High Country

by Nevada Barr

  “We gonna fiddle around trying to find her? I want to get the fuck off this rock pile. Packing this shit out forty pounds at a time we’ll be here till the Fourth of July,” Phil complained.

  “You don’t want your cut, just say so. I’m sure the boss will be understanding.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Phil took another drink and held the bottle out to his comrade. To Anna’s disappointment, Mark resisted temptation.

  Hell of a time for rehab,she thought bitterly.

  “We do it till we’ve got what we can. This is prime stuff,” Mark said.

  “Soaked with God knows what weird shit.”

  “It’ll give the college kids a new kind of kick. We ought to charge extra.”

  They laughed and it grated on Anna’s nerves. The desultory conversation continued. Soon she heard nothing but a mangle of voices. Standing, leaning, she’d fallen asleep on her feet like a horse. Weight shifted and she would have fallen but that her ankle sent a vicious wake-up call. Either she grunted or stumbled. She came awake to full silence. Phil and Mark stared in her direction.

  “What was that?” Phil said.

  “Shh.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Anna stopped breathing. Her heart beat loud in her ears, so much so it seemed they must surely hear it.

  “Snow falling off a tree or something,” Phil said. “The bitch is dead or about to be. It’s colder than a witch’s tit up here. We got her pack. She’s got nothing.”

  They listened a moment longer.

  “I guess,” Mark conceded. “Give me her pack.”

  Phil lumbered to his feet and retrieved Anna’s backpack from a pile of debris that had accumulated at the base of a tree.

  Mark took it and dumped it out. Her good down jacket was thrown on the fire. Her compass pocketed. Phil grabbed up a granola bar, ripped off the wrapper and began eating it. Till then, Anna had not realized how hungry she was. Great ravening hollow-eyed hunger thundered over her, leaving her weak, shaken and so livid that for a moment she was no longer cold. Slobby, malodorous Phil scarfing down her food made her angrier than being shot, chased and left to die of exposure.

  Mark continued to go through her belongings, throwing everything into the fire after he’d looked at it, including the things that wouldn’t burn. When it was empty he turned it inside out.

  “Not here,” he said and her pack, too, went onto the conflagration smoking and sizzling with nylon, paper and down feathers.

  “Why would she have it? She’s nobody. Just some old broad still waiting tables at fifty,” Phil said.

  “She outran your fat butt with a bullet in her.”

  Anna had eluded them both and Mark had been in the lead. From her place in the night, she watched this retort crawl across Phil’s beefy face, followed by the probably wise decision not to say anything. Anna wished him more whiskey and less wisdom. To see one of them kill the other would almost be worth the stiff admission price she’d paid for the show.

  “She was up here, wasn’t she? And she’s been living in that dorm. She knows something,” Mark said. “I’d bet my life on it.”

  “She bet hers,” Phil said, “and lost.” He laughed. Mark merely smiled.

  “Maybe.” Mark stood and stomped to get circulation back into his feet. Anna, who’d continued the quiet flapping, clenching and bending that had restored life to her nether parts after her near-fatal nap, envied him the ability to do so. “Maybe not. We better post a watch. You first.” Mark smiled again and Anna was amazed she’d not seen the cruelty there when she and Mary first met him despite the fact that he’d entered Dix’s tent cabin on a gust of woman-hating invective. The human disguise he’d adopted was near perfect. In this wilderness he’d dropped his mask. Fire, usually the kindest of lights, bringing warmth and the illusion of youth to the tired and old, flickering past flaws and scars, showed him demonlike.

  No flames reflected in his dark eyes, no moving shadows suggested a horned skull beneath the skin—nothing so theatrical. The orange glow reflected back from his nice straight teeth illuminating the joy he took in one more small cruelty perpetrated upon his loutish companion. How much greater his pleasure would be tearing the wings off flies or drowning kittens. Or catching Anna before the cold killed her.

  Lurking in the dark, unsure whether the cold or her ankle hurt worse, she remembered an old aliens-among-us film. Once the scaly lizardlike beings assumed human form the only way to know them was by the little pinky of the left hand. It didn’t bend, some technical glitch in the metamorphosis.

