Authors: John M. Green
The Chancellor was as startled as the President when a posse of Secret Service agents appeared from nowhere, yanked Foster’s arm off him and whisked the President through a side door,
abandoning the Chancellor to ponder the cold outside alone.
Less than a minute later, the First Lady emerged from the same door and, wide-eyed as though nothing had happened, greeted Schneider. “May I escort you to the Blue Room, Chancellor?”
She took his arm and added blankly, “The President apologises for the abrupt interruption.”
Schneider noted Marilyn’s strained formality, and couldn’t help looking up to scan the skies.
“AT forty-fucking-two?” President Foster drummed his fingers against the rim of the Resolute desk, the one that most presidents since 1880 had leant on in times of
stress. “A fatal heart attack…? You kidding me? Mitch worked out. Hey, Don,” he nodded to his chief of staff. “Are we sure this wasn’t…?”
Foster’s teary, strained eyes fell to one of the quotes that President Barack Obama had asked to be woven into the Oval Office’s centrepiece rug: “
The only thing we have to
fear is fear itself
.”
“Mr President, nothing showed up in the bloodwork, and,” Don said, checking his watch, “St Anthony’s are doing a full body-scan.”
Foster shook his head, “He goes through all the pressure of the campaign and… bam! We’re in office a few measly days and his body packs up? Go figure. I’ve got to visit
with Julia and their kids. The First Lady, too… I’ll tell her to pack some things when I get to the Blue Room. There’s no way I can dump the Chancellor tonight—Kurt just
got here—so we’ll fly out in the morning. He’ll understand. Don,” he added, “fix the rest, okay?”
“Yes, Mr President. There’s something else…”
The President said nothing, but his heart was pounding.
“We’ll need to announce your new vice…”
“Fuck that. This isn’t the time…”
“It’s precisely the time, Mr President. Section Two of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment requires you to nominate…”
“Not before I pay my respects to the family of the last one, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
Exasperated, Bobby squeezed his chin and exhaled, “There are no buts, Don. Even after I nominate whoever, it’ll take months. Both Houses of Congress have to confirm it, and
they’re not gonna do that till after all the damn hearings, so a day here or there, even a week… it’s all fucking irrelevant, orright?”
Don had gotten used to Bobby’s temper. This time it was personal, sure, but the unseemly behaviour was nothing new and he would let it wash over him, as usual.
He scrolled his mind to the following morning when the President would run across the South Lawn to his helicopter Marine One, ducking to avoid the rotors. Don would be beside him, stooped no
more than usual, but whether Foster wanted to read it or not, Don would be passing him a detailed brief on the succession procedures, including a list of twenty potential nominees.
It was a shock, for sure, but both men knew this was no unique moment in history, although the details would come in Don’s brief, which three of his best staff were already preparing. It
would tell Foster that no fewer than seven vice-presidents had died in office and two had resigned. In 1973 when Spiro Agnew resigned and Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford as his new
Vice-President, it took nearly two months of Washington gum-chewing before Ford got to take his oath of office. When in 1974 Nixon himself resigned, Ford just one day later nominated Nelson
Rockefeller as his Vice-President, but it took almost four months for Rockefeller to take the oath of office; four months with no vice-president to step up should President Ford really stumble. And
neither of those precedents remotely compared to the days before the Twenty-Fifth Amendment got passed in 1967: Lyndon Johnson had no vice-president for 14 months after President Kennedy’s
assassination—some said there still wasn’t one even after Hubert Humphrey was eventually sworn in.
“But sir, what if
you
, er, suffered a… um… a heart attack?” Don was getting to his real concern. “Under the succession rules, it’s the
Speaker—Diaz—who steps up. And after that FOX segment, there’s not even a scintilla of an argument to stop her.”
I
N THE THIRTY minutes of snow and slush that Isabel had put between herself and the shack, she’d tramped not quite two miles, and had long
discarded her snowshoes as virtually useless. The curtain of nightfall was closing in, and would slow her even more as the thickening cloud cover threatened to block the moon.
Her breath was streaking ahead faster than she was. Normally she loved it out here but tonight she felt totally isolated. Vulnerable. Petrified.
