Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  The hint of a shrug. “Hand it over.”

  “I don’t have it,” Kate said.

  The Savage 110’s barrel moved in a little wave. “On your knees,” he said, “hands behind your head.”

  She looked past him out the open door. It was too early for the sun to have reached the bottom of the canyon, but it was light out. She saw no movement except for faint wisps of steam rising from the top of the first pond.

  He raised the rifle and pointed it in a less general direction. She felt her belly contract in response, and she shivered in her long johns. She hoped it didn’t show.

  “On your knees,” he said, “facing away from me.”

  She should have tackled him instead of talking. She got on her knees.

  “Hands behind your head.”

  She put her hands behind her head and felt him approach, but she could feel that he was keeping what he thought was a safe distance, and he was taking his time, which allowed her to formulate a plan.

  He took one of her wrists and she felt a loop slip over one hand. She spread her ankles, let her butt slide to the floor between them and pushed off with her knees into a backward somersault, rocking onto her back, bringing her knees together and her feet up in a single sharp kick. He was too tall for her feet to hit his jaw—she noted that for later—and instead both her feet hit him squarely in the sternum, just below his rib cage.

  His breath whooshed out, but he didn’t fall, only staggered back several steps. He’d had to tuck the rifle under one arm to deal with her hands, and her kick had knocked it loose.

  The impact against the wall forced his lungs to expand and he caught his breath and the rifle before it hit the floor and was bringing it up when she completed the somersault. In the same smooth, continuous motions, she swiveled on both feet with knees bent and launched her right shoulder at his midsection in a tackle that would have earned her a starting position with the Seattle Seahawks. Or it would have if her fucking sleeping bag hadn’t slipped beneath her feet. She lost traction and force and the tackle turned into more of an uncontrolled collision, during which she managed to push the barrel of the rifle to one side. It went off too close to her head and he fell backward with her on top of him.

  Her ears ringing, she went for the rifle with both hands. He was bigger than she was and stronger than she was—also noted—but she was quick and slippery and he kept grabbing for her hands where they’d been a moment before and in the meantime she was kicking and biting and clawing and in general keeping him too occupied with protecting his groin to get to his feet.

  “Fuck this,” he said, and dropped the rifle for a hand in her hair and another on the seat of her long johns. He threw her across the cabin. As she felt herself sailing through the air, it felt like she had all the time in the world to think about where she was going to hit and how she would prefer to land. She gathered herself into a ball just in time for her butt to smash into the wall directly beneath one of the former loft supports. She bounced to her feet, only to find him there before her, rifle in hand and trained on her again.

  “You’d better use that thing,” she said, breathless, “because I won’t get on my knees for you a second time.”

  The face beneath the balaclava moved in what might have been a snarl. The rifle came up to his shoulder and she dove for her own rifle tangled in the folds of her sleeping bag, and Mutt came through the door like a silent streak of vengeful lightning.

  She hit the intruder in the torso with the full force of her one hundred and forty pounds and he hit the wall again, this time hard enough to shake dirt loose from the roof. He fell to the floor and she went for his gun arm with her teeth.

  He let out a yell, his first unrehearsed speech of the morning, and dropped the rifle. There was the sound of tearing Gore-Tex. A cloud of goose down burst around Mutt’s head, and when it had settled the arm of his parka was seen to be dangling from her teeth.

  By then Kate had her rifle. “Hey! Hey, asshole, get your hands up! Mutt! Back off! Mutt!”

  Mutt ignored her, dropped the sleeve, and attacked again, going for the arm now clad only in a red-and-black plaid shirtsleeve. He managed to roll over and tuck it beneath him. Undeterred, Mutt went for the seat of his bibs. She must have got her a mouthful because this time he screamed like Macaulay Culkin.

  He rolled again and Kate realized he was rolling toward the door at about the same time he managed to grab his rifle and scramble to his feet. There was a kind of chunk in the wall behind her a second before she heard the report of another rifle, this time from outside the cabin. She ducked instinctively, far too late if whoever it was had been any kind of a marksman.

