High Country

by Nevada Barr

  Silence returned and stayed. Evil had moved on or waited motionless nearby. Anna dozed and dreamed. Listened and waited. Pins and needles tortured her. Pain throbbed from her ankle. Her bladder filled. A true mountaineer would have watered the tree rather than suffer. Childhood taboos and a vestigial training in how to be a lady would not allow her this crude comfort. The worst was thirst. Because the body could go only a short time without water even in the earliest stages of deprivation, the cravings were intense. Customarily she would have cursed herself for a fool, holing up without water. Since, at the time, she’d had a lot on her mind, she gave herself a pass.

  Sleep helped. It made the time pass, and with no food and an injury, being warm and still were next best to getting out or being rescued.

  Two o’clock came. Two-thirty. Three. Mark didn’t return. If he ever left. He left, Anna told herself.If he knew I was here, he’d have killed me. If he didn’t know I was here he’d have left. Ergo . . . Regardless, she didn’t dare move till full dark. If he had waited, if he saw her, she had no defenses: not speed, not strength, not weaponry.

  The afternoon passed in a misery of dreams and physical demands unmet, but it did pass. When the crescent of light that was her entire view of the world had completely vanished, she began to stir. Emerging from her cocoon, she struggled as mightily as any newborn butterfly. Nerves buzzed and snapped, firing off mixed messages of cold, burning and electrical shock. Finally upright, she turned on Mark’s flashlight, the only thing she’d taken to bed with her, and scanned the area. He’d gone. His pack—her pack—had been dragged from its hiding place beneath the pine tree. Bullet holes pierced the nylon, and the aluminum frame was bent where he’d vented his frustration with the ax. The camping stove had been hurled against the tree. Matches lay scattered on the ground. The water bottle, half-full and undamaged, was beneath the pack. Anna drank it all.

  Feeling stronger, genuinely hopeful, she repacked sleeping bag, stove, matches and empty bottle. The smashed frame rested uneasily on her back but it weighed little and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be in the backcountry. Already the sleeping bag had saved her life. If she were forced to go to ground it might do so again.

  Lame, without compass, stars or landmarks, Anna had to find her way back to the trail. If he’d hiked out, Mark would have used the trail as well. Without a flashlight he’d have had to do it during daylight hours. The ruined eye would be hurting him, and Anna had heard, though she couldn’t remember where, that after the loss of sight in one eye a person could suffer visual disturbances in the remaining eye. She hoped it was true, but not so true as to keep him from leaving. She wanted him to escape, to run as far away from her as he could. There’d be plenty of time to track him down later.

  Picking her way slowly down the Illilouette, a sturdy branch for a staff and the flashlight for a guide, Anna played these rationales over and over in her mind. The logic calmed her somewhat but didn’t lessen her wariness. Her ears strained against the near perfect silence of the night. Her eyes strained against the darkness. Her soul waited for a return of the stench of evil Mark had called forth from the depths of her being; practical evil that had saved her life.

  Necessary evil?

  She wasn’t sure there was such a thing. At least not that the average pagan could afford to invest in.

  Steps and minutes, steps and hours ticked past with the slowness of seconds on a wall clock. Pain and fatigue returned in force, jarred through her for timeless time, then seemed to recede. They were still there, she could still feel them. It was just she didn’t mind so much. She stopped focusing on hiking out. She focused only on hiking, making that one small step into the white circle of light that was always one step ahead of her on the trail.

  A waltz rhythm kept time in her head. Not a classic waltz, but one she and Zach had danced to, the Rock and Roll Waltz: one, two, three—rock; one, two, three—roll. It was in this strange auto-induced trance that she came down out of the granite-polished high country into the gentler wooded slopes where the Illilouette ceased to tumble and fall and ran placidly beneath a skin of ice. It was four thirty-five in the morning. The six-cell flashlight she’d stolen from Mark was beginning to fade. She was three miles from Mono Meadows and her rental car and, with luck, codeine or Percocet or some other kindly obliviating painkiller.

