Winter Study (21 page)

“I suppose I could just balance here till the ice refreezes along the seams,” she said sarcastically.

“How long do you think that would take?” he asked seriously.

Anna
was going to die and there would be no one but an oversized clown to
witness her demise. “Come around to where I can see you, would you?”

“The ice won’t—”

“Big circle, Bob,

big

circle,
stay as far out as you need to just—” She stopped to let off the steam
building in her brain. She’d been about to say “just move your fat
ass,” etc., etc., expletive not deleted, but, from what she’d observed
of Bob Menechinn, he wouldn’t respond well to that approach. “Keep well
back from me,” she said instead. “The ice is solid there.”

For
a moment, he didn’t speak or move, then she heard his boots squeaking
over the snow to her left. He loomed into her peripheral vision then,
finally, to where she could see him without straining. Pissed off as
she was, the sight of him relieved her. He didn’t look like he was
about to run off and leave her to perish. She had that going for her.

“I need you to go to the shore and get a tree limb, a long one, as long as you can manage.”

Bob
looked toward the shoreline. Though less than half a football field
away, it was murky, dark and out of focus behind falling snow.
“Visibility is getting bad,” he said. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t be able
to get back to you. I don’t want to leave you alone out here.”

Anna
cocked her head the way a Jack Russell terrier will when it’s trying to
figure out what its master is saying. The visibility was bad, and she
knew, as close as they were to the shore, connected by radios, if he
went into the trees he could still get turned around and be unable to
find where he’d come in off the lake.

“Don’t go into the trees,” she said. “There’ll be something along the shore. Something is better than nothing.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “It would take too long.”

His
words sounded fine, his voice was even and strong. Still, she suspected
his sudden devotedness had more to do with not wishing to go into the
spooky old woods alone.

Blinking
past the snow and the shards of tears frozen in the inner corners of
her eyes, she tried to see who he was, a key to move him. Mockery
wouldn’t do it. His ego was too fragile. In a way, he reminded her of
the psychotics she’d worked with in the lockdown ward where she did her
brief mental health internship when she was getting her EMT. Men and
women shared a common room, with a television set between the men’s
ward and the women’s ward. Anna’d spent her time there, too ignorant to
be of much help to the nurses and too small to be of much assistance to
the orderlies, who looked more like bouncers or second-string football
players than upstanding members of the medical profession.

It
had been a number of years ago, back when “crazy” was as much a medical
diagnosis as an insult. The ward wasn’t for neurotics; the people who
ended up there were desperately ill. Most had lost so much of their
world to mental illness and the drugs administered to control it that
they didn’t care what was said to them. It had little to do with what
they heard. Those who could still interact tended to respond instantly,
and sometimes violently, if their delusions were challenged. Anna’d
always thought it was because somewhere inside they still knew the
difference between the reality around them and the one that they forged
for themselves, and they believed when the illusion they had of
themselves died they would die too.

Sane people weren’t a whole lot different; they just didn’t drool as much.

Bob
Menechinn had a vision of himself. The squeaky, scared man in the tent
attacked that vision. That’s why he’d had to work so hard the following
day to rebuild it. The cowardly Bob, who panicked at the snort of a
wolf, wasn’t a man he could live with.

At
the moment, Anna could muster no pity for him, but she knew she would
get nowhere trying to shame him into doing right. Shame would attack
the illusion.

The tic in her thigh graduated to a twitch. Soon the muscle would cramp.

“Get
the traps out of your pack,” she said. Bob was as formless and shadowed
in the snow as tabloid pictures of Bigfoot. He went down on one knee
and slung the backpack to the ice. As he fumbled with the buckles, Anna
went on: “Put the end of the kinkless chains in the jaws of the traps.
Don’t make a circle; make a line. We’ve got twenty-four feet, if you
link it together.”

“I was just thinking that,” he said.

Anna
watched without speaking as he spread the traps out on the ice and
connected them, jaws to tails. She moved her left foot fractionally to
ease her thigh muscles. The ice did not shift alarmingly. Maybe the
seam was refreezing.

It wouldn’t take much,

she
thought hopefully. The urge to jump was almost overwhelming. Body and
mind craved action. They also serve who only stand and wait was an
understatement. Waiting was a purgatory a nonbeliever could not pray
her way out of. Trusting in the kindness of strangers was another.

“How’s it going?” she asked to take her body’s mind off just yelling “Fuck it!” and leaping for the good ice.

He looked up, his hood thick with snow, his shoulders white with it. “Good,” he said. “Another minute. Hang on.”