  The shot made Mutt hesitate for one second. It was all he needed to get out the door. Mutt took off after him. Kate went after her, bare feet and all, in time to see Mutt’s tail vanish around the corner of the cabin.

  From in back there was a bark and a thud and another yell and a creaking sound and a crash in quick succession. Kate rounded the second corner just in time to see the outhouse fall over again and the guy knocked either by accident or design into the hole.

  Another yell and a curse and a bark from Mutt that sounded like savage joy personified. Amazingly, the guy scrambled up and out of the hole and took off again, covered in powdered lime and frozen shit, Mutt snapping at his heels. He, Mutt, and Kate rounded the corner of the cabin and the guy lit out down the canyon.

  The shooter was either just around the corner of the dogleg or up on the little saddle above. A tiny fountain of water spurted up from the surface of the pond right in front of Mutt. Again, a second later, Kate heard the report, and the third shot kicked up snow in front of Kate. Shooter getting his range.

  She dodged to the side and yelled. “Mutt! Mutt, no, come back!”

  Mutt ignored her and made a leap that was poetry in motion to fasten her teeth one more time in the man’s retreating behind. He screamed again, this time sounding like Daniel Stern.

  Another shot, this one kicking up snow far too near Mutt’s hind legs, and Kate put all her considerable force of will into the next shout. “Mutt! Come! Now!” She drew out the last word, the scar on her throat pulling at her vocal cords in a way it hadn’t in years.

  Mutt let him go, and in a gait that was half limp, half scuttle he made it around the dogleg and disappeared.

  There was another shot. This one hit the gas tank of her snow machine.

  Gas spurted out through the neat hole made in the blue tarp.

  “You son of a bitch,” Kate said, really pissed off now, and dove for her rifle in the cabin. She rolled outside again and up on her belly and elbows to pull the stock into her shoulder and sight down the barrel, bringing the little metal bead to bear about man-height on the edge of the dogleg. The downward slope of the canyon floor was on her side this time. She fired twice in quick succession, or as quickly as possible with a bolt action rifle, resighted on the top of the little saddle, and fired twice more.

  Then something smacked her on the side of the head and she slammed into the wall of the cabin. She heard the report of the rifle just before she plummeted down into darkness.

  * * *

  Someone was sandpapering her face. Again.

  “Ow,” she said.

  The sandpapering redoubled in speed, this time with the sander kicked up a notch. A background sound resolved itself into a frantic, high-pitched whine. She’d heard that same whine before, and not that long ago, either.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  If anything, the whine doubled in volume and intensity. Somebody had to make it stop. She’d do it herself but she couldn’t get her eyes open.

  The sander went into overdrive and the whine achieved a decibel level reminiscent of the first few chords of any Metallica song. She had to do something or her ears would start to bleed.

  With a tremendous effort she swung the boom over, attached the tackle to her eyelids, and hit the winch. The cable almost snapped under the strain, but slowly, one eye
lash at a time, she got her eyelids open.

  She was laying flat on her back in the middle of the cabin, although she couldn’t see much of it because a frantic Mutt hovered over her, howling and whining and snapping and growling. It was all too familiar.

  “God damn you, Uncle,” she said, her voice sounding not at all like her own. “What the hell have you gotten me into?”

  Mutt gave a joyful bark at Kate’s return from the dead, and if she hadn’t sprayed her with spit Kate might have been able to join in the celebration. Instead, she shoved Mutt to one side and levered herself into a sitting position. She reached up a shaky hand to discover a shallow, inch-long groove above her right eye. It was remarkably clean, as was the surrounding skin and her hairline. She looked at Mutt, yellow eyes filled with fury and dismay and, yes, shame. She also saw traces of her own blood on Mutt’s muzzle.

  Great. And she’d just been getting over the first set of shiners. Still, Mutt had cleaned her up pretty good. Not to mention saved her life. Again. “Thanks, girl,” she said.

