“That’s twice.” It was Kincaid from his place along a far wall between
two mumbly denture-suckers who served as the prison house guards.
The old doctor turned his seamed face first left and then right,
searching the dark corners of the old stable, lifting his chin like a
bloodhound straining to catch a scent. “I felt it,” he said, looking back
at the two old guards. “What about you?”
Neither answered. Now, if Greg or Pru or Aidan and his minions
hadn’t been around, they might have said something. But maybe not.
Having decided that a doctor was too valuable to Ban or execute, the
Council had made Kincaid into a ghost, an untouchable to be avoided
unless absolutely necessary.
“Shut up, you old douche bag,” Lucian said, the silver fob of a
tongue stud ticking against his teeth. Scabs beetled Lucian’s patchy,
moth-eaten scalp. Greg wondered if maybe one of these days, the
kid’s hand would slip while he shaved his head and instead slice open
a carotid or jugular and do them all a favor. “I didn’t feel anything,”
Lucian said. “I didn’t
hear
anything neither. Probably just this guy
bouncing around, or the music.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Kincaid transferred his eyes to Greg. Well
. . .
eye.
The left. The right was gone. A bit of Aidan’s handiwork.
Greg thought Kincaid didn’t wear a patch on purpose. Like he was
daring
Greg to take a nice, long look at what they’d done. The worst
had been the first week or so after, when the socket was raw and
wept blood. “Sound came from the south.” The baby-pink flesh of
Kincaid’s socket twitched. “Might want to check with—”
“You deaf, old man? We’re busy, and you’re not here. Unless”—
Aidan favored Kincaid with a snaky grin—“there’s something wrong
with that other eye? Want me to scoop it out, too, take a look?”
“Well now,” Kincaid said, mildly, “you do that and then get yourself shot, Aidan, I just might have to operate by
feel.
I wouldn’t lay
odds on that turning out so go—”
A fast whicker, something cutting air. A
snap
that made Greg
jump and Pru straighten out of his slouch as Kincaid doubled over,
grunting with pain and surprise, as the too-red lips of a slash opened
beneath his remaining eye.
“Duuuude!”
Sam crowed as Lucian cracked up. The two mumbly
guards jostled out of the way like startled sheep, putting distance
between them and a man they’d probably once called a friend.
“Aidan, are you
nuts
?” Pushing aside the ache in his head, Greg
started forward but stopped when Pru clapped a huge paw around
his wrist, tipped his head toward Aidan, and gave a warning shake of
his head. His meaning was clear enough, but Aidan slicing and dicing
their only doctor into ribbons did no one any good. Greg pulled free
of Pru’s grip. “Doc, you okay?”
“Of course he’s
okay
.” Aidan’s lips skinned from a ruin of yellowing teeth. Whatever else Aidan had cared about before the world
went bust, good oral hygiene hadn’t been at the top of his list. “If I’d
wanted it any other way, I’d have done worse.”
“Yeah. Old asshole’s lucky I ain’t clipped off his tongue with a wire
cutter and fed it to the dogs,” Sam drawled.
“I don’t know.” Uncoiling his own very long, very pink muscular
rope, Lucian flicked his tongue at Kincaid like a serpent tasting the
air. His stud gleamed. “My dad used to boil up this big old cow’s
tongue every winter, eat it with this sauce of raisins and wine and
shit? Some Jew thing, but it was pretty good.”
“Yeah, but you need a cow first,” Sam said.
“Or a Jew,” Aidan said, and the three boys sniggered.
Greg ignored them. “Doc?”
“I-I’m all right, Greg. Th-thank you, son.” Fumbling open his bag,
Kincaid ripped open a gauze pack with shaking hands. Whimpering,
Daisy left her corner to nuzzle Kincaid’s elbow. “Yes, girl, thank you,
it’s okay,” Kincaid said, gently shoving the dog back as it tried licking
the blood sheeting over his fingers. “Greg, she’s all upset. You want
to call her off, please?”
“Daisy,
down
,” Greg snapped, ashamed, the heat crawling up his
neck. He should go to Kincaid. “Go on, now,
sit.
”
“Leave the old bastard,” Aidan said. “He’s fine.”
“No, he’s
not
,” Greg shot back. “You do that again—”
“And
what
?” Aidan tossed the blood-smeared aerial aside. The thin
whip ticked to the grimy brick and then rolled into a purple puddle
of Dale’s blood. Aidan unzipped his parka, revealing a baggy, redchecked flannel and white thermals so grimy the collar was the color
of ash. “You want to fight, Greg? You want to take a shot? Go on.”
