by Mark Parragh
Redpoll didn’t inhale. There was only a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. For once in Josh’s life, his inner monolog was silent. No pop culture reference, no gallows humor. Here was death, the real thing, and he had nothing to say about it.
Josh crouched over the old man’s body in the dark. He could hear his heartbeat racing in the silence. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, and then settled back against the car’s hard plastic seats. Beside him, Redpoll’s corpse was still, silent, cold.
He sat there in the stillness and the dark for more than a minute. Then it was as if a valve that had closed somewhere in his mind was suddenly open again, and the thoughts came back, rushing over him like a flood.
Did I just see the world end?
What happens when they find out he’s dead? Does it all just go up? The rest of his merry band burns down the planet, trying to seize the throne?
Did this asshole spend his whole life waiting for the world to fall apart, and now it’s going to happen exactly because he finally died?
Is that ironic?
It feels kind of ironic.
Technically…I’m not sure.
Where’s Alanis Morrisette when you need her?
Whatever. All hell’s going to break loose. Fire and brimstone from the heavens, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. And right now, I’m the only man on Earth who knows it’s coming.
He looked at Redpoll, and the old man’s dead eyes stared back at him. They offered nothing. One of the car’s windows rattled softly in a gust of cold wind from outside.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
Chapter 33
They’d stopped talking after the first few hundred steps. Crane’s world shrank down to the cold air, the sound of their breathing, and the rhythm of their boots on the cement. They’d fallen into the same pattern as they climbed, their feet striking each step in unison.
Crane kept his finger ready alongside his weapon’s trigger assembly. He was deeply aware of how vulnerable they were here. At any moment, someone might fire down on them from above. The sound of gunfire would become a wall of noise as it echoed back and forth from the sides of the tunnel, and there would be no place to hide.
But there was nothing he could do about that. He ignored it and kept climbing.
“There,” Swift said eventually. If she was winded, her voice didn’t betray it. She’d trained at least as hard as he had, Crane reminded himself.
“Where?”
“Up there,” she repeated. “Where else does this thing go?”
He looked into the darkness above them and saw a place where the shadows were subtly different. Pale light filtered into the tunnel and faintly illuminated the cement platform where the car would stop and let off hikers bound for the trail that led along the glacier’s edge. Another fifty steps, maybe.
They reached it and stopped, still in unison. On their left, the platform jutted out only a couple feet into the tunnel and extended about the length of the car before the stairs started up again. On the right was an alcove with a bench where returning passengers could wait for the funicular to arrive. Beside that was the side tunnel to the glacier, dark and narrow. It was cold up here. Crane saw bits of ice on the stone inside the tunnel and heard water dripping.
They sat on the bench without a word. They were both in peak condition, but still. They didn’t know what they would encounter beyond the tunnel. They would have no cover as they approached, except the night. It was too much to hope that the helicopters had been left unguarded. Time was critical, but they would need all their energy out there.
Crane listened to Swift’s breathing, felt the gentle pressure of her arm against his. He was glad he didn’t have to do this alone.
“It’s not going to work,” she said suddenly. “Even if we get a Chinook, how far are we from a hospital? It’s been too long. I failed.”
“Not yet,” Crane said as he took her hand. “Don’t give up. He’s tough. We’ll get him out.”
“I should have had him out hours ago. I let him down.” She sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I know. It’s stupid. I’ve been trying to get away from him all my life. But now…”
Crane turned to kiss her head. “It’s okay. You did all anyone could do. More. Not many people would have been able to get him this far. And we’re not done yet.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. “It’s just always been this way. No matter how hard I worked, how hard I pushed myself, it was never enough. He was never satisfied. He always had to drive me harder.”
She laughed at herself. “Finally I realized he was just always going to do that. There wasn’t some standard I could finally achieve and it would be enough. No matter what I did, he’d always want to see if I could dig just a little deeper. Just to push me a little farther. But by then, it didn’t matter. I knew it was just a tactic, but it was wired into me. I couldn’t get away from it.”
She took his hand. “That’s why I wanted to get away from him so badly. Part of it, anyway. I’d be free, but it was more than that. If I got away, it would mean I beat him. There’d be nothing more he could say, no higher level he could push me to. I’d beat him, and he’d have to admit I beat him.”
She laughed briefly. “Because it still matters what he thinks. Even now. Maybe that means I’ll never really be free of him.”
They were alike in that, Crane thought. Both growing up without their mothers, with difficult fathers. Difficult in different ways, but both had left their mark. Crane could still feel the effects of his own difficult relationship with his father. Hers must have been so much more intense.
She was lost. She’d been trying to tell him that back at the gift shop, and he’d let that frighten him off. But time was short now. If he didn’t say it this time, he might not get another chance.
“You’re not a failure,” he said, “not by anybody’s measure. And you might always be what he made you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be free. All we have to do is chart our own path. Nobody can stop us.”
She looked up into his eyes. “What are you saying?”