  Mutt licked the side of her face one more time, and then looked around and growled, apparently giving the cabin notice not to make any sudden moves.

  Kate blinked a little herself. The door was open. Hadn’t she been outside?

  Her shoulder felt sore, and she pulled at the neck of her top to look at it. Tooth marks, although none had broken the skin. “What, did you drag me inside?”

  Mutt growled. She was still seriously unhappy.

  The resemblance between the last cabin Kate had regained consciousness in and this one was just a little too close for comfort. The contents of her pack were scattered from corner to corner. Her bed was a tangled mess. The stack on the barrel stove was knocked askew but thankfully had not broken open or there would have been soot all over everything.

  Nausea tickled uncomfortably at the back of her throat. She staggered outside, where four steps from the door she dropped to her knees and threw up. That, too, was all too familiar.

  It made her feel a little better, although the wound in her head still throbbed. She washed her mouth and face with snow and stood up. There was no sign of the intruder. There was, however, a strong smell of gasoline. She moved on shaky legs to her snowgo and removed the tarp, although she had to stop every couple of seconds to make sure the lights were going to stay on.

  The bullet had caught the tank dead center. The good news was that (a) the tank hadn’t exploded, and (b) the flood of gas had eased as it sank beneath the hole. She ripped the tarp off the trailer and found the duct tape and taped off the hole so at least more wouldn’t evaporate. After that, she tried to think past the throbbing in her temple. Numbers had never been her best thing.

  Her Arctic Cat got between twenty and twenty-five miles to the gallon if she kept her speed reasonable, hard to do until she got out of the mountains. She’d spent the extra $400 to get the high-capacity fuel tank. If it was half empty it should hold a little over four and a half gallons. She had a five-gallon gas can in the trailer, and she’d topped off the tank yesterday to prevent condensation inside the tank from the cold temperature. So the gas can was probably two gallons down.

  Be conservative, say four gallons in the tank and three gallons in the gas can, seven total. It was about sixty miles to Niniltna. Even taking into consideration the first fifteen miles, which would burn more gas in negotiating saddles and doglegs and hairpin turns and crevasses and dense stands of trees and boulder fields, she should be okay. Probably. Maybe.

  But she did not have gas to burn indiscriminately, which precluded chasing whoever it was who’d attacked her. Which was no doubt why the shooter had holed the tank. Fucker. She thought of his cohort dripping limey shit all the way down the cabin, and hoped the ride back to civilization was an aromatic one for them both.

  Suddenly, insanely, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard it rang off the rock walls of the canyon. She laughed so long all the energy drained out of her and she had to sit down hard on the trailer. “Goddamn son of a bitch,” she said.

  She had more and better curses but had no energy left to make the welkin ring as deafeningly as it deserved, so she sat there a while longer and thought them instead, loudly.

  Mutt, anxious, trod over to her side, and Kate hung an arm around her neck and buried her face in Mutt’s fur. “Sorry, girl. Gimme a minute here. I promise I’ll get back up to speed.”

  Mutt looked unconvinced, and her anxiety pushed Kate to her feet again. She started looking around the clearing for signs of how the intruder had arrived. Before she got very far along in this endeavor she realized she was still in her longies and without her boots and that the temperature was in the mid-thirties. She gave out with another halfhearted curse and staggered back inside the cabin to disinter her clothes. She had a powerful urge to remake her bed and dive in but she was dimly aware that going to sleep with a head injury was a bad idea. So she kept moving.

  She used socks for pot holders and straightened the smokestack and built up the fire in the stove. She stamped her feet into her boots and located the first aid kit in her pack. Antiseptic cream spread on a Band-Aid would have to do for her head wound until she could get back to Niniltna and the clinic. She was not looking forward to the commentary she would undoubtedly receive from the Grosdidier brothers. She bolted a couple of aspirin dry and followed them with a mouthful of snow. The cold shock on the tissues of her mouth and the trickle of moisture down her throat alleviated the worst of the nausea.

  Shrugging into her parka, she abandoned the rest of the mess in the cabin to go back outside.