The
work of his hands had driven thoughts of the oversized wolf from his
mind. The linking of the three chains had relieved him of the necessity
of getting near where the ice had broken. He sounded manly, strong,
stand-up. It was hard to believe not too many minutes ago he was poised
to leave her to her fate or, worse, watch while it visited itself upon
her. He wasn’t afraid now, Anna realized, and that made him brave.
Except brave didn’t count if one wasn’t afraid. Without fear to burn
away the dross and transform it from baser metal, bravery was merely
stupidity or poor impulse control.

“They should hold,” he said and held up the three chains attached to each other by the steel-jawed traps.

It
would work, Anna told herself. All Bob had to do was lay one end of the
chain to one side of her, then walk the other end around the break and
pull till the chain gently eased over her island. She’d pick it up; on
the count of three, he’d jerk as she leapt. It would work.

The
dull pull of a muscle trying to cramp moved out from the twitch above
her knee. If she waited any longer, she would not be able to execute
the straight-backed deep knee bend and rise without tottering after she
picked up the chain. Inside the Sorels, she flexed toes grown numb from
lack of movement. “Let’s get going,” she said. “My legs are starting to
cramp.”

Bob hurled a trap at her.

“No!”
she heard herself shout. Ten pounds of metal struck her in the chest.
Clamping her arms across it, she fought for balance. The ice tilted.
Her boots began to slide. White lake and sky rushed past as she fell
backward. Her head struck lake ice. Her brain slid forward inside her
skull. Her chin smashed into her chest, slamming her teeth down on her
tongue.

For
an instant, she carried the burden of her life in the balance, trying
to decide whether to hold tight to the trap or throw her hands back
over her head, get as much of her on the solid surface as she could.
The physical world did not slow down while she made up her mind.

The backpack pulled her down.

The ice island tilted.

Water so cold, she felt it only as a blow slammed into the side of her face.

12

The
ice did not flip, dumping her like a man in a ducking booth, the way
Anna had seen it in her mind’s eye. The lake chose to savor her rather
than swallow her whole. The ice slab fell away with terrifying
slowness, a grinning maw opening at her heels.

She
thrust the metal trap from her and threw her arms wide, trying to catch
the beast’s throat. The island of ice was too wide, and only one
mittened hand reached the serrated edge. On her back, a beetle with a
backpack as a carapace, helpless to save herself, she was sliding,
sliding down, under the ice, pulled by her own weight and the hunger of
the lake. Then the lake couldn’t wait. The slab under her gave all at
once.

Light
flashed past, a white streak four inches wide; the edge of the break.
Fighting the drag of her pack, she kicked and pawed her way upright and
clutched at the surface ice. In sodden mittens, her hands were pulpy,
worthless.

Clutching at straws.

A
burst of energy that drove a scream from her lips lifted her enough
that she managed to get her right arm as far as the elbow onto the
surface. Balling her mittened hand into a fist, she drove it hard into
the shallow snow and pressed her sodden sleeve against the ice.

Freeze, God dammit.

If
her sleeve, her glove — any part of her — would adhere to the ice, she
might be able to pull herself out. Grabbing the end of the other mitten
with her teeth, she pulled. Freezing water crashed against her teeth
with the subtlety of brass knuckles. Biting down, she pulled her hand
free of the mitten and reached through the fractured water to press it
to the ice by her elbow. Flesh might freeze faster than fabric.

“Bob!” she screamed. “Where the fuck are you?”

Hell would freeze over.

The sleeve of her coat was sticking, freezing to the good ice.

Carefully
she dragged on the arm. She could see herself moving infinitesimally
closer to the edge but was losing feeling. Cold was killing her body
while her mind watched. A quarter of an inch; an eternity.

Ice
canted steeply toward a white sky. Flakes of snow, scarcely
differentiated from the universe they fell through, showed clear for an
instant, like magic, like the pictures in the mall that flashed from
two dimensions to three with a flash of the mind. Then the sky grew too
steep. Her hand was not in front but above her. She hadn’t grabbed the
solid ice; she’d grabbed onto the edge of the floating island and it
was rotating with her weight. Through frost-rimed eyelashes, she
watched each thread of her sleeve as it pulled free of the ice. Her
pack was battened on her back, dragging her down, hungry like the lake
was hungry. Sentient and indifferent.

Frantically
she wrenched her gloved hand from its last tenuous connection with the
ice and pounded on the buckle of her chest strap. The push-button
release opened and the strap came free. The pack lifted, drifted from
her.