  This Mark creature undoubtedly had a stiff little finger.

  He pulled down one of the sleeping bags, then stuffed it and himself into the tent. Phil took a long pull on his bottle and, now that Mark could no longer see him, indulged himself with a look of pure hatred.

  For another twenty-two minutes, according to Anna’s watch, several hours if she listened to her internal clock, Phil stared into the fire and drank. Bottle emptied, he hurled it into the darkness. Having nothing better to do with his lips now the bottle was gone he began muttering. Scraps and fragments of sentences slipped through the bitter air.

  “Fucking bitch’s an icicle by now . . . watch . . . for chrissake, I freeze my balls off . . . goddamn Marlon BrandoGodfather shit . . . he’s a fucking low-rider from Fresno . . . stupid fuck . . .”

  Anna began to suspect, were theF word excised from the English language, Phil’s vocabulary would be halved. He used it as noun, adjective, verb and adverb.

  Finally he rose unsteadily, and while Anna was willing him to fall into the fire, he retrieved the second of the two sleeping bags, worked his boots off and threaded himself into it, coat and all. Snoring started before he’d zipped the bag. If she listened hard she could hear a faint echo of alcoholic gurgles. At least she needn’t wonder whether the two were asleep. These were men whose bodily functions were scarcely more subtle than their language.

  Keeping her eye on her watchface, the subtle blue glow of its nightlight oddly comforting, she waited through an eternity of fifteen minutes to let Phil sink thoroughly into sleep or stupor. Finally the big hand made it to its destination. Anna pushed away from the trees that had been holding her up this long, cold time. Unaware she did so, she gave them a pat of thanks. Not offending the woodland gods was a habit so deeply ingrained, she no longer gave it conscious thought.

  Despite her efforts to keep her circulation going, she was alarmingly stiff and clumsy. Try as she might, the sole of the boot on her injured leg scraped when she lifted it and thumped when she set it down. Whatever part of the nervous system it is that informs the brain how far one’s foot is from the ground had suffered from the vagaries of bullet, blood, constriction or cold.

  Other than stopping her heart with each tiny explosion, the noise had little effect. Both snorers were too far under the sandman’s shovel to be bothered by minutia.

  Moving facilitated moving; as Anna shuffled along outside the ring of light, muscles warmed, stiffness abated. A prolonged rage of tingling and pain served to sharpen her mind. Enduring rehab-by-fire, she circled the camp, ever attuned to the tenor of the snores and the posture of the one visible enemy.

  The magnet which drew her through rock- and tree-studded darkness leaned against a ponderosa pine opposite where she’d kept watch. She had no way of knowing who had the gun, but from what she’d observed, Mark and Phil had issues. Despite the fact that Phil had been left out in the night to defend against intruders, it was a good bet the handgun was inside the tent, snuggled up next to Mark’s heart. The weapon available to Anna was the double-bladed ax. Handheld weapons—axes, hatchets, baseball bats, butcher knives, lead pipes—all lacked the effective distance of a gun, but they had the edge psychologically. The damage incurred was close and wet, crunchy and dripping. Personal, vicious violence. Used improperly they could be more intimidating than a firearm. Or so she told herself as she worked her way across uneven ground knowin
g she would die if she couldn’t find warmth and knowing her weapon of choice lay locked in the firearms safe behind the chief ranger’s office.

  At length, sweating and, for the moment, warmed, she stood behind the ax’s leaning tree. The fifty-foot trek from one side of the camp to the other had taken ten minutes and nearly as much effort as the twelve-mile hike into Lower Merced Pass Lake. Circumstances had compromised her ability to leap tall buildings and move faster than speeding bullets. As a rule it offended her to be rescued, but this one time she would have welcomed it, been gracious even. And grateful. With staggering suddenness she felt lost, defeated, small and middle-aged, and hurt. This time she would die.

  To counteract this frailty of spirit, she picked up the ax and held it in her two hands, the handle across her chest. The blade, evil-looking and running red with the light from the fire, comforted her. The wooden handle felt warm and strong, the ax head heavy and sharp.