“Come away with me,” he said. “Everything’s chaos right now. Turnstone’s flipped the table. What better time to just walk away? He’s going to have a lot on his plate. Turnstone, all of them. By the time they think to look for you, we’ll be long gone. The trail will be cold. We’ll go somewhere together, anywhere you like. We’ll disappear until we’re ready to take them all on on our own terms.”
He looked at her with a mixture of anticipation and dread. But it had been the right thing to do. He saw that in her eyes as she smiled at him. Then she snaked a hand around his neck and pulled him in for a long, gentle kiss.
“Thank you, John,” she whispered. “No matter what happens out there…thank you.”
Then she broke away, stood up, and pointedly went through the motions of checking her equipment.
That wasn’t an answer, Crane realized. He stood up and checked his gun and gear.
When she was finished, she stopped suddenly, turned, and took Crane’s arm. She pulled him near.
“I have one thing in the world that’s mine,” she said quietly, “that didn’t come from him. I barely remember anything from before, not even my family. But I remember my name, the name they gave me.”
She leaned in to his ear. “Iskra,” she whispered. “My name is Iskra. It means ‘spark.’”
Then she stepped back and was all business once more. The moment faded as she turned into the narrow tunnel. “Let’s go,” she said. “None of this is going to matter if we can’t score one of those Chinooks.”
Crane stood, watching her as she set off into the tunnel. Then he took a breath and set out after her.
The tunnel was narrow and rough-hewn. The floor was wet, sandy grit with pools of water. A metal cable was fastened to one wall at waist level with a series of eye bolts to form an improvised handrail. It was unusual for the Cambie—everywhere else exuded hig
hly polished luxury. Crane guessed it was meant to enhance hikers’ sense of passing into a more rustic world.
Swift stopped and crouched at the tunnel mouth, and Crane crouched behind her. It was windy up here, and dim moonlight filtered through the clouds. He could see the trail curving off to his left. To the right, the glacier ended in a sudden cliff. He heard faint cracking sounds as stresses bent and squeezed the ice. It sounded like the glacier whispering.
“They’re a couple hundred yards up,” Swift whispered. “Near the trail.”
Crane saw lights in the distance and the shapes of the helicopters’ twin pylons and drooping rotors. The lights were pointed up on spikes driven into the ice, and the wind blew snow through the columns of light. It was bright enough that it would be difficult to approach unseen.
“We should circle around,” he said. “Leave the trail about halfway up, move out onto the glacier. Better chance to sneak up on them.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Let’s move.”
They hurried down the narrow trail. Like the tunnel, the right side was marked off by a cable strung on a series of posts. Signs warned hikers to stay on the trail, with graphic warnings of what might befall someone foolish enough to stray onto the glacier. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped.
They picked a spot as close to the helicopters as they could get without being caught in the pool of light surrounding them. Swift looked back at Crane, and he nodded. Then they stepped over the cable and onto the ice. They bent low and moved as quickly as they could in a long arc out onto the glacier, keeping the cage of light around the helicopters just over their left shoulders.
The wind whipped them with drifting snow as they ran, and the ice creaked and moaned to itself. Crane felt the snow crunch beneath his boots. There was just enough light here to avoid the odd crack in the ice or upthrust ridge waiting to trip them up.
Crane gradually moved ahead, and he was about to slow down and let Swift catch up, when a shout echoed across the ice. A moment later, a burst of gunfire cut into the night. Crane saw muzzle flashes near the helicopters.
He dropped to the ground and turned back to check on Swift. She was the one they’d seen, he realized as the bullets chewed up the ice around her. She fell to one knee and opened up with her MP7, a tongue of flame lighting up the night and giving her away.
From up the slope, more figures appeared, long shadows moving in front of the lights. More muzzle flashes, more bullets slapping the ice.
She turned to him and waved him off. “Go, damn it!”
Crane sprinted away into the darkness. If he could flank them, maybe…
Then a flare exploded overhead. It cast a harsh light across the glacier as it drifted slowly down, hissing like a baleful tiny sun.
“Left Eleven!” he heard someone shout. Then there was more gunfire, directed at him this time. He returned fire with a long burst from his MP7, and then set out running to make himself a moving target.
But then once more, he heard the distinctive thump of a grenade launcher. Crane dove to the ground as bullets tore through the air around him. He heard the grenades detonate, felt the glacier protest as snow and ice fragments lashed at him. Then there was a deep grinding sound and a vibration through his body. At first, he thought it was the shock of the explosions, but it didn’t stop.
Crane scrambled up as the ice began to shift beneath him. His instincts were screaming at him to run. But he couldn’t quite make it to his feet. He was scrambling on his hands and knees when the surface fell away beneath him. He scrabbled at the ice, but found nothing to grip.
Crane plummeted, spinning, down into the blackness beneath and was swallowed up.
Chapter 34
“Be a billionaire international playboy, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.”
Josh gave another fierce tug, and Redpoll’s corpse lurched another foot or so across the cement. Then Josh dropped to his knees beside the body, breathing hard, and worked his aching arms.
