Born to Run (35 page)

With Gretel hanging off her arm and dragging her to the ground, Isabel clenched her fingers round the jagged bottle neck. She screamed a long gurgling shriek and heaved it down, straight into
Gretel’s eye socket, and twisted with all her fading might. She twisted again, but this time her own head exploded in pain, from her wounds and the memories she would rather have
forgotten.

Both fell backwards, away from each other. The wolf thudded into the snow and her head thrashed around as she convulsed, trying to cast the glass out of her eye. Isabel tripped on a rock and her
right leg twisted under her.

ANDY backed his flat-top out of his garage so he and Paul had more room to heft the snowmobile and the ATV up onto the tray. After lashing them down securely, Andy threw in the
first-aid kit and a stretcher sled and they spun off. It was ten minutes of rumbling and bumping over rocks and roots and it was only after they’d passed three
No Vehicular Access
signs that Paul spoke, lifting his voice above the racket, “Bein’ a ranger’s got some privileges, huh?”

“Gotta save my wolf, man,” Andy yelled. “Those’re my signs, anyhow. Don’t apply to me.”

Half a mile higher up, their lights flashed on a
No Vehicles. No Camping. No Fires
sign. Paul said nothing. He was monitoring the GPS and Andy thrashed the pedals, concentrating hard in
the dark, it being no mean feat trying to steer clear of ditching the truck or smashing it into the sudden succession of trees or rocks that kept materialising out of the blackness.

It took them forty minutes to reach Lambert’s Crossing which, by necessity, was the end of the line for the flat-top. By GPS calculations, they had to cover two more miles to reach Gretel,
but the pair could see the cover here was too patchy for the snowmobile. Andy hauled on the handbrake and the two men jumped out and bounced the fat-tyred ATV down onto the dirt. Andy strapped the
stretcher sled and first-aid kit to the back; they hopped on and he revved off. Paul had charge of the tracker and the battery-powered spotlight but he couldn’t grip onto Andy and operate the
two devices at the same time.

“Stop,” Paul shouted into Andy’s ear.

He screeched to a halt. “What?”

Paul needed to rearrange himself. He slipped the GPS strap around the front of Andy’s throat and over so it rested down his back and he could see it from behind. With one hand free to hold
the spotlight and one to grip Andy, Paul was set. “Go!”

THE two miles were tough. Andy’s tracker map was basic, lacking the detail of Isabel’s but at least it was working. Fifteen minutes for two miles. Bluffs and cliffs
and fallen trees blocked them. Repeatedly, they had to stop for frozen-over creeks to check for weight carry. By the time they got close to the clearing, Gretel’s heart rate was almost
flat-lining.

“Over there,” screamed Paul.

Andy wrenched the throttle forward and they flew up and into the clearing, bouncing down about ten feet from the fallen wolf, but when he slammed on the brakes, Paul almost flew over
Andy’s shoulder. He managed to grip and stay on, though the spotlight flew into a tree and sputtered out.

Unexpectedly, another flashlight beam sliced across their route to Gretel.

“What the f…,” Andy wheezed, surveying the gruesome scene. Dark—he assumed red—rivers were flowing out of both bodies. The broken neck of a bottle stuck out of one
of Gretel’s eye sockets twisting her into some rabid, R-rated cartoon character. A sickening concoction of shock and revulsion welled inside him, but loathing for the perpetrator kept it
down. He stood still, to grip himself. Out the corner of his eye he saw Paul running to check the other body, whoever the fuck the murdering bastard was, probably a poacher. To Andy, he deserved
whatever he got.

Andy lurched over to Gretel. Dribbles of her bile slobbered into the puddle under her pitiful head. Her good eye was almost opaque, the once luminous yellow-green had doused itself.

Gretel was gone. There wasn’t even a squiggle showing on his monitor; not even a misty puff of air from her lips.

Paul shouted, but Andy didn’t hear what he was saying.

“Andy, it’s some woman.”

Andy glimpsed over to see him rolling her onto her back, unzipping the top of her parka and feeling her neck for a pulse.

The loathing smouldered within Andy as he dropped, helpless, to his knees beside Gretel. Instinctively, he knew who the wolf-killer had to be.

What had that bitch fucking done? He removed his glove and stroked his wolf. The only trace of warmth left on her frosty fur was from his touch. His anger welled and he gripped his hand into a
fist and pounded it at the melt beside Gretel, but smashed it against a thinly disguised rock. Absently and without a sound, Andy lifted his hand and stared as his own blood dripped out of his
glove and mingled with Gretel’s.

“Andy, get over here,” screamed Paul. “Now!”

R
UMBLING DOWN TO Manifold on the back of the flat-top, Paul moulded himself around Isabel like a hotdog bun, his arms and legs wrapped to radiate
his body heat into the frozen woman. He and Andy, mostly he, had cleaned and patched her wounds and removed her wet clothes, replacing them with the dry gear they’d found in her backpack. Her
space blanket as well as Andy’s, and his crusty back shelf rug and sleeping bag were now swaddling the two of them, keeping the chill out from the air and the metal truck tray they were lying
on. They’d left both the snowmobile and the ATV at Lambert’s Crossing. Andy, a trained paramedic as well as a ranger, should have been the one to hop up on the back and care for Isabel
but when Paul saw the rage steaming out of his friend’s nostrils, he didn’t even suggest it.

Andy drove with the two very premature wolf cubs coddled inside a blanket on the seat next to him. With his tears streaming, he’d sliced Gretel open to save her litter. There’d been
five, but three were already gone.

When they got into phone signal range, Andy radioed ahead to alert the doctors at the county ER to scrub up for an emergency.

“Injuries…? Age…? Sex…? Name…?” grilled Emily, the triage nurse who took the call. Andy had dated her a few times.

