High Country- Pigeon 12 (21 page)

The lake was on her left. She'd made it down the hill it had cost her so much to climb no more than two hundred yards to the east. Marsh grasses poked through snow and frozen mud, thick up to the treeline. Beneath black boughs and the gloom that drifted from day to dark with no need for twilight, she was protected from eyes on higher ground.

She crawled.

The creek was close; she could smell it.

Thank God for small fucking mercies, a cramped and bitter part of her mind hissed. Unaccustomed to creeping on all fours, her arms shook with exhaustion. On the few occasions she dared to stop, her muscles had twitched and quivered. Her shoulders ached; the ball joint in one of them-heard through her skeleton rather than her ears-grated as if broken glass ground in the rotator cuff.

Soon, Anna knew, she would devolve further, from quadruped to arthropod crawling on her belly.

Worms tended to have short life spans.

Duff gave way to layered rock, slabs of stone overlapping like flagstones for a giant's patio. Her trail would not show here; the tree cover kept the frost off, at least in the so-called heat of the day. Her knees and palms complained of the hard surface and it surprised her. With the clamor of pain sounding from ankle to hip she'd thought newer, lesser pains would be drowned out. The incredible delicacy of the body's nervous system never ceased to amaze her, though at the moment she could have done with less sensation.

Running water. The sound came to her ears like a balm. The creek was right where the map had promised. Winter-full, six inches deep, clear and ice cold, it ran over granite steps fifteen feet across.

First Anna drank, sucking up the frigid water so greedily her head ached and the fillings in her teeth sparked.

Skidding.

Swearing.

They were coming. Forcing herself upright or nearly so, hands catching at trees, she made her way along the creek's edge, careful to splash water on the rock. Ten, thirty, fifty feet more she kept it up. Distance had become a single step, and had to be continually done over again. When she reached a break in the giant's paving stones where the creek left the granite to dig into the shallow skin of soil supporting the forest, she walked up and down several times as if making a decision.

That done, she sat on the rock ledge where water boiled over the lip to the deeper creekbed below and unlaced her boots. The right boot slipped off. The left she would have had to have removed with a prybar. Her ankle was swelling. Once the boot was off, she'd never get it on again. Removing the much-abused turtleneck, she wrapped it around the snow-caked boot. One sock on, one boot swathed, she stood and, careening from tree to boulder to tree, moved back across the overlapped slabs of granite till she'd put three or four yards of rock and a thin screen of pines between herself and the stream.

The closer she stayed the better it would work. It would work. It would work. Anna was counting on the accumulated power of thousands of books and movies about good guys tracking bad guys, Indians tracking cowboys, convicts fleeing bloodhounds and innocents running from vigilantes.

Still so near she could hear the gentle life of the stream, she dragged the filthy turtleneck on once again to mask the offending red fleece. She hadn't the strength to deal with the boot. Pain and cold and crawling had sapped her energy till each movement was almost impossibly hard. Curling down, she lay with her back to the creek, pulled her knees to her chest and tucked her head in. Devolution was nearly complete. She'd adopted the defense of a pill bug. All that remained was to slide back into the primordial seas. On a metaphysical level, that might happen all too soon.

She would rather have remained standing or, failing that, sitting in such a way she could watch for the approaching men, but none of the trees were big enough to screen a body, and hide-and-seek logic dictated that if she could see them, they could see her. And there was the superstition that people could feel hidden eyes upon them. Despite the fact she had watched enough people to know that if a sixth sense attuned to eye pressure existed it was exceedingly rare, the feeling persisted.

It rankled to curl and hide, blind and helpless. Should trouble come she preferred to meet it head-on, though against a pistol and a double-bladed ax she'd probably make a pretty poor showing.

"Here! She came over this way." The speaker was not the man who'd introduced himself as Mark and been a gracious host, but the Mark who'd first slammed through the cabin door. The hard-edged misogynist who used showers and women with the same utilitarian contempt. "Where you looking?" A duller voice, thicker, the breath coming in heavy labored gasps. One of the stooges. Not the youngest, not the one with a soul behind his eyes.

"Here, you stupid motherfucker. Look at the rock."

The chase across the lake, up the hill and down again hadn't improved Mark's temper or vocabulary.

They were so close it sounded as if they stood over her, trying to figure out if her gray and curled form was animal, vegetable or mineral. Unaware she did so, she squeezed her eyes shut. Had she covers, they would have been pulled over her head.

"Shit, man"-Mark again-"she's gone into the creek. Look here. No way to track her. Fuck. Take that side."

"How am I gonna get across?"

A thump. A splash. A laugh. "Walk. Keep your eyes on the ground. She's gotta come out somewhere. Jesus. Did you bring a fucking flashlight?"

"I got one back at camp."

"That's a big fucking help."

The conversation faded. They followed the creek. Or rather, followed the script where the hunted inevitably reached a creek, predictably chose to walk in it to lose the hunters. Trackers always checked the banks; ambient knowledge gleaned from America's fiction.

Without moving, Anna listened till she could no longer hear them. Silhouettes turned to shadows, shadows faded into night so black she could feel its weight on her eyes, its body as she breathed it in and out.

In a moment she would move, get up, put her boot on, figure out how to survive the night. Cold cradled her, as tight and close as a lover, comforting, almost restful. Soon she would get up, but first she must sleep. Just a little, just enough to get her wind back.

Ice and night closed around her brain and Anna felt the bliss of sinking into it.