Well, the playboy part never quite came together, but hey, you’re rich now. All your troubles are over. Never work again a day in your life. Take it easy. Do what you want. It’s easy street from here on out. Yeah.
And yet, somehow, here he was, alone in the cold and damp, surrounded by killers with machine guns, dragging a body through the high mountains in the dead of night.
What time is it, anyway?
He checked his watch. It was a little after three in the morning.
I guarantee you Jeff Bezos doesn’t have to deal with this crap. I bet he’s got someone on payroll just to get rid of bodies for him. Where did I go wrong?
But there was only him. And this had to be done. He’d sat in the funicular car, alone in the dark with Redpoll’s body, for nearly an hour before the full weight of it had settled on him.
Why were Turnstone’s soldiers still at it? Why were they still ravaging the hotel and searching the grounds? Because they needed to know that Redpoll was dead. When they were sure that they’d succeeded, then they could blow the hell out of this place and disappear. But as long as the outcome remained in doubt, they were pinned down. Because if Turnstone wanted to take over, he’d have to convince the rest of Redpoll’s merry crew that the old man was really dead. They’d demand ironclad proof. Like a body. Once his soldiers had that, then Turnstone could start his apocalypse.
But right now, there was still that sliver of doubt, still the possibility that Redpoll might suddenly reappear, denounce Turnstone, bring the whole organization down on them like the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. As long as that doubt remained, Turnstone couldn’t move. As long as they weren’t certain, there was still a chance to stop them.
Someone has to get rid of the body. Make sure they never find it.
And I’m the only man on Earth who knows for sure he’s dead.
So I guess it’s going to have to be me.
He’d wrapped the body in blankets, though he hadn’t been able to bring himself to wrap Redpoll’s face. Then he’d gone looking around the station for anything portable but heavy. He’d found a dented steel toolbox in the control alcove and taken it back to the car. He’d placed the contents around the body and then wrapped them up again in more blankets. Finally, he’d managed to place the body back onto the makeshift stretcher they’d used to bring him here and tied him down securely with some nylon cord he’d found with the toolbox.
Now it was just a matter of getting him to the lake.
Behind him, there was a cold gust of wind from the mouth of the station. He got up, looked down at the body, and sighed. Now he understood why they said “dead weight.” The only way he’d found to move the stretcher was to bend down facing the body, pick up one end by the painfully non-ergonomic handles, and drag the thing backward a couple steps at a time. He’d gotten it out of the car and the station that way, and about halfway down the wide cement plaza. At the bottom was the trail around the lake and, beyond that, the dock.
The lake would do, he knew. It was deep. Almost three hundred feet in places. And the bottom dropped away almost immediately past the shoreline. He’d go deep. The glacier-fed water was cold, especially a few hundred feet down at the bottom. Barely above freezing, like a just melted ice cube. The body would be preserved down there for years. No gas bubbles formed by decomposition lofting him back to the surface. Short of exploring the bottom of the lake with a mini-sub, Josh doubted they’d ever find him.
“Okay, old man,” he muttered. “Let’s do this.”
He hauled the body, step by step, the rest of the way down the cement ramp to the paved trail. Another few yards up the trail was a dock they used to launch canoes and rowboats when the weather was more appropriate. It extended out about fifty feet on pontoons. The water at the end would be deep. Deep enough, he hoped.
Josh’s back was screaming at him by the time he reached the turnoff to the dock. He was breathing hard, and his heart was racing from the exertion and the adrenaline. At any moment, he expected a challeng
ing shout, maybe a burst of gunfire. He was totally out in the open. If they were still flying the drones overhead, how long would it take them to notice someone out here alone, well away from the hotel, dragging something that looked a lot like a body toward the lake?
The far end of the stretcher bounced down the railroad tie steps to the dock in a series of thumps. The goal was in sight now. Josh leaned into it, hauling the stretcher forward. Then the poles dug into the soft earth at the bottom of the stairs, and Josh dropped the stretcher and nearly fell over.
“Oh, come on!”
Josh fell to his knees and caught his breath. He thought of alternate ways he might carry the stretcher by himself, but nothing seemed practical to him. Maybe if he could get one end up high enough to get it onto his back. Then he could hold the poles against his shoulders and at least see where he was going. But that would mean lifting up to an angle he wasn’t sure he could manage. And he could see himself losing control of it, watching it fall off the side of the dock too soon and end up in too-shallow water.
“Tell you one thing,” he muttered to the corpse, “I get out of this, I’m done. I’m getting on the Normandy, and I’m just going to sail around the South Pacific, have the crew mix me very complicated fruit drinks, and let Crane deal with this shit. I’m just going to stay on the boat. That’s what you should have done. Lesson learned. Bad things happen when you get off the boat.”
He slapped the body in frustration. “Why the hell didn’t you just stay on the boat?”
Of course, Redpoll didn’t answer. Finally, Josh got up and started dragging the stretcher out toward the dock. The poles left deep gouges in the dirt as it moved.