Squaring his bony shoulders, he slipped to his falsetto again. “Or is
poor widdle Greggie-weggie too
scaaared
?”
Aidan’s minions howled. “Hey, hey, knock it off, A,” Pru said, his
eyes pinging from the Three Musketeers to Greg and back again.
“Greg, man, let it go.”
“Screw that.” Heat crawled up Greg’s neck, and before he stopped
to think, he was shucking his parka. “Stay out of this, Pru.”
“Greg, listen to him. Don’t do it.” Kincaid struggled to his feet. His
hand was still clapped to his cheek, the gauze pad going crimson and
drippy. “I’m fine. Just calm down.”
“Stay
out
of this, Doc!” Greg roared, thinking,
I don’t want to calm
down. I haven’t been calm in months. Why start now?
His heart was
drumming so hard he could feel the knocking all the way in his teeth.
His brain was bleeding, the migraine stabbing like knives. No one
was supposed to get on top of him, no one! He was
in charge
and
Peter was dead and Chris had run away; he’d
run
and left Greg to pick
up the pieces, and
goddamn
Chris, what kind of
friend
did that? And
Aidan was there, grinning, and probably had a shiv for sure or just
a good sharp knife, or one of his crew did, and they’d stick Greg in
the gut or the heart and say it was self-defense and get off, scot-free,
because the Spared were Spared and special and got away with murder; and there was Mick Jagger, wailing,
Please, Doctor, I’m damaged.
“All of you, back off !” A hot, rose-red bloom of rage expanded in
Greg’s chest. “Just back off,
back off
!”
“
No,
Greg!” Kincaid and Pru shouted at the same moment—but it
was, of all people, poor Dale Privet who probably saved Greg’s life.
“My God,” Dale said, with a touch of wonder in his wheezy old
man’s voice, “what is wrong with you people? What are you boys
doing to each other?”
Alex had no idea what she should do or how to save herself. A tumble
down a regular vanilla mountain, no sweat: roll onto your stomach,
dig in, protect your head, do a self-arrest. Oh, and don’t panic.
But one thing her dad never taught her was what the hell to do in
an avalanche.
The snow was her world. It was like being carried in the crush of
an enormous wave, only instead of riding it like a surfer, the snow
had scooped her up and swallowed her whole in its mad, churning
thunder. She was tumbling, somersaulting, slamming sideways, then
crashing onto her back. The snow was a boot planted between her
shoulder blades, and it ground down, as inexorable and unforgiving
as gravity. She’d lost the night, wasn’t even sure which way was up.
She kept trying to dig in with her boots and hands, attempting to stop
her slide the way she might if she’d stumbled into a chute. But the
snow kept pillowing over her head, cresting then curling and breaking. Snow jammed into her mouth and up her nose. Spluttering, she
coughed it out, started sweeping her arms in front of her face, desperately shoveling away the white, punching out an air pocket.
Snow is like water.
The snow was still screaming down the rise and
she knew she must be going very fast. She kept swimming, aiming for
what she hoped was up, scooping away snow, pushing for space—for
air.
If I can just get to the surface . . .
Something
whacked
her left hip. Maybe a tree or a rock; she didn’t
know. A blaze of pain raced across her pelvis, and she opened her
mouth to scream. A fist of snow instantly jammed into her mouth,
forcing its way down her throat—and now she was choking, flailing, no air at all. Another
wham!
The impact slammed her shoulder
blades. The plug of snow in her throat popped onto her tongue
and then she was spitting, scraping her hands in the white space
before her mouth and nose, dragging in a lungful of air and then
another—
She was slowing down. The drag of the snow was decreasing, no
longer rushing past in a roar.
Getting near the bottom.
She kept clawing
snow from her face, pulling in what air she could.
The rise can’t be that
high. Has to stop—
All at once, the snow and she stopped moving. It was as if someone had thrown the switch, killing the power. Stunned, she could
only lie there a moment. Where there had been a roaring, there was
now nothing but a profound, dead silence. It was completely dark.
She knew her eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. At all.
I’m under the snow.
Horror erupted in her chest.
Got to dig myself
out. I’ll run out of air, I’ll suffocate, I’ve got to . . .