It wasn’t the moose tracks that worried her; Isabel imagined she could deal with a moose. It was the ripped-open logs and digging marks, signs that screamed of a black bear. Normally, a
bear would be no problem unless you got between a mother and her cub but, right now, Isabel could only imagine the worst. For comfort, she glanced at her handheld GPS map-tracker as though it could
reveal the whereabouts of vicious animals.
The distant howl of a wolf stopped her, chilled her. But even that didn’t pump her adrenaline as much as the dread of the impending dark and the many dangers it could hide.
BEFORE she had left the shack, she had plotted onto the laminated map with a marker pen what seemed like an easy path, and she was sticking to it as closely as possible,
comparing it against the GPS tracker every ten or so minutes. “Easy” turned out to be a relative description, as her aching legs and back were discovering. It was heavy going over the
thick snow and until now, despite the fading light, she’d resisted using her flashlight or miner’s lamp. But it was no longer safe to advance without them. Her pack had been cutting
into her shoulders, so she readjusted it, bounced it into the small of her back and retightened the waist straps for support. After ten paces, it was hugging a lot better so she strapped the
halogen miner’s lamp over her woollen cap and snapped on the light. In her left mitten, she had her tracker and map, and her other gripped a walking stick that doubled as a probe checking for
crevasses hidden under the snow.
The miner’s lamp was a mixed blessing. She could see whatever its fairly narrow beam illuminated, but out of the gloom at its edges a succession of sinister shadowy shapes kept looming,
one appearing like an angry mother bear… another she lashed her hiking pole at, imagining that the branch was Ed.
Twenty minutes later, guided by the headlamp, she had already tripped four times—over semi-concealed rocks, tree roots, and twigs—so she dug out her flashlight and, despite some
initial confusion with double shadows, the depth of vision was a welcome relief.
She trudged a mile down a slope packed with slightly thicker snow. Despite the deep holes sunk by each tiring step, her boot linings kept her feet dry.
A fallen branch, as grey in this light as the snow, caught her heel and she back-flipped and turtled, landing helplessly onto her pack with her legs and arms splayed out. She lay still for a
while, winded, and scooped up some snow and sucked on it as she looked up, watching the tree canopy shiver as an eerie breeze whistled through. Suddenly realising it was foolish to lower her
temperature, she spat out the remains of the snow, unstrapped her backpack and twisted herself out of it before getting back to her feet where, after wrapping her scarf around her face and yanking
the hem of her parka down, she heaved her backpack on and continued walking.
This wind was going to be a friend, she saw. It was high, huffing away the clouds to let the moon through and a mellow light was already thankfully spreading around her. She paused to check her
location—the base of Milligan’s Hill—and she pushed on. Her steps still sank deep but twisted a little on the pebbly terrain below the snow. She guessed it was a deposit of scree
that had collected during spring rains, so she went on even more gingerly, wary of her footfalls as well as the branches scraping her outerwear. She was rubbing her arm where a surprisingly rigid
limb had ripped through her parka sleeve when her boot caught under a rock and she pitched headlong into a fallen trunk.
When her eyes opened again she guessed she’d been blacked-out for at least five minutes. Her head was spinning and her forehead was aching and when she went to rub her brow, she discovered
that when her head had hit the log, her headlamp had smashed. As she drew her hand away, she saw blots of blood on her glove.
She wobbled herself up to sit on the trunk, and slipped off the lamp strap. Attempting to wipe her head with her forearm sleeve, the shot of pain through her right arm jolted her. She could see
blood seeping out of another rip and, looking around, saw that the offending branch at the base of the log was waving a tiny flag of her parka sleeve. Below it, pink bloodstains had spread into the
snow.
Her arm only hurt if she lifted it, which also made her woozy. She knew she had to stem the blood and stop the cold seeping in through the tear in the fabric. She had to go on. Turning back was
not an option.