CHAPTER 12

A perfect dream of warm sand and blue ocean was being repeatedly interrupted by a need to scrape stinging jellyfish off of her left foot. After what seemed a lifetime of fruitless washing and scratching, the irritation dragged her from the sunlight and the shore. Opening her eyes to the darkness Geppetto must have known in Monstro's belly, Anna had no idea where she was. Several times she tried to fix her mind on the problem, and several times she drifted away to the delicious heat on the white sand beach. Each time the stinging jellyfish brought her back, unfriendly fire burning her ankle. She tried to think and could not. She tried to move and could not. With a herculean effort she succeeded only in stirring up pain so sharp she heard herself whimper. Make a noise and you die, one part of her brain informed another. The whimpering ceased. I'm already dying. I like it. It's warm, the brain answered itself, and Anna smiled. It was warm.

Dying. Vaguely she remembered promising someone she wouldn't do that. Molly. It must have been her sister, Molly. With the blink of a mind's eye Anna was looking through Molly's window then and saw her seated in the tiny kitchen of her Upper West Side apartment, her husband's long legs bent out like a grasshopper's from beneath the Barbie-sized table. The two of them were sipping fancy coffee, heatedly and happily arguing politics. Molly was okay. Molly was good. Frederick was there to take care of her.

Anna turned away from that airshaft window above Manhattan's streets and wafted toward her beach. Sunlight shattered on the waves, the glitter as bright as mirror shards. She walked toward it.

Not Molly, came an intrusive voice. Paul. She'd promised Paul she would not die, not this time, not this trip, not this assignment.

Without thought or effort, she was in Mississippi. For some reason it was raining, though it hadn't been when she'd left. Paul was not in his beautiful historic home in Port Gibson with its hardwood floors and marble-tiled fireplace, stretched out on his overstuffed couch, as she might have expected. He was in her dreary Mission 66 government housing-built in the mid-sixties as part of a grand plan-in Rocky Springs campground, carport full of spiders, backyard full of BaptistChurch groups and Boy Scouts.

Hovering above the cracked cement of her front walk, she watched him through the living room windows. Unlike with her sister and brother-in-law, she could not hear him, but his lips were moving and his face was animated as if he spoke to someone.

Piedmont, her old orange-striped tomcat, came out from the kitchen, his tail hooked in its customary question mark. Paul squatted down and the cat trotted over to be petted. Cats liked Paul. A sign of favor from the gods. Taco, her three-legged dog, wasn't in the scene. When she'd left, Paul had promised to look after her family. Taco, valuing real estate over personality, went to Port Gibson to live in style. Piedmont, for exactly the opposite reason, stayed home.

Anna hadn't thought to be gone long enough for it to matter.

Paul lifted the big cat and draped him over one shoulder. Having let himself out, he awkwardly locked the door behind him and carried the cat to his truck parked in the driveway.

He'd worried about her cat, come fifteen miles in the rain to take Piedmont home.

Shit, Anna thought. For a while she hovered in the nowhere of her mind between the bright beach and the black cold.

One could break promises. It was allowed.

One could not abandon one's cat. Not and retain any hope of heaven. Turning her back on the sparkling sea, she opened her eyes, or thought she did. It was too dark to tell. By dint of will, she focused her mind. Hypothermia; irrationality was a late symptom. She seemed to remember being taught that if a patient could raise his or her hands overhead and wiggle them then they weren't too far gone. Anna couldn't even find her arms.

Pain was as realistic as life got. She would start with that. Ever so slightly, she moved the foot the jellyfish had been attacking. Pain, duller than she remembered from whatever lifetime she was returning to, coursed up her shin bone.

Better than smelling salts, she thought as the fog in her brain began to clear. Broken ankle, curled in a ball, half-frozen in the backcountry, two, maybe three men trying to kill her, black as pitch: it all came back. Despite the jellyfish, the beach looked better and better.

Move, she ordered herself and kept on repeating it like a mantra till her gloved hands found down and pushed. Elbows locked, head hanging, she rested a moment.

Not resting, drifting, she reprimanded herself. Move. She did and kept on doing so, inch by bloody inch until she was upright, boot in hand, leaning against the rough bark of a pine tree no bigger around than her neck, but sturdy and kind.

Blind, invisible and glad of it, she performed homemade calisthenics tailored to a gimpy ankle. Had she been able to see herself, she'd have been further warmed by a good laugh. Alone in the dark she flapped and writhed and stretched, hugged herself, scrubbed her face and hair with gloved fingers, massaged, patted and pawed various parts of her anatomy till ten zillion exquisitely agonizing prickles announced returning life. Even her butt was numb. At least that was a new, if not pleasant, sensation.

Being alive pretty much sucked, she decided, but no longer harbored any desire for the shore. In memory there was a decidedly sinister aspect about that sunshine-and-warmth routine, rather like the alluring scent of cheese mixed with the slightly metallic tang of a well-used trap.

Eventually enough flapping and posturing had been executed that coordination as well as mental clarity returned. She put her hiking boot back on. Her bad foot had swelled until it was squashed into the other boot so tightly she couldn't wedge a finger between the leather and her sock.

This was good. The boot created its own pressure bandage to stop the bleeding. Working blind, she gathered materials for a splint to immobilize her leg to the knee. Technically the knee should have been splinted as well to keep the pull of muscles and tendons on the injured bone to a minimum. Anna couldn't afford to cripple herself that much, and she was fairly sure the ankle was only chipped or cracked, not broken through.