  It was a gray day, with clouds that promised more snow. If her intruder had left anything of interest behind him, best to look for it now before it was covered up. Ignoring the little man with the hammer wasn’t easy, it wasn’t even possible, but by focusing grimly on the task at hand and taking it one minute at a time, and with an alert and vengeful Mutt at her side every step of the way, she kept herself upright and moving.

  A set of tracks postholed through the snow past the steaming ponds and around the little saddle. There she found signs of a snow machine, from the track possibly one of the newer Polaris models, although she wasn’t as up on her snowgo sign as she could have wished.

  There was a second, separate set of human tracks. The second set of tracks was smaller, indicating either a smaller man or a woman. Or, she supposed, a teenager of either sex.

  Mutt, always acute at sensing Kate’s moods, growled, a deep, rumbling sound full of promising menace.

  “You said it, girl,” Kate said.

  Either the aspirin were starting to work, the little man’s arm was getting tired, or being pissed off had its own healing properties. With the easing of the pain in her head her eyes cleared and she felt a little less like a sleepwalking bear. She studied the tracks some more.

  Yes, just around the curve, against the wall of the saddle, there were the knee marks, and yes, there were the elbow marks where the shooter had leaned to take aim.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch,” Kate said again, only this time much more quietly and with infinitely more feeling.

  The track of the Polaris led out of the canyon. She listened, but she couldn’t hear anything. She squinted at the sky and figured the time, amazingly, at early morning, no later than ten. It felt like she’d been out for hours.

  Had they traveled to the hot springs at night? If they had, they would have had to be local, or they never would have been able to find the way.

  And then she remembered the moon. She could have read the fine print of the Oxford English Dictionary by the light of last night’s moon. And it hadn’t snowed between her arrival and this morning. All anyone would have needed to follow the track of her snow machine to Canyon Hot Springs last night was twenty-twenty vision.

  The longer she stood here, the farther away they got. She wanted to get on the snowgo and head out after them. She spent several pleasurable moments imagining what she would do when she caught up to them
.

  The cold air eased the pain of her wound some, but not enough. She was hurt and tired and hungry and thirsty, and in no shape to go chasing after a couple of bushwhackers.

  She went back to the cabin. No singing mice had cleaned up the mess in her absence, but the water was steaming on the stove. Her eyes were starting to feel puffy, too. She didn’t get the mirror out of the survival kit because she didn’t want to know. She looked down at Mutt, whose hair had yet to lay down on the back of her neck. The blood on her muzzle was still in evidence and Kate was sure that it contained cells from more than one donor. “Good girl,” Kate said. “Well done.”

  Mutt gave her a look through narrowed yellow eyes. She was still pissed that Kate had called her off.

  “They were shooting at you,” Kate said. “Even you can’t outrun a bullet, Mutt.”

  Mutt lifted her lip in what on a less august countenance might have been called a sneer. I could have caught them. She might as well have said it out loud.

  “Yeah,” Kate said, “I know, you’re a working dog, and I’m supposed to let you do your job, which includes tearing the asses off assholes.” Her eyes strayed to the most recent scar, by this time invisible in the gray fur to anyone who hadn’t watched it heal day by day. Two years later, the image of Mutt unconscious on the vet’s table in Ahtna was still vivid in Kate’s mind.

  She felt a sharp sting and looked down in mild surprise to see that Mutt had nipped her left ankle hard enough to draw blood. She looked up to meet a hard yellow stare and a hairy lip lifted to display a pair of sharp canines.

  “Okay,” she said, “that’s fair. But you go any more psychic on me and I’m hiring an exorcist.”

  Mutt gave a high-pitched bark, one that Kate knew from experience denoted outrage and disillusionment. Kate almost shied away from meeting Mutt’s eyes. Mutt barked again, and this time there was no mistaking the warning.

  “I don’t get in your way next time, is that it?” Kate said.

  Another bark.

  “Or what?”

  Mutt barked a third time, turned her back, shouldered the door open, and marched outside.