Her left arm was bent
at the elbow, close to her face. Her right had worked its way over
her head, and was starting to hurt. She needed both hands to dig
her way out, and something rigid: Leopard’s knife or even the butt
of the Glock, except . . . no hard knuckle of plastic in her spine.
Lost
the Glock; must’ve gotten ripped out.
But the knife was secured to a leg
sheath, and she thought it was still there. Hard to tell with all this
snow, but if she could get at it . . . She felt her right biceps flex.
But her arm wouldn’t budge. For a crazy, wild, terrible moment,
she thought,
I broke my back. I’m paralyzed, that’s what it is.
Then she
sent a silent command to her toes, felt them wiggle in her boots. After
three more seconds, however, she discovered her
legs
wouldn’t move
at all, no matter how much muscle she put into it. She felt the fingers
of her left hand feather her cheek, but that arm wouldn’t move either.
Then she knew the truth. She wasn’t paralyzed. Oh, she
could
move, but only a little because of all that snow, compressed around
her body, molded to her like concrete. The snow had her and wasn’t
about to let go.
She was buried alive.
“Shut up!” Quick as a snake, before the thought streaked from a
glimmer to a certainty, Greg whipped Dale a fast one across the
jaw. The blow was hard, a
crack
like the shout of a walnut bursting
under pressure
.
The punch jerked a gasp from Dale at the same
moment that it exploded in Greg’s hand, a bright ball that mushroomed to a burn he felt all the way to his elbow. “Shut the fuck
up
!” he screamed.
“Attaboy!” Aidan crowed as Lucian and Sam whooped their
approval. But Pru only groaned, “Greg, man, what are you doing?”
Kincaid—his friend, a nice man, someone Greg really
liked
—held
out his hands. They were saturated with blood. “Greg,” he said,
that one eye shining and so bright it hurt to look. “Stop, son. You’re
better than this. Don’t you see what’s happening? Peter and Chris
would never—”
“BUT THEY’RE! NOT!
HERE!
” Greg bellowed. He could feel
the cords knotting in his neck. One more second, and the top of his
head would blow like a grenade. “They’re
gone,
and it’s all on
me
, and
you’re a fucking
ghost
, you’re
nothing
!”
But he thought of his mom and dad at the same moment: how
ashamed they would be. His mom never cursed, and the one time his
dad really let go, he’d smashed his thumb with a hammer, so that was
understandable. Neither ever raised a hand to him or his jerky older
brother, never.
Yeah, yeah, but you guys aren’t here either. Things aren’t so easy anymore, so give me a break.
“And you,” he said to Dale Privet, “you’re one to talk about us.
You’re a thief. You came to steal. You’re no better than the rest of us.”
“But you don’t understand. I was just so
hungry
,” Dale whispered,
tears leaking from his eyes to trickle down his temples. The purple
imprint of Greg’s fist was stenciled on the old man’s cheek, and there
was smear of fresh blood on Dale’s chin. The rest of his face was the
color of salt. “You don’t know what it’s like, now that there’s nothing
coming in. Peter and your boys used to bring food, but now we got
nothing. No deer either, no raccoons—all the game’s run off or dead.
There’s nothing out there anymore, and I got no ammo to speak of
even if there was. What am I supposed to do, eat bark? Eat dirt? And
my granddaughter, she’s just a baby, she—” Dale’s mouth suddenly
clamped shut.
“Granddaughter?” Greg was breathing hard, and
God
, his head
hurt
from the thump of that migraine, a molten throbbing that
pushed behind his eyes and might just dribble out of his ears. But his
heart—he felt that clench and go hard as stone. “You said you were
alone.”
“I—” Dale’s eyes were so huge with terror and dread, the irises
were nothing but pinpricks. “Please. They haven’t done anything. It
was me. You have the power to save them. Do whatever you want
with me, but—”
At that moment, Greg’s radio, which was clipped to his hip, let out
a rapid series of clicks:
break-break-break.
“Well, look at that, Dale,” Greg said, with absolutely no humor.
“Saved by the goddamned bell.”
Backing away, Greg acknowledged by keying the unit with a
quick double-click. One of a half dozen World War II relics Rule
had scrounged and then doled out to key personnel, the radio was
always kept to a single dedicated channel. To save on batteries and
boost transmission distance, no one used anything but coded clicks
and Morse. Greg listened to the comeback, responded, then seated
the radio on his hip again. “Come on,” he said to Pru. “Lookout says
something’s up.”