Her GPS tracker had perched itself on top of the log, safely she thought, and the strap of her flashlight was balanced on the tip of her walking pole as though she’d carefully hung it
there herself. After she oofed off her pack, she took out the first aid kit and, puffing some antiseptic powder through the rip, plastered her arm and then, after removing a few shards of glass
from her head wound, cleaned and taped that too. For good measure, she sealed the slash in her ski jacket with two strips of duct tape, making an X. Ready to move off, she reached out for the
tracker but the pain from her arm scorched her again.
Bad had just gone to worse: the GPS screen was smashed. She guessed the EPIRB function was still okay, but had no way of knowing without setting it off. She slipped it into a pocket, glad she
had also brought the old-fashioned laminated map and compass, and she slogged onward.
As she reached lower and lower down the mountain, the snow was thinning, in increasing spots fingering itself out to rock and hard, bare dirt. She sped up; not too fast, since it was still icy
and she was fretful of her arm, steering away from stray branches, especially as waves of occasional dizziness washed over her.
The map showed that Major’s Creek was coming up and she became tetchy about crossing it. Would it be frozen solid, or would the cover merely be a deceptive skin of easily cracked ice? She
needn’t have worried, not about that, since pretty soon it was clear she wasn’t even close to Major’s Creek.
Under her flashlight, she carefully checked and rechecked the map. Where had she gone wrong? She trudged on another few hundred feet; still no creek. She went back, at least she thought so, but
the ground was starting to rise when it should have been falling.
Her arm was pounding and her head was no better, but she had enough sense to take another pause. She slung her pack to the ground, parked herself on it and, under the side flap, her fingers felt
around for two Mars bars and one of her bottles of water. Steady methodical chewing. It was calming, but only until her mind was sucked back to Ed’s betrayals.
She leant her head back to take a swig of water.
He must have been at this for months, she thought, the two-faced… Isabel replayed the sick, depraved banter in her mind.
She was lost, that was obvious to her. Three hours she’d been going and she didn’t have a clue where she was. She knew she’d been crazy to try this at night. But should she
have stayed up at the shack, set off the EPIRB and waited? More importantly, should she do that now? She slipped it out of her pocket and looked at the shattered screen as though it would reply for
itself.
It was 8:15 PM. Yet even with the wrong turn she’d obviously made somewhere, she was sure she’d get herself back on track, just like she’d done with her life. If she triggered
the EPIRB it would take Search and Rescue at least the three hours she guessed she still had to go—but there was a good chance they would wait till daylight—and she needed to keep
moving, not to stay stuck in this frozen, godforsaken spot.
Isabel ate a second snack bar and stowed her trash, slipping the empty bottle into the mesh pocket on one side of her backpack.
Calmer, she studied the map and, after about five minutes of mental backtracking, she calculated there was a good chance she was near Potter’s Mound, and if she simply headed west a
little, she’d find a stand of black spruce.
SHE was right. Unfortunately.
She could smell the familiar earthy, sweet spruce perfume even before she saw them. Potter’s Mound was smack in the centre of the wolves’ urine-marked territory, and Andy
Goodman’s prize female had been out on the prowl for a couple of hours, always keeping close to the den she’d established for when her litter came. Gretel was big. Nose-to-tail, she was
five feet long, last time weighing in at 120 pounds though she was undoubtedly heavier now.
Gretel whipped her tail out from behind an old hemlock and her glossy black nose sniffed out something tempting. Near to the ground, she stalked forward and a few shards of broken glass flashed
the moon into her yellow-green eyes.
She drew up to the log and started to paw at the alien shiny parka material but drew back sharply… her paw had been cut. She spied the stains on the snow but knew instinctively they
weren’t hers, even before smelling them. Ignoring her paw—she’d had worse—Gretel’s snow-white snout dropped back down and sniffed around the strange bloodstains. Her
ear brushed against the torn piece of sleeve hanging from the branch and she twisted up to inhale its scent. Her long back arched and, with her good front paw, she jabbed at the spatters of blood
in the snow. She seemed to make a decision and turned, low to the ground, making a slow, stealthy pace toward the stand of black spruce, a blood-spotted track trailing behind her.
Halfway along, she stopped dead. Her head lifted and she sniffed the air.
She pulled her lips back to bare her teeth and her menacing, guttural growl cracked the silence.