: lengths of pipe, knives, an improbable hickory-handled hatchet brought down for some long-forgotten purpose. Pulaski arrived with a six-foot length of galvanized water pipe that he'd sawed off at a sharp angle to make the point of a spear. In a society with no guarantee of safety, people were arming themselves as best they could.

Robert Norse had looked the night before like a faith-shaken priest, his shell of infectious confidence cracked by the discovery of Gabriella's body. The news of her death left him haggard, his eyes sunken, and he'd refused to help take down the forlorn corpse. "I can't deal with the rest if I have to do that," he'd said, his voice hollow at the news of her death. "I have to function. One of us has to function." So the dead woman had been laid to rest with no ceremony, her cross the fourth in a row, the gravediggers chilled and spooked and anxious to finish the task and get back inside to the light and warmth of the dome. Whoever had hanged Gabriella might be lurking somewhere out there in the dark of the plateau, waiting for the next one to pick off.