  Trees closed overhead. Anna could smell the closeness of the pine. Under this cover her crunching footfalls were muffled, less alarming. The trail bed was of needles, not rocks, and her ankle wasn’t viciously jarred by a misstep every few feet. She moved faster.

  As she was thinking she would make it out and was considering allowing herself the distraction of a small dream of a hot bath and a hot cup of tea, the white circle of light that led her brought a horror up from the ground with a suddenness that made her scream.

  One smashed, but still attached, eye cried down a cheek as ashen gray as dirty snow. The other eye was red and weeping, swollen nearly closed. Floating on the darkness—the body that it supported invisible in black down and dark-blue denim—was Mark’s face. He’d been sitting, waiting, like the spider that possessed him. Knowing she must come.

  As the light hit him and Anna screamed, he roared to life. A gloved fist rose from his lap, the pistol clutched in it. Anna clicked off the flashlight and stumbled off trail into the black of the swallowing night. Bellowing, he crashed after. Shots were fired. None found her. As blind as he, she ran, fell, rose, ran again, struck a tree and reeled to one side. The flashlight was lost. Direction was lost. She could as easily run to him as away. It was over after all. He would catch her. The noise of her passage could not be masked.

  She had but a twenty-foot lead. Forcing down the need to flee and keep on fleeing though the exercise was doomed from the onset, she stopped, became absolutely still.

  For perhaps half a minute he bashed on, coming straight toward her. The urge to run was so strong it was a tangible thing, pulling at her heart and lungs. She didn’t move. He veered, crashed, cursed. He was moving away from her now. She prayed he’d gone mad.

  Then the crashing stopped. Heavy breathing rasped at her ears as if he were but inches away. Cold magnified sound. A minute more and the rasping ceased. Darkness froze over the mountains, a solid thing with no chinks or breaks. It pressed against Anna, clung to her eyelids, soaked into her clothes. She breathed it in and felt her blood turn black.

  She waited.

  He waited.

  The waiting built, an unvoiced scream, until Anna wanted to clap or laugh or stomp just to end things. She didn’t.

  Mark broke before she did.

  “It’ll be light in half an hour. I’ll kill you then.”

  His voice was gravelly, the throat dry and raw from his night’s exertions. Weariness robbed the words of drama and made them more frightening; not a threat, a mere statement of fact.

  Half an hour. Anna didn’t dare look at her watch, but she figured he was right. Maybe even less than that. He didn’t need the full light of day to see her. A slight graying in the east, enough to separate trees from the overcast sky, would be sufficient.

  Probably she had a little over a quarter of an hour to live. She wondered if she should be thinking of anything in particular, maybe sending out a spam of last-minute prayers for forgiveness to assorted deities, making mental good-byes to loved ones, savoring her last moments, seeing her life flash before her eyes.

  It was too dark for the last item on her list. Even inside her skull it was night.

  No other thoughts coalesced till unto her awareness came a spectral voice.

  “Come and take it.”

  She never heard anyone say that. She’d seen it crudely stitched on a homemade flag by the women of Gonzales, Texas, a tiny town on the Texas-Mexico border. Santa Anna was marching north with two thousand men. Orders came before him. All settlements were to turn over their weaponry. The town of Gonzales had one cannon and no shot. The townspeople loaded it with scrap, wheeled it to the edge
of the settlement, draped it with the embroidered flag and stood their ground.

  They were, of course, slaughtered, but the flag had made Anna cry.

  Mark would have to take her.

  Working as quickly and quietly as she could, she slipped the ruined pack off and pulled out the sleeping bag. The sound of fabric slithering out was as of a hundred snakes loosed on the snow.

  “I hear you.”

  Anna kept working.

  “What are you doing?”

  She said nothing. She could hear him as well, tentatively feeling his way toward her. Mercifully the sleeping bag was still unzipped. Awkwardly she spread it in front of the tree she kept at her back.

  Crunch. Shuffle. “Fuck.” He was closer now. How close, she couldn’t tell.

  Groping in the near-empty pack she took out the last remaining items in her improvised arsenal, the camp stove and matches. Cold had numbed her hands, and she had to pull off her gloves to unscrew the cap from the stove’s tiny fuel tank.