  Courage returned—or the last vestiges of reality departed. A dreamlike quality took over; a nightmare, but one experienced from the point of view of the monster. Anna was not afraid. She felt very little either internally or externally. The cold and the hurt that had invested every move, every moment of her being since the bullet had damaged her ankle, receded; still with her but muted, faded, of no real importance. Whether she limped or not as she walked toward the fire, she couldn’t have said, but the move was swift, effortless.

  Heat from the flames soaked through her trousers, alien against the back of her thighs. Air passed into her lungs without burning cold. The sudden warmth made her eyes and nose run. She made no effort to wipe her face. From the tent, to her right now, scarcely six feet away, came the even, intermittent growl of the sleeping Mark. She didn’t look his way. He could wake at any time from intuition, a misstep on her part, a full bladder, but she knew he wouldn’t. She had all the time in the world. Fleetingly, she wondered if, in just this state, reality only a dream, the dream merely a disconnect from a place of godlike loneliness and indifference, Lizzy Borden had wandered, ax in hand, from room to room.

  Then she was standing over Phil. Head resting against the bole of a young tree, jaw loose, snapping half shut with each snoring inhalation, his throat was bared and white. A chicken’s neck stretched over the chopping block.

  Aware of every spark of firelight on the blade, of the smooth passage of metal through the frosty air, of the small pulses and throbs in the man’s throat as he snorted and gurgled through his whiskey sleep, Anna swung the ax back.

  She had become a thing of nightmares, the boogeyman, the midnight escapee from the lunatic asylum.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Silent, beautiful, cutting through the air with a faint hypnotic whistle, the ax fell. Time warped. Anna watched its graceful arc, the play of the flames on the blade, the liquid way light ran over the honed edges. Then nightmare turned on her.

  Wild-eyed, spattered with blood and brain, ax dripping gore, hacking again and again, chunks of meat that had once been a human being falling away from scarred bone. Sleeping bag tethering kicking feet, blood, rendered colorless in the red light of the fire, glowing suddenly ruby as it struck snow. Her, hobbling, crooked, evil, insane, kicking embers from the fire as she waded through it to the tent and the second sleeping man. The ax falling again and again, tent collapsing, flexible plastic poles snapping, the man within screaming, terrified, fighting the nylon, the funny grotesque shapes his shroud made as he fought, bright humps and angles purple-blue against night and snow, the absurdity of it—of him—making her laugh even as the blood began to ooze through the fabric.

  “Jesus,” Anna whispered as the dream broke over her. Her hands turned. The blade rotated into the twelve-and-six position the instant before it struck. Flat metal struck skull bone with the sick-making sound of a watermelon hitting pavement. Phil slumped over on his side.

  The snoring stopped.

  Shaking as much from the vision of carnage as the actual attack, she bent and felt of his carotid. He lived. She didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed.

  Her shakes did not subside but grew worse. Wave on wave of shudders jellied her viscera and rattled her bones. Unable to continue standing, she sat down next to the man she might have butchered. A half-eaten granola bar lay in the dirt beside him. She ate it. Then she ate the inch of beans remaining in a tin a few feet away, then another granola bar. Between bites she gulped water from a bottle Mark or Phil had left standing on a rock nearby.

  Hunkered down troll-like, she devoured the leavings of their supper, stuffing food, swallowing, scarcely taking the time to chew, washing it down with water. Finally she slowed, then stopped. Food and warmth chased the shakes away. TheTexas Chainsaw –style massacre she’d counted on to save her own skin had been thwarted by conscience—or an overactive imagination.

  Eventually Mark would wake. He’d find Phil, who might or might not wake up in this mortal coil, and he’d come after her. Remembering the cruelty of his smile, she didn’t dare hope he would cut his losses, let her go and pack out. That smile would hunt her down and kill her. Sitting before his fire, having eaten his food, listening to his snoring, she tried to think how she might even the odds. The rule in law enforcement wasn’t even odds but a stacked deck. No self-respecting lawman wanted a fair fight with a criminal. They wanted an edge.