“It’s the Speaker of the House, orright? Go fuckin’ Google her!”

Paul hugged Isabel close to him. Initially, he confused her shivering with the rough terrain Andy was bouncing the truck over and he called out to get Andy to slow down. But, once he realised,
he worked harder at stroking warmth into her. Before they took off, Andy had explained she was probably in hypothermic shock, so Paul needed to get her warm and keep talking to her, pushing her to
respond, to stay conscious. Paul spoke to her about everything and nothing, at least he tried, but his voice came out in fits and starts: whenever the truck would dip into a ditch or bounce off a
rock, it would throw the huddled pair, and his words, off-balance.

“… so T-Taylor had a heart attack and po-popped it. It was while he w-a-as reading
Dr Seu-Seuss
to some s-school kids. C-can you believe th-that?” Paul asked, not
expecting an answer.

Isabel coughed for the first time and, against his cheek, he felt an eyelash struggle to open. She whispered something Paul couldn’t make out over the bumps and rolls.
“Wha-a-at?” he asked.

She tried again. “Too l-late.” Her hand, limp, did its best to imitate a fist against his shoulder blade.

Paul misunderstood. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” Shit, he thought; she could’ve been President of the United States and here she was, thinking
she was dying in his arms… Maybe she was, he shivered, but it wasn’t just from the cold.

“T-too late,” she repeated as her eye closed.

BY 9:30 PM, protocol formally reassigned the Vice-President’s Secret Service detail to Isabel now she was officially next in line, albeit temporarily until Foster
nominated his own choice as replacement for Taylor. They worked fast and would’ve acted even quicker if they’d known where she was and in what condition, but intelligence is hardly a
perfect art, as the startling, unpredicted eruption against despots in the Middle East and North Africa proved yet again.

“She’s up at her mountain shack,” said George calmly when he took their call. “She’ll be back in Washington tomorrow afternoon.” He had also taken quite a few
calls from media, but had told them nothing, not even that.

“No coms up there, right?” asked the Special Agent.

“Coms?” asked George, worried the goon was a Cold War throwback.

“Communications, sir. Our records say there’s no phone line, no phone network or anything else up there.”

“Correct. Taylor’s death’ll be some big shock when she finds out. After all she went through last year, to find herself now—what’s the saying?—a heartbeat
away from being president…”

“Yes, sir.”

“You should phone her husband.” George wasn’t about to do it himself.

But the agent had already tried Ed’s number, and had got a voicemail message.

T
HE COUNTY HOSPITAL pulsed as the staff prepped for Isabel’s arrival. Normally not much happened around here at night, apart from occasional
heart attacks that mostly turned out to be indigestion.

Dr Tom Cisco had been at his monthly Rotarians dinner when his pager buzzed, licking his lips and inhaling the window-sill aroma of the freshly baked green apple pie being brought around by the
waiters. Even in Manifold, a deep Democrat town, the sudden death of a vice-president couldn’t get in the way of the town’s famous pie. But his pager could. Tom Cisco was on call
tonight.

“We’ll call you again when they’re closer, so you don’t need to come over till then,” the triage duty nurse offered. She knew how much the hospital’s head
surgeon looked forward to his pie.

As his slice of pie was placed in front of him, Cisco held the phone and pondered what he’d just been told. The aroma of steaming apple, cinnamon and sugar was normally heaven for him,
eliminating all other sensations, but now, all he could think about was how the more apt phrase would be the
hypocritic
oath, what with him being a committed liberal and now apparently
charged with saving the life of the new, and Republican, second in line.

But then he recalled his med school buddy Joe Giordano’s story. When President Ronald Reagan was shot, he was lying on Joe’s operating table, and he looked up at him and quipped,
“
I hope you
’
re a Republican
…” Joe, a Democrat like Cisco, famously answered, “
Today, Mr President, we
’
re all Republicans.”

The nurse crackled into the phone. “Dr Cisco, hell-o-o-o?”

“I’m coming in now,” Cisco said and hung up. For a patient like this, when the nation’s eyes would be on him, even pie would have to wait, but he took a long deep sniff
of it before he left. Then a forkful.

Two, in fact.

DR Cisco was already scrubbing up when Andy’s tyres squealed into the emergency bay. The night crew knew that their initial task, in addition to staunching the blood
loss, would be to get Isabel’s temperature up. The first check had her well below normal but a touch above the danger marker for severe hypothermia.

“Paul… Andy,” smiled the nurse, “you guys may have saved her life.”

Andy shrugged as if he didn’t care, which was not far from the truth. All he wanted to do was get Gretel’s two pups to the vet. Paul was already on the phone to his wife, telling her
the astonishing story.

As Isabel’s gurney was wheeled inside, she drowsed in and out of consciousness. “Wha…s that?” she asked weakly, pointing to the warmed tube a nurse was inserting into a
vein in her hand as they rolled down the corridor. She couldn’t make out a name on the badge. Everything was too blurry.

“It’s a heated drip, ma’am,” the nurse responded, “to get your temperature up.”

Isabel’s attention focused momentarily on the second nurse, shooting the air and a stream of liquid out of a syringe, and her brow furrowed.

“And this is a pain killer,” the nurse said.

Isabel tensed. “I need… phone… now. Must phone…”

“You’ve lost a lot of blood, ma’am,” said the nurse, still wielding the syringe, “and you’re hypothermic. We’ve got to get you warmed up before we take
you into theatre. The doctors are already scrubbed and waiting.” She peeled back a ripped piece of Isabel’s parka and tried to swab her shoulder but Isabel struggled, and pushed herself
back in the gurney as far as she could, her face twisting with the excruciating pain. She yanked the drip out of her vein and knocked the syringe to the floor, the needle scraping across her hand.
The orderly wheeling the cart pulled to a sudden halt.