  A slap of a branch. Another curse. He couldn’t be more than a few yards away, homing in on the noise from her machinations.

  The cap was off. The stove slipped from her frozen fingers and fell. No matter. By feel she found it and emptied what had not already spilled over the sleeping bag. That done, she straightened, put her back to the tree, faced into the darkness and said: “Come and take me.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Anna used the noise of his approach to cover the sounds she made moving behind the tree. Ignoring the pain pumping up her leg, she scraped the side of her boot hard against the bark, making as much racket as she could.

  When she stopped, there was silence. Mark was waiting. She didn’t know where. But she could see something; above her was the faintest lightening. Just a hint of day. Enough to differentiate black of pine from sky. To see her was to shoot her. Soon it would be over.

  With all her strength she hurled the empty stove straight up, then covered her head with her arms. The metal made a satisfying disturbance, crashing into the boughs and loosing a cascade of snow. A thump let her know it had come again to earth nearby.

  “You some kind of damn polecat?”

  The voice was so close Anna jerked like a trout on a line, but she made no sound. Had the pine not been between them they would have been face to face. The evil that had called forth its namesake from within her and stalked her dreams as she lay in her hollow log poured forth into the darkness, a palpable miasma that sickened Anna body and soul. Her knees shook, her stomach heaved, her head ached and swam. From the other side of her tree she could hear the whispering of Mark’s feet, wrapped in layers of fleece and wool, as he shifted them over the sleeping bag at the tree’s base.

  Soon.A few seconds more, she told herself. Having him so fiendishly close made the back of her neck tight and loosened her bowels.

  “You’re some kind of fucking she-devil. You can forget whatever you’re planning. I’m not climbing the goddamn tree.”

  Four shots rang out, one after the other. Anna flinched as if the bullets had hit her. Snow cascaded down her collar. The deafening reports were disorienting. She touched the bole of the tree that she might know up from down.

  She could wait no longer. Hoping osmosis had done its thing, she knelt, leaned around the tree and struck a match. It flared to robust life. She blessed the quality control people at Blue Diamond.

  “What the—”

  Anna touched the match to the gas-soaked sleeping bag.

  Night was swept away on a voracious orange wind. The sleeping bag didn’t so much catch fire as explode with a suddenness that sucked the air in at ground level and blew the flames upward. From what seemed an eternity of black, light blasted forth. Anna’s eyes hurt with it and at the same time drank in the incredible blessing of sight. It was a glory simply to see color, shape and form.

  This visceral celebration lasted only an instant. Then Mark began to scream. For a while—it seemed a long time but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds—Anna was transfixed.

  Evil became manifest in a Dantean vision. A creature in flames, face monstrous, feet outsized, danced and capered in orange and blue fire.

  The creature was a man. And Anna had burned him alive.

  Reality was worse than a visionary hell. Staggering, she pushed into the remaining dark. The macabre beacon from behind lit her way with singular clarity for the first fifty feet, then, like the screaming, died.

  Maybe Mark had saved himself, dropped to the ground and rolled. Maybe the fire had consumed the available fuel in record time.

  A rule from her wildland firefighter’s training clicked on in her brain and she had the compassion to hope Mark was wearing cotton underwear. Other fibers had a nasty way of melting into burned flesh. Anna wanted him gone—dead even—but torture was not part of the plan. It moved her too close to the spidery force that had helped her to gouge out his eye.

  Just as if somebody’s world had not ended, the sun began to rise. A difference was born between earth and sky. She could see enough to move between the trees. She pushed in the direction where she remembered the trail was.

  Anna woke in a hospital bed. Twice she’d awakened in like situations. Much as she loathed hospitals, it was a happier ending to her adventure than she’d foreseen, and she had the grace to be grateful. Sun poured in the window, real, gold, honest-to-God, bright sunlight splashing in a distorted square across her knees and feet. Having been so long in gray and black, Anna felt like rolling in the stuff. She might have done so had an IV needle not been taped into her arm. Out the window, she could see roof-tops, branches of winter-bare trees and dusty green live oaks. She was in Merced.