  Momentarily she wished she’d suffered madness just long enough to dispatch them both with the cutting edge of the ax. It passed. Those were not images she wanted to add to an already full repertoire of nightmare pictures she carried in her head. Lethargy took her and for a time she simply sat in a lump, soaking up the warmth, staring into the fire and promising herself she would start thinking real soon.

  A cross between a whimper and a groan from Phil or Mark—the nature of the sound making it difficult to gauge direction—galvanized her. One man, awake with pistol in hand, and she would have bashed in Phil’s skull for nothing.

  Moving more adroitly for the rest, food and heat, she slipped to the tent where Mark slept. He’d zipped both tent and rain tarp, and she didn’t dare try to unzip them. He’d not consumed nearly enough whiskey to render him that deaf.

  Blessing the entire Swiss nation, she took out her much-used knife and opened it to the smaller blade, the sharpest, least used blade. Just above the ground she cut a horizontal slit about fourteen inches long, then a vertical slit of like length intersecting it. This done she put her hand through.

  A story she’d been told years before came back to haunt her. It was of a stone mouth, the Bocca della Verità—the Mouth of Truth—in Rome, into which people giving testimony must thrust a hand. If they lied the mouth would close, bite the hand off at the wrist. Anna’s skin tingled with anticipation, not of stone jaws but of a viselike grip followed by a bullet in the face.

  Her fingers poked and plucked through soft places, the inside of a tent even on short trips usually resembling nothing so much as a dirty laundry hamper.

  Her fingers closed on a hard round object and a needy mind told her it was the barrel of a pistol, but it proved to be a water bottle. Anna slid it through the cut. Either she’d take it with her or destroy it. Oddly it took more courage to put her hand in the second time. Rather than being emboldened by her success, she had a bad feeling that life held only so many chances for any given individual and she’d spent hers with the abandon of a drunken sailor; one day, maybe this day, she’d use up her last.

  A whimper.

  She jerked her fist from the hole as if she’d been scalded. Her heart swelled till it blocked her breath. She fought the sudden panic and won. The whimper had come from Phil. Now that she was between the two men she could tell from where sounds emanated. He might be close to waking. Anna hoped not. She’d have to hit him again, and if the first blow did enough damage, a second would kill him. Why killing him now repulsed her when half an hour before she’d been ready to hack his head from his shoulders with his own ax, she wasn’t sure. Maybe because now
she didn’t have to.

  A deep breath and she plunged her hand back through the nylon and reached. They were there, on the opposite side of the tent flap from the cut. One by one she eased Mark’s boots out and put them on the fire. Phil was next. His boots followed Mark’s. Flames licked and curled in pretty blues as the fire found new and wondrous components to consume.

  Methodically, she ferreted out everything she could that might be of use and fed it to the blaze. Inside the tent there would probably be a flashlight, certainly a sleeping bag and possibly a second water bottle. These things being beyond her reach, she didn’t waste time thinking about them.

  For herself, she took one of the backpacks, two pairs of socks, a gas camp stove and matches and Phil’s sleeping bag. If any food was left it wasn’t in either pack. In cold weather, fuel for the body to burn to warm itself was important. Lamed as she was, Anna wasn’t sure she could hike out in less than two days. Maybe three. And that was if the weather held. Without food to cook, she considered jettisoning the stove but, should the expedition drag on, hot water would do her body more good than cold.

  Throughout the rummaging, packing, pillaging and burning the big man remained comatose. Anna rolled him onto his side. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s with a concussion chaser were going to make him vomit at some point and she didn’t want him to choke to death on his own bile. For like reasons, she left him in his down coat. At what point he’d changed from prey to patient, she couldn’t have said.

  The tenor of the snores from inside the tent changed. Maybe the fierce and fitful alteration in the fire’s light had penetrated to Mark’s subconscious. Time had come for Anna to vanish like the thief in the night she was.

  The pack wasn’t heavy and she welcomed the warmth it lent her back. The ax was heavy but it served as crutch, cane and companion. It never crossed her mind to leave it behind.