  Bits of memory led her to this moment: tumbling out of her rental car into the parking lot of the Yosemite Valley Medical Clinic. A woman ranger, the same one who’d given her a lift to the Ahwahnee dorm the night Nicky had been assaulted, sitting beside her in the back of an ambulance saying: “Don’t worry, you’re not dying. The doctor gave you a sedative.” A nurse in funny pink scrubs with blotches of baby blue and yellow on them clucking. “My Lord, what have you been up to?”

  Anna pushed herself into a sitting position. The use of her hands gave her a jolt and she looked at them. The right had a loose gauze wrap and the tips of three fingers on the left were bandaged. Fire flashed behind her eyes and she saw again the explosion of flame. Her hand had been engulfed for a moment. The left brought forth no images. A touch of frostbite maybe. She pulled at the tape and unwound the dressing. Not bad. Blisters on the heel of her hand over an area about the size of a half-dollar. Painful, but it would heal quickly and leave no scars.

  There was no memory of other injuries but for her ankle. She threw back the covers to assess the damage. The move elicited an unladylike grunt. Muscles ached and flesh was bruised till she felt twice her age. Her foot and calf were swathed in an Ace bandage, her toes, looking pathetic and young, peeped out the end. Assorted scratches and scrapes accessorized her bruise collection, but no one had seen fit to bandage or splint any other portion of her anatomy.

  Her greatest sufferings at the moment were from lightheadedness and hunger. The lightheadedness convinced her not to go scavenge. She had had her fill of falling down for one lifetime. Once one’s center of gravity grew more than twenty-four inches from the ground, these gravitational visits became jarring. A clock on a metal bed stand said it was two-thirty. Way past lunch and far too long till dinner. Anna pushed the nurses’ call button. Unless there was some injury she wasn’t aware of—a concussion that left no headache or a mysterious fever—she’d been here for less than twenty-four hours.

  Ten minutes passed before a nurse came. Anna didn’t mind the wait. Little things were giving her immoderate joy: drinking the flat-tasting water from the metal pitcher on the bed stand, seeing and feeling the sun on her legs, watching airplanes as they made their pattern prior to landing at Merced’s small airport.

  This idyll was eroded around
the edges by niggling memories of what she had done: the axing, gouging, burning. Whether because of residual drugs in her system or because these things had happened in the dead of night like the grisliest of dreams, they were mercifully unreal.

  With the nurse and the food came information. As she had surmised, she’d been in the hospital half a day. Her ankle bone was cracked, but not broken, and she’d suffered a bad sprain. The doctor hadn’t put a cast on it because six weeks of atrophy would do the leg more harm than the crack in the bone. The bone would heal more quickly and with less discomfort than the sprain. The bandages on her fingers were for frostbite, but it wasn’t severe. She’d lose no digits, just a little skin. Mostly she’d been suffering from exhaustion and dehydration.

  The nurse took the intravenous tube from her arm and Anna immediately felt better. Lying in a hospital bed, tubes and needles invading the body, felt like the precursor to a long and humiliating death.

  Proving hunger really is the best sauce, she devoured the hospital food the nurse brought. Reassured and fed, she decided to face her responsibilities.

  “I need to make some calls,” she said. “How do I get an outside line?”

  The nurse explained the hospital’s phone system and the billing system for calls. Following the lead of America’s finest hotels, hefty surcharges were levied for simply lifting the receiver from its cradle.

  Mostly Anna wanted to call Molly, but her sketchy memory of her less than triumphant return to the valley following her mountain sojourn didn’t include her having reported to anyone. Because she was known only to a handful of people as anything other than a waitress at the Ahwahnee, the clinic wouldn’t automatically inform the ranger division of her injury. Anna called information for the park number and waded through choices and button pushing before she got a live human being who could transfer her call to the superintendent’s office. Experience had taught her that, when a death was involved, if the superintendent wasn’t one of the first to hear, sparks